I have been following Blockchain for quite a while now. I understood the technology was innovative. But, I always wondered if it was hyped ? Diving deep into the field and interacting with thinkers assured me it wasn’t. Few insights written here, surfaced in my conversation with the Marketing Director of Vanywhere ,Gil Ram (Thank you Gil).
Open Business
It’s actually called Decentralised Autonomous Organisation, I use “ Open Business” to make it sound simple. Open Source communities which are the backbone of organizations like Linux, Google, etc have the least or no politics. I am not talking about the organization but their projects.
For example, Hyperledger is a project by Linux Foundation. It will help you build applications for private Blockchain. People around the world contribute to this project. It doesn’t matter who you are or what you are if you do good work, your code will be merged to the source. You are solely recognised for your work.
I have observed people who know how to play cheap politics overpower people who work hard. In a Decentralised Autonomous Organisation, everyone’s work will be recorded on a transparent Blockchain. Your salary would be provided by the system which evaluates your work.
Open Business will have the future of Open Source projects. Anyone anywhere with a business idea could start a Decentralised Organisation. Anyone could be a part of it, a programmer could be automatically added to the system based on his git profile. Every member of the organisation would be paid solely based on what each one brings to the table.
The Future Is Going to Be Great For Producers
You might have been already bored by the words “Eliminating middleman”. Let me tell you why it is a big deal. If I have to sell a book on Amazon, they take 50% of the sale as commission. Writing a book is hard work. It would take months to write a book.
It would take double the time to find a publisher. These publishers have their own biases (JK Rowling Turned Down By 12 Publishers), even if your work is good it would never see the light. In case you get lucky and your book was published. The majority of the cut goes to the publisher.
If you self-publish the book you have to break your sweat on marketing it. On top of that seeing Amazon take a huge cut is really painful. Only a few people dare to fight these challenge and become producers. Producers in almost every industries are exploited.
The vegetables you ate today was produced by a farmer. In India, most farmers live in poverty. Datatery Popat Ghadwaje, 42, committed suicide after days of hushed chanting “the sky betrayed”.
India's shocking farmer suicide epidemic_Umbrale, India - After days of hushed chanting that "the sky betrayed" him, Datatery Popat Ghadwaje, 42, committed…_www.aljazeera.com
We can’t control the sky. But, giving a good deal of their hard work is a must. Governments try to solve the problem by giving farmers easy/reduced loans or pensions. These things don’t work. We need to go to the root of the problem and address it. We need system thinking here. We need a system that enforces farmers to get properly rewarded for their hard work.
Middleman is hungry for power, fame, and money. Blockchain replaces them with computers. Computer systems are not hungry for power, fame, and money (Except for Bitcoin). Can a computer system replace middleman?
What does a middleman do? He finds producers and consumers, buys from the producer for less and sells it to the consumer for a higher price. This can be easily replaced by a program, except the computer will give the producer a reasonable price. It’s also important that the program is transparent and not controlled by an individual. This system is what the Blockchain enables.
The future is going to be great for writers, composers, singers, farmers, or producers in general.
What about freelancers?
Upwork takes 25% of my earnings, if I earn $1000 for a project, they take $250. That is a substantial amount! So how does Blockchain help? Upwork has infrastructure cost, they need to pay for their server, database, maintenance, etc. On a public blockchain like Ethereum, the infrastructure cost is reduced drastically. Reading data from Ethereum is free.
On a centralized infrastructure which Upwork is based on, the more the people, more servers to handle the load and more money is needed. On a decentralised network, more the people, less money is required because the load is used to favour the Blockchain network.
On a blockchain based platform, the fee can be as less as 4%–2%. I have to only pay around $40 or $20 as commission. That’s drastically less compared to $250. Vanywhere is building a blockchain based platform.
Vanywhere
I recently came across Vanywhere (yet to launch). The idea is to help people monetize their skill.
It’s not limited to freelancers like in Upwork. If you have skills in cooking, fashion, traveling, sports, etc, you have an additional source of income with Vanywhere.
The brilliant thing about Vanywhere is that they are a platform based on Blockchain. This means their infrastructure cost would be drastically less and they would take less commission compared to sites like Upwork who presently eat 25% of my revenue.
Kindly note, this post is sponsored by Vanywhere.
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