Usually in economics the word “commitment” refers to promises that are *forward-facing*, something like “I put myself in a position such that either I later do X or I lose $YYY”. This is interesting because I actually see blockchains as having value in both the forward-facing and backward-facing directions — see Vlad Zamfir’s description of cryptoeconomics, where *cryptography* is backward-facing, in the sense of proving things that happened in the past, and *economics* is forward-facing, in the sense of creating assurances of the form “either X will happen in the future or the people that made X *not* happen will lose money”.
Author: Vitalik Buterin
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