Just before the ICO bubble went completely nuts, I read the white papers of the 10 highest market cap ERC20 tokens. None of them made any sense from an investor

Just before the ICO bubble went completely nuts, I read the white papers of the 10 highest market cap ERC20 tokens. None of them made any sense from an investor's perspective, from a consumer perspective, from a mechanism design perspective. With the exception of Augur (and I have other problems with Augur), they all relied on the Chuck E-Cheese model: requiring the customer to use of a novel internal currency for purchasing the services of the smart contract. This model is an absurd rent-seeking hack that basically assures your service will not grow at all. As someone interested in mechanism design, cryptocurrency strikes me as a low-stakes method of testing out various mechanisms, such as Futarchy and quadratic voting. But pyramid schemes (both intentional and unintentional) seem to be the order of the day. At this point for me to take a cryptocurrency seriously I would require it to have an inflationary monetary policy. And not "inflationary" in the sense Ethereum is. I mean, inflationary in the sense that the price does not go up over time. It doesn't have to be pegged to an existing currency, but it needs to manage its supply in such a fashion as to make a speculative bubble impossible. There would be little financial incentive to work on such a project, but Linux had that problem too. The upside is I am pretty certain it would screen out most of the toxicity of Bitcoin and its ilk. And it would actually have a chance of being useful for someone. In terms of prediction markets, the big problem with prediction markets is liquidity. There is no liquidity because it is provably irrational to participate in a non-subsidized prediction market. Subsidizing a prediction market with demurrage seems like a very good idea to me and isn't something a traditional prediction market can do. Something like this seems like a worthy experiment.