Comment by ElevenLathe

I think payola diplomas will probably continue to be valuable, since they represent non-falsifiable economic power/sacrifice. Even if schools just literally sold diplomas for 100k, they would still be useful for business to filter out people who are too poor to matter (i.e. they have such divergent interests from shareholders/management that it would be more trouble that its worth to try and socialize them to a particular professional role).

This is a bit less cut-and-dried, but IMO cryptocurrency has normalized this kind of view where simply wasting resources is itself a way to generate, or at least represent, value.