in addition to the well-documented problems of pseudo-currency speculation it's just not clear to me that this is an obviously central feature of a distributed computing environment

there are certainly use-cases for incentivizing someone else to run your code while your computer is offline -- perhaps trading in a commodities market or watching for particular news stories -- but it seems more common that we want to run our own software locally on our own computers. i want to organize a soccer game, balance my chequebook, calculate the risk of a catastrophic asteroid impact in the next 20 years. it's not clear to me that any of these systems are well-suited to that kind of work.

@Peter van Hardenberg I think the use of cryptocurrency to fuel computation (ETH) or storage (FileCoin) is an interesting experiment in answering the question of how to support computation processes or preservation of data that is valued by a society, without some of the pathologies and failure modes of the current models. Right now many large-scale computations & data aggregations are kept alive by VC-funded corporations (which often leads to a personal data exploiting model) or motivated individuals (which depends on the continued good health and motivation of the individual). Attaching a currency directly to these processes is one way that society could express “we want this computation/data to be preserved”, in such a way that when that interest dwindles, the shared resource is effectively garbage-collected. (There’s also the related topic of how society expresses support for particular code to be maintained and evolved, on which Nadia Eghbal has done excellent work.)

I do believe that there are many valuable data aggregations and computations that make more sense to be shared by many users than (expensively) re-derived by every individual’s computing node: for instance, web search indices, weather predictions, public transport routing graphs and live data caches (my own current field)