Own the Means of Production

The next Facebook, Airbnb, or Uber won’t be funded by a bank loan, a VC, or angel investors. Innovation of the future has found a more direct method for realizing it’s ambition, the ICO.
An Initial Coin Offering is how new blockchain projects seek funding in order to build out a digital infrastructure. A team issues a whitepaper that explains the technical blueprint, along with prototype MVPs to visualize their roadmap. Then, anyone in the world who believes in their vision and wishes to participate can purchase tokens during an ICO. These token purchases are incredibly liquid, as tokens are often immediately tradable on open markets (also making them inherently speculative).
At first glance, an Initial Coin Offering (abbrev. “ICO”) might be confused with the familiar term “IPO” or Initial Public Offering, in which a company lets the public buy and trade their shares on the stock market. While both grant a form of ownership, purchasing tokens are often used for a different purpose. Unlike a company’s stock, which is purely bought for speculative/investing purposes, purchasing ICO tokens is akin to buying fuel early to use on a specific platform when it launches.
This is the fuel for building out blockchain infrastructure. And in blockchain, you only need to solve a problem once, and it is available worldwide.
The beauty behind ICOs is its decentralization of a process previously not accessible for large swaths of the world. It creates an alternative for fundraising innovation that opens the doors to new participants. It also introduces new dynamics of community ownership. Governance is decentralized and community oriented, incentivizing all token holders to work towards the success of their decentralized platform (which is owned by no one).
“Governance is decentralized and largely community oriented, incentivizing all token holders to work towards the success of their decentralized platform (which is owned by no one).”

As a society, we form governments and institute collective taxation to create the standard of living that we enjoy today. By combining our funds and distributing it through a government, we have the economy of scale needed to physically build and manage the shared public infrastructure that provides the backbone of our economy: energy grids, roads, transportation networks, sewage systems, etc.
Currently this process is very top-down: governments tax the public, select improvements needed for society, selects the contractor to build the project, and sets up a department to maintain it.
Up until now, this is how we build societies and shared responsibility for “the commons”. Yet there’s a shifting wind. Recent trends within the blockchain industry offer an innovative alternative to this rigid top-down approach. Individuals now have the tools to organize building public infrastructure with their neighbors, in order to craft a future they believe in.
ICO’ing the real world
ICOs enable the same sort of decentralized fundraising as a Kickstarter, yet with the incentive of participation that an IPO offers (actual partial ownership of the company/platform). Thus, what if we applied this accessible fundraising method and apply it to infrastructure that we can use everyday in our communities?
Normally fundraising and governance of public infrastructure is built top-down, yet this crowdfunding approach is bottom-up, allowing for many smaller participants to form together and create a vision they all believe in. By funding this vision together, enthusiasts and infrastructure developers can build the infrastructure of a society they want to live in.
For example: an individual who wishes to live in a green future invests in a windmill to power their home with green kWh. If an individual wishes to revolutionize transportation, they can invest in fleets of self-driving cars and have free trips wherever they travel. If someone wishes to live in an “access economy”, they can invest in drones that deliver their mail for free. Whenever you aren’t using the utility of your windmill/car/drone, it’ll sell it to someone else and purchase more tokens that deliver even more services.
We own the Commons
When ownership of public infrastructure belongs directly to the communities it serves, its priorities are different than that of a company. Goals like sustainability, green, and accessibility are long-term values that are better enacted by a community, than shareholders demanding positive quarterly reports.
Services are delivered at near zero-marginal cost, since funding was upfront instead of taking a loan. The maintainer of the infrastructure is like everyone else in the collective ownership agreement, and they also receive a portion of productive capacity (incentivizing them to keep it running).
In addition, by creating an accessible fundraising platform for innovative public infrastructure, we lower the barrier to entry and open the doors of innovation to entrepreneurs who wish to create services for their communities. Innovators can present infrastructure blueprints directly to the communities they wish to launch in and the community would vote by funding the project or not. New ideas can spread through grassroots initiatives and successful projects will be copied in cities across the world.
Conclusion
Uber aims to become the global transport utility. They wish to control fleets of autonomous cars in every city across the world. While profitable for Uber, this innovation in transport should serve the communities they exist in, not the pockets of a few shareholders in San Francisco.
Together we can own the infrastructure which provides the backbone of our communities. Let’s start a bottom-up revolution in which communities are shareholders of the infrastructure that fuels the future they believe in. For this future isn’t just for ourselves, but for generations to come.
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