Content:
The core feature of public blockchains is getting people to do stuff by rewarding them with tokens. Blockchains are tokenized ecosystems that can help align incentives among a group of token holders, each of whom has "skin in the game."
An objective function ****can be used to define what we want participants in a blockchain network to do.
Blockchains are decentralized, immutable, and they make it easy to issue and transfer assets. They are trust machines whose unique features unlock powerful capabilities like smart contracts.
Blockchains can also be seen as a nearly unstoppable form of Artificial Life, or a super-stupid AI. Designing objectives and constraints for AI is hard because it's difficult to communicate our intent to machines. An AI with access to vast resources but with bad objectives and constraints could end badly for humanity.
This is why we need to get incentives right when we build tokenized blockchain ecosystems. We need a practice of Token Engineering–"the theory, practice and tools to analyze, design, and verify tokenized ecosystems."
We need an engineering approach to successfully design tokenized ecosystems. Â An engineering approach is about rigorous analysis, design, and verification of systems. It is also about responsibility, being ethically and professionally accountable to the machines you build.
We can leverage existing fields to help design token engineering in three main ways
Example: Analysis