Who is your boss? Mr. Blockchain is…

Bitshares is paying developers and solving governance issues all at the same time

J. Chitty
2 min readMar 23, 2016

Imagine if Facebook users could vote to fire Mark Zuckerberg, or hire someone to develop a cool feature they thought the website needs. Thanks to a major leap in blockchain technology, this is now possible.

It works using the Bitshares blockchain. Shareholders (the people who hold the crypto token), have the ability to vote for workers (employees) to carry out a certain task. They do this by voting proposals from people who demonstrably bring value to the system.

With Bitcoin, all newly available coins are automatically spent on paying a decentralized network of ‘miners’ to secure the network. However, with Bitshares, the flow of new funds can be directed to whatever the Bitshares ‘shareholders’ want, creating a type of collective hive mind that governs the growth of Bitshares.

This new kind of organization is called a “decentralized autonomous organization”, or DAO for short. Bitshares, like Bitcoin, it’s completely open source, decentralized and anonymous.

How do you get “hired”?

By convincing shareholders within the Bitshares community you’re the best guy for the job. The job offer listings can be viewed on the bitsharestalk.org forum along with other community proposals.

People are able to propose whatever they want to do and get hired by the community who sees value in their work. Through the power of cryptography, Bitshares is attempting to code its way to a more free and efficient society.

If you prefer a more visual explanation on this subject and the centralization problem that Bitshares is actually trying to solve, I highly recommend watching this Daily Decrypt Episode:

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