Thanks Rohan!

I would say that “necessary” is a strong word. Rather, I view it as just a new model that opens up interesting use cases — ones that were simply not possible before. The “But…why?” link in the further reading section above has my thoughts on this.

It also matters if one holds a coin-centric vs. ledger-centric view. I am more of the latter, even though it is of course just two sides of the same coin — pun intended. In my opinion the “coin” or payments is the least interesting use case.

Digital gold or silver (and oil/fuel…) are metaphors that are often used to describe crypto. Those are helpful, but another model I use in my mind is digital stone — in the spirit of the idiom “let’s set this in stone…”. In the physical(old) world we could point at such a stone and say — look, there is the proof. We have a high level of trust in what is written on the surface because stone has unique physical properties; there is a level of permanence to it and alterations would be obvious. There’s a reason we don’t say “ok attorney, let’s set this in sand…”. For the very first time, we now have a similar material in the digital world — one that can be used for many things and that is open to all. Rocks sound boring, but to me that’s very exciting. I may write a short post to expand on that.

In the mean time, there’s a lot of people with fantastic coverage of the latest (i.e, Linda Xie’s Ethereum 101 and also ConsenSys are good ones to follow). Hope that helps!