Remembering that Crypto-Tokens are ‘Programmable Money’

tl:dr; Programmable money is something so radical that we may not understand its implications for years to come. Here’s one super small example.

There was a really interesting line, nestled toward the end of the great post by David Truong, Incentivising participation and growth in communities (using crypto-economics), that read:

Depending on how strict the community leaders want to be, they can also disable ‘sending’ of the token to ensure that the community tokens are not sold on secondary markets.

Now, the blog post itself is about growing communities through tokenized incentives, but this line of “disable sending” is an important fact to remember.

With crypto, we have ‘programmable money.’

Think about it in terms of traditional vesting of a stock or options.

You don’t take control of the stock (well, ever) and it sits at a 3rd party custodian (which has a cost and a security risk).

However, what if the company could actually issue you the tokens, but disable sending on them until some future date?

Or, what if they could give you all the tokens, but they would get “burned” if your employment lapsed or you were fired (as in a third party oracle providing that info)

The point is that with tokens, you can program in many of the rules that now exist outside of the token, and which are managed by third parties.

Programmable money. That’s never been possible before.