Jacob | Five Eye Tea on Nostr: Considering the fact that money is central to the human existence, it's usually not ...

Considering the fact that money is central to the human existence, it's usually not completely separate. IPFS, as a network, functions on its own without Filecoin. However, with Filecoin, it incentivizes more people to host, making the network stronger. Voluntary hosting can only do so much.

This is similar to how Session, as a messaging app, is just an end-to-end encrypted messaging app running over an onion routing network, and you never have to even think about the crypto side of things, yet the nodes in that onion routing network are hosted by people who stake the OXEN cryptocurrency (though they're switching over to a new token called Session Token). By staking this token, it locks down that node while also earning the host some income over time. This reduces the likelihood of sybil attacks (one of Tor's only inherent anonymity weaknesses) because governments would have to stake OXEN/Session Token and, well, the blockchain transparency means we'd be more likely to know about it as a community.

In terms of LBRY, they probably would have been better off NOT having their token (LBC) since that's what the SEC went after to shut down the company, but the network lives on because it's driven by the LBRY blockchain. It's also what allowed Odysee, which was once just LBRY's main web front-end (and spun off into its own company ~2-3 years ago), to regroup and start switching over to a new framework that's operating on Arweave.

I can also give another example of blockchain being used like this: MeWe. Previously just a centralized, privacy-friendly alternative to Facebook, they've recently completed a migration over to Frequency, using Decentralized Social Network Protocol (DSNP). Frequency is specifically designed to be a utility blockchain that hosts decentralized social networks. Frequency tokens aren't worth any money, yet they will eventually offer voting power over the way the blockchain is governed over time.

In general, I totally get the skepticism over crypto. I also agree that Bitcoin is undoubtedly the best cryptocurrency and blockchain. However, we also have to be fair and recognize some of the weaknesses, as well as the fact that there are definitely still ways that blockchain and altcoins can be useful to a future digital society. Not all of them are ponzi memecoins, some of them have some really awesome potential that we can use side-by-side with Bitcoin.