Vega Protocol

i spent a few weeks reading the anti-crypto community's works, not the reactionaries, but the technical communities. here's the biggest takeaway: above all else, they do not want our coins. however, most of the technical content against crypto and "web3" tend to support the idea of p2p and decentralized networks and protocols. everyone's sick of the failures of big tech, everyone's sick of having every heartbeat sold to data brokers, everyone's sick of the developer-user dynamic antithetical with free as in freedom software the achilles heel is network-tokens-as-money, which is applicable to all native blockchain tokens that present themselves as "money". this is a premature abstraction fundamentally, p2p networks require participation to function. not everyone has the technical expertise and spare hardware to contribute to every p2p network, so it only makes sense to create some unit of account which correlates with contributions to the network. early stage proof of work is an perfect example of this. want to transact on bitcoin? contribute some cpu cycles to the network in exchange for some credits. these credits can either be spent to transact, or traded to other people who don't have the time or resources to contribute themselves however, this goes wrong when the community presents these credits as fundamental stores of value, something that will appreciate in value against state sponsored currencies. this sparks an arms race to build mining farms and mining pools which centralize over time i believe transparent, algorithmic monetary policy is a better way to manage currencies, but not everyone sees it this way, not everyone has a dire need to escape their local currency. but networks right now give you no choice but to use their currency. you want to use any defi systems on ethereum? you buy ether and you transact with ether. bootstrapping an ether balance is no longer accessible to a broad audience. contributing to the network requires 32 ether up front (which is about ~4x the median income in the united states) and a computer that never disconnects from the internet and is always powered and is regularly monitored for crashes and is kept up to date as the network changes. or you find a paymaster that seeks rent from the ether abstraction we need networks with usage credits correlated to network contributions, bootstrappable by a reasonable distribution users, with a focus on the utility of programmable digital currency and without the ideology maxxing bag pushing we have now