Decentralized DLTs (decentralized distributed ledger technologies) all require a rewards system and a cost to the person/entity running a node. This has to date only been successfully supported by crypto-currencies. The incremental costs of running an application on a node and incremental payments for maintaining/running a node are paid/rewarded by crypto.

To date, almost no discussion of this and its problems has taken place in the community. The costs and problematics of mining the hashes to add the blocks has been discussed, but not in a way that questions the basic economics and feasibility of decentralization.

First off, if there were only a small number of D-DLT’s projects, once one overcame the non-scalability of blockchains (another huge discussion and problem that has a hundred solutions right now) then one could imagine these being as revolutionary as the thousands of promoters, activists, strategists, advisors, and (it seems, fewer) technologists say.

But there are now hundreds of D-DLT platforms and it seems every day brings another few. This creates two problems even for ones that don’t have scalability or other problems: how can you get a critical mass of people/entities to run nodes for your platform and how can you attract enough users (different applications and/or large number of users of applications). Since token economics relies entirely on demand for the token/crypto-currency, this is in my view eventually a sector destroying fault.

Every new solution to D-DLTs’ other problems or new and excellent-sounding application of D-DLT virtue eventually has to solve the unspoken problem to ever succeed: how to generate enough demand and enough usage to make it worthwhile to run enough nodes and run enough applications/users to be viable. By now actual and sweat equity in the space is already in the billions. And no viable use cases.

All I hear is crickets.