Crypto Curmudgeon: What the Hell is a Crypto White Paper?

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It’s a business plan for a coin, and most of them suck.

When it was explained to me, I thought I got it. A white paper is a constitution. It sets the rules for how a particular crypto coin is going to operate. White papers define:

• How many coins can be mined — is there a limit? who can mine them?
• It determines the role of staking — what are you staking for? who can use the staked coin and for what purpose? Is there a value that can be captured for providing staking regards?
• How is it governed — is there a decision-making body? Or is it automated as a market? Who is on that body?
• The problem to be solved — How will this crypto be deployed to solve problems?

Then I started reading them.

Whew! What a bunch of jargon! A few sentences from the Abstract on one paper:

“Within distributed tokenized financial networks, Amp serves as a medium for accruing value while aligning the incentives of all participants. This is achieved via virtuous feedback loops on increasing spending capacity coupled with a non-inflationary reward distribution…”

You get the picture. My head was spinning. And that was only the summary!