Blockchain Revolution

particular fan. Artists and museums can use Ascribe’s technology to loan pieces to
other individuals or institutions.
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Monegraph offers a similar service: it uses digital
watermarks and the cryptography intrinsic to the blockchain for authenticating pieces.
Artists simply upload the art to a page on the Internet and submit the URL to
Monegraph. The firm issues a set of public and private keys, except that the value
associated with the public key is a digital deed to the art rather than bitcoin per se.

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Monegraph also tweets a public announcement of the deed, noteworthy because the
U.S. Library of Congress archives public Twitter feeds.
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Someone else might try to
claim the URL as his own, but there would already be at least two proofs in the public
record to verify ownership.
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Verisart, a Los Angeles–based start-up with bitcoin core developer Peter Todd as
an adviser, has even greater ambitions. Certifying the authenticity and the condition of
a piece of fine art is big business, and one that is largely paper based and controlled
by elite experts with access to restricted databases. Finding who owns the art, where
it’s stored, and in what condition is a real challenge, even for those who actually know
what they’re looking for. Verisart is combining blockchain technology and standard
museum metadata to create a public database of art and collectibles. This worldwide
ledger will serve artists, collectors, curators, historians, art appraisers, and insurers
anywhere in the world.
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By using the bitcoin blockchain, Verisart can confer digital
provenance to any physical work, not just digital art, and users will be able to check a
work’s authenticity, condition, and chain of title from their mobile device before they
participate in an online auction or agree to a sale. “We believe technology can aid
trust and liquidity, especially as more of the $67 billion annual art market shifts to
private sales (peer-to-peer) and online transactions,” founder Robert Norton told
TechCrunch. “The art world is not broken. It just relies too much on middlemen to
ensure trust and liquidity. We believe the advent of a decentralized world-wide ledger
coupled with powerful encryption to mask the identities of buyer and seller will be
attractive to the art world.”
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The artist becomes what could be called a “rights
monetizer” with the technology making deals and collecting revenue in real time.
You could apply this same model to other fields as well. In science, a researcher
could publish a paper to a limited audience of peers, as Satoshi Nakamoto did, and
receive reviews and the credibility to publish to a larger audience, rather than
assigning all rights to a scientific journal. The paper might even be available for free
but other scientists could subscribe to a deeper analysis or threaded discussions with
the author about it. She could make her raw data available or perhaps share data with
other scientists as part of a smart contract. If there is a commercial opportunity
flowing from the paper, the rights could all be protected in advance. More on this in
chapter 9.
3.
Blockchain Cooperatives
The trust protocol supercharges cooperatives—autonomous associations formed and
controlled by people who come together to meet common needs.
“It’s nonsense to call Uber a sharing economy company,” said Harvard professor
Benkler. “Uber has used the availability of mobile technology to create a business that

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lowers the cost of transportation for consumers. That’s all it has done.”
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David Ticoll
said, “In common English usage, sharing denotes free exchange—not financial
transactions. As in kids’ sharing toys. It’s a shame that this term has somewhat lost
that meaning.” To him, “sharing is the main way that humans and members of other
species have conducted exchanges with one another for millions of years, beginning
with the act of conception itself. While some Internet companies have facilitated
genuine sharing, others have appropriated and commoditized the social relationships
and vocabulary of sharing.”
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Most so-called sharing economy companies are really service aggregators. They
aggregate the willingness of suppliers to sell their excess capacity (cars, equipment,
vacant rooms, handyman skills) through a centralized platform and then resell them,
all while collecting valuable data for further commercial exploitation.
Companies like Uber have cracked the code for large-scale service aggregation
and distribution. Airbnb competes with hotels on travel accommodations; Lyft and
Uber challenge taxi and limousine companies; Zipcar, before it was purchased by
Avis, challenged traditional car rental companies with its hip convenience and
convenient hourly rentals.
Many of these companies have globalized the merchandising of traditional local,
small-scale services—like bed-and-breakfasts, taxis, and handypersons. They use
digital technologies to tap into so-called underutilized, time-based resources like real
estate (apartment bedrooms), vehicles (between-call taxis), and people (retirees and
capable people who can’t get full-time jobs).
Blockchain technology provides suppliers of these services a means to collaborate
that delivers a greater share of the value to them. For Benkler, “Blockchain enables
people to translate their willingness to work together into a set of reliable accounting
—of rights, assets, deeds, contributions, uses—that displaces some of what a
company like Uber does. So that if drivers want to set up their own Uber and replace
Uber with a pure cooperative, blockchain enables that.” He emphasized the word
enable. To him, “There’s a difference between enabling and moving the world in a
new direction.” He said, “People still have to want to do it, to take the risk of doing
it.”
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So get ready for blockchain Airbnb, blockchain Uber, blockchain Lyft, blockchain
Task Rabbit, and blockchain everything wherever there is an opportunity for real
sharing and for value creation to work together in a cooperative way and receive most
of the value they create.