/biz/ - Business & Finance

Are you ready for the blockchain to redistribute wealth and end capitalism? So much for your "lambos".

>From China to the United States, from Europe to Latin America, and regardless of political system, capitalism has conquered the world. High productivity growth has meant that between 2003 and 2013, for example, global per capita income doubled. The result is a world rapidly getting rich enough to take care of everyone.

>Here’s where blockchain comes in: it provides a technological mechanism for enabling sharing. At its core, the technology of blockchain is a mechanism for securely keeping track of information, for example about ownership and transactions. Rather than storing the information in a central location, blockchain makes multiple copies and distributes them across all the nodes of a network. Each transaction is propagated across the network at essentially zero cost and with total transparency.

>This capacity has profound implications for enabling an authentic sharing economy. For example, each new robot in an autonomous vehicle fleet could be fractionally owned by every member of the community in which it operates. Every time someone purchased a ride with one of the vehicles, rather than the income only going to a private company, it could be distributed to everyone in the community.

>This capability makes blockchain a potentially powerful accelerant for ensuring that everyone can own a share of economic goods. Instead of trying to make up for technologically driven job displacement via UBI, blockchain makes it possible to address inequality at its root, on the production side. Instead of waiting for the inequality to happen and then addressing it via a universal basic income, we can instead pursue the idea of a universal right to intellectual and capital goods — a universal basic capital.