I don’t want to miss the chance of contributing to the token legitimacy debate that’s currently going on. From the position I stand in, as head of legal in a decentralized project, and former M&A lawyer, I’ll try my best to explain why I consider there’s a need for deeper understanding about token existence before we begin demonizing them.
After reading tons of medium posts, magazine articles and after hours of discussion with friends and colleagues, I find three main points for a defense statement:
Tokens respond to behavioral economics, and materialize community-belonging sentiments.
Behavioral economics is a discipline I knew nothing about 6 months ago. Then, “Misbehaving, The making of behavioral economics” by Richard H. Taler came to my hands, and I took sense of the magnitude the Blockchain-based decentralized business could take.
Yuval Noah Harari wrote “Sapiens” as a shake-up, an instrument for us to question certain basics of Human history. Among other, he describes the ways in which civilizations have managed to be stable, claiming that “an imagined order cannot be sustained by violence alone. It requires some true believers as well.”
For the imagined order is not a subjective order existing in my own imagination — it is rather an inter subjective order, existing in the shared imagination of thousands and millions of people. The inter subjective is something that exists within the communication network linking the subjective consciousness of many individuals.
Inter subjective phenomena are neither malevolent frauds not insignificants charades. They exist in a different way from physical phenomena such as radioactivity, but their impact on the world may still be enormous.
Source/More: Million-dollar question — Tokens – techburst
