The We of Web3 are accountable
What did you have today for breakfast? Do you know where it comes from? In a blockchain future you can check that and much more: scan your avocadoes and you will see in which farm in Nicaragua they were grown, how much its workers got paid, in what boat they got shipped to your place and how much emissions did it cost to send you a kilo of avos. Projects like slavefreetrade.org will help increase transparency and accountability and allow parties to take informed decisions on their purchases. Similarly, by having visibility on the supply chain and transport externalities of the products, the government knows the carbon footprint of your breakfast and it might want to tax you a carbon fee so they can put this money into carbon reduction projects.
Do you have a car? In an interconnected world your car can help a petrol pump price your fuel. By tracking how you drive and what sort of car do you have you might be charged less for driving in an eco-friendly manner or you might get charged a surplus for indulging in aggressive joyrides.
The key here is accountability and responsibility: you can have avocadoes from Nicaragua and you can take your ride for a need for speed-style highway chase, but blockchain allows us to set incentives in a way that overcomes the tragedy of the commons.
The We of Web3 are participative
After breakfast you will possibly go to work, but “work” might not mean the same it means now. Decentralized communities, non-hierarchical organizations with tokenized stakes will allow you to be your own boss together with a flexible number of participants in the organization. No more obscure top down orders! No more feeling detached of the decision making process and total disengagement! Aragon.one is an example of how to leverage the ethereum network for creating such decentralized organizations. Even the DAO, despite its terrible flop, engaged the whole community in a vision that changed the mindset on how the future of companies can be: a Decentralized Autonomous Organization where the token holders have a way to vote for the projects that the DAO should engage with.
We talked about governments taxing your meals, but what about these governments? They will not be the rigid opaque structures we are used to now. Technology will enable more representative practises like liquid democracy and allow for much more experimentation with smaller units coordinating into bigger ones, creating a global platform for governance and at the same time enabling hyperlocal organizations in the same framework.
So we see two parallel processes going on at the same time: decentralization of organizations that breaks borders and allows for real global collaboration and at the same time a process of hyperlocalization, since If your Nicaraguan avocadoes include the cost for all the impact and externalities in their pricing, you might want to source your produce from a much closer farmer, giving an opportunity to proximity commerce.
The We of Web3 are empowered
What do you do with your spare time? You surely must like to travel. Well, the folks at Winding Tree are setting up a platform where travel products can be distributed more efficiently and without intermediaries so you will be able to access all travel fares and options without needing to rely on a centralized party that increases the cost of your trip.
But you might also enjoy spending time in communities, consuming content or even creating content. Curation markets allow us to generate mechanisms to give the interested parties real skin in the game to decide the future of the community or the future of the content. Remember the dogecoin community sponsoring a NASCAR car or the Jamaican bobsled team? This is an example of a self-organized community with power to drive the direction of what the community is about.
When we are talking about content, the fans would be able to fund stories, influence storylines and interact with the content in a way that it is not possible now. New forms of narrative will arise, and consumers will have much more power to make the content they consume really theirs.
The We of Web3 are changemakers
After all that you might realize that, even if the above sounds like a pretty good world, it’s not a utopia yet. There might still be people out there that need help, or research to be funded, social good to be shared. And again, in a blockchain future we can improve the way we give.
Enter projects like Giveth, which will revamp how we think of charity. It consists of an open source DApp (Donation Application) that allows social impact driven organizations to create campaigns and collect funds from donors to fulfil this campaigns. These funds, though, are stored in a Vault in the ethereum network and released to the campaign only upon the completion of certain milestones — validated by external parties. Donors then have full assurance of transparency and can decide to withdraw their funds at any point before the release to the non-profit.
But not only this, Giveth is a way for communities to unite around causes. With the creation of DACs (Decentralized Altruistic Communities), many people can pool together resources to have a bigger impact. These DACs will fund campaigns that align with the community goals in a way that, If you are not an expert on healthcare but you want to make sure that your donations go to the most worthy campaign, by delegating the donations of your funds to a healthcare focus DAC you can make sure to be doing the right thing while retaining at the same time total control of your funds and overseeing of your impact!
So the We of Web3 have a lot do. A lot to dream. We are believers in open source, in decentralization, in being empowered, in creating a better world, in free choice, in helping each other, in trusting each other, in rewarding fairly. The We of Web3 are building the future on ethereum, on the blockchain, and it’s a promising future.
This is a submission for the Status Community Competitions’ Inaugural Contest: “The ‘We’ of Web3”.