Of course, you will not need any FLOW tokens if you do not want them; they can be traded freely on crypto currency exchanges like other currencies. If we continue further into the future and looking at what may become possible with blockchain technology and distributed ledger technology, it may turn out that FLOW tokens actually have value even without using them for Dapps or remittance or social contribution, so from the point of view from being a form of payment they have potential value. However, it will probably be more meaningful for FLOW itself to have additional use cases and grow with various industries in order for it to truly succeed as a cryptocurrency.
Up until now we discussed that FLOW was created aiming towards growing into something bigger than just a simple token payment method on the Storj platform, but this alone does not make an interesting story. So how do we get people interested in using FLOW? By increasing its usability through making it attractive to companies such as Dapps developers or remittance services akin to PayPal.
From the point of view of social contribution, FLOW was created in order to further experiments with donating tokens by having a portion of token exchanges exchanged for charity donations; this is not much different to the above-mentioned use cases. Even though it would be possible to carry out these experiments using other cryptocurrencies, FLOW has an advantage when it comes to social contribution that could potentially lead towards the world beyond cryptocurrency itself.
However, there is something that makes FLOW less convenient than other tokens for both developers and users alike: since no transactions occur on a public blockchain until a user uses a file or service that generates a transaction, there is no way for anyone besides the issuers of FLOW themselves to check whether any transaction actually occurs Therefore, it is a must to have a partner with an audit system that can check for this kind of information.
However, if you have your own token and there are people who want to use it as payment, then from the user's point of view is not particularly important whether they see FLOW tokens being used on the Storj platform or another partner's platform. In fact, most users do not need to know anything about FLOW; all they need to worry about is knowing how much their file will cost them in money and time (in terms of transaction fees).
What we do first and foremost is selling it as a method of payment on our own platform: first we make money by selling jigsaw spoilers and make sure that our users are happy with the service, then we make it possible for them to pay us using FLOW tokens. As time passes and our users continue to use Storj's services, they will need more of these tokens in order to purchase more space on the platform. There are certain fees that you have to pay when files are downloaded or shared with others etc., but if you want some extra features such as getting your file even faster than regular speed, then there will be higher fees for this added convenience. It is possible that at first people become interested in FLOW through being able to save money by choosing Storj over our competitors simply because their expenses are lower on Storj or because they can download files faster due to the low latency.
The Storj platform started its development back in 2013 and since then we've made it our goal to make Storj the best decentralized cloud services provider on the market. As time passed, more Dapps were created that aimed towards utilizing the power of blockchain technology; some projects aim to sell tokens as payment for their service while some use cryptocurrencies as a fundraising method.
