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This is painful to read. techcrunch.com/2017/08/20/yes…
Has the person who wrote this piece ever heard of the stock market? 
Or mutual funds?
I'm upset by how dumb this piece is. I have to go take a walk.
I just realized what the token mania reminds me of.
It reminds me of the enthusiasm and zeal for corporate prediction markets in back in the 2000s. cbsnews.com/news/why-dont-…
The idea was "all decisions would be made better if people just put a price on beliefs"
And that there was no decision that couldn't be made better with markets and prices. A very pre-crisis view.
The tokenize thing is that all over again. Make society better by everything being public, tradeable, and priced.
A spare bedroom, a car, an idea you have in whitepaper only. Just attach a token to it, and let the market judge its worth.
It's all rubbish, but it's the same impulse driving both things.
Anyway, that's my rant for the month.
As @aaronlammer points out, people even thought prediction markets could be used to fight terrorism. nbcnews.com/id/3072985/t/p…
Alright, I lied. While going for a walk to calm down, I thought of one more thing I had to rant about regarding tokens...
Many of these articles, like the TechCrunch piece, or this CNBC piece, are not *really* making the case for tokens cnbc.com/2017/08/21/bit…
They're really just making the case for small, traded equity on literally anything of value. A share of stock. A car. A spare room etc.
But even if you were to stipulate that this is a desirable or inevitable thing, which is a huge if...
These arguments don't establish why blockchain technology is useful for this. Traditional technologies can certainly handle decimal points!
Blockchains solve the problem of not needing a trusted third party, and they solve the problem of censorship-free transactions.
None of this stuff that anybody's talking about needs these things at all. In fact, they're incompatible.
Imagine I sell you my bedroom in a token sale (lol!). Ok, you have some equity in my home. But what if I sell you my home and don't tell you
The solution is to get a judgment from a trusted third party (i.e. the government). Completely violating the point of using a blockchain.
So not only is the dream (everything traded!) asinine, the technology isn't even designed for fulfilling that dream.
I'm pretty sure, btw, some tech people will see this thread and talk about finance people not "getting it"...
But, IMO, it's the token people themselves who don't get the technology or what it's good for.
Virtually none of the pro-token arguments explain why applied cryptography is needed to accomplish what they're setting out to do.
Ok, I think that's the end of my rant.
PS: There's only one token that actually solves a problem, and I think we all know what it is. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trillion_…
