Fred Ehrsam, cofounder of Coinbase, today shared his thoughts on an [App Coin future](https://medium.com/the-coinbase-blog/app-coins-and-the-dawn-of-the-decentralized-business-model-8b8c951e734f#.t9413mkoi).  He did it on Medium and he totally should have done it on Steemit to hammer home his point.  Nonetheless, it's a fantastic article that is worth a full read.  He outlines how so-called App Coins, like Steem, are fostering disruptive innovation and preempting traditional fundraising.

Here are some highlights:
> Now someone can create a protocol, create an App Coin that is native to that protocol, and retain some of that App Coin for themselves and for future development. This is a great way to incentivize creators: if the protocol is successful, the App Coins will go up in value. 

...

> Imagine if this had been the model from the start for projects like Twitter, Wikipedia, Facebook, Reddit, or Uber. Instead of a central company making money by owning and extracting rent from the network they created, a software protocol replaces the central operator, and all of the creators and contributors to the network mutually own it. Contributors to networks (like drivers for Uber) look less like worker bees and more like mutual owners in the network they are creating value in.

...

> This is the biggest and most important trend we have seen in digital currency in a few years. It will likely be the underpinning for the first killer apps it feels like we have been talking about forever.

> One only needs to think about the few major protocols that exist in the world today to see how much common good they create: HTTP gives us data across the internet, SMTP gives us email, SSL gives us secure data transfer online. Decentralized protocols and the App Coins that make them tick are the beginnings of a mechanism to create more of these. This means more global equality and opportunity, mutual ownership in the networks we contribute to, more innovation in the world, and better options for consumers and businesses.

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