The Past, Present, and Future of Sharing

Sharing is not a novel concept — it is a core human behavior. But how have we seen “sharing” transform on a social, economic, and enterprise scale? More importantly, can we predict how sharing will continue to evolve, especially in the context of blockchain technology?

By Everett Muzzy, ConsenSys

This is the third in a series of posts by Ondiflo, a blockchain-based ticketing solution platform exploring ways to integrate blockchain technology into the oil and gas industry. Previous posts:
The History of Disruption in the Energy Industry
A Recent History of Innovation
The Past, Present, and Future of Sharing
Blockchain Technology and the Oil & Gas Industry
Blockchain Use Cases & Benefits for Upstream Oil & Gas
Blockchain Use Cases & Benefits for Downstream Oil & Gas
Blockchain Use Cases & Benefits for Midstream Oil & Gas
The Biggest Challenge to Enterprise Ethereum Isn’t Tech
Ondiflo: Blockchain for Oil and Gas
Ondiflo: A Roadmap for the Future

The Ondiflo Blockchain platform has processed over 10,144 water hauls as of the morning of July…

Sharing: A 10,000 Year Recap

Sharing evolved alongside human community organization as a sociological behavior to ensure preservation. Survival is the most innate human condition, and we quickly evolved to understand sharing as synonymous with survival — and therefore equally as innate. By sharing physical and mental resources, one could more likely ensure his/her individual survival. Therefore, though interests were individualistic, they were achievable only through cooperation and shared resources, strength, and intelligence.

With shared resources came the ability to divide labor and expertise — giving rise to community-oriented trading and bartering. This early economy was organic and intensely peer-to-peer. No intermediaries determined the values of the items or services being traded. Instead, there was community consensus around the value of resources — but the eventual transaction details always rested in the hands of the parties involved. These communities operated in a scarcity mindset — there was no room to “store” value with the eventual aim of purchasing something needed. Services, products, and resources were acquired when they were needed, were often only acquired for individuals or families, and there was never certainty of abundance.

The rise of organized, structured civilizations allowed for massive efficiency and resource abundance. The traditional P2P, community-driven economic model was unsustainable in the face of such abundance. Centralized services, therefore, arose to help organize society around resource abundance and intermediate economic transactions. WIth these centralized entities, however, came the siloing of resources and of information. The inability to access resources directly — instead having to go through an intermediary — perpetuated a scarcity mindset in society, even in the face of resource abundance. Consequently, this gave rise to waste, misallocation, corruption, and inefficiency — and still does to this day.

The Internet & the Emergence of Connected Living

In the wake of the Internet, we witnessed the single greatest sharing event in our lifetimes. The Internet ushered in an unprecedented era of connectedness and cooperation. With people able to coordinate across borders (real and imagined), we witnessed a world grow more collaborative. Connected Living — the restructuring of daily life off the knowledge gained from a collective “other” — became standard. At its simplest and most original form, connected living meant a collective mind. Some of the earliest popular uses of the Internet were chat rooms, blogs, review sites, and websites like Wikipedia. All of these sites relied off the shared brain power of a newly-connected community. An explosion of information sharing started breaking down the walls of siloed information and resources.

Connected Living through the Internet meant that the access to resources (primarily information) and the action those resources allowed (engaging with others online, making informed decisions) were both decentralized and organically peer-to-peer, often void of centralized intermediaries. Early connected living, however, did not present too many economic incentives to promote enterprise adoption. Many sites relied on community maintenance (i.e. Wikipedia) and did not have an integrated, core economic model. It took many years and greater daily integration of the Internet for the robust, economically-enticing model we know today to emerge — the Sharing Economy.

The App Store & the Rise of the Sharing Economy

The “sharing economy” refers to a new class of (largely) B2C companies seeking to leverage unused resources, skills, and services to lower costs and increase access.

The modern sharing economy can be said to have truly emerged with Apple’s release of the iPhone and, more exactly, the App Store. The App Store provided companies with direct, personal, and mobile access to consumers on a 24/7 basis. These companies could therefore connect unused resources (in the form of products, services, and individual skill sets) with those consumers who would otherwise have no efficient way to source them.

We have seen the sharing economy become immensely successful. Behemoths such as Uber, Lyft, Airbnb, and TaskRabbit have grown to dominate industries (and VC interest). Despite the financial success of the sharing economy in the decade since its explosion, however, we have seen the darker side of the economic model emerge. The “sharing economy” has quickly grown to conflate with the “gig economy,” in which service providers such as ride-sharing drivers find themselves deprioritized by the sharing intermediaries.

