On: Thoughts on Tokens

[harryh]

That's different though. That's paying for a service (compute time). Not somehow getting money for an open source software library.

[ajmurmann → harryh]

The team got $8.6 million in the initial token sale though. I'm pretty sure they also retained a fair number of tokens. Since there is s fixed amount of tokens the value per token should go up if Golem gets many people to use it and thus the value of the retained tokens rewards the team for their success. A scheme like that of course only would work for a very small portion of open source projects. I could see this work though for pretty much anything that needs hosting. In order to join the network you pay tokens to someone else who is providing that hosting. You could clone pretty much any social network that way. Want to have an account or make changes to your account you gotta pay for the computation.

[harryh → ajmurmann]

Why would people want to use a social network they have to pay for when all of the existing ones are free?

[dragonwriter → harryh]

> Why would people want to use a social network they have to pay for when all of the existing ones are free?

Basically, to avoid the problems that come with the "advertiser pays" model, which include:

- Getting content you don't want (ads) because it pays the bills,

- Not getting content you do want from feeds you are following because limited free reach is used as mechanism to secure sales of ads and paid reach.

[harryh → dragonwriter]

Empirically speaking, very few people care about those things. And, given metcalfe's law, their opinion pretty much doesn't matter.