num_pages: 364
description: Tokens - often referred to as cryptocurrencies - can represent anything from an asset to an access right such as gold diamonds a fraction of a Picasso painting or an entry ticket to a concert. Tokens could also be used to reward social media contributions incentivize the reduction of CO2 emissions or even ones attention for watching an ad. While it has become easy to create a token which is collectively managed by a public Web3 infrastructure like a blockchain network the understanding of how to apply these tokens is still vague. The industry keeps referring to Blockchain as different from Bitcoin creating an artificial divide that is often misleading. There seems to be too little understanding about the fact that Bitcoin is a blockchain network which is (a) globally managed by people who mostly do not know each other and (b) enabled by the consensus protocol that (c) incentivizes all network actors for their contributions with a native token. The governance rules are tied to the minting of a native blockchain token. The Bitcoin token can therefore be seen as the currency of a distributed Internet tribe called the Bitcoin network where network actors are rewarded with Bitcoins just as the Ether is the currency of the distributed Internet tribe Ethereum network or Sia is the native currency of the Sia network. The Bitcoin network and other distributed ledgers all represent a collectively maintained public infrastructure and are the backbone of the next generation Internet what the crypto community refers to as the Web3.This book attempts to summarize existing knowledge about blockchain networks and other distributed ledgers as the backbone of the Web3 and contextualize the socio-economic implications of the Web3 applications such as smart contracts tokens and DAOs to the concepts of money economics governance and decentralized finance (DeFi).
language: English
title: Token Economy: How the Web3 reinvents the Internet
publisher: Token Kitchen