Decentralized Cryptoeconomies and the Critical Role of Knowledge Sharing Networks
We’re on the threshold of major change in the way money reaches people in today’s society, and everyone can see it happening, although few fully understand the more important question — why now?
Adam Smith was an 18th century philosopher who published two great works, The Theory of Moral Sentiments in 1759 which laid the foundation for classical economic theory, and The Wealth of Nations in 1776, the very same year America declared its independence from British rule. Thomas Jefferson called Smith’s work the best book on the economy yet in existence, and thus the commercialism model was born. Of course the centralists fought back, as they have since the beginning of trade. Since the founding of the United States, the money issuing authority has changed hands 8 times between centralized banks and the US Treasury which was meant to represent the interests of the people. They didn’t have blockchain and cryptocurrencies back most recently in 1913, so guess who won.
With cryptocurrencies, and the blockchain technology upon which they are built, the centralized control model of money has finally met its match. What people have been theorizing about since the days of Adam Smith is finally delivered in the single greatest economic disruptor technology the world has seen to date — blockchain and the cryptocurrency reward model.
And it took until now with good reason, as it requires a high level of technology, mathematical theory, and computer science to implement, all of which were previously unavailable to the people of the world until we reached today’s computational age.
As proven by the explosive adoption and growth rate, and the ever increasing market capitalization of what is globally recognized as the standard cryptocurrency — Bitcoin — free market decentralized currencies are coming into existence.
Bitcoin’s underlying blockchain and consensus mechanism is revolutionary, and when Ethereum came onto the scene, everything changed. With Ethereum, we’ve seen an explosion of new applications and technologies that are rebuilding the internet in a trustless, decentralized model.
We’ve seen many movements towards decentralization through the internet age. Work tasks and even complex production such as software development has been spread out across the globe, employees are often hired remotely not confined within walls, people and initiatives have been supported in mass by crowdfunders, and data moves at lightning speed from node to node. It was the perfect time for the currency model to follow suit.
Within our lives, we’ve seen the proliferation of data on orders of magnitude never before witnessed in human history. More data will be produced in 2017 than in the previous 5000 years of humanity.
Supergiants like Google and Facebook currently control the vast majority of this data, and they monetize it on the web primarily through advertising and ecommerce. It’s what keeps the internet free, but it comes with a cost — centralization once again.
Digital advertising is a $223.7 billion global market dominated by Google with expected ad revenues for 2017 of $73.8 billion, and ecommerce is a $2.29 trillion market dominated by the major advertiser brands.
According to the World Federation of Advertisers, over the next 10 years we could see the global cost of ad fraud rise to $50 billion. That’s one gigantic waste, but thanks to Satoshi Nakamoto and the blockchain technology pioneers of today, there is a solution — Knowledge.io
Knowledge is a collection of data points which when analyzed reveal a truth. Knowledge can take the form of Proof of Humanity or Identity Verification, Usage Data, and Accuracy Scoring to name just a few of these truths. Really, anything that can be proven correct or incorrect falls within the scope of Knowledge.
“Greater engagement and insight into the knowledge of your audience is at the core of all great communication and satisfaction measurement initiatives. We’re looking forward to helping advertisers, employers, academia and others to fulfill this vision,” said Marcia Hales, Chief Operations at Knowledge.io, producers of the Knowledge Score blockchain and KNW token reward, issued to people for sharing their knowledge about topics, all of which can be used to target advertising to a person with a particular score.
This is a new dimension in the marketing world, one which was only determined through probabilistic methods in the past, and not as effective as the deterministic method available by accessing our blockchain. Ad tech platforms currently target to users based on consumption of content and topics — meaning someone read an article about this topic or these topics — but these systems lack the ability to measure the amount of knowledge the person has about a topic.
By adding this new dimension, a cryptocurrency fits perfectly into an ecosystem where advertisers put Knowledge into the system to target messages to people, users earn rewards for sharing their knowledge within websites and apps they use, the publishers and platforms who create these apps receive their rewards for their user base and for uncovering Knowledge sharing opportunities to help improve the Knowledge Score for each user, and experts are rewarded for their overachievement.
Knowledge flows between the advertisers, publishers and platforms, and users within the ecosystem, continuously circulating and changing hands. Users who earn Knowledge buy products from the marketplace powered by advertisers who spent Knowledge to target them. Some even go on to become influencers who earn more tokens from advertisers as Knowledge Stars. As the amount of publishers, apps, and platform partners increases, the user base increases, more tokens are put into circulation, and the decentralized knowledge sharing network grows.
By scoring accuracy, Knowledge.io also disrupts the $200 billion recruiting market globally, as well as the $2 trillion higher education market. Imagine people could be recognized for their true value, for what they really know and understand. By proving knowledge expertise, potential employees can be identified more accurately, and messaging can happen more efficiently between the hiring entity and the potential employee.
“We’re looking forward to the future, when people are rewarded and celebrated for the knowledge they share within their community and with the rest of the world,” said Steven Englander, Chief Product of Knowledge.io. “It’s time to rightfully reward the people for their achievement.”
Knowledge in. Knowledge out. That’s Knowledge.io
Visit knowledge.io for more details, or join us in our Telegram chat.
Read the whitepaper.
