Most of everything blockchain today is subsumed on mainstream financial channels using the term cryptocurrencies. The more ripe the opiner, the more likely for them to refer to entire ecosystems with a diverse class of applications as “coins”. And here’s the thing, it’s not only that they found a sufficiently revelatory local minimum that fully accounts for an unfamiliar  up and coming, young and tie-less global player but also unsurprisingly they depict it using pejoratively construed routine language, “a fixed supply of nothing”, to condescendingly wave it aside as a nothing-burger.

And this is exactly what I want to also do below. Take the shapes and words I prefer and frame fungible tokens (ERC20s, coins, cryptos etc.) as belonging to the class and categories of things I know. I am a DAOist and when you’re a DAOist, everything is a DAO. As when you’re a capitalist, everything is capital. When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Etc. etc. If at all convincing, one has to ask themselves the degree to which our biases and defaulting instincts damage the prospects of meaningfully using new cryptographic, economic and computational capabilities.

Decentralized

For an ERC20 token to be decentralized it has to have more than one balance owner. But even if they have only one owner we can give it a pass for several reasons. First every DAO we know of likely started with one member. Secondly, an ERC20 that has throughout its lifecycle only one owner makes no practical sense to the extent that its fungibility can be brought into question. Decentralization is natural to fungible tokens.

Autonomous

Autonomy is a tricky and, imo, has no place in defining what we know of today as DAOs. Its central role is likely the result of the need to advertise properties belonging to the underlying infrastructure. That aside, what are the ways in which a fungible token is autonomous in the same way and extent to which we think of DAOs as autonomous? Fungible digital tokens are a collection of account associated balances that can only operate changes by means of known, unbreakable rules. In short, it operates deterministically and by doing so it reduces the likelihood of confusion and dispute. Consequentially, it has no need to legitimize and is free from external interference.

Organization

Organization, at this time and age, does not mean much but entails a whole lot. I will spare you the details, but the simplest way to maybe put it is that this sentence is an organisation of words. So, here’s the things that “organization” implies: belonging and belonging criteria, and some kind of relationship among those that belong as well as an implied legitimization of the systematizing order. Any ambiguity or dissolution in any of these things and what you are likely to observe is anything but organisation. Back to our sheep; the shepherd is the smart contract. The shepherd color codes the sheep to reflect their owner, secures the daily orderly routine and execute easter-time activities.

If you didn’t keep up, the sheep are the tokens. But there’s a catch here and a crucial difference between fungible digital tokens and sheep or ‘real world assets’. The digital fungible tokens exist only insofar as the ownership relation exists. The token is the relationship. There is no relationship without the token and no token without the relationship. The amounts are but relational intensities that might just let us infer the degree of indebtedness of the shepherd as a service provider or the time of the year.

If you’re not yet convinced that fungible tokens are a sub-genre of DAOs, I’m unlikely to further push you along this righteous path; but here’s a few more things to entertain when thinking about tokens. First, when people think about cryptocurrencies they also think market and price and exchange and pump and rug, but none of these are constitutive features of fungible tokens. Crypto coins, as conveyed above, effectively exist only insofar a relationship between two or more agents exists. Anything not about quantitatively expressing relationships is necessarily perverse monkey brain fugazzy.

So what are “Cryptocurrencies” for?

Fungible tokens are for codifying relationships that benefit from being explained in absolute terms by means of relative amounts. When this happens in an immutable context that can only mutate deterministically (...), all the owners of the token are or can be thought of as being members of an organisation. What a fungible token owner does with its tokens affects both other members individually as well as, potentially, the issuing organisation. So, that said, I don’t know about you; but if I can’t mind my own business due to your business, that gets me pondering over the likelihood of us not only potentially being in the same business but very much so in the same organisation.