> The crypto community has to ask themselves whether they want decentralization or money. Sometimes they can have both, but at some point, they’ll be forced to make a critical choice between one or the other, and that’s how we can know what is the primary value upheld by the community.

I've seen this sentiment quite a bit and it bugs me because you cannot easily separate money from the system.

When choosing between centralized, federated, and decentralized services you have the same fundamental problem.

Do you:

A) Host it yourself or

B) Have someone else host it for you.

A is a non-starter for most people. However, B introduces a new problem, the resource allocation problem. We live in a world with finite resources and we need to figure out how to allocate them. Money is a solution to the resource allocation problem.

Decentralized and federated software is great but it doesn't solve the whole problem. This is one of the reasons federated services haven't taken off yet and why crypto seems to have some traction.

A great example is IPFS. It's an interesting piece of software, however, you still need people to host files on IPFS. This takes resources and without money you rely on people hosting files out of the goodness of their hearts. Unfortunately this isn't a reliable motivator which is why Filecoin exists.