There’s a lot going on in the blockchain sector. In the end, what will be judged to have been on the right side of history?

How much money do you own?

If it sounds like a personal question, it’s not. We already know the answer: none.

You don’t own the dollar or pound in your pocket. Not really. You didn’t create it, you don’t set its value, you can’t be sure it will be worth anything in the future. If you keep it in a bank account you don’t know whether it will be confiscated or frozen for reasons as diverse as a bail-in, unexpected tax bill or computer error. That money isn’t really yours. You just have permission to use it for a while, under certain conditions, imposed upon you whether you like it or not.

This is what we call Closed Value. It’s a term that only makes sense as a counterpoint to Open Value, which is a concept we’re helping pioneer and explain here at Incent, because Closed Value is actually an oxymoron. Restricting value, as our fiat money system does and as the traditional loyalty sector does — amongst many, many other sectors — ends up destroying it. Value isn’t really value unless it can be held, transferred and traded completely freely.

We have a system where we are accustomed to people taking our property. Fiat money is subject to inflation and QE. The music file you pay to download is often subject to restrictions about how you can use it (which is why people go to such lengths to circumvent them). Loyalty points as they currently exist aren’t transferable, and they often expire after a certain time. They’re not yours to use as you wish; they come with strings attached. These strings invariably rob them of their value. This is what we mean by Closed Value. And we believe it’s a major own goal.

Open Value is better than Closed Value. That’s not just an article of faith: it’s true almost by definition. Value is less valuable when you impose conditions on it. There’s an irony here. Like love, value is something that’s worth most when you give it freely.

But don’t get us wrong: we’re not hippies. At Incent we’ve been around crypto a long time and we’re passionate about adoption. Bitcoin pioneered what we’ve come to think of as Open Value, but it’s a hard proposition to sell people — partly because they’re so used to the Closed Value paradigm of fiat money, and partly because it’s technically quite a tough concept to communicate. That’s why our priority with Incent is not just to explain Open Value. It’s to get it into people’s hands and show them why it’s so powerful. Because people get this stuff on a visceral level. They don’t like the fact that a gift card company can go bust and suddenly all the ‘value’ that was locked up in those cards has evaporated. They don’t like that the tracks they pay to download can only be used with specific software. They see the value of open source software and open knowledge platforms like Wikipedia. They just need to be given a use case and they will be away without thinking twice about it.

There’s an awful lot going on in the blockchain world, but these new organisations are often very hazy about their openness — something that’s second nature to bitcoin, the original open value blockchain platform. Take Ripple, for example. Is what they are doing really ‘open’? Is it really delivering genuine Value into the hands of users? We’re not sure they can claim it is. It’s just more of the same, Closed Value turbocharged by a ledger.

Without too much navel-gazing, there’s a wider conversation for humanity here. Is what we’re doing with blockchains going to end up on the right side or the wrong side of history? How will it be judged in 10, 20, 100 years? We have some incredible technology here, but there’s a risk that it will just end up being used to do Closed Value more efficiently. And that really would be unforgiveable.

Incent is absolutely committed to Open Value. It’s in our DNA, core to what we are doing. Over the coming weeks and months we’ll explain more about this. Ultimately it will be worth developing definitions to gauge whether a project really offers Open Value — criteria about transparency, issuance and supply, durability, tradeability, and so on, to name a few.

For now, we want to put the idea out there and encourage a conversation about Open Value. If you want to find out more, listen to our lead dev Pete talk about it in this interview with Core Radio: https://soundcloud.com/coremediaradio/openvalue