Is Steem a global common or a decentralised for-profit P2P?
P2P foundation and Michel Bauwens
Many of you might know the P2P Foundation and Michel Bauwens, founder of the P2P foundation.
I am a big fan of manyof his ideas and I really think he shows an interesting peak into the future, or at least into a possible future. Basically his work is about commons and how we can change our economic system by using peer to peer.
In short he believes that in the same way Wikipedia produces knowledge people will soon be able to produce most of the services and products that we have today. In this way a P2P society would really be an alternative to capitalism.
More information on the P2P Foundation can be found here:
http://p2pfoundation.net/
https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Main_Page
(picture wikimedia)
Bitcoin as P2P
In one of his video's you can find on Youtube titled 'Michel Bauwens: Four Scenarios for the Collaborative Economy' he explains the different ways P2P can be implemented. Very specifically he makes the distinction between centralised and decentralised, and for-profit and for-benefit P2P.
He gives bitcoin as an example of decentralised for-profit P2P. The decentralised nature of bitcoin is obvious but about the for-profit aspect Michel Bauwens argues that it's clear that the design of bitcoin aims at speculation and profit. He also refers to the similarities to gold.
STEEM and P2P?
Now my question is:
Can we put STEEM and STEEMIT in de same corner as Bitcoin? Is it a decentralised for-profit p2p, or what Bauwens calls distributed capitalism? This would mean that the main goal of STEEM is profit.
Or...
Is STEEM an example of a Global Common, in which the profit is used as means to create a post-capitalist P2P society? In this case the network and sharing of ideas/content is the main goal of STEEM. The value of STEEM and itss ability to create profit would only be a secondary goal.
The future of STEEM
My hope is that STEEM is, and will evolve more and more into a Global Common.
If you have some thoughts on this, please let me now!
PS: I hope the P2P Foundation will join the Steemit community soon. We need them!!
I have to disagree that p2p is an alternative to capitalism, which I define as market activity. There is a lot to say about this but the thing that should stand out was that 'capitalist' was originally an insult, the latin root 'capit' means to grasp. The french had a more friendly word 'entrepreneur', which means 'to grasp between'.
So I would say that in fact the p2p revolution is in fact a more perfect expression of capitalism than any before. Capitalists rely on information gathered from movements in the marketplace, and p2p systems allow this feed to be less filtered by big media players and their controllers who want to push an agenda that benefits them.
It is a common misconception that capital has anything to do with authority. In fact, this has to do with a mis-spelling, the word Capitoline was the name of the hill in Rome where the government was based. Over the years it has been muddled up and that is why people are confused about it. Capital means a stock of surplus resources that you have accumulated for future investment into some kind of enterprise. Yet they call it 'capital punishment' when they kill you for a crime. But one is the government and one is your own decision to not spend your resources in order to enable you to do something productive in the future.
P2P is indeed not an alternative to capitalism. It's more a new kind of capitalism in which knowledge is not owned by a company but is freely available. I guess you could say that it is an alternative to neo-liberal capitalism.
Thanks for your comment!
Capitalism is technically anathema to 'intellectual property' anyway. It cannot exist without a monopoly to enforce its overreach into the physical property of those whose property bears an imprint of this IP. It is however still fraud to copy someone else's work verbatim and claim it as your own, but that is easy to prove especially with computers and search engines, indeed we see here on Steem that anti-plagiarisation bots post when you copy too much of other people's original work from anywhere spidered by Google.
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