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One of the biggest criticisms of the sharing economy is that there’s not much sharing going on at all. Take Air BnB for example. Yes, there are resources being shared between users, but the profits certainly aren’t being shared. It’s an interesting twist in the capitalist system. The capitalists no longer own the capital… they simply own the information about that capital. And thus, the most valuable hotel chain owns no real estate and the most valuable taxi companies didn’t own any cars (although that’s changing).

This is actually common throughout the tech industry. Starting from Facebook and Google, most of them don’t produce any of the content that makes them valuable. It’s all user-sourced. And the common complaint is that users should be able to reap some of the rewards of making these internet giants what they are. However, building and maintaining these companies isn’t cheap. Yes, the reward is extraordinary since they use millions of unpaid laborers, but at the end of the day, Facebook still has a website to run. What wrong with them making a profit? And how do you expect them to pay all those users anyway?

Well, blockchain technology offers one type of solution. Distributed computing systems have no owners. They run on millions of computers around the world with each ‘node’ operating in concert with the others. In the Bitcoin protocol, payments are made to directly to these nodes, called miners, through what’s called a coinbase transaction. The every ten minutes a payment of 25 bitcoins is sent to one of the miners operating around the world more or less at random. This happens without any central authority or control mechanism… the network makes the payments on its own. Pretty trippy when you think about it.

So, how big of a stretch would it be to make these types of automated payments to the people that create content for websites like Facebook and YouTube? Instead of going to Zuckerburg and his investors, the money generated by you and your friends’ posts could be sent directly back to you as some kind of bitcoin like token. Well, this is already being done. In SteemIt, we have one of the first social networks being run completely on blockchain technology. Coins are sent to the users who create the most popular content and those coins can be paid back to the network in order to buy advertising or privileged placement on the network. Alternatively, you can sell those tokens to another person or a business who would like to gain exposure. It’s a clever system, although there is some debate over whether the creators of SteemIt are being very good stewards of the platform. Blockchain governance is hard.

Which brings us back to the sharing economy. The recent decision by Uber and Lyft to leave the Austin market has opened the door to a number of competitors. One of these, Arcade City, has laid the groundwork for a distributed Etherium based network where the drivers can get paid without the need for an Uber-like entity. Sadly, they have also run into governance issues… The initial Arcade City group has been divided into two camps, one led by the founder, Christopher David, and the other led by a group known as the “City Council” who have rebranded their entity Swarm City. In so doing, they’ve also taken the funds raised by a recent crowd funding event earmarked for the further development of the Arcade City concept.

You may notice that these types of power struggles are common among blockchain platforms due to their democratic nature. Bitcoin faced a similar battle last year during the Block size debate and Etherium has indeed split into two distinct currencies, Etherium (ETH) and Etherium Classic (ETC). From an investor standpoint, these events may represent a risk that you should try to be aware of. However, from a philosophical standpoint, it shows that the concept of decentralized power is working. I believe it’s a testament to the design of technologies like bitcoin that a founder or founding group can’t simply direct the whole network by fiat. It means something that Bitcoin Core (the de-facto governing body of bitcoin) needs to have buy-in from the community in order to make big changes. It’s actually great that Christopher David was able to lose control over the Arcade City app. In a world where democracies seem to be in decline worldwide and authoritarianism is on the rise, technology may be our only hope for maintaining individual liberty.

Viva la technolution.