The 4 Horsemen of Abstract Assets
This was inevitable.
NFTs — already gone
Pure abstraction layered on top of nothing. Zero weight, zero density.
Crypto — next
A ledger pretending to be a commodity. No physical throughput, no irreducible constraint relative to energy.
Software / SaaS — now
Near-zero marginal cost meets higher discount rates and shrinking tolerance for intangibles.
Streaming — the slow bleed
Infinite content, finite attention. No scarcity, no ownership, no durability—just rented access competing against time itself.
These are invisible services competing with a world that is rediscovering friction.
They weren’t mispriced.
They were misunderstood.
Inflation Is a Physical Phenomenon
Inflation isn’t just “too much money.”
It’s too many claims chasing too little matter.
When real-world constraints return—energy, manufacturing, logistics—the market stops rewarding abstraction and starts rewarding compression of value into form.
Price-to-weight matters because:
Physical assets can’t be duplicated
They resist financial dilution
They embed optionality across cycles
They survive regime shifts
Price-to-Weight: Why Invisible Assets Are Failing
For years, I been using a simple mental model to think about this economy, and it keeps proving itself out.
I call it price-to-weight.
Not valuation multiples.
Not narratives.
Not promises about the future.
Just one question:
How much value is packed into something that actually exists?
Density Beats Abstraction
In an inflationary, supply-constrained world, the winning assets aren’t the most imaginative ones. They’re the ones with the highest density of value per unit of physical reality.
The economy is quietly repricing toward compactness - think Japan.
You see it everywhere:
Metals finally catching up after years of underinvestment
Energy refusing to cheapen despite financial repression
Hardware outperforming software
Infrastructure beating platforms
And most obviously: compute.
GPUs, Memory, Data centers Are Physical Stores of Value
A modern GPU is not “tech.”
It’s condensed economic leverage.
It embeds:
Energy
Rare materials
Advanced manufacturing
Supply chain complexity
Time
That’s why assets tied to real compute—GPUs, memory, fabs—behave less like growth equities and more like hard assets with throughput.
This is why companies like NVIDIA sit in a different category than SaaS vendors with recurring revenue but zero physical constraint.
One produces capacity.
The other produces claims.
The New Hierarchy
The hierarchy is becoming clearer in 2026:
Hard < Hybrid > Purely Abstract
This doesn’t mean software disappears.
It means it stops being priced like magic.
And once you see the economy through this lens, the recent carnage isn’t confusing at all.
It’s correction back to reality.
Really sharp framing on price-to-weight. The GPU-as-hard-asset argument cuts through the usual tech narratives - you're right that there's an irreducible floor under compute capacity that software subscriptions don't have. I've watched private mkts reprice away from pure abstraction this past year, especially where infra costs started mattering again. This lens makes recent capital flows way less confusing.