[qubex]

I’m no cryptocurrency fanatic, but you can’t set up a mutually exclusive dichotomy between the terms asset and currency as the latter is a proper subset of the former: currency you own is an asset of yours, currency you owe is an asset of somebody else's (a debt).

Pedantry aside, however, I agree with you that these ‘tokens’ are cryptoassets, entities whose only saving grace is their deliberately manufactured scarcity.

That's all block chains are, really: methods of manufacturing scarcity on a distributed, open medium.

[phoenix9]

Block chains are a fundamental technological revolution which for the first time in human history provides a verifiable public accounting ledger which eliminates double spending, back dating transactions, and as you mentioned eliminates the ability to arbitrarily create more tokens.

[qubex]

Yup. I consider blockchains, at root, to be distributed DRM systems at heart: they ensure a consensus view of who has the exclusive right to use a given token at a precise moment in time. This is remarkable in that they build upon a P2P system that in the past was notorious for being piracy-friendly on the simple grounds that digital information is inherently infinitely duplicable. To think of blockchain technology in terms of currency replacement is a bit reductive (and, as far as my perspective of orthodox macroeconomics goes, pretty misguided). They will, however, have alternative applications of much greater import.