How to Understand the Blockchain Economy by Jason Potts and Chris Berg from RMIT
Channel: Agoric
Date: 29/06/2019

The RMIT Blockchain Innovation Hub has developed a unique set of models and analytic frameworks to make rigorous and well-founded predictions about how blockchains will disrupt the economy, as well as draw insights about how to govern decentralised networks.

We apply the new institutional economic analysis of Nobel prize winners Oliver Williamson, Friedrich Hayek, Elinor Ostrom, Ronald Coase, Oliver Hart, Jean Tirole, and James Buchanan to understand the business opportunities and challenges of this economic revolution.

We start from the insight that blockchain technology is an institutional technology — an economic institution that mitigates the economic problems of bounded rationality, opportunism, asset specificity by industrialising trust.

Blockchains offer a way to govern economic activity that competes with firms, markets, governments, clubs, and the commons.

We call this field institutional cryptoeconomics, and it allows us to model the future of:

• Business strategy and management
• Investments in blockchain applications
• Investments in the traditional economy
• Consensus mechanism design
• Financial market dynamics
• National and regional global competitiveness
• Public policy (regulation, fiscal policy, taxation)

The RMIT Blockchain Innovation Hub is the world’s first social science research centre dedicated to the study of blockchain technology. Based in Melbourne, Australia, the RMIT BIH is a group of distinguished economists, political scientists and lawyers studying the disruptive economic impact of blockchains and other distributed ledgers.
https://sites.rmit.edu.au/blockchain-innovation-hub/