Everything will be tokenized and connected by a blockchain one day.
Bitcoin is inherently international, and one of its great promises is it enables cross-border payments in a more efficient way.
Forks often arise from differences of opinion in the direction of a project. And tokens are increasingly a mechanism for voting on changes to their protocols. Since the point of a fork is to try a new path, the new fork may not want to port all of the prior holders opposed to trying the new path the fork was created to take.
Ethereum has taken what was a four-function calculator of a programming language in Bitcoin and turned it into a full-fledged computer.
Just as the Internet brought the cost of disseminating information down by an order of magnitude, bitcoin brings the cost of transferring ownership down by an order of magnitude.
OpenAI is doing important work by releasing tools which promote AI to be developed in the open. Compute power is largely produced by NVIDIA and Intel and still relatively expensive but openly purchasable. Blockchains may be the key final ingredient by providing massive pools of open training data.
Sales conducted on-chain through smart contracts couldn't really be done before Ethereum, which is why they are a newer concept. I think this style will become the most common over time.
For the foreseeable future, I'm all about building blockchain-based decentralized services.
The Internet had a core innovation that made it valuable: The ability to disseminate data over a distributed network in a way that was significantly cheaper than the prior methods.
Bitcoin has a core technological innovation: The ability to publicly verify ownership, instantly transfer that ownership, and do so without the need for a trusted third party.
AIs trained on open data are more likely to be neutral and trustworthy instead of biased by the interests of the corporation who created and trained them.
I'd guess blockchains will be the full-blown backbone of virtual worlds - the system for currency, assets, identity, even governance - before doing the same in the 'real world.' Which is where I think we will end up in the real world eventually; it's just a matter of which goes first and how long until it's the case for both.
I think it's fundamentally a good sign that more and more professional traders and market makers are providing liquidity to the whole ecosystem. It allows people to move much larger quantities of digital currency more quickly than they would if that were not the case.
Ethereum may make monetary policy decisions like, 'Let's do 1% inflation to support the ongoing development of the Ethereum protocol.' A token built on Ethereum might want to do the same.
Working on a token is similar to working on a startup: higher risk and lower initial impact but higher upside potential. How core protocol work is best funded beyond the initial Ethereum Foundation endowment is an open question, but likely further out.
Bitcoin is valuable as a currency because of the economic efficiencies the bitcoin network is already creating as transactions flow over it. As with the Internet, more applications will flourish which will make the bitcoin network, and thus bitcoin as a currency, valuable.