As with the early days of the Internet, the actions the Sharing Economy facilitates (a rider and a driver in a Lyft; a TaskRabbit painter helping a house owner) are peer-to-peer. The access to those resources, however, originate from a centralized entity with carte blanche power and data control. Moreover, the economic value of the transaction is still largely captured by the intermediary — especially when customer data is harvested. Such centralization of economic value and resources access allowed the Sharing Economy to become a global phenomenon by facilitating scale, efficiency, and structural hierarchy. We are quick to realize, however, that our access to shared resources is restricted, moderated, and exploited — and we continue to operate in a scarcity mindset as resources are misallocated and wasted.

So the question remains: Is there a better way?

Blockchain & the Rise of Collaborative Consumption

“Collaborative Consumption” is a sociological term first coined in a 1978 paper. In a 2010 book, Rachel Botsman precisely defines Collaborative Consumption as “traditional sharing, bartering, lending, trading, renting, gifting, and swapping redefined through technology and peer communities.” If we understand the Sharing Economy as facilitated by powerful, centralized intermediaries, we understand the important nuance of Botsman’s definition that sets Collaborative Consumption apart. Collaborative Consumption more closely describes the innate, “traditional” P2P bartering of bygone days rather than the P2P-accessed-through-intermediaries economy that exists today.

Collaborative Consumption aligns the actions, the access, and the economic incentives that have previously been unable to coexist in the modern sharing of resources. Early Internet days allowed P2P actions and decentralized access, but without the economic incentives to scale. The Sharing Economy creates robust economic incentives and facilitated P2P actions, but the access to those resources is concentrated. Collaborative Consumption is the return of traditional P2P sharing where the economic incentive exists to allow decentralized access to shared P2P actions and resources. This is — and will continue to be — powered by the integration of blockchain technology into industries and economic models. By removing intermediaries but maintaining the benefits of centralization (scale and efficiency), blockchain technology allows peer-to-peer to be global. With a global, peer-to-peer economy, we begin to shift from a mindset of scarcity to one of abundance as individuals coordinate with one another to measure and respond to realistic supply and demand.

What Does Collaborative Consumption Mean for Oil & Gas

The question of Collaborative Consumption, blockchain technology, and oil & gas is really a question of enterprise adoption. Before the era of Collaborative Consumption, the economic benefits of the sharing economy were largely restricted to B2C business models. The sharing of resources on an enterprise level posed serious competitive risks. Primarily, if ones shares information, how can they ensure too much information isn’t shared, or that it isn’t shared with the wrong person? In the Sharing Economy, the economic incentives against sharing between entities was too strong. The risks too great and the measures to mediate those risks too immature. Information remained siloed and restricted, leading to more waste, misallocation, and exploitation.

Collaborative Consumption, powered by blockchain technology, allows enterprises to share information and data selectively with parties who can all mutually benefit. The type of data shared is transparent and traceable, and the parties who access that information are known and recorded. Without the risks of sharing proprietary material with the wrong individuals, enterprises can share resources, knowledge, and services with one another to augment efficiency and profitability.

Collaborative Consumption demonstrates clearly to us that access to resources is arguably more important today than ownership of those resources. In an economy where enterprises siloe, hoard, and restrict access to those resources, both consumer and provider continue to operate in a scarcity mindset. In an economy where information is shared, we begin to reach a global mindset of abundance, where resources are more appropriately allocated and consumed. So is there a better way? Absolutely — we just need to keep building it.

Rana Basu, Ondiflo

To learn more visit our other articles in this series:

The History of Disruption in the Energy Industry
A Recent History of Innovation
The Past, Present, and Future of Sharing
Blockchain Technology and the Oil & Gas Industry
Blockchain Use Cases & Benefits for Upstream Oil & Gas
Blockchain Use Cases & Benefits for Downstream Oil & Gas
Blockchain Use Cases & Benefits for Midstream Oil & Gas
The Biggest Challenge to Enterprise Ethereum Isn’t Tech
Ondiflo: Blockchain for Oil and Gas
Ondiflo: A Roadmap for the Future

The Ondiflo Blockchain platform has processed over 10,144 water hauls as of the morning of July…

Ondiflo is a B2B blockchain-based ticketing solution for the oil and gas industry. The solution creates a verifiable and trusted trail of events and attestations for field services logistics, enabling agreement on facts between counterparties so vendors are paid soon after delivering products and services, leading to even more cost savings and benefits. The Ondiflo Consortium is a group of oil and gas companies to assist in the development of the Ondiflo platform as well as learn and strategize about the further implementation of blockchain technology into O&G. Key-players include Producers, Midstream Companies, Refiners, Distributors, Service Providers, Financial Institutions, and Electronic Data Exchange Providers. Learn more about the Consortium here and email here if you are interested in joining.

Resources:

“History of Sharing.” New Society: 1–20. https://newsociety.com/var/storage/blurbs/9780865717466_excerpt.pdf

Botsman, Rachel. What’s Mine is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption. New York : Harper Business, 2010.