Mental Model: Blockchain Economics
The nodes that run a blockchain spend real money on the physical resources required to operate. For this to be sustainable, nodes must be compensated.
The users who submit transactions to the blockchain pay this compensation. A user pays a "transaction fee" for submitting a transaction. This fee is the total gas units of work done by the transaction, multiplied by the price of each gas unit ("gas price").
Gas price is denominated in the blockchain's own unit of value: a "native token" (e.g. ETH for Ethereum). To submit a transaction, a user must spend native tokens.
Net new native tokens are created upon the processing of every new block. These tokens are issued to the account of the node that built the block.
Each new block updates the balance value stored in association with the block builder node's account. So far, we've seen the following data stored in the blockchain database for each account:
balance: the amount of native tokens (e.g. ETH) held by the account.nonce: the increment-only count of transactions initiated by the account on the blockchain.
How native tokens acquire monetary value
At genesis — the very first block of a blockchain — a set of accounts are initialized with a non-zero native token balance. Additionally, new native tokens are issued every block to the block builder node's account.
A user who wants to submit transactions to the blockchain needs native tokens to pay transaction fees. To acquire native tokens, a user must obtain them from an account that already holds them — whether a genesis account holder, a node that earned block rewards, or another user — by offering something of value in exchange, like fiat currency.
This exchange establishes a market price for native tokens in fiat terms. As more users want to use the blockchain, demand for native tokens increases, and so does their fiat price.
Since users spend native tokens to store and update data in the blockchain database, and native tokens have a fiat price, the data stored in the blockchain database has real monetary value.