Bitcoin: It’s the platform, not the currency, stupid!
Bitcoin protocol is key to the success of the collaborative economy
As we head into 2014, one trend will tower above them all: the power shift from big, centralized, bureaucratic hierarchies to technology driven distributed networks of individuals and communities. It’s the democratization of technology.
This power shift happens in two phases of sharing. The first phase started with social media. By using all kinds of social media, like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Snapchat, people are now used to share their thoughts and media online.
The second phase is the sharing of the physical world, the sharing of products, services and technology in the same seamless manner when using social media. Airbnb, Uber, Lyft, Kickstarter, TaskRabbit and Coursera are the first companies that are guiding us into this future.
Airbnb global growth
Jeremiah Owyang, a former Forrester analyst, has dedicated his working life to this movement. He defines this Collaborative Economy as follows: “The Collaborative Economy is an economic model where ownership and access are shared between people, startups, and corporations.”
By sharing ideas, media, products, services and technology “the Collaborative Economy focuses on eliminating excess and waste in today’s overbuilt and over-owned world.”
We are entering a new era of human-to-human commerce where companies and governments are no longer “the middle man”. “The future will be less of a “one-to-one” or “one-to-many”, and more of an “all-for-one”, “one-for-all” model where everyone benefits that participates.”
The role of the company in this new economy is changing rapidly. The crowd is the new company and the Bitcoin protocol will be the frictionless and transparent mechanism that empowers these new kind of companies in the Collaborative Economy. “It’s a massive paradigm shift in how we live, work, play, travel, create, learn, bank and consume.” It can even impact complete countries or nations, like Iceland will probably experience with the Auroracoin. So is your business ready to be disrupted?
Adapt or die
Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google, once said: “The Internet is the first thing that humanity has built that humanity doesn’t understand, the largest experiment in anarchy that we have ever had.”
The Bitcoin protocol might even dwarf the Internet in this regard in the coming years. New business models where trust and control will be carried out in a completely new way and the Internet of Things will lead to a new economic agent – “the machine” – being added to the existing economy.
The idea that machines can participate autonomously in the economic marketplace raises concerns about (technological) unemployment. The fact that the Bitcoin block chain even supports decentralized autonomous corporations makes it even worse. Will the machines take over?
Like any powerful technology, Bitcoin can either be seen as a Pandora’s box, or as a step towards Utopia. Bitcoin just obeys the First Law of Technology: “Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral”.
Asking yourself whether Bitcoin will fail is like questioning yourself whether technology can be “un-invented”. It is much better to experiment and innovate with this new platform. The best strategy is to build a startup that cannibalizes their own business model. A strategy that enables companies and governments to quickly adapt to the changing circumstances, if they wish to survive. It’s Digital Darwinism!
Next:2014: The year of encryption