the crowd can do a great deal to maintain quality standards, though there may be other trade-offs, like how easily or quickly participants can post new items, how quickly they are shared, who gets to see them, and, yes, how much profit can be earned from the content.

Incomplete contracting and residual rights of control will probably always necessitate the existence of companies.

things over and over. Governments have not yet shown much willingness to create digital dollars, euros, yen, renminbi, and so

But firms exist and endure because they work, and they work, in part, because they address the problem of incomplete contracts and residual rights of control that plague markets.

Instead of filing for patents, they uploaded the plans for Robohand’s parts to Thingiverse, a site where the crowd shares 3D printing files.

everyone’s preferences, and feed all this data into a “single mind”—a giant economic optimization algorithm that would run continuously to “work out the implications”? Because, Hayek explained, that algorithm would never get all the data it actually needed; it could never “secure the best use of resources known to any of the members of society, for

Nakamoto designed the system so that a new block would be created and Bitcoins awarded about every ten minutes. Nakamoto noted that “the steady addition of

Someone well versed in transaction cost economics and the realities of incomplete contracting might have predicted an outcome like this.

“Decentralize All the Things.” Why not take the philosophies, processes, and technologies