Alfred Taudes (Vienna University of Economics and Business) – Cryptoeconomics – The Basis for a Future Digital Economy?

Today´s most valuable corporations Google, Facebook or Amazon are Internet platforms. Their value is derived from the extraction of the network effects that arise in two-sided markets involving information goods with zero marginal cost, lock-in and machine learning. Initially consumers profited from the disruptive growth of these platforms via free services. However, with growing market power and lack of viable alternatives today these players provide monopoly rents to the investors who took the risk of financing the bootstrapping of the network while users and developers of complementary goods face increasing privacy and censorship risk, yielding reduced incentives for innovation. Building on the principles first applied in the Bitcoin network cryptoeconomic digital platforms fundamentally promise to change the rule of the game. They avoid the extraction of network effects through open source code, forking, distribution of data and transaction logic and provide incentives for participating in operating the network with a network specific cryptocurrency (token). On the other hand they provide financial incentives to early investors through the value appreciation of the token issued to bootstrap the network. Besides presenting these concepts we discuss a number of case studies, deal with obstacles to the adoption of cryptoeconomic platforms and present results of an exploratory study done together with the Students´ Chapter of the Research Institute for Cryptoeconomics of Vienna University of Economics and Business.

Termin
Freitag, 24. August 2018, 11.00 Uhr

Ort
Oesterreichische Nationalbank – Geldzentrum
Veranstaltungssaal O3085, 3. Stock
Garnisongasse 15
1090 Wien

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