Historically it has been difficult to incentivize the creation of new protocols as Albert Wenger points out. This has been because 1) there had been no direct way to monetize the creation and maintenance of these protocols and 2) it had been difficult to get a new protocol off the ground because of the chicken and the egg problem. For example, with SMTP, our email protocol, there was no direct monetary incentive to create the protocol — it was only later that businesses like Outlook, Hotmail, and Gmail started using it and made a real business on top of it. As a result we see very successful protocols and they tend to be quite old. (Editor: and created when the Internet was government-supported)

Now someone can create a protocol, create a tokens that is native to that protocol, and retain some of that token for themselves and for future development. This is a great way to incentivize creators: if the protocol is successful, the token will go up in value…In addition, tokens help solve the classic chicken and the egg problem that many networks have…the value of a network goes up a lot when more people join it. So how do you get people to join a brand new network? You give people partial ownership of the network…

These two incentives are amazing offsets for each other. When the network is less populated and useful you now have a stronger incentive to join it.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3626178&forum_id=2#33393247)

2. He's making a slightly different point.

3. On your tulip point you're actually wrong and if you read that section you'd see a pretty thorough debunking of the tulip bubble myth.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3626178&forum_id=2#33396562)

So let me rephrase it in a way to placate your delicate sensibilities: whatever happened with Tulip pricing, futures, and options, it crashed because there was no society-wide consensus on its utility. Else it would have recovered. Not so for crypto. It may crash because of mistiming, but not for a lack of utility. All of this is captured in my earlier one-sentence summary.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3626178&forum_id=2#33396652)

You must be pretty low IQ to be impressed enough to push this pedestrian article so hard. And I say this as a financially illiterate middling-IQ wagecuck.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3626178&forum_id=2#33398043)

https://medium.com/humanizing-the-singularity/what-does-ether-100-mean-bb58522f781e

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3626178&forum_id=2#33396567)

---

What kinds of things can you do with programmable money? Nearly the entire financial system is built from programmable money. They don’t call it that, of course, but the loans and bonds and derivatives and futures and mortgages and credit default swaps and all the rest? Although at the very bottom of the stack, right in the guts of the system they might eventually be represented by a paper contract, in fact they’re represented as software for almost every step in their evolution. An individual mortgage might be a paper contract between a person and a bank, but a hundred million mortgages in the mortgage system are pure digital: software representing homes, offices, warehouses, cars, land — and more ephemeral items like airline tickets and concert tickets and even the music itself in a digital download. All of this, and more, is just software representing value, programmable money singing its songs of desire and achievement across the wires.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3626178&forum_id=2#33396643)