Cryptoeconomy

Description

Trent MacDonald:

"A cryptoeconomy is the techno-economic paradigm built on the general purpose technology of the blockchain, which is itself emergent from an information economy. Institutionally considered, a cryptoeconomy is an extreme form of decentralised or distributed economy.

As a general-purpose technology, the blockchain is new, just as steam power, iron and steel, electricity, plastics, computers, and the Internet once were.

As these technologies were adopted and scaled, they gave us the industrial economy, and then the information economy. These are technologies for making things, for moving atoms and bits. This is the economics of Adam Smith and Joseph Schumpeter.

But the blockchain is a different type of technology because while it is, at base, an information technology, it is also an institutional technology. It is like a market, a firm, or a government, which are also institutional technologies. These are technologies for coordinating economies, for moving people into an order that produces value." (http://mesosoup.com/2015/12/13/the-new-economics-of-blockchain/)

Discussion

Trent MacDonald:

"There are two broad ways of making classifications of types of economy: by dominant or ascendant institutions (socialist, collectivist, and centralised versus market-capitalist and distributed), or by dominant or ascendant technology or technological regimes (a.k.a. ‘means of production’).

It wasn’t long after the invention of the macro-economy in the 1930s, whilst under the influence of development theory and the hopeful prospect of industrial planning, that we started to classify macro-economies by their predominant production form, e.g. subsistence, agricultural, heavy industrial, etc. along with reference to their institutional vector, e.g. emerging, transitional, and catch-up.

As technology rolled on, by the 1980s and 1990s we started using labels that referred less to specific nation-state economies, or their political economy (e.g. socialist, mixed, capitalist), but to super-clusters of new technologies—collectively labeled the new economy—such as the information economy, the knowledge economy, the post-industrial economy, and the digital economy.

An information economy is broadly based on information and communications technologies (ICT) as the dominant GPT or ascendant techno-economic paradigm. This decade, the 2010s, following the Web 1.0 and 2.0 economy, has seen the rise of what is variously called the sharing economy, or platform economy, or peer-to-peer economy (some call this the Web 3.0 economy)." (http://mesosoup.com/2015/12/13/the-new-economics-of-blockchain/)