It's not uncommon for cryptocurrency newcomers to have painted expectations about what they're getting into, framed from how it's portrayed by the public. It's not a stretch of the imagination to picture a Rich Uncle Pennybags type of character puffing away at his cigar, tuning into the news, and seeing the abrupt expansion of Bitcoin all over the headlines after it reaches a major milestone. "Hurumph," thinks he to himself, in-between sips of brandy. "Suppose I were to invest in this so called crypt-oh-currency. Place some portion of my fortune in it and live off the gains. It'll be another fun little thing to do with my ludicrous wealth, once betting on horses and games of poker begins to lose my interest."

No shortage of people are drawn to cryptocurrency for the financial incentive behind it. After all, if the only users of cryptocurrency were those fascinated by its technological aspects alone, we'd see about as many people with some form of cryptocurrency in their possession as we'd see people who owned a physical recreation of a Lorenz cipher machine.

But as we're demonstrating through the very platform this message is inscribed on -- assuming of course that my words aren't being plagiarized and read somewhere else -- the technology that supports cryptocurrency has many more spinoff applications beyond mere medium of exchange. I'm certain no shortage of early users scrambled to the interwebs, hell-bent on buying "One Bitcoin and one Ethereum, please!" as though they were some woefully uninformed grandmother, lost on the technological nuance behind such an advent.

Ethereum makes a fine example -- there is no such thing as an Ethereum. You cannot purchase an Ethereum. You can purchase Ethereum tokens, the most notable being the native cryptocurrency of the blockchain platform, Ether. A blockchain is just a ledger, after all -- a metaphorical sheet of paper that contains timestamps and signatures and lists transactions, along the lines of "Alice owes Bob 0.005 units of currency," all of which is encrypted with a hash.

However, there's nothing saying you can't make a ledger that follows a set of rules while dealing with multiple different cryptocurrencies -- just the same way that there's nothing preventing you from doing the same with a group of multicultural friends. If I happened to lease an apartment with friends from Mexico, Japan, the United States, etc, and we all frequently went out for dinner at authentic restaurants, it might make sense for us each to keep tabs on how much we owed each other in our respective currencies. "Tom owes Juan 500 pesos" and "Chang owes Tom 20 dollars" and "Juan owes Change 2,000 yen" might be transactions you'd expect to find on a one single multicultural ledger.

There's nothing saying you can't use this metaphorical sheet of paper ledger for other business, too. After all, Ethereum acts as a computer network, for which transaction protocols are only one of its many features. Through smart contracts, Ethereum VM is Turing complete -- this allows it to perform, given enough time, the same computations that any other computer would manage.

If you're already familiar with Ethereum, you're most likely heard of the ERC20 standard. ERC20 standard is a protocol that's expected of all ethereum tokens -- if you have any ERC20 compliant token, it can be sent to any Ethereum wallet and will be recognized. (Even if the program isn't always able to display its qualities.) All ERC20 standard tokens abide by the following six functions:

• TotalSupply: This function is an anonymous constructor function that run no more than once at the very start of a deployment to an Ethereum network, and which is used to measure -- not surprisingly -- the total supply of tokens on the network.
• BalanceOf: This function accepts a single address and returns its results. You use this function whenever you lookup a public address or query an account balance.
• Transfer: Allows the owner of the wallet to send a token to an address.
• TransferFrom: This function allows for a smart contract to execute within the parameters specified on behalf of the wallet owner.
• Allowance: This function opens unidirectional transfers between two addresses.
• Approve: This function pertains directly to allowance -- by way of permitting an address to send some number of tokens to another address.

ERC20 isn't the only standard, of course. Some tokens specify further terms on top of the six functions that apply, most notably ERC223, which seeks to address flaws with approval and transfer; ERC621 which includes all the traditional six functions, but expands on them with the capacity to alter token supply; and ERC827, which permits a third party to spend tokens on the original wallet owner's behalf. Yet one can make the argument that each of these protocols abide by and respect the fundamentals of ERC20.

But do all Ethereum tokens follow the ERC20 standard? It'd have to in order to be considered an Ethereum token, wouldn't it?

Well, no.

Let's talk a little bit about Golem.

Golem takes advantage of smart contracts to decentralized raw computation. Similar to how mining pools combine the processing power of multiple users to perform a task, Golem users can spend their tokens in order to access computational power from a pool of other Golem users who lease their otherwise idle processors and reap the reward. This allows for singular users to take advantage of previously unattainable computation for uses in machine learning, modelling, protein folding, etc.

Golem, or GNT if you want, is a little bit different from other Ethereum tokens. It lacks the Approve/TransferFrom functions that other Ethereum tokens rely on. Although it can be wrapped, forcing it to abide by all ERC20 functions, the migration process doesn't have a set deadline.

"...Currently GNT is not an ERC20 token. When the token needed to be created it was yet to be clear whether or not the ERC20 token standard was ready for adoption (yes, GNT is that old!) so the decision was at the time made to create and audit our own token type, still on Ethereum although just not technically ERC20. With the rise of decentralized exchanges and layer 2 solutions usually being built for ERC20 tokens it became clear that the token needed to be migrated. Our future-seeing developers at the time of GNTs creation included a migrate function in the GNT smart contracts so thankfully token holders can migrate in a decentralized and trustless manner..."

-Golem Project FAQ, Oct. 26th 2020

This means that so long as there's somebody out there with an cold Ethereum wallet loaded with GNT, there will exist tokens that are compatible with the Ethereum network but are not ERC20 compliant.

This essay isn't necessarily an endorsement or condemnation of Golem, either as a cryptocurrency or as an application. Whether or not it's useful to you would boil down to whether or not you have any pressing need for employing the computational energy of a global supercomputer. And my computer can already run Crysis 2.

But I think that Golem serves as an example for the unique nature of cryptocurrency. The way that it's implemented, the way that it attracts consumers and developers far and wide to approach different problems from different perspectives, is unparalleled.

There are cryptocurrencies like IOTA that are technically still a centralized currency. There are currencies that have had a hand in sending Dennis Rodman to North Korea in the interest of promoting cannabis. And there are Ethereum currencies that technically don't abide by all the same rules that would practically define an Ethereum token.

In the world of cryptocurrency, anything goes. In this wild west, the rules are the way they are until they aren't anymore.