Blockchain Revolution

Chapter 5: New Business Models: Making It Rain on the Blockchain
1
. To prevent spam, it’s possible that new public keys (personas) with low reputation will have to pay a certain fee
to list. The fee can be moved to an escrow contract and be returned once the persona has successfully rented
their property out, or perhaps after some period of time elapses and they decide to delete their listing. Large data
items like pictures will be kept on IPFS or Swarm, but the hash of the data and the information identifying the
persona that owns the data will be kept on the blockchain inside the bAirbnb contract.
2
. Perhaps using the Whisper protocol.
3
. Formatted and annotated with the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML).
4
. David McCandless, “World’s Biggest Data Breaches,” Information Is Beautiful, October 2, 2015;
www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/worlds-biggest-data-breaches-hacks/, accessed November 27,
2015.
5
. As defined by Vitalik Buterin: “Cryptoeconomics is a technical term roughly meaning ‘it’s decentralized, it uses
public key cryptography for authentication, and it uses economic incentives to ensure that it keeps going and
doesn’t go back in time or incur any other glitch.’” From “The Value of Blockchain Technology, Part I,”
https://blog.ethereum.org/2015/04/13/visions-part-1-the-value-of-blockchain-technology/.
6
. www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2fhwMKk2Eg.

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7
. http://variety.com/2015/digital/news/netflix-bandwidth-usage-internet-traffic-1201507187/.
8
. Interview with Bram Cohen, August 17, 2015.
9
. Stan Franklin and Art Graesser, “Is It an Agent, or Just a Program? A Taxonomy for Autonomous Agents,”
www.inf.ufrgs.br/~alvares/CMP124SMA/IsItAnAgentOrJustAProgram.pdf.
10
. Ibid., 5.
11
. Vitalik Buterin, https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/05/06/daos-dacs-das-and-more-an-incomplete-terminology-
guide/. “Autonomous agents are on the other side of the automation spectrum; in an autonomous agent, there is
no necessary specific human involvement at all; that is to say, while some degree of human effort might be
necessary to build the hardware that the agent runs on, there is no need for any humans to exist that are aware of
the agent’s existence.”
12
. Ibid.
13
. Technical detail: Because storing data directly on blockchains is very expensive, it’s more likely that there is a
hash of the data, and the data itself will be on some other decentralized data storage network like Swarm or
IPFS.
14
. Interview with Vitalik Buterin, September 30, 2015.
15
. Interview with Andreas Antonopoulos, July 20, 2015.
16
. Ibid.
17
. Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams, Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything (New
York: Portfolio/Penguin, 2007). Wikinomics defined seven such business models. The list has been extended
here.
18
. Commons-based Peer Production is a term developed by Harvard Law professor Yochai Benkler in the
seminal article “Coase’s Penguin,” The Yale Law Journal, 2002; www.yale.edu/yalelj/112/BenklerWEB.pdf.
19
. http://fortune.com/2009/07/20/information-wants-to-be-free-and-expensive/.
20
. Interview with Yochai Benkler, August 26, 2015.
21
. Interview with Dino Mark Angaritis, August 7, 2015.
22
. Andrew Lih, “Can Wikipedia Survive?,” The New York Times, June 20, 2015;
www.nytimes.com/2015/06/21/opinion/can-wikipedia-survive.html.
23
. http://techcrunch.com/2014/05/09/monegraph/.
24
. http://techcrunch.com/2015/06/24/ascribe-raises-2-million-to-ensure-you-get-credit-for-your-art/.
25
. www.nytimes.com/2010/04/15/technology/15twitter.html?_r=0.
26
. http://techcrunch.com/2014/05/09/monegraph/.
27
. www.verisart.com/.
28
. http://techcrunch.com/2015/07/07/verisart-plans-to-use-the-blockchain-to-verify-the-authencity-of-artworks/.
29
. Interview with Yochai Benkler, August 26, 2015.
30
. Interview with David Ticoll, August 7, 2015.
31
. Interview with Yochai Benkler, August 26, 2015.
32
. www.nytimes.com/2013/07/21/opinion/sunday/friedman-welcome-to-the-sharing-economy.html?
pagewanted=1&_r=2&partner=rss&emc=rss&.
33
. Sarah Kessler, “The Sharing Economy Is Dead and We Killed It,” Fast Company, September 14, 2015;
www.fastcompany.com/3050775/the-sharing-economy-is-dead-and-we-killed-it#1.
34
. “Prosumers” is a term invented by Alvin Toffler in Future Shock (1980). In The Digital Economy (1994) Don
Tapscott developed the concept and notion of “prosumption.”
35
. Interview with Robin Chase, September 2, 2015.
36
. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9437095.
37
. This scenario was originally explained by Don Tapscott in “The Transparent Burger,” Wired, March 2004;
http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/12.03/start.html?pg=2%3ftw=wn_tophead_7.
38
. Interview with Yochai Benkler, August 26, 2015.
39
. Called “the wiki workplace” in Wikinomics.
40
. CAPTCHA stands for “Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart.”
41
. Interview with Joe Lubin, July 13, 2015.
42
. Ibid.

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