How Blockchains Organize and Incentivize Swarm Intelligence
The first phase of blockchain adoption will be how existing processes are optimized. That’s the straightforward part and is already happening.
The crazy (for me) exciting part is the 2nd phase where we will see entirely new models emerge.
I don’t want to say “business models” because I am not sure that many of them will be businesses in the traditional sense.
What blockchain-based tokens enable are the alignment of incentives across a broad group of people with no centralized command and control infrastructure.
Rick Falkvinge has some fame (and notoriety) for having started the Pirate Party in Sweden, which then spread to more of Europe. To his credit, he was also a very early adopter of Bitcoin and has done well for himself in that regard.
But what he accomplished in a short time and basically no budget with the Pirate Pary was notable.
I knew about it in passing but recently watched his TedXOslo talk about Swarm Intelligence.
He talked about the critical elements of a Swarm Organization
- Set a goal that is tangible, credible, inclusive, and epic
- Create an organization that is designed for speed, trust, and scalability
- Have fun
and the reward is two orders of magnitude of cost-efficiency advantage.
The next video I watched was William Mougayar interviewing Fred Wilson at the Token Summit.
But here’s the key part of the interview.
He says “don’t think about them about companies…” Just prior to this, he explained token economics…that the more people use a token, the more that everyone benefits from the usage.
Now, I don’t have all the answers here, but I think if you put Falkvinge + Wilson together and you have Incentivized Swarm Intelligence in a Decentralized manner, you are on to a pretty powerful force potentially.
This could be the way that new political parties are formed (and financed) and certainly how entities that compete with existing companies are formed and financed (it’s already happening).
“Leveraging the Swarm and the Swarm gets paid.”