What if the world was tokenized?

2017 was a great year for crypto. During 2017 I noticed a few coins that had a very specific purpose.

Potcoin, Cannabis coin, there was a VR coin, and even Burger King came out with their own cryptocurrency token.

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What would they do with that token? What if you had to buy your burger and fries from Burger King with Burger King coin and you couldn't use actual money?

Well the very simple and real answer is that people would just go to McDonalds.

Does anyone even eat a Burger King anymore? I don't know.

That's beside the point though. I see these Cannabis, Potcoins, and everything else and I wonder what it would be like to have to buy Pot with these coins if you smoke.

Honestly, that's something that I can't imagine if the government legalized it.... but I do believe that the government would be in control of these coins.

Cryptocurrency is not the first form of currency that attempts to tokenize the world.

I think the first type of tokenized currency is probably arcades. I don't know why when you go to the arcade you have to exchange money for tokens. The reality is that you're changing something that you can use to buy anything for something that you can only use to play video games.

GIphy

That makes sense if you know exactly how many games you're going to play. However, the company behind the arcades is betting that you will go home with extra tokens that you did not use and then never use them.

That's free money for them. It's the same way with gift cards. I've never really understood gift cards. You can buy a $20 gift card to Burger King if you want, and give it to someone if they really enjoy Burger King.

You can also give someone $20. If they want to use that $20 on Burger King they can, but they can also use it to help pay their light bill or do whatever else they want with it.... like buy groceries.

You've got more options with cash than you do with a gift card.

So what is the tokenization of the world going to achieve? Well it's going to be an attempt by companies to not only take control of market share, but also get more money and appear to be helping you while at the same time taking something from you.

I'm not saying this is going to be the case with everything, but I really do think attempting to tokenize every little nook and cranny of the universe is going to create a bad situation when we've already got a universal currency called cash.

Now getting Bitcoin to work everywhere is a great goal, but I really would hate to see the grocery store take specific grocery store tokens. That would suck.

Now it is possible that by buying tokens you can also by market share in the company. If you could buy a part of the company with the tokens, even if it was a very very tiny percent, then that might be a worthwhile goal.

However, if these companies are simply exchanging cash for their cryptocurrency with no real benefit then all they're doing is essentially selling you a gift card that's called a token and that is a terrible idea.

If Bitcoin starts to take off and takes the rest of the cryptocurrency world with it because we have another giant bull run then these are the kind of things that we are going to need to think about.

You can bet that Burger King won't be the only organization coming out with their own token.

How would you like to have to buy a next version of Windows with Microsoft token? Wouldn't that be great?

What if you needed to use Toyota token in order to buy your new Toyota? Would that be a fun idea?

You would be locked into a product that way. It would definitely not be a consumer friendly world. I think this is the way the world is going to start to go though.

We need to be careful to make sure that the world doesn't get tokenized.

What if the world was tokenized?

We need to prepare for it. It's very likely not going to work out well.