This post is about understanding the negative response to NFTs and cryptocurrency which has become apparent in the last few years. I think that understanding the objections of the crypto critics and how these are likely to mature alongside the technology is the best way to get a sense of what widespread adoption of crypto might look like in the future, and speculate about who the beneficiaries of such a trend might be.
It has been just over one year since I released version 0.8 of Peer Production on the Crypto Commons (PPCC), so this change log for the upgrade from version 0.8 to 1.0 is doubling as a recap of 2020.
If you haven’t read PPCC most of the material here is integrated within it somewhere, along with a general introduction to open source, peer production, and common pool resources - and an exploration of how these concepts feature in decentralized cryptocurrency ecosystems.
This post is about why I wrote “Peer Production on the Crypto Commons”, a free book type resource (website, ebook, pdf).
The short answer is that I am inspired by the people who see some broken aspect of their society and set about to fix it or build an alternative. I am not optimistic about the direction in which the dominant global institutions are steering our society. I am optimistic about what we can do to re-engineer things if we continue to better leverage the benefits of the digital commons and the freedom to communicate and distribute information securely at low cost.