> No, the perverse incentive is that there will be RepoCoin, and the people involved will be incentivized to make the price of that as high as possible.

Isn't this problem unrelated to cryptocurrency?

There will be the US dollar, and the people involved will be incentivized to keep its value high, e.g. by pressuring or invading other countries to prevent them from switching to other currencies. Or they'll be incentivized to adopt policies that cause consumer and government debt to become unreasonably excessive to create a large enough pool of debts denominated in that currency that they can create an inordinate amount of it without crashing its value.

Or on the other side of the coin, there will be countries with currencies they knowingly devalue, either because they can force the people in that country to accept them anyway or because devaluing their currency makes their exports more competitive and simultaneously allows them to spend the currency they printed.

If anything cryptocurrency could hypothetically be better at reducing these perverse incentives, because if good rules are chosen at the outset and get ossified into the protocol then it's harder for bad actors to corrupt something that requires broad consensus to change.

Sure, but your average developer doesn't have a lot of agency in if the US invades another country in order to increase the value of the coin they got for having a PR merged.

But with crypto they do. See for example all the BAGS coins that get created for random opensource projects and the behavior that occurs because of that.

Just use a stablecoin, don't float a "utility token" those things are stupid. Have a smart contract receive a USDC deposit. If the maintainer "times out" reviewing your PR, the contract returns all the deposit. If the maintainer does not accept your PR, the contract burns 0.5x of the deposit and returns the rest. Maintainers can decide to turn off the time-out for very popular projects where you probably would have devs trying to spam PRs for fame/recognition, but hopefully the deposit price can accurately reflect the amount of spam the project gets.

Utility tokens are fundamentally equities and you need to firewall equity from an organization the same way companies in most market economies are regulated.

You don't even need to burn it, just send it to someone other than the developers, like the EFF, so the developers aren't given a perverse incentive.

The average developer also doesn't have a lot of agency with respect to how major chains like Ethereum are run either, but they can use them.

Creating your own chain just because you can rather than because you actually have a reason to implement the technology in a different way than anybody else should be disfavored and viewed with suspicion.

I'm talking about your own coin, not chain.

ERC20 tokens are part of Ethereum (and yes I realise there are also non ETH based tokens and that the gas cost of Eth makes them attractive etc etc)

Ahh, I see now the angle you were coming at it from, my wrong!

But it could just be made a stablecoin.

It's a huge shame that crypto has been so poorly-behaved as an industry that almost nobody is willing to touch it except for speculation. It could be useful but it's scared away most of the honest people.

The fact that people around the world are trading hundreds of billions of dollars of stable coins [1], with India, Pakistan, the Philippines and Brazil in the top five countries [2], not least of all for the purpose of "greater monetary stability" [3], I think points toward the revolutionary usefulness of its inherently non-speculative properties (as referenced in positive applications of crypto in above comments).

It really has been a shitshow of get rich schemes, and yet crypto keeps not dying, instead increasingly getting applied to extremely valuable real world every day use cases, which I think is evidence of the value of the inherent technology.

[1]https://defillama.com/stablecoins [2]https://www.trmlabs.com/reports-and-whitepapers/2025-crypto-... [3]https://www.goldmansachs.com/what-we-do/goldman-sachs-global...

The greed has ruined it, and the greed and desperation to get rich at all costs keeps it alive.

My point is that despite the incredible greed and desperation it not only doesn't die, its practical uses are growing. The numbers say that the actual value exceeds the grift.

gitcoin lol