A thread on why crypto is like the internet, why the corporate R&D economy will be replaced by an open-source economy, and why we need crypto to get there.
The internet fundamentally changed the economics of information distribution, making many things >10x cheaper:
- exchanging information pairwise (email, facetime)
- collaborating on shared information (wikis, reddit, github)
- distributing information en masse (netflix, twitter)
- exchanging information pairwise (email, facetime)
- collaborating on shared information (wikis, reddit, github)
- distributing information en masse (netflix, twitter)
Crypto fundamentally changes the economics of value distribution. It also makes things 10x cheaper:
- exchanging value pairwise (bitcoin)
- collaborating on shared value (smart contracts, creating new markets)
- distributing value en masse (ICOs, airdrops)
- exchanging value pairwise (bitcoin)
- collaborating on shared value (smart contracts, creating new markets)
- distributing value en masse (ICOs, airdrops)
One specific instance, courtesy of @michael_nielsen: before crypto, you couldn't just create a new market. Goldman Sachs could, but you couldn't. Now it's just a little bit of coding to make an ERC20 token and you can get it listed on a decentralized exchange.
This is analogous to how before the internet, you couldn't just distribute a video to the world. CBS could, but you couldn't. Now it's just a simple matter of uploading to YouTube.
Like the internet, this will enable many innovations. Some are obvious - like that email would eventually replace snail mail, or that bitcoin will eventually replace ACH. But many are non-obvious (who saw Wikipedia coming?), and those are the ones I'm most excited for.
My take: in the future, most research & development will be open-source: anyone can use for free, and hack + contribute + improve. This will be huge. Imagine if drug discovery and medical technology went open source! Goodbye healthcare cost crisis.
This open-source economy is a fundamentally better fit for an economy driven by the spillovers & synergies of intangible capital. Corporations were a good mechanism for organizing & controlling 20th century value chains. Today, open-source is the best way to develop technology.
Keeping technology locked in a particular corporate citadel, with rules that stop others from hacking on it, improving it, and recombining it: *so* 20th century. In a networked age of rapid innovation, it's laughably inefficient.
That's why Linux crushed Windows in the server market, and why market leaders like Google open-source crown jewel technologies like TensorFlow, rather than keeping them as proprietary advantages. It's the start of a new reality.
But switching drug discovery and medical tech to open-source seems a little far-fetched, because we do a bad job of rewarding open-source contributors. People build incredibly important core infra for the internet, then need to beg for donations. Crazy!
We need a new go-to image for open-source sustainability. We need to fairly reward people who contribute to open-source projects. Luckily, crypto is all about giving us new ways to distribute value.
What if every OS project could make its own project-specific token, and distribute them to the project's contributors? What if supporters who bought the token were rewarded with prioritized support, bugfixes, and influence on the feature roadmap?
What if those tokens flowed according to the code dependency graph, so that developers and early supporters of foundational technologies like Git or @babeljs could become appropriately (i.e. fantastically) rewarded?
What if the value of these tokens was correlated with the long-term success and usefulness of the project, so that an ecosystem of "venture socialists" would emerge to fund promising early-stage open-source projects?
That's the vision for "grain", a system of tokens that act as economic scaffolding for open-source projects. Grain will be to open-source projects as equity is to corporations.
But before that is possible, we need a system for allocating a project's grain to it's contributors. It needs to be fair, transparent, and produce good incentives, so that people earn grain by helping the project, not by gaming the algorithm. That's where @sourcecred comes in.
SourceCred's mission is to create a fair, transparent, and robust system for attributing "cred" in a project to its contributors. Cred will be computed based on GitHub interactions, source code analysis, human feedback, and more.
You can read more about it at sourcecred.io, or check out the prototype, which shows SourceCred's own cred: sourcecred.io/prototype/. You can also try the prototype on any project you find interesting - instructions on GitHub.
It's still early days for SourceCred - I don't recommend allocating any tokens based on cred just yet. 😅 It's early days for crypto too - like the internet in 95, we need to build some more infra to get ready for prime time.
And like the internet, prime time is gonna be big.
And like the internet, prime time is gonna be big.
