Interest misalignment is a core component of society’s systematic inequality. Blockchain networks offer a new incentive structure that can better align interests in which “employees” and “shareholders” are one-in-the-same. This better interest alignment could be a solution to today’s inequality.
In our modern capitalist economy, parties can be broadly categorized into three buckets: managers, employees, and shareholders. Each of these groups have fundamentally contradictory interests. Shareholders want to reduce employee and manager income to maximize profit. Lower incomes and fewer benefits can mean more corporate earnings and higher returns for shareholders. According to the Economic Policy Institute, while productivity has…
Alongside usability, volatility* is one of the largest inhibitors to mainstream cryptocurrency adoption. Stablecoins have the potential to make payments anywhere as easy, fast, and cheap as sending an email while ensuring that your purchasing power remains intact.
In follow-up to the recent Medium Post How Much Could You Earn on Celo?, we’d like to provide a month-by-month breakdown of the anticipated circulating CELO (Celo’s Native Asset) post-Mainnet release.* As anticipated allocations are partially dependent upon on-chain governance and foundation grants to optimize for the long-term sustainability of the network, the indicative figures below are best estimates of anticipated CELO allocation.
For the purpose of this article, circulating supply is defined as the best approximation of the number of digital assets that are circulating in the market (see source). …
The comment I receive most on why Bitcoin won’t work is its significant energy consumption. Most comments sound something like, “If Bitcoin were a country, it’d rank XXth in terms of energy consumption. There are many more energy efficient alternatives for reaching consensus1.” While Bitcoin’s energy consumption is indeed impressive, I will make the case for why this energy consumption is necessary for Bitcoin as “digital gold.”
The purpose of proof of work (PoW)2 is to secure the network and create energy-dependent immutability. Bitcoin produces work for securing a global currency worth approximately USD 200 billion at the time of…
I frequently receive the question, “should I use blockchain for [fill in the use-case]?” In many cases, the answer is no. Below is a reference to five reasons blockchain may NOT make sense for your business and a simple framework for understanding when blockchain does make sense. I’ve included a definition of blockchain from IBM below for those who are new to the space.*
The value of disintermediation should exceed the costs of maintaining the network’s integrity. Here are five reasons why the costs of using blockchain may exceed the benefits1:
- Redundancy- having every network member (node) record every transaction…
Volatility has been a large obstacle to cryptocurrencies becoming more widely used for payments. Stablecoins are an attempt to overcome this challenge by holding a steady price (usually relative to fiat).
However, using stablecoins requires putting your trust in whoever is supposed to remain the peg behind the coin. This has been a key problem for the leading stablecoin by market cap and volume (Coinmarketcap), Tether’s USDT. While USDT has recovered to near parity with the US Dollar since falling to ~$0.85 on October 15, 2018 on several key exchanges like Kraken (Coinmarketcap), mystery still shrouds the stablecoin in the…
Decentralization has become synonymous with blockchain, but it is poorly defined at best and misleading at worst. “Distributed,” as used in the original bitcoin white paper, is far more effective in describing the simple underlying economic reality: not all of the transaction processing is done in the same place.1
Blockchains are, in fact, very centralized in their logic as there is only one commonly agreed upon state based off of a single protocol. This centralized logic allows the network to be maintained from anywhere in the world even if individual nodes (computers) maintaining the network go offline. …
The internet enabled companies to create tremendous value, but the monopolization of data has inhibited upstarts from taking part in the next wave of technological disruption, artificial intelligence (machine learning). Blockchain 3.0 offers a solution.
Internet companies dominate their respective industries, largely due to the data advantage they enjoy over potential competitors. As an example, Google and Facebook’s ability to provide targeted data and insights to advertisers have earned it over 60% of online advertising revenue. …
Media has painted tokens as simply a new form of crowdfunding riddled with fraud, but this masks “utility tokens” potentially far more profound impact on value production relationships.
At a high level, there are only two constituents in the modern capitalist society: laborers who work for wages and capitalists who own the means of production. While labor is directly creating value, the excesses of value creation have disproportionately concentrated amongst capitalists, shareholders and managers (i.e. average CEO of a large company makes over 200 times the median employee’s salary).1 …
Alex Witt
Finance @ cLabs, shaping Celo
