Abstract
Starting with BitTorrent and then Bitcoin, decentralized technologies have been on the rise over the last 15+ years, gaining significant momentum in the last 2+ years with the advent of platform ecosystems such as the Blockchain platform Ethereum. New projects have evolved from decentralized games to marketplaces to open funding models to decentralized autonomous organizations. The hype around cryptocurrency and the valuation of innovative projects drove the market cap of cryptocurrencies to over a trillion dollars at one point in 2017. These high valued technologies are now enabling something new: globally scaled and decentralized business models. Despite their valuation and the hype, these new business ecosystems are frail. This is not only because the underlying technology is rapidly evolving, but also because competitive markets see a profit opportunity in exponential cryptocurrency returns. This extracts value from these ecosystems, which could lead to their collapse, if unchecked. In this paper, we explore novel ways for decentralized economies to protect themselves from, and coexist with, competitive markets at a global scale utilizing decentralized technologies such as Blockchain.
Highlights
We live in a fascinating time in human history
Based on available research, decentralized socioeconomic models, often referred to as a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) or Commons6 structure typically have three main components (Giotitsas and Ramos 2017; Filippi et al 2007): 1. Entrepreneurial Common (EC): An EC is the commercial interface with external ecosystems and gives funds it raised from selling goods and services or other activities such as investments in other ecosystems in the form of tokens to the For-Benefit Common (FBC) and receives goods & services to market and sell from the Production Common (PC) in return
Ownership & Control: Ownership: When analyzed through the lens of a decentralized socioeconomic context we find two forms of ownership in decentralized economies: Self-Sovereign Ownership where ownership rights over an asset are entirely self-sovereign; i.e., “even if shared with others I can do with my ownership share as I please”; Non-dominium ownership where assets are held in common within a DAO as a custodian and the rights governed by asset rules established by the DAO through consensus
Summary
We live in a fascinating time in human history. Humanity is rapidly approaching a “Singularity” as Ray Kurzweil put it in his book “The Singularity is Near” (Kurzweil 2005), referencing the point in human history when artificial intelligence agents will be more intelligent than the entire human race. Today’s hyperconnectedness exposes both belief and need dichotomies, “Us” vs “Other”, of billions of people at a global scale in real time, and, our subconscious reactions to the “Other” that have been shaped by millions of years of evolutionary development This global real time phenomenon is leading to greater, deeper, and more extensive conflicts globally from the Global Financial Crisis to the Arab Spring to Global Warming to the rise of global extremist terrorism and local armed conflicts. Because centralized entities commonly fail to address current global problems, this class of technologies and organizations abandons the primacy of centralization that focuses solely on the self, or “I” This psychological “I” focus has been the predominant paradigm of both society and technology since the dawn of time due to our physiological limitation to maintain very large numbers of trust relationships (Dunbar 1992). Using case studies, we illustrate ways that these two models currently interact, and make several proposals that can be employed to protect decentralized economies from extractive market forces while enabling a mutually beneficial coexistence
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