Quilibrium's Native Token Utility

[Tyga]

So I was listening to Cassie’s interview on Web3 Galaxy Brain’s channel on Spotify (https://open.spotify.com/episode/2olhPEMb98fv4oQHPdZnK7) the other week about Quilibrium and was curious to know more about the token utility of QUIL on the Quilibrium Network.

I’m referring to the Incentives part of the discussion at 1.20.00.

From what I understand, initially, running applications on the network will be free-- because nodes are competing against each other for the emissions from the network rather than needing to charge for the service. A node runner could charge, but likely won’t in exchange of doing more work and getting more tokens.

That is at least what @cassie theorizes.

This would essentially be the node-runner paying the end-user’s hosting bill in exchange for QUIL tokens.

The pro is that the theorized 0 cost for applications/storage makes it incredibly cheap to use Quilibrium and I can see many trying to use this.

However, the con to this idea means that this requires profit-motivated node-runners to wait 10 years before the token utility becomes a significant part of the value of a token.

Meaning the value of the token will driven down due to users of the network lack of not needing tokens.

This is great for end-users, but for the backbone of the network, the node-runners, this type of relationship means it will likely not be profitable to run a node for many years.

This heavily favors those with the funds/investments to wait the emissions period out and users need to purchase QUIL to keep their applications running.

Maybe I’m missing something, and if so, I’d like to know what that is.

My thoughts for node-running with the above in mind is that renting servers will generally go the way of the do-do because it’s way more cost effective pay once and to run your own machines for X years than to need to come up with rent every month. Those that can’t run their own machines will be forced to operate at extreme loss if they rent.

Also there may be services that are not part of the network that accept only QUIL, say management services, domain names, premium services, etc. (however they could accept any currency they want).

[cassie]

@Tyga

That is at least what @cassie theorizes.

It is conjecture, yes, but it’s based on a similar principle as happened with bitcoin, where the congestion was low, and token incentives were high enough (not entering into speculation here, just literally that the token itself was a larger quantity compared to later on the issuance curve) that miners chose to permit transactions that paid no/minimal fee.

@Tyga

However, the con to this idea means that this requires profit-motivated node-runners to wait 10 years before the token utility becomes a significant part of the value of a token.

Not at all – it will likely come sooner than ten years – it only took bitcoin about a year before transaction fees were a complete norm.

I do expect renting will fall out over time – compared to owning server hardware, you’re paying a huge premium over the lifetime of the server compared to the initial cost of the hardware + data center contract, amortized over ~2-5 year period.