[chrisco255]

That's the whole point of crypto tokenomics. You use the token to incentivize capital expenditure on the speculation that demand will come. The entire point of a token is to align incentives around this. It has worked for Bitcoin and Ethereum. It has worked for many other protocols (Sushi, Aave, Chainlink, Filecoin, Arweave, etc). It has also failed for some protocols.

[nradov]

Actually it hasn't worked anywhere except to incentivize capital expenditure on mining hardware which does nothing of value beyond wasting electricity. All of those protocols you listed are scams or pointless failures.

[orril]

You really think the first, ever, widely used public key databases are useless? You don't believe cryptography has any usecase? Or you misunderstand why a blockchain is novel? Two possibilities.

[SilverBirch]

I read your comment, and started to draft a reply, but I went back through it, I don't actually think you understand the words you're using, so it's kinda pointless.

[nradov]

We have had widely used public key infrastructure available in database products since the 1980s. Perhaps you weren't paying attention?

Cryptography obviously has use cases. Real customers have been paying for it since long before the advent of digital computers. That has little to do with the scammers, grifters, and ideologues pushing cryptocurrency schemes.

There's not much novel about blockchains. It's a clever bit of mathematics, but so far no significant commercial value. You should read the NIST overview.

https://csrc.nist.gov/publications/detail/nistir/8202/final