 The primary factor to appreciate in understanding the significance of token economics is that the most basic way in which economic data is recorded is changing today. With the advent of blockchain technology, the information layer upon which economies are built is changing, and therefore everything upwards of that layer will change, which is essentially everything we know about how our economies work. Electronics is before anything about information. It is based on records of ownership that define who owns what and what is exchanged, what we call ledgers. Everything that exists within an advanced economy exists because it is recorded somewhere in a ledger. Because these ledgers define who has what, we have to trust whoever it is that maintains those records. These records are currently maintained by the thing we trust the most, which is the government and legal system. The legal system determines who gets to make entries into those databases, and it grants that power to various institutions that prove their trustworthiness to the legal system. Banks, insurance companies, hospitals, enterprises, institutional investors etc. These centralized authorities manage this complex set of records or databases, and thus control how value is represented and flows within the economy, which is of course the foundations of their power and influence within society. This centralized approach can have many advantages in terms of simplicity, speed and efficiency, but it also means that we have to trust those institutions, and in this way we hand over massive amounts of power to those centralized institutions and have to continuously wild to constrain those powers through regulations in the legal system. Throughout the latter half of the 20th century, we converted that information into a digital format, but the structure of the system remained largely unchanged. Centralized organizations just got faster and more efficient at doing what they do. But today, everything that we turned into digital data, we can now move onto blockchain networks, which can be understood as a form of distributed database. With this system, people can now connect to the database directly, and we can automate the maintenance and updating of that data. Likewise, we can build ever more sophisticated algorithms on top of it, thus replacing more and more of the functions that were previously only achievable through centralized management structures. The trust required to maintain society's records of value is thus displaced from centralized institutions and now placed in the mathematics of cryptography, computer code and digital networks. This means that at least theoretically, we do not need these centralized institutions to manage the data now in the way that we did in the past. The profound implication of this is that society and economy no longer need to be architectured around centralized institutions. The consequences of redirecting all these flows of information, value and power within society, away from centralized channels and into distributed networks, are almost unimaginable. The ramifications are so profound that none could predict the outcomes. The surprising thing, though, is that this is not the dream of some radical anarchist group, but simply the consequences of a revolution in information technology. Such an extraordinary transformation happens very rarely in human civilization, as it signals the true coming of age of the information age. The blockchain is unlike other new technologies, because it taps into a deep structural transformation brought about with the move into the information age. That is to say, the rise of distributed networks as a new organizational paradigm for society, economy and technology infrastructure. The blockchain is not magic as it may appear, but simply builds upon existing information and communications technologies that are enabling this deep structural process of change that takes us into the network society.