There is a lot of excitement in “money tokens” and “privacy coins”, and while I agree that those are useful and valuable (to a point), my question is: how many different money and privacy coins does the world *actually* want and need? It’s greater than 1, but less than thousands.
2/ By comparison, today there are ~180 fiat currencies recognized by the U.N. representing ~$90 trillion, ~92% of which is digital.
3/ I’d love to hear other people’s thoughts, but I only see a few scenarios where we have more than 180 money tokens...
4/ First: Tokens architect around new digital nations, states, citizenships, and communities that both cut across traditional boundaries but also create new ones—ones organized around certain beliefs, values, principles & behaviors. But will these be less accessible & fungible?
5/ Second: Each jurisdiction will have its own set of money tokens, because regulation does not allow others to be easily accessed or exchanged for their respective fiat currencies. This would lead to a lot of fragmentation however and likely centralize value with in a few (BTC).
6/ Third: “Money” has always been an enabler to some higher order job, use, or ability, and so “utility tokens” and “money tokens” start to converge (except for global payments, SoV, privacy, and maybe others). My intuition is that this will more likely be the end state.
7/ The interesting implication of #3 above is that if the token is not for the purpose of storing, exchanging, or transferring value, then it must enable some higher order job, service, or action that is valuable to people/society (or interact with those services)...
8/ ...but it begs the question, that if value is ultimately created by the services (aka dapps), then isn’t that where the value should be stored and accrue in the long run (with the exception of a handful of horizontal money and privacy tokens)?
9/ I guess this has become an long term alternative case for utility tokens and dapps over money and privacy tokens (as a category)
