AN AUTOMATED, DECENTRALIZED WORLD
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One of the very exciting implications of decentralization is how it has the potential to take the sharing economy to stratospheric new heights. As we become less reliant on centralized entities, it opens up new possibilities for sharing and earning money.


You have the examples of Uber and Airbnb and how they are transforming cities. The basic premise is that you take the stuff you are not using (your time or your free apartment) and you let someone else share it in return for payment. Pure free trade, beautiful. Even a service like Uber hasn’t even reached it’s full potential. Since they have this network of drivers in cities around the world, they will be able to expand to things like food deliveries and express courier services for example.


There are many more areas in which our lives will be radically changed in the next decade or so and automated systems along with micropayments through technologies like Bitcoin are going to enable all of this.



ELECTRICITY


This is going to be one of the big ones over the next generation or so. As oil and gas reserves start to dwindle around the world, the use of alternatives should hopefully be in full swing. The cool thing here though is that depending on your setup, you might be able to earn money on your solar or wind investments for your property. Since Bitcoins can be subdivided to 8 decimal places, it’s possible to drip payments out to those who may want to use your spare power.


One example may be for electric cars in the future. Each house may have its own charging plug on the street facing edge of a property. You hook up a bitcoin wallet with a timer function and you pay for an hour or so of charge time. Everything is authenticated through the blockchain so when your hour is up the power is cut off.


This noding of electrical supply makes each community much tougher and resilient to outside influences and possible disruptions to everyday life.



INTERNET ACCESS


An ability to access the internet is something that most of us take for granted, but in much of the world, this is still very much a luxury. Something that could change this is an increased usage of mesh networks, with a pay as you go feature built in. This potentially means that anybody in the entire world could offer a percentage of their personal bandwidth up to those who want to use it in return for realtime income. Markets will automatically pop up in crowded cities to offer the best quality service for the lowest price.


This opens up the very cool possibility of being able to find near instant internet access anywhere.



FOOD


Recently a team of scientists in Tokyo made some breakthroughs in aquaponics, allowing them to grow gigantic amounts of lettuce in a very short amount of time. Their setup involved growing the food indoors in a mineral rich liquid, with special LED lights to speed up and regulate the growth cycles.


This kind of technology will hopefully come to the consumer space within a few years and that brings with it some curious implications. Potentially it could shift our perception on a lot of our food consumption. Imagine if every household had it’s own food cupboard or pantry where every week or so, a substantial part of your weekly nutritional needs would be grown using this type of automated system.


I can imagine each house down the street having vending machines where they put their excess food stuffs, where passers by could quickly pay using bitcoin. That would have knock on effects for not only farms and what we consider classic food production, but also local shops and supermarkets. Again this sort of decentralization also brings a robustness to communities and a self sustainability that is sorely lacking today.



PROCESSING POWER / COMPUTER STORAGE


Almost everything technological has a computer in it today, and with the internet of things future we’re starting to see, alot of them are also connected to the web. What you could do in this situation is automatically lease out a slice of processing power to the highest bidders when you’re not using the devices. The processing could be used for all sorts of applications, the first and most obvious people always talk about is scientific research, but it could apply to many many areas such as providing a decentralized swarm ‘server’ for various businesses, cryptocurrency cloud mining, cloud gaming and lots more.


Imagine earning money through our toasters, TV’s, fridges, charging phones, unattended computers and gaming consoles when they’re on standby.



TRAVEL / TRANSPORT


In the future it’s not totally out of the question to think of a world with a decentralized currency like bitcoin being accepted in most places. The impact and peace of mind by not having to convert money back and forth, often incurring exorbitant fees is going to be very cool. Add onto that the fact that border guards will no longer be able to confiscate your funds if you take the necessary security precautions. We will potentially be able to truly be citizens of the world.


We’ve already seen that services such as Airbnb and Uber are bringing some great changes in how we travel, but imagine if we had totally automated food and shelter. If you just need a place to rest your head at night, it would be cool to be able to rent out automated capsule hotel rooms using bitcoin or the like. It could be designed in a way to minimize the need for extras such as blankets and tvs and basically have a heated, secure pod that could be used for the night. Once the person leaves, again due to its design, it would automatically clean itself to a ridiculous standard.


With the advent of self driving vehicles, you could also allow travelers to hail your car for a quick automated trip to and from airports. You set how far away you want your car to travel, and once the fare has been paid, you can have the car either go on to other customers or return home to you. The car could automatically use the fare funds that it has received to pay for battery recharging, so that your car could potentially be making money for you around the clock, completely autonomously.


Even at the airport, it could be imagined that we will eventually have small family sized drones that would take care of personal air travel. Much like the cars, these automated drones could be used for courier services as well as just ferrying humans around.


Let’s not forget about virtual reality too. If it gets to such a level that we feel completely immersed in our surroundings, perhaps the prospect of traveling in meatspace may not seem as appealing. In these scenarios, you could envisage much more automation going on in the real world, perhaps with avatars/androids moving about doing our work for us.



PRODUCTION


Consumer 3D printing is not quite at commercial manufacturing levels yet, but it is only a matter of time until it catches up. We will literally be able to have a desktop factory that can make electronic hardware, plastic and metal objects or mill wood. When that time comes, you could provide local manufacturing services to your community through an online interface. Design something and want it built? Sign on to your neighbor Jim’s website and make it. Again, like the food vending machines, houses could potentially have automated windows or vending machines where the newly finished products wait and are released by specific payment relating to the bitcoin address which purchased it, proving you are the owner.


You could even combine that drone technology to automatically send the package a short distance.



CONCLUSION


As you can see, this type of decentralized sharing economy redefines what we consider in terms of owning and using products and services, as well as having deeper implications on what we consider our jobs, since we could potentially earn enough money from lots of small revenue streams from the items and services we are not currently using. The very act of owning something that could be useful to someone else is valuable in itself.


Aside from that it adds a stronger robustness to every day life, we’d be more self sufficient and less beholden to large centralized institutions for how we live. Inversely, a decentralized society would also bring about greater interpersonal connections since we would become nodes in a sharing network. You’d have your personal autonomy, but also the security of being able to utilize other nodes in the network if and when you might choose to. This is in contrast to relying on a central system to be functioning 100% of the time which we do today.



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BY CHRIS ROBINSON