> “Think of this as an incredibly efficient barter system,” says Harvey. “Barter is generally inefficient, but if you have a network and you tokenize the goods and services and enable it with a blockchain, it can become very efficient.”
Maybe I just lack imagination, but I am missing where the benefit of this lies. When Apple has a coin and Toyota has a coin and Kodak has a coin (as seemed would be the case at the time this was published) why is it any better to hold any one of these, barter through a set of intermediaries to get to ConvenienceStoreCoin, and settle your candy purchase with that, versus holding investments, selling them for cash, and using that everywhere? Even putting transaction costs aside, my sense is that a natural, shared unit of account / means of exchange will end up predominating and this "incredibly efficient barter system" won't be the paradigm shift the article implies.