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Comment by jaggs | Hacker News Reader

Wasn't the original idea that tokens would 'fund' the project without requiring external venture capital etc? The problem was the speculation part of the equation began to dominate the underlying story about building decentralised processes and that's when the media smelled blood.

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It was also a way that enabled new entrants to be competitive against larger business with network effects, by using a win-win structure of incentives (the earlier you join the community, the more you gain if the community takes off). If not tokens, I’m curious what else could fulfill this function.

That structure leads to pump-and-dump behavior; it's far from win-win.

There should be SOME way to get a win-win from the situation. Some way to disincentivize specultation somehow while still retaining the beneficial effects of tokens??

Yeah, I meant the goal was good, even if the current implementations didn't work out as expected (at least, as far as I know). But if not the token economy, what other advantage can new entrants offer to compete with the network effects of larger companies?

The goal wasn't just to replace the existing winners with others, but to do so in a way that ensured the gains of the enterprise would be more equally shared with the community. If the token economy can't do this, might there be another way? Or should we declare this a utopia and give up trying?

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