> I'm not super up on Star Trek lore, but to my understanding the setting takes place in a post-scarcity universe, where the only thing that is still scarce is latinum.
Perhaps it's some material where replicators always add some noise to the atomic structure when replicating; and then the "value" is just how close it's to a perfect structure, by whatever measure of perfection. Then you'd have replicator farms just replicating them over and over until something of acceptable quality pops out - like a physical PoW.
It makes for a fun theory at least! And the post-scarcity societies can go "whatever would you want that for?"
Perhaps it's some material where replicators always add some noise to the atomic structure when replicating; and then the "value" is just how close it's to a perfect structure, by whatever measure of perfection. Then you'd have replicator farms just replicating them over and over until something of acceptable quality pops out - like a physical PoW.
It makes for a fun theory at least! And the post-scarcity societies can go "whatever would you want that for?"