What would a blockchain social network for the firm look like? Think Facebook
for the corporation (or simply an alternative to Facebook for you). Because several
companies
are working on this, we can flash-forward a year or two and here’s what
we get:
Every user has a multifaceted wallet, a sort of portal into the decentralized online
world. Think a portable personal profile, a persona or identity that you own. Unlike
your Facebook profile, the wallet has diverse functions and stores many kinds of
personal and professional data and valuables including money. It is also private to you
and you share only what you want. You have pairs of public-private keys that serve to
anchor your persistent digital ID. While multiple personas
can be housed in the wallet
for each person or company, let’s assume that a wallet holds a single canonical
persona anchored in a single key pair. A publishing system delivers a stream of
information that you or your firm will happily pay for—a colleague’s patch of new
code, a summary of a conversation with a new client, or—with the client’s permission
—a tape recording of a call, a Twitter feed from a conference that you couldn’t attend,
live stream of a client’s use of your new product, photographs of your competitors’
booths
at an industry expo, a Prezi presentation that seems to be closing new business,
a video how-to of something a colleague just invented, assistance in completing a
patent application, or anything else that you value.
There is advertising, perhaps from third parties or maybe from the HR department
about open enrollment or changes in insurance plans, but you, not Facebook, get
revenue or some reward for paying attention. This is called an “attention market.” You
could receive microcompensation for agreeing
to view or interact with an
advertisement, or for feeding back in detail about a new product pitch, or just about
anything else, such as transcribing CAPTCHAs
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or scanned documents.
The news stream, publishing system, and the attention market all look similar, but
payments flow differently for each. Said ConsenSys’s Joe Lubin, “You pay for
publishing. Companies pay for your attention. The news stream has no payment flow.
I
am happy to read your stream, because I value that social connection, but I am not
going to pay to see a picture of you and your buddies drinking at a bar, or to read your
opinion on the Blue Jays pitching staff.”
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You also participate in or create topical discussion channels, where you configure
your privacy. Privacy is enhanced in other manners too. For example, spy agencies
can’t conduct traffic analysis because they are unable
to discern the source or
destination of messages.
There would also be a nifty mechanism for finding people and feeds that you
might care about. In addition, distributed tools aggregate and present interesting new
people or information for you to follow or friend, possibly using Facebook’s social
graph to help out. Lubin calls this “bootstrapping the decentralized Web using the
pillars of the centralized Web.”
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Experience shows that value ultimately wins out in the digital age. The benefits of
this distributed model are huge—at least to the users and companies. The huge
resources of social media
companies notwithstanding, there is no end to the richness
and functionality that we can develop in such an open source environment. Compare
the power and success of Linux versus proprietary operating systems. Blockchain
technologies ensure security. Your privacy is completely configurable. No social
media company can sell or leak your personal information to government agencies
without your permission. If you’re a dissident in a totalitarian country, no one can
track what you have read or said online. Because you own your data, you can
monetize it along with your attention and efforts. You share in the wealth of big data.
Companies too should be enthusiastic about their employees’ using such
platforms for business.
To attract talent, firms need to show integrity and respect their
employees’ security and privacy. More important, as any firm works to become
networked, approaching talent outside its boundaries, they can offer up such
interenterprise collaborative platforms that their partners can trust. Time will tell.
In summary, these are seven of the emerging business models whereby both
companies large and small can make it “rain on the blockchain.” Overall, the open
networked enterprise shows profound, even radical
potential to supercharge
innovation and harness extraordinary capability to create good value for shareholders,
customers, and societies as a whole.
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