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There are a lot of bullshit blockchain projects. That said, the reason tokens are tied to so many of these projects is to act as incentive and to quantify part

There are a lot of bullshit blockchain projects. That said, the reason tokens are tied to so many of these projects is to act as incentive and to quantify participation. There is no reason for people to, say, seed torrents aside from feeling good about sharing with other people. Financializing this process brings an incentive to participate in decentralized projects that otherwise would have no way to exist. Sure, most of the projects will fail and perhaps only existed in the first place to enrich the founders, but isn't that true of the startup space as well? The projects that succeed will succeed big, but I estimate we are still years away from an example that will be overwhelmingly convincing. By then most the profit will have been made and there will still be people on HN saying the whole cryptocurrency space is a scam. It is my opinion they are wrong, let history be the judge.

pharmakom 5y ago
Funny that one of the most successful decentralised technologies (torrents) has no token for incentives.
- cinquemb 5y ago
  While torrents are great for some things (wrote my own bare bones client off of libtorrent and use it to send files to friends as well as download stuff, as well as merged it to work with my fork of opentraker that has a built in LSA search from hash-metadata mappings [0: that can also be distributed via torrents]), they are pretty poor at incentivizing people to seed unpopular content and have it be widely accessible, and tokens on various networks seems to have addressed that for specific applications (there are a bunch of decentralized aws-like type stuff popping up that involve a token, but I still think it will take some time for things to pan out). Would be great if we could incentive via tokens people to run mastodon instances where people can log in with their address (and multiple chains tokens are recognized) because I personally have no desire for onchain social media like i do for onchain derivatives and exchange functionality. [0] https://github.com/cinquemb/opentracker https://github.com/cinquemb/opentracker
- mattwilsonn888 5y ago
  What makes you think they are the most successful when Bitcoin has a near $1 trillion market cap? Even if you think its worth $0, you cannot deny that it securely locks up all that money despite the hacker honeypot. That seems like an accomplishment.

pharmakom 5y ago

Funny that one of the most successful decentralised technologies (torrents) has no token for incentives.

cinquemb 5y ago
While torrents are great for some things (wrote my own bare bones client off of libtorrent and use it to send files to friends as well as download stuff, as well as merged it to work with my fork of opentraker that has a built in LSA search from hash-metadata mappings [0: that can also be distributed via torrents]), they are pretty poor at incentivizing people to seed unpopular content and have it be widely accessible, and tokens on various networks seems to have addressed that for specific applications (there are a bunch of decentralized aws-like type stuff popping up that involve a token, but I still think it will take some time for things to pan out). Would be great if we could incentive via tokens people to run mastodon instances where people can log in with their address (and multiple chains tokens are recognized) because I personally have no desire for onchain social media like i do for onchain derivatives and exchange functionality. [0] https://github.com/cinquemb/opentracker https://github.com/cinquemb/opentracker
mattwilsonn888 5y ago
What makes you think they are the most successful when Bitcoin has a near $1 trillion market cap? Even if you think its worth $0, you cannot deny that it securely locks up all that money despite the hacker honeypot. That seems like an accomplishment.