Brown Bag Seminar: "Blockchain and its economic implications"

This presentation will provide a framework for understanding the economic implications of blockchain: a novel technology that allows a network of computer to transmit, store, verify, manipulate data. I will mostly discuss how blockchain-based projects are financed. Unlike traditional open source projects, developers of blockchain-based projects can reap large financial rewards thanks to a modern form of seignorage, but it is still unclear to what extent this mechanism is effective at generating incentives to innovate. I will also discuss how data can now be stored, maintained, manipulated, trusted outside traditional organizations, effectively allowing to unbundle data from the provision of services requiring these data.