Can Blockchain really thrive without crypto or a token economy backing it?
During the past few months, there has been a lot of speculation in India about laws related to crypto. The exact details have been under wraps. There have been some unconfirmed reports.
An extreme unconfirmed reports says that it proposed a 10-year-long prison term for people who “mine, generate, hold, sell, transfer, dispose, issue or deal in cryptocurrencies”.
There have been others who have said that the law also contains the word “illegal” in this. That would make it much more reasonable. But if it does not contain “illegal” then what happens to the citizens of India?
The people who hold cryptocurrency via mining? The people who bought it via legal digital channels? Should they delete the seed wallets for the crypto currency wallets? Should they delete credentials for any crypto exchanges? We can only wait till we see the actual contents of the proposed law.
But while thinking about this one other thing came to my mind.
Can blockchain thrive without crypto or token economy backing it?
Whatever blockchain initiatives that I heard about contained some form of token. The basic reason was incentivising users to participating in the network. Whether it be proof of work (Bitcoin, ETH 1.0), proof of stake (ETH 2.0, EOS), proof of capacity (IPFS, BTT) there are tokens.
The former finance minister of India, Mr. Arun Jaitley, said no to crypto but blockchain is good. I have been skeptical about this. Does this mean using completely permissioned blockchain controlled by central authorities? That seems like the only explanation to me. After all, someone has to pay the bills to keep it running. Without any incentives to be part of it public won’t run the nodes.
Does the community think I am missing something here? Are there other blockchain initiatives without crypto that have been successful?
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