Decline of Ownership

The exponential pace of technology has resulted in a zero marginal cost society placing downward deflationary forces on the price of information-based goods and services. The advent of cheap bandwidth and cloud storage has given rise to services like Spotify, Instagram, YouTube and Netflix.

For a long time now it’s been cheaper and more convenient to rent digital services rather than buy. You don’t own songs on Spotify, you pay a subscription fee to effectively rent any of them ondemand. This has spilled over into the physical world with “sharing economy” services like Uber, Airbnb, Lyft, WeWork and bike sharing initiatives.

What these services are increasingly doing is presenting a personal economic argument against the exclusive private use of assets and property:

Idle self-driving car -vs- making money on Uber

Empty house or office -vs- making money on Airbnb

Projecting the current sharing economy trend into the future, it’s very likely that ownership models come to an end on the consumer side of the market. For example, if you can get an instant self-driven ride anywhere for a few cents, then you probably wouldn’t bother buying your own car.

Blockchain Commons

The problem with services like Uber and Airbnb is that they are peer-to-peer marketplaces with giant corporate entities sitting in the middle of the transaction, extracting billions of dollars for their investors. If you could pay your UberX driver directly, the fare wouldn’t include Uber Inc’s 25% fee.

Enter blockchain platforms such as Ethereum which enable the middleman to be removed. With Ethereum you can build a decentralised Uber with the same service quality but no Uber Inc. Or you could rent your home, office, bike or anything out to anyone without Airbnb Inc taking a cut.

Blockchain smart contracts or dApps (decentralised apps) are basically little pieces of code that live in a distributed cloud, can be used by anyone with internet access and run ondemand. They also manage secure financial transactions and store money in wallets without needing a bank at all.

One potential use-case is a self-driving car that owns itself via the blockchain. The car would have it’s own wallet address (bank account) allowing it to collect fees from giving rides to ondemand passengers. It could book itself in for routine maintenance, pay for recharging, request roadside assistance, and even purchase new self-driving cars.

Well if a car can own itself, so can a house.

Continue to Part 2: PropertyDAO solution & transition strategies