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by kylebrown 4349 days ago
These things will work, they just won't be good for "store of value" like bitcoin. Supply of disk space, bandwidth etc keeps growing, but the demand for those resources grows as well. Hard to predict the ratio of supply to demand, and therefore the price, but I think they could work very well in the long term. Not as a universal payment currency, but rather as a token (with fluctuating price) for some particular type of service.

I see the future of "resource coins" as being efficient mechanisms for p2p resource distribution. Conventionally, a customer would use their credit card to pay some cloud hosting company. The conventional hosting company is a business which operates as a privately managed bureaucracy. A P2P coin operates as standard protocol acting as a meta-company, aka a DAC/DAO - Digital Autonomous Company/Organization.

In a conventional business, a private bureaucracy manages a resource uses it to provide a service (bandwidth, disk space, and CPU as managed by a hosting company). P2P coins replace that centrally-operated middle man with a decentralized algorithm and account database. Bitcoin is like a meta-company which operates a distributed ledger internet payments. Why stop at payments? If its efficient, we should *coin all the things.

1 comments

"I see the future of "resource coins" as being efficient mechanisms for p2p resource distribution." -- Agree. This is totally valid and can definitely work; it's kind of a special purpose currency or intermediate currency then. Just a way to measure the value of a service, like storing stuff.

I'm still not convinced that you could actually use that revenue as a value in itself, like, storing it for later use. To be fair, I did not read the paper. If you would get existing coins for sharing a resource, that could work ... if you only rely on the mining process to earn value, it won't.