I would argue that "buying your way into a token" is EXACTLY what is needed to create a "virtuous economic cycle".  BTC/ETH mining and even  Lisk forging is creating "money" from thin air.  The "unforgetable and very rewarding experience" you refer to is an illusion that makes the participant feel incorrectly like they have contributed something valuable to society.  Wasted crypto hashes generated by a miner are NOT like a bag of corn they grew or a car rolling off an assembly line where they welded the body together.  All a miner has done is wasted a lot of electricity, creating a lot of environmental pollution in the process.  They have also diverted trillions upon trillions of CPU cycles away from achieving something profoundly worthwhile like http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/.  All in the name of greed.

"Buying your way into a token" is code for "letting something represent a store of real value", which is what you do when you open a bank account or buy a prepaid debit card.  THIS is the fundamental kind transaction in our society, not "mining coins out of thin air".  If Lisk can start replacing bank accounts by "buying your way into a token", we will have a market penetration and success level we can only dream about.

Wasteful, unsustainable exponential-growth mining is a type of masturbation by Bitcoin and Ethereum nerds that will never produce a baby who will grow up to change the world.

Mining is stupid.


This.