Blockchain: Blueprint for a New Economy

minimum reinvented with blockchain

concepts. Further, blockchain technology

is not just a better organizational model

functionally, practically, and

quantitatively; by requiring consensus to

operate, the model could also have

greater liberty, equality, and

empowerment qualitatively. Thus, the

blockchain is a complete solution that

integrates both extrinsic and intrinsic

and qualitative and quantitative benefits.

Extensibility of Blockchain

Technology Concepts

Blockchain technology can potentially

unleash an important element of

creativity and invention in anyone who

encounters the concepts in a broad and

general way. This is in the sense that it is

necessary to understand the new ideas

separately and together. These include

concepts such as public-key and private-

key cryptography, peer-to-peer file

sharing, distributed computing, network

models, pseudonymity, blockchain

ledgers, cryptocurrency protocols, and

cryptocurrency. This calls into question

what might have seemed to be

established definitions of traditional

parameters of the modern world like

currency, economics, trust, value, and

exchange. It is a requirement and twenty-

first-century skill set to understand these

concepts in order to operate in the

blockchain technology environment.

When you understand the concepts

involved, not only is it possible to

innovate blockchain-related solutions,

but further, the concepts are portable to

other contexts. This extensibility of

blockchain-related concepts may be the

source of the greatest impact of

blockchain technology as human agents

understand these concepts and deploy

them in every venue they can imagine.

The Internet was a similar example of

universality in application and

extensibility of the core technology

concept; it meant that everything could

be done in a new way—quicker, with

greater reach, in real time, on demand,

via worldwide broadcast, at lower cost.

Blockchain technology is rich with new

concepts that could become part of the

standard intellectual vernacular and

toolkit.

Fundamental Economic

Principles: Discovery, Value

Attribution, and Exchange

One broad way of thinking about the use

of blockchain concepts is applying them

beyond the original context to see ways

in which everything is like an economy,

a market, and a currency—and equally

important, how everything is not like an

economy. This is a mindset that requires

recognizing the fundamental properties

of economics and markets in real-life

situations. Blockchain technology helps

elucidate that everything we see and

experience, every system in life, is

economics to some degree: a system for

allocating resources. Furthermore,

systems and interactions are economics

in that they are a matter of awareness

and discovery, value attribution, and

potential interaction and exchange, and

may include a mechanism for this

exchange like a currency or token, or

even a simple exchange of force, energy,

or concentration (as in biological

systems). This same basic economic

structure could be said to exist

universally, whether in a collaborative

work team or at a farmers’ market. The

quantized structure of blockchain

technology in the form of ledger

transaction-level tracking could mean

higher-resolution activity tracking,

several orders of magnitude more

detailed and extensive than we are

accustomed to at present, a time at which

we are still grateful for SKU-level

tracking on a bill of materials.

Blockchain tracking could mean that all

contributions to a system by all involved

parties, no matter how minute, can be

assessed and attributed in a seamless,

automated way, for later roll-up to the

macro level—or not, because some

community value systems might dictate

not having user contributions explicitly

tracked. The ethos and morality of

tracking is a separate and interesting

social-science topic to explore in the

blockchain studies research agenda more

generally. However, one way that the

blockchain-based capacity for tracking

could work is in the form of a “GitHub +

Bitcoin” concept, for example, that

tracks code contributions line by line

over all revisions of a software code

corpus over time. This is important,

because economically savvy rational

agents participating in the system (i.e.,

currently humans) want to assess the

contributions they and others have made,

and have these contributions tracked and

acknowledged for remuneration,

reputation, status garnering, and other

rewards.

Blockchain Technology Could

Be Used in the Administration

of All Quanta

What the blockchain could facilitate in

an automated computational way is one

universal, seamless model for the

coordinated activity of near-infinite

numbers of transactions, a universal

transaction system on an order never

before imagined for human activity. In

some sense, blockchain technology

could be a supercomputer for reality.

Any and all phenomena that can be

quantized (defined in discrete units or

packages) can be denoted this way and

encoded and transacted in an automated

fashion on the blockchain. Blockchain

venture capitalist David Johnston’s

summary and prognostication of this

dynamic is that anything that can be