In recent decades humanity has made great technological strides, many of which have been facilitated by our ability to share more information faster. We are always building on all previous knowledge, but access to this knowledge hasn’t always been easy to come by. Everything changed with the rise of the internet.

Data-sharing

Today we can easily acquire almost any information we desire, we can collaborate instantly regardless of location and build on top of the work of others. The open source movement has built a mountain of tools so developers no longer need to build everything from scratch. All this, along with many other timesaving innovations, has allowed us to both increase human productivity and speed up the pace of innovation considerably.

While this is certainly amazing, none of this changed much about the economics of how we live and work. Open source projects often have trouble monetising as the only options are usually donations or providing services to compliment the open source code. Both are fairly tricky ways to generate enough revenue for a project, easily relegating it to pet project status. Salaries still come from corporations just as they did 100 years ago. Then came bitcoin.

Incentivised Collaboration

Bitcoin suddenly created a significant financial incentive for open source work. Bitcoin isn’t a company, it doesn’t pay salaries and it doesn’t have employees. Structurally it looks very different from any traditional organisation. Yet there are hundreds, even thousands, of people contributing their time and effort to helping it succeed. Furthermore, almost anyone can take part and it’s not owned by any government or organisation. This was a fundamentally new way of financially incentivising collaborative work.

People quickly realised that you could do so much more with blockchain technology than just store money and in a surprisingly short period of time, the industry exploded with new projects. These new projects provided all kinds of services and displayed a wide spectrum of different technological implementations. There are now projects building marketplaces for file storage and processing power. There are prediction markets and tools for running decentralised organisations. There are supply chain management systems and meme currencies. Essentially everything on the internet is being built on the blockchain.

Data-silos

While all this open collaboration is exploding on the internet, an interesting thing has happened to the creation of wealth in the traditional economy. As the open source movement has democratised the building blocks of online services and falling prices of computing power have made even sophisticated machine learning accessible to many, the last bastion of wealth creation has become data.

Data allows large corporations to create more addictive products and maintain stronger network effects. You think you’re not susceptible to smart algorithms making you like more, up-vote more and comment more, but you are. We all are. This ability to keep people engaged for increasingly long periods of time keeps strengthening the network effects of these platforms and it’s all fuelled by data.

Data is the most valuable commodity of our time and the foundation of wealth in the most valuable companies. I believe data-silos are the greatest barrier to innovation in existence today.

Open Data

The remarkable thing about cryptocurrencies is that it allows people to easily benefit from the success of others. Anyone can invest in the tokens of a competing project, so it’s easy to create incentives for sharing.

What if we created an incentive for everyone to share their data? Imagine a world where all of Facebook’s user data was freely available for anyone building the next social network and Facebook could benefit financially from the sharing of this data. Imagine if all anonymised medical data was freely available or you could get all information on Amazons sales in realtime. Imagine if everyone shared their data.

This could be achieved in two ways…

Open Data Protocol

This protocol would incentivise projects to push their valuable data to an open network, where it could be accessed by anyone.

The data layer might be the “Fattest Protocol”

Cross Database Sharing

Here the application databases themselves would have sharing incentives and mechanics built in.

Open data would increase the rate of innovation drastically. Every product or service would be better from day one. Sharing could be incentivised by a token which would be used to reward sharing of valuable data, in addition to everyone investing directly in competing projects.

The best part is we have the technology to achieve this today. With open data we could open the floodgates of human innovation, right as we are getting the next 1 billion humans online.