I’ll have to disagree. Selling something to you at its precise value (or arbitrarily close) is a malicious economic exploit.
All the good effects which are possible comes from the gap between what the buyer values something at, and what the selling values something at. If something is worth 4000$ to you, and I can produce it at 2000$, I can sell at 3000$ and we’ll both benefit with 1000$ of value. But if I sold it at 3995$, I’d be no better than a scalper and you’d only benefit if the time the purchase took is worth less to you than 5$. Think about it, your water company could charge you more, and there’s likely nothing you could do about it if you wanted to survive. But your water company does not exploit you like this, even though it technically could. It does not maximize profits, at least not yet.
My previous comment does not mention competition, but that’s something which will often force this exploit to not be possible. But as tech gets more complicated, the amount of alternative choices naturally drop (sometimes it looks like you have a choice, e.g. it looks like there is more than 2 different browsers, but the vast majority of them are based on Chromium and Firefox. It also looks like there’s many search engines, but they all collect from a relatively small set of indexes)
I’ll have to disagree. Selling something to you at its precise value (or arbitrarily close) is a malicious economic exploit.
All the good effects which are possible comes from the gap between what the buyer values something at, and what the selling values something at. If something is worth 4000$ to you, and I can produce it at 2000$, I can sell at 3000$ and we’ll both benefit with 1000$ of value. But if I sold it at 3995$, I’d be no better than a scalper and you’d only benefit if the time the purchase took is worth less to you than 5$. Think about it, your water company could charge you more, and there’s likely nothing you could do about it if you wanted to survive. But your water company does not exploit you like this, even though it technically could. It does not maximize profits, at least not yet.
My previous comment does not mention competition, but that’s something which will often force this exploit to not be possible. But as tech gets more complicated, the amount of alternative choices naturally drop (sometimes it looks like you have a choice, e.g. it looks like there is more than 2 different browsers, but the vast majority of them are based on Chromium and Firefox. It also looks like there’s many search engines, but they all collect from a relatively small set of indexes)