But this makes zero sense! What purpose does the coin serve here? Imagine coins had somehow gotten tied in with email protocols. The person who came up with the protocol somehow gets to magically siphon off money every time someone sends an email? Why? How?
The same is true with Bitcoin or Ethereum. You can fork it and make your own, but the majority of the people want to use one of the original protocols, and you can only use the protocol if you pay with the proper protocol token (either BTC or ETH).
But not value that can be captured by the creator of the protocol. Let's go back to cloud storage. Sellers of storage sell 1GB-Month for 1 token (or whatever). Buyers of storage eventually run out of tokens because they've given them all to sellers. So they have to purchase the tokens back from sellers for dollars. How much will sellers charge? The cost of storage (plus whatever profit they can get away with).
At that point buyers of storage are paying exactly what they'd pay for storage if the token system didn't exist. It's just this goofy middle layer of scrip. There's no magical extra money that the protocol creator can siphon off.
Step back and look at the big picture. The only way for a protocol creator to make money is for either sellers of storage to charge less than they otherwise would or for buyers of storage to pay more. Why would either of those two groups ever want to do that?
That's also how proof-of-work systems should have worked with surplus compute cycles, except ... ASICs. I basically consider Bitcoin broken because of this.
As to how the protocol creator makes money, they can sell storage like everyone else, but creating a protocol doesn't require the same initial capital as starting a whole cloud storage company.
I'm saying that the creator of the protocol won't.
Because? Value?
Sorry, I really lost a lot of faith after that one.
No, it doesn't. Being scarce, by itself, is not valuable at all. Being useful is was gives something value. In fact, I'd argue a protocol that I have to have a coin for is much, much, much less useful, and therefore less valuable, than one that doesn't.
The only people who need to be magically paid are the ones executing the contract... miners, signers, etc.
In FoodCoin the cooks would get paid, the health inspectors would get paid, the poisoning investigators would get paid, the underwriters would get paid when those people do their jobs and lose their stakes when they don’t. The eaters would pay.
These people are paid for doing work in alignment with the contract incentives. A good cryptocontract makes it hard to get rewarded for work that goes against the planned incentive scheme. A bad one fails at this.
In order for this to work without a centralized payment gateway like PayPal, you need to issue tokens. Those tokens will have a value of TOTAL_TRANSACTED_PER_AVERAGE_HOLDING_PERIOD. Their price will depend on speculation about that value over time. Contracts finding more use will tend to have a bigger TOTAL_TRANSACTED_PER_AVERAGE_HOLDING_PERIOD.
They don't, why would they?