[teamonkey]

As far as I can tell, the purpose of tokens is to provide an incentive for running the ledger client and processing transactions: mining for uptake and transaction fees to maintain scale long-term. You need as many people to run the client as possible.

If you can find some other reason for processing transactions and can guarantee that the population is big enough then the coin becomes unnecessary.

[Geee]

Distributed ledgers (e.g. blockchain) are based on security by game theory. It's financially rewarding to agree with each other, and financially very costly to disagree or attack it. You can't have game theory in the protocol without intrinsic rewards, as far as I know.

[teamonkey]

I assume you mean extrinsic reward. Yeah, it's unrealistic to expect people to burn CPU cycles processing the ledger client just for the fun of seeing the dials on their power meter spin faster.

An extrinsic reward doesn't have to be financial though, it's anything that you want to get out of an activity that isn't part of the activity itself.

If the blockchain ledger was a part of a greater whole and the client software of which it forms a part was somehow intrinsically fun, useful or needed, the token itself wouldn't be necessary.