Decentralized Infrastructures

Discussion

Rachel O'Dwyer, in the context of the potential of Ethereum for the commons:

"A third significant innovation is a change to infrastructure. Ethereum describes itself as “an infrastructure for next generation social and economic systems”. Blockchain innovations that manage networks, servers or natural resources really do radicalise infrastructure. We’re no longer speaking about monolithic resources with prohibitive barriers to entry, the quintessential server farm housed in some distant industrial estate. Instead, we can imagine infrastructure as something immaterial and dispersed, or managed through flexible and transient forms of ownership. Where powerful servers, channels and processing capacities seem like the primary chokepoint of open networks, the blockchain is a powerful antidote. As Buterin argues in a recent interview: We would build a decentralised Internet network where all of us would access documents and content without going through a server. It means that you will need zero infrastructure to develop and distribute applications. The payoff seems to be that new blockchain-based technologies have the potential to support new forms of commons-based peer production, supplying necessary tools for cooperation and decision making, supporting complementary currencies and even provisioning infrastructures." (https://www.academia.edu/11627298/The_Revolution_Will_not_be_Decentralised_Blockchain-based_Technologies_and_the_Commons)