Though something like this is never going to happen, it is quite interesting to see how the world would look like if everything had its own token.
What could be the advantages and the disadvantages of such a system and what needs to be done in order to at least see some big companies issue crypto tokens for their products.
A Token Needs Regulations
The first step towards tokenazation are regulations. If there are no regulations, big companies won’t proceed in an undertaking like this. A simple regulation that could benefit both companies and the people who are willing to use the token is, in order for a company to issue a token for a products, first there must be a product.
At the moment most of the companies that issue a token don’t have a working product or the use case is rubbish and they never gonna deliver what they promised. A research conducted by Satis Group in 2018 showed that 78% were identified as scams, approximately 4% failed, around 3% had gone dead and only 15% of them went on to trade on an exchange.
Today, after two years of the ICO burst, most people who are into cryptocurrencies are well aware of what happened and are not willing to invest or buy these kind of crypto tokens.
Furthermore, as many are saying the year 2019 is the exit scam year, as the biggest exits scams happened this year. A notable exit scam that happened during the summer of 2019 is the PlusToken exit scam, where the scammers managed to steal 3 billion dollars from the users.
Advantages Of A Tokenized World
There are advantages for both users and the companies which issue the token. The users would have the opportunity to monitor if the product is a fake or not given that the company issues the token using a public blockchain or share and exchange their tokens with other users who need or want the token.
As for the company which issues the tokens, there is a big number of advantages. First, the company could monitor how many of their products the people actually buy and make their production and distribution more efficient. Secondly, by knowing information like this, it could also give the company insights regarding the market share and the competition with similar companies with more precision.
Disadvantages Of Using Tokens
Even if there are huge advantages for the companies to issue a token for their product, this could be also be devastating for a number of reasons.
Let’s say for example that Coca-Cola issues a token their products. Everything’s going great until one big scandal comes to light. We could expect that the users of Coca-Cola token may show their anger by dumping the token or don’t use it at all as some kind of boycottage. This may lead in the company to have huge loses as it would be in the hands of the users on what they will do with the bad news.
Now on the people’s side, the disadvantages given what the world looks like at the moment, would be non-stop monitoring of what the user is buying, when and why, shifting away from privacy giving enormous power to individual companies.
One simple example could be Facebook’s Libra, that will offer services and transactions using Facebook’s platform. This can give Facebook even more information on its users activities which is a bad thing for people in general.
The Unknown Future Of A Tokenized World
If we want to be realists, we shouldn’t expect a fully tokenized world in the future but a system with regulations balancing out both companies and people’s rights.
The global economy is in a critical state at the moment so we can’t be really sure on whether the governments can fully control big companies. Some big companies have so much money that some countries combined haven’t. That maybe a problem on how the world will shaped in the future.
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
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