Using blockchains to implement new and experimental forms of ownership for land and other scarce assets, as well as new and experimental forms of democratic governance.

The answer is: having strong Token economics for their project. We call Tokenomics (Token + Economics) all the things that enable participants to contributing positively enabled by strong token design. Setting up Tokenomics for a project means "What can a creator put in place to allocate & incentivize a community to participate in the project."

The dominant social networks tightly restrict access, hindering the ability of third-party developers to scale. Startups and independent developers are increasingly competing from a disadvantaged position. A potential way to reverse this trend are crypto tokens — a new way to design open networks that arose from the cryptocurrency movement that began with the introduction of Bitcoin in 2008 and accelerated with the introduction of Ethereum in 2014. Tokens are a breakthrough in open network design that enable: 1) the creation of open, decentralized networks that combine the best architectural properties of open and proprietary networks, and 2) new ways to incentivize open network participants, including users, developers, investors, and service providers. By enabling the development of new open networks, tokens could help reverse the centralization of the internet, thereby keeping it accessible, vibrant and fair, and resulting in greater innovation.

A blockchain system has no ability to regular "the market" in the sense of people's general ability to freely make transactions. But what it can do is regulate and structure (or even create) specific markets, setting up patterns of specific behaviors whose incentives are ultimately set and guided by institutions that have anti-collusion guardrails built in, and can resist pressure from economic actors.

people normally tend to focus on the unrealistic nature of perfect information and perfect rationality. But the unrealistic assumption that is hidden in the list that strikes me as even more misleading is individual choice: the idea that each agent is separately making their own decisions, no agent has a positive or negative stake in another agent's outcomes, and there are no "side games"; the only thing that sees each agent's decisions is the black box that we call "the mechanism".

There is a large body of intellectual work that criticizes a bubble of concepts that they refer to as "economization", "neoliberalism" and similar terms, arguing that they corrode democratic political values and leave many people's needs unmet as a result. The world of cryptocurrency is very economic (lots of tokens flying around everywhere, with lots of functions being assigned to those tokens), very neo (the space is 12 years old!) and very liberal (freedom and voluntary participation are core to the whole thing). Do these critiques also apply to blockchain systems? If so, what conclusions should we draw, and how could blockchain systems be designed to account for these critiques? Nathan's answer: more hybrid approaches combining ideas from both economics and politics. But what will it actually take to achieve that, and will it give the results that we want?