[seibelj]

I have also thought about this a good amount, and the answer is any place you want a market. Markets are a very interesting thing, and when they exist all sorts of things happen, but especially real time price discovery.

What digital assets enable are markets around digital goods. Software can be funded and operated using new tokens specifically for that project. I believe it can be one solution for financing and creating real gains from open source.

[googlemike]

Agreed that markets are very interesting, and agreed that real time price discovery is a thing that happens in markets...

But I still fail to see how blockchain is relevant here? A centralized system for managing supply and demand equilibrium through dynamic price changes seems like the best system here.

I do not feel as though have answered my question - would you mind expanding on your answer?

[RhodesianHunter]

Agreed. It seems like a trusted third party exchange will always win out due to:

1. Better efficiency 2. The third party is there to help when things go wrong 3. The legal system can help when 2 won't work 4. It's more accessible to the less tech-literate 5. The third party always has skin in the game, and therefore an incentive to always be improving the system

[QuackingJimbo]

Well said

I don't know how anyone over the age of twelve cannot see #2 and #3

Code has bugs. Things will go wrong. You need lawyers.

[seibelj]

Blockchain allows you to run certain types of programs in a purely decentralized manner. You can create a smart contract and allow anyone to use it, and pay for its operation, forever into the future without maintaining any infrastructure. The user pays.

The use cases are novel and not necessarily directly applicable to current problems, just as the Internet was novel and required entrepreneurs to invent new business models.

But let’s imagine you created a new protocol for email. You decide that all emails in the new protocol require the use of a token. You are now incentivizing early users to bootstrap, improve, develop, and promote the protocol. What was previously unfundable is now profitable.

I’m only scratching the surface, but with some imagination you can see how “not crazy” this is.

[epanchin]

Much easier to charge users using their own credit cards. Don’t see what crypto is solving here?

In your email example, what is the advantage to you over charging a subscription? How do you create ongoing revenue?

[seibelj]

No one profited from the creation or success of the SMTP protocol except those who created services that operated on top of it.

Similarly, someone creates a new open-source project and AWS hosts it and earns all the money.

Blockchain allows you to create protocols that actually profit as more people use the base layer. This is a brand new thing.