Students are the next generation of media professionals. During eDay Next Gen, I had the pleasure to educate hundreds of students on the power and opportunities of open-source, and that working open-source can be big business, too.
34% of all the websites on the web are empowered by the free software WordPress. It’s a textbook example of how a community plus open source software became a market leader.
What if businesses, planet earth, and the galaxy could be operated as open-source communities? In this 30-minute talk, Sebastiaan will take you on a journey to a 100% open-source world!
And: don’t worry, there’s big business in open source!
Did you miss the presentation? No worries, I recently did a keynote, covering a big chunk of the insights I shared at Emerce eDay.
If you want to learn more about how how to work more open-source, and how open-source if big business too, this video is for you!
Are you a WordPress user? Try WordProof today!
Questions and Answers
The day after the talk, I received an email from Laura Schmitz, one of the students in the audience. Among kind words the presentation, she attached some questions which I will answer below 🤓.
I was wondering because you said that intermediaries would not be necessary anymore (e.g. your Uber example) because all important information can be saved on the blockchain – but what is happening with them? Do we accept that a lot of people will lose their job because of this or what could they do in order to use the blockchain in their favor?
Companies like Uber and AirBnB are often given as examples for a sharing economy. In the coming years, blockchain alternatives will arise, which will have way less operational costs (most processes will be automated via smart contracts).
In the case of Uber, around 25% goes to them for facilitating the ride. Imagine an open-source community running a competitive platform, for just a 1% fee. In that case, a rider can pay 12% less, while the driver earns 12% more. With blockchain, the sharing economy can finally unfold in an open and transparent way, without ‘rent-takers’ who are continuously increasing their fees.
What might happen is that way more platforms for peer-to-peer solutions will arise.
Ultimately, I hope that we will move to a form of Universal Basic Income, where everybody receives enough funds to survive, and additional income can be generated via entrepreneurship or working on transparently operating sharing economy platforms being runned by communities.
And innovation will and shall always shift the places where we need labor; old jobs will disappear, new work opportunities will arise. It happened all the time in history. For example: before having a fridge was mainstream, it was a common job to carry ice from place A to place B 😅.
Then I was wondering, what is, in general, the potential of blockchain? Because it goes much further than just timestamping data?
Absolutely, once that value is programmable (that’s what blockchains do), the sky is the limit.
Here’s a broader introduction into blockchain.
By the way, are there any downsides to using blockchain?
Of course, as a fully transparent world has downsides, too.
And what I see as a downside for Bitcoin and Ethereum (those are the two biggest blockchains at the moment of writing) is that they’re using a large and ever-increasing amount of energy.
At WordProof, we use another blockchain, which uses 55.000 times less power than the Bitcoin network.
My last question would be, how do consumers recognize timestamped documents?
In the case of WordProof, publishers can choose to show a link on the bottom of every post. That’s for example what Persgroep title ‘indebuurt.nl’ does. And you’ll find it at the bottom of this post.
How long do you think it takes, that people are picking up the blockchain and timestamping-trend?
In a few years, it expect timestamping content to be a best-practice. Especially when search engines consider a blockchain timestamp as a ranking factor for SEO, adoption will sky-rocket.
Thank you, Laura, for asking those questions!
Great article. Once more, thank you very much for your time answering my questions! I appreciate it!