Along with that, because it’s inherently tied to financial value, there will generally be a decently centralized component unless handled delicately.

Well, as I understand it, their goal is to make something totally decentralized. That is after all, one of the primary features of good crypto currencies.

And the thing is, they’re trying to build actual physical infrastructure here, people running computers and routers, and they’re all using energy at someone’s expense. Given those expenses, money will have to be involved at some point if it’s ever going to work, there’s really not much way around it. So if you want this decentralized, with nobody controlling things, I really can’t see any way of doing it without a cryptocurrency.

And yeah, NFTs are garbage, no argument there. For every good use for crypto, there are a thousand truly stupid ideas.

There’s another project I know of called MaidSafe.

They’re trying to create a decentralized and autonomous mesh Internet (Hardware and all). The biggest challenge of making that work is ensuring there are enough data links, bandwidth and storage space available for the network to operate. And to make that happen, at the end of the day all that hardware, bandwidth and resources need to be paid for. So it also has an internal cryptocurrency to keep track of who is supplying these resources. You can earn this currency by providing storage and connectivity, and you’ll need to spend it to use bandwidth and storage. You can use your own idle PCs to earn this currency throughout the day, but if you don’t want to do that, you can also just buy some at it’s market value to use the network. (Those people using the network without hosting servers are what will give the currency any value, and how the people providing lots of resources will get paid).