The problem is that money is a vital piece of the technology. In traditional cryptogrqphy, an attacker needs exponentially more resources then the honest parti

The problem is that money is a vital piece of the technology. In traditional cryptogrqphy, an attacker needs exponentially more resources then the honest parties. With crypto, all an attacker needs is about as much resources as the honest actor. The theory being that anyone with those resources would gain even more by behaving honestly. Without the money portion of this, the security guarentees here are just not viable.