That said, the reason tokens are tied to so many of these projects is to act as incentive and to quantify participation. There is no reason for people to, say, seed torrents aside from feeling good about sharing with other people.
Financializing this process brings an incentive to participate in decentralized projects that otherwise would have no way to exist. Sure, most of the projects will fail and perhaps only existed in the first place to enrich the founders, but isn't that true of the startup space as well?
The projects that succeed will succeed big, but I estimate we are still years away from an example that will be overwhelmingly convincing. By then most the profit will have been made and there will still be people on HN saying the whole cryptocurrency space is a scam. It is my opinion they are wrong, let history be the judge.