Blockchain: Blueprint for a New Economy

between the learner and the learning

sponsor; and really directly with the

automated software contract. Again, the

idea is like Kiva or Heifer International

(i.e., peer-to-peer direct) for blockchain

literacy for individualized learning

contracts.

Learncoin

Learncoin could be the currency of the

smart contract literacy system, with

schools, student groups, or individuals

issuing their own token:

MthelieLearncoin, Huruma Girls High

School tokens, or PS 135 tokens (that all

convert to Learncoin, and to Bitcoin).

School fundraising in any area

worldwide could be conducted with

Learncoin and LocalSchoolName tokens.

Just as physician RFPs make the health

services market two-sided, students or

student groups could post their open

learning contracts (or funding needs and

budget) to a Learning Exchange, which

could be fulfilled by learning-funders on

the other side of the transaction.

Learning Contract Exchanges

Learning contract exchanges could apply

in a much broader sense—for example,

as a universal learning model. This

could apply to government workforce

retraining, graduate students, and

employees within corporations. Learning

contract exchanges could be a way of

reinventing or improving the

orchestration of the continuing

professional education (CPE) programs

required for many fields like law,

information technology, and medicine.

Learning contracts in the development

context could be extended to many use

cases in emerging markets. There could

be many categories of “literacy”

contracts, such as basic reading for

elementary school children, but also for

every area of education, such as

vocational learning (technical literacy

and agricultural literacy), business

literacy, social literacy, and leadership

literacy.

Blockchain Academic

Publishing: Journalcoin

As every category of organized human

activity has moved onto the Internet and

currently has the possibility of being

reinvented and made more efficient, fair,

and otherwise attribute-enabled with the

blockchain, so too could academic

publishing be put on the blockchain.

There have been innovations toward

openness in the academic publishing

field, such as open-access journals,

which although they provide open access

to article content instead of keeping it

behind a paywall, force authors to

support possibly prohibitive publication

fees. So far, the Bitcoin convention of

making open source code available by

publishing software for cryptocurrency

blockchains and protocols on GitHub

has extended to some forms of

“academic” publishing in the area, too,

as white papers are posted as “Readme

files” on GitHub. For example, there is

blockchain venture capitalist David

Johnston’s Dapp paper (“The General

Theory of Decentralized Applications”)

and Factom’s concept for batching the

notarization of digital artifacts paper

(the “Notary Chains” white paper).

An interesting challenge for academic

publishing on the blockchain is not just

having an open-access, collaboratively

edited, ongoing-discussion-forum

journal per existing examples, or open-

access, self-published blockchain white

papers on GitHub, but to more

fundamentally implement the blockchain

concepts in blockchain journals. The

consideration of what a decentralized

direct peer-to-peer model for academic

publishing could look like prompts the

articulation of the functions that

academic publishing provides and how,

if these are still required, they might be

provided in decentralized models. In

terms of “publishing,” any manner of

making content publicly available on the

Web is publishing; one can easily self-

publish on blogs, wikis, Twitter,

Amazon, and the like. A blockchain

model in terms of decentralized peer-to-

peer content would be nothing more than

a search engine linking one individual’s

interests with another’s published

material. This is a decentralized peer-to-

peer model in the blockchain sense. So,

academic (and other publishers) might

be providing some other value functions,

namely vouching for content quality.

Publishers provide content curation,

discovery, “findability,” relevancy,

advocacy, validation, and status

ascribing, all of which might be useful

attributes for content consumers. One

way to improve a centralized model

with blockchain technology is by

applying an economy as a mechanism for

making the incentives and reward

structures of the system fairer.

Journalcoin could be issued as the token

system of the publishing microeconomy

to reward contributors, reviewers,

editors, commentators, forum

participants, advisors, staff, consultants,

and indirect service providers involved

in scientific publishing. This could help

improve the quality and responsiveness

of peer reviews, as reviews are

published publicly, and reviewers are

rewarded for their contribution. With

Journalcoin, reviewers can receive

reputational and remunerative rewards,

and more transparency and exchange is

created between authors, reviewers, and

the scientific community and public.

ElsevierJournalcoin and

SpringerJournalcoin, for example, could

be issued as metacoins, running on top of

the Bitcoin blockchain, say as

Counterparty assets, fully convertible at