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by jbrukh 3700 days ago
Sorry, my fault for not being clear. I didn't mean that digital equity would empower employees to circumvent company policies.

Rather digital equity and governance systems [1] that are currently being built around blockchain and decentralized projects simply take a much more egalitarian and healthy approach to distributing ownership in the first place. And, hey, if you want to use equity as an incentive for retaining employees, you still can do that using (for instance) a smart contract in a way that is fair and not concentrated as a power in the signature of a single person.

At the end of the day, traditional private equity whether it is an investment or as compensation has a lot of problems, as I'm sure HN readers on here know very well.

[1] Most forward-thinking real world example: http://daohub.org
2 comments
argonaut 3700 days ago
The existence of a distributed ownership mechanism isn't going to convince companies to use that mechanism.

Honestly, the best way to decentralize ownership is to lead by example and start a hundred-billion dollar company that distributes ownership. If the next Google has decentralized ownership, that would be a model for other companies to follow. Right now, there is no incentive for any company to do anything nontraditional here.

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jbrukh 3700 days ago
That's what I'm saying. The next generation of companies will have all of the tools and technologies to enable that distributed ownership. It's early days, but "decentralized Uber" Arcade City is doing precisely that.
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neilk 3700 days ago
Okay, let's assume that a smart contract with a particular blockchain is going to remain viable and secure for an entire decade.

The issue here is taxation before gains are realized. Are you assuming the government isn't going to tax you, just because it's a smart contract?

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jbrukh 3700 days ago
(1) Okay, let's assume that. It's not exactly an outrageous assumption -- Bitcoin has been operating for 7 years. Ethereum has been around for 1 year, but even if it fails, there will be other smart contract platforms perhaps even on the Bitcoin chain (i.e. Rootstock).

(2) Sorry, not following you. I never said or implied anything of the sort. I don't see how that's a central issue to our discussion, but perhaps you can educate me.

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