<story><title>Cryptonetworks and why tokens are fundamental</title><url>https://www.nickgrossman.is/2018/cryptonetworks-and-why-tokens-are-fundamental/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rajeck</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m always happy to be convinced that someone has seen something I&amp;#x27;ve missed in all of this hype about crypto, but when you say things like...&lt;p&gt;&amp;#x27;imagine if you could fork Amazon and launch a direct competitor&amp;#x27;&lt;p&gt;..you&amp;#x27;ve lost me.  Amazon is not a code base. It has over 500,000 employees who work hard to serve its customers. How do you fork that?&lt;p&gt;I would offer another, better example but I can&amp;#x27;t think of one. Web 2.0 companies are so far ahead that web 3.0 is going to have to come up with something completely different to be commercially interesting.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>roymurdock</author><text>The author is arguing that decentralizing the control of compute power and compute-as-a-service is valuable and should be invested in.&lt;p&gt;It is valuable if we ever reach a point where say, AWS has a monopoly on all compute power, and starts making bad&amp;#x2F;unfair&amp;#x2F;predatory decisions that hurt customers.&lt;p&gt;Otherwise running decentralized payment networks to exchange compute power is much less efficient and much more costly than relying on purchasing services directly from a few competing (read: non-colluding) service providers using USD, GBP, EUR, credit cards, etc.&lt;p&gt;There&amp;#x27;s really no need to decentralize compute-as-a-service. This person is getting paid to talk their book because their employer has placed a lot of bets in the cryptocurrency&amp;#x2F;blockchain world and is trying to brainstorm ways to turn them into actual viable products and exit these investments.&lt;p&gt;Blockchains &amp;#x2F; decentralized ledgers are almost always solutions looking for a problem. They solve the very niche issue of exchange between untrusted parties, with caveats, and with extra performance&amp;#x2F;cost added to a centralized solution.&lt;p&gt;There&amp;#x27;s currently no reason to implement a decentralized ledger solution for exchanging compute-as-a-service.</text></comment>
<story><title>Cryptonetworks and why tokens are fundamental</title><url>https://www.nickgrossman.is/2018/cryptonetworks-and-why-tokens-are-fundamental/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rajeck</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m always happy to be convinced that someone has seen something I&amp;#x27;ve missed in all of this hype about crypto, but when you say things like...&lt;p&gt;&amp;#x27;imagine if you could fork Amazon and launch a direct competitor&amp;#x27;&lt;p&gt;..you&amp;#x27;ve lost me.  Amazon is not a code base. It has over 500,000 employees who work hard to serve its customers. How do you fork that?&lt;p&gt;I would offer another, better example but I can&amp;#x27;t think of one. Web 2.0 companies are so far ahead that web 3.0 is going to have to come up with something completely different to be commercially interesting.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>JumpCrisscross</author><text>&amp;gt; &lt;i&gt;Web 2.0 companies are so far ahead that web 3.0 is going to have to come up with something completely different to be commercially interesting&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Web 1.0 (&lt;i&gt;e.g.&lt;/i&gt; e-mail, http, &lt;i&gt;et cetera&lt;/i&gt;) was more de-centralised than any token-based company I see today.</text></comment>