Daniel (from the episode) seems to have a really hard time understanding any potential use case of tokens (aka appcoins, metacoins etc.) that cannot be simply done by just using bitcoin. Only thing I can think of is that he has never even used bitcoin at any sort of scale before...
Lets take LTBcoin as an example. Pretend that instead of LTBcoin, we just gave people BTC as an incentive to post / create content etc.. (and got rid of the weekly deflationary aspect, since its already sort-of built into bitcoin). Say we gave 0.1 BTC a week to audience members. Right now, over 1,000 people are participating each week. If this was split evenly, you would only get 0.0001 BTC per week. Or in other words about enough to pay for a single transaction fee.
So what happens if we get to 5,000 people per week participating? How about 10,000? Very quickly it turns into a situation where the average user is going to get like maybe 0.00001 BTC per week if they are lucky and post a lot. Would you rather get a tiny fraction of BTC, or something like 5,000 LTBcoin tokens? Or how about the fact that if you have a ton of really small bitcoin payments/inputs, you get totally creamed on transaction fees (sometimes to the point where the fee is worth more than what you are trying to send)? Or the dust limit (min amount you can send and still get confirmed is about 0.0000055)?
The only solution to the above problem would be to pay people more every week. So instead of splitting up 0.1 BTC... sending 1 BTC, or 10 BTC... as soon as you try and scale at all, the whole operation becomes REALLY expensive both in transaction fees and the amounts needed to send to even make it work. Which makes no sense at all unless all the posts etc. people are making directly increased the sites revenue - which would not happen for simple forum posts.
Bitcoin itself is just not suitable for an internal community participation incentive/rewards program. Hence why we have LTBcoin. It serves its purpose as an internal community incentive, and is much more mentally satisfying to receive (getting 10,000 LTBcoin is much nicer than getting 0.0001 BTC.. even if it might be worth the same). Not to mention the whole point of it is very specific to this community, not to create a new form of online cash... with just pure BTC people would just save it up and take it and use it somewhere else the vast majority of the time, which defeats the entire purpose of the project.
