Please listen to this really great conversation: ECSA on Transcending Hayek and his Digital Disciples

Contextual Citation

"Is cryptoeconomy just a refinement and acceleration of a capitalist economy or can it create new economic space? It could be either or, indeed both. The platforms that utilize blockchain and cryptographic technologies can be placed at the service of protocols that are essentially capitalist — designed around private property, self interest and profit calculus — or protocols that are conceived more co-operatively and commons-oriented — designed around shared networks and risking together. The technology permits both capitalist and social versions to be designed centrally or in a distributed way."

- Dick Bryan and Akseli Virtanen [1]

"What makes cryptocurrencies so powerful is that we can use them to express different social and economic agendas and to measure things differently; to implement different incentives and record their effects. Economy opens as a design question. This is the precondition for building different social and economic agendas and de-naturalising the rule of private and individual measures of social contribution, materialising in concepts like ‘profit’ and ‘efficiency’."

- Dick Bryan and Akseli Virtanen [2]

"Current attempts to develop new kinds of cryptocurrencies must be judged, valued and rethought on the basis of this simple question as posed by Andrea Fumagalli: Is the currency created not limited solely to being a means of exchange, but can it also affect the entire cycle of money creation – from finance to exchange? Does it allow speculation and hoarding, or does it promote investment in post-capitalist projects and facilitate freedom from exploitation, autonomy of organization etc.?"

- Tiziana Terranova [3]

"Blockchain is inconceivable without commodification – its very architecture rests on economic incentives coordinating independent actors, and its raison d’etre is the dis-intermediation of digital asset transfer. But their unique features not only allow blockchains to dis-intermediate and reorganize existing markets, but also to create new markets under previously unfavorable conditions. They thus constitute a crucial element in looming processes of formal subsumption, pushing the frontiers of capitalism ever further into the sphere of social relations previously unattainable to commodification. What’s more, through incentive systems rewarding specific interactions and punishing others, these technologies open the door for what Marx referred to as real subsumption – the systematic restructuration of commodified relations along the needs of capitalist profit maximization – of hitherto not or only formally subsumed social spheres."

- Felix Fritsch [4]

From a DAO to a DPO, i.e. a Distributed_Programmable_Organization

"The Distributed Autonomous Organization evolves toward the Distributed Programmable Organization. Post-blockchain architectures are already emerging that have even more flexible, lower-cost, rhizomatic architectures operating on the peer-to-peer model. These make it possible to design alternative models embodying an ethos of sustainable economic and social cooperation that is integrally built into the systems architecture at all levels.

These developments open new possibilities for collective projects to invent their own self-sustaining creative economies, operating not in competition with each other but in a shared, open-source environment based on notions of the “common”."

- SenseLab [5]

Encoding the neoliberal subject (methodological individualism)

"What kinds of subjectivity do we want to algorithmically inscribe into our systems? Blockchain start-ups begin from the assumption that there is no trust and no community, only individual economic agents acting in self-interest. Fair enough, you might think, it’s precisely the fact that projects like Ethereum engineer confidence and provide economic incentives for contribution that may distinguish it from other services like Freenet. But it also proceeds from a perspective that already presumes a neoliberal subject and an economic mode of governance in the face of social and/or political problems. ‘How do we manage and incentivise individual competitive economic agents?’ In doing so, it not only codes for that subject, we might argue that it also reproduces that subject."

- Rachel O'Dwyer [6]

Key Resources

Key Articles

• Intro: The Blockchain Economy: A beginner’s guide to institutional cryptoeconomics

• Please read this very good overview of Metacurrency / Holochain and Economic Space Agency projects: The state of the art of co-designing digital ledger technologies for commons and common good. By Dan Diojdescu. [7]

Please read: Will Ruddick of Grassroots Economics on the Characteristics of a Fair and Decentralized Currency System

• Coops Based on Cryptonetworks. Jesse Walden: "we believe that cryptonetworks — what we call “community owned and operated networks” — could unlock a new paradigm for continued cooperation, while still sustaining strong network effects".

• Jeff Emmett on the Commons Stack project: Towards an ‘Ostrom Compliant’ Cyber-Physical Commons + Aligning Cryptocurrency Incentives To Finance Positive Externalities

• Most Cryptoeconomics Do Not Challenge Neoclassical Premises + Potential of Cryptotokens as Innovative Units of Account

See also:

• Davidson, S., De Filippi, P., & Potts, J. (2016). Disrupting governance: The new institutional economics

of distributed ledger technology. SSRN Working Paper https://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2811995

• Davidson, S., de Filippi, P. and Potts, J. (2018) ‘Blockchains and the economic institutions of

capitalism’, Journal of Institutional Economics. Cambridge University Press, 14(4), pp. 639–658. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1744137417000200

• Davidson, S., De Filippi, P., & Potts, J. (2016). Economics of blockchain. Available at SSRN 2744751.

https://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2744751

ECSA

• Redesigning Markets Through Different Distributed Network Protocols‎ : "Transcending Hayek and his digital disciples: the market, prices and profits as protocols"

• The Influence of Hayek on the Crypto Economy

Key Books

• Protocols for Cryptoeconomic Networks. the Economic Space Agency's White paper. By Dick Bryan and Akseli Virtanen.

• Radical Markets

Key Podcasts

• ECSA on Transcending Hayek and his Digital Disciples [8]

ECSA is probably the most sophisticated project to come out of the peer to peer commons movement.