Do you ever get the feeling that, by being in cryptocurrueny, you know something the rest of the world is completely unaware of?
I got that feeling reading an article in Harvard Business Review that focused upon wealth inequality.
The idea behind the writing is the fact that the wealth gap just keeps expanding. Those at the top keep seeing their assets grow while the middle class and down end up suffering. We saw a radical expansion of this over the last decade when the stock market took off. Most of the stock is owned by those in the up 15%.
Worker buyouts is the solution that was put forth as a way of eradicating this. Under this scenario, when the owner of a business wants to retire, a plan is put into place where the workers can buy the company. In fact, this often is started long before retirement where workers get a piece of their company. This is paid through payroll deductions, allowing employees to keep increasing their stake every pay period.
It is fairly evident that a lack of ownership of assets is a large reason for the gap increasing. Essentially, most people have little stake in the economic or financial affairs that are taking place around them. Worker-owned enterprises, which constitute about 12% of the U.S. workforce have proven successful in the past.
Such ownership structures have already proven successful: About 17 million people, or 12% of the U.S. workforce, are employed at variations of worker-owned enterprises. These companies are not just small groups of artisans or craft workers. Agricultural cooperatives Land O’Lakes and Ocean Spray have become major players in dairy production and fruit farming, earning hundreds of millions in annual revenue. And some companies with employee majority-owned stock programs, such as Publix Super Markets and outerwear maker W.L. Gore and Associates, are leaders in their industries. The largest industrial federation of worker cooperatives in the world, Mondragon Corporation, is one of Spain’s top 10 multinationals, with about $13 billion in revenue from 105 cooperatives, and 75,000 employees stretching across Europe, Asia, South America, and the United States.
https://hbr.org/2018/08/why-the-u-s-needs-more-worker-owned-companies
Obviously, on the surface this is a good way to approach things. Instead of a company being sold to a large public corporation, the owner sells to the individuals who are involved in it. At the end of the day, he or she still gets paid what the company is worth. It also leaves a legacy since when public corporations buy companies out, the one purchased is just gobbled up.
The challenge with this solution is the fact that the workforce is going to change greatly over the next decade. Never in my lifetime has I see so much business uncertainty. Industries that are very strong today face the prospect of being gone in a decade. This creates a rather volatile future for industries and businesses, let alone employees.
We cannot deny that we are also embarking upon an age of rapid expansion of automation. If 10% of what is being worked on, technologically, pans out, we are going to see a massive disruption to the workforce. In my view, that is not a bad thing in the long run because I think we need to really look at the nature of work. However, in the short-to-medium term, this would cause a lot of pain.
Automation is a wonderful thing. I am very excited about the progress that we are about to make. The only issue I have is who owns the automation and benefits from it? To me, this is the crux of the problem.
When production is automated, sending profitability through the roof, we have a situation like we are facing. The ones that control the automation get the benefits while everyone else falls further behind. It is the basic story we witnessed over the last 30 years.
Here is where the DAO as a business structure is vital.
The DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization) has the ability to close the wealth gap very quickly. Over the next decade if we see a majority of companies adopt this, we are going to see wealth generated at an unbelievable pace while being spread to most individuals on the planet.
We can see the early versions of this with blockchains such as Bitcoin and Steem. These organization are run automatically by servers validating transactions at set intervals. Software is on computers all over the world which run 24/7. If one computer goes down, there is a line of other waiting to step in and validate the block.
Token holders are the ones who get the benefits. Since there is no profit and loss statement, the benefit comes in the form of price appreciation. This is realized as more people utilize the service.
On a blockchain like Steem, many of those who have stake are the users of the platform. This is where the contributions of individuals are rewarded, thus increasing their holdings. Unlike entities such as Facebook, where the company, i.e. the shareholders, are the beneficiaries of all advancement, with a DAO, it is often the people using who reap the financial gain.
One major difference is the stake is not an ownership piece but, rather, a utility. Having larger stake enables one to do more within the ecosystem. This is where the utility aspect comes in. Those with less stake are limited by what they can do.
This is a model we see starting to spread out all over the crypto-sphere. While we are in the early days, hence organizations are not that advanced, we are seeing the green sprouts coming through. Over time, as these organizations grow in users, the value will increase, many exponentially. This will generate enormous wealth for those who are involved.
Of course, the best part of all this is the lack of limit to what or how many can be created. Anyone with an idea can structure a business like this. If successful, that individual along with the other stakeholders will financially benefit. Ultimately, we are likely to see millions of different DAOs. In fact, the process is already starting in Artificial Intelligence and quantum computing.
Cryptocurrency is going to have a much bigger impact than most people think. They are stuck in the idea of traditional ownership and looking at tokens as replacements for stock. While it can serve that purpose, tokenization goes much deeper. It essentially makes commerce native to the Internet. This opens up a host of possibilities that were never-before possible.
As we move further into the radical technological age, we are going to see some advancements that will really drive this idea home. I will be doing an article on virtual businesses and explaining how all this ties into that.
In other words, there is the potential for things a lot bigger than most are imagining.
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