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How should a free society protect privacy? Dramatic changes in national security law and surveillance, as well as technological changes from social media to smart cities mean that our ideas about privacy and its protection are being challenged like never before. In this interdisciplinary book, Chris Berg explores what classical liberal approaches to privacy can bring to current debates about surveillance, encryption and new financial technologies. Ultimately, he argues that the principles of classical liberalism – the rule of law, individual rights, property and entrepreneurial evolution – can help extend as well as critique contemporary philosophical theories of privacy.
Blockchains are the distributed ledger technology that powers Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. But blockchains can be used for more than the transfer of tokens – they are a significant new economic infrastructure. This book offers the first scholarly analysis of the economic nature of blockchains and the shape of the blockchain economy. By applying the institutional economics of Ronald Coase and Oliver Williamson, this book shows how blockchains are poised to reshape the nature of firms, governments, markets, and civil society.
A cryptodemocracy is cryptographically-secured collective choice infrastructure on which individuals coordinate their voting property rights. Drawing on economic and political theory, a cryptodemocracy is a more fluid and emergent form of collective choice. This book examines these theoretical characteristics before exploring specific applications of a cryptodemocracy in labor bargaining and corporate governance. The analysis of the characteristics of a more emergent and contractual democratic process has implications for a wide range of collective choice.
When Entrepreneurs Meet: The Collective Governance of New Ideas challenges our understanding of how entrepreneurs crystallize opportunities surrounding new technologies. While innovation is the fundamental driver of growth and prosperity, how the earliest stages of entrepreneurship are governed remains elusive. This book creates a new, institutional approach to understanding entrepreneurship before emphasizing how entrepreneurs create governance structures to coordinate new knowledge resources.Rather than the conventional view that entrepreneurship happens inside firms, this unique transaction-cost economics analysis of entrepreneurship suggests it might begin earlier in hybrid, polycentric self-governance structures, including the innovation commons. Allen explores and analyses various examples of these structures, including hackerspaces and the institutions coalescing around the development of the blockchain economy, along with the dynamics of how those institutions might collapse into firms. This new understanding of the entrepreneurial governance problem is also connected to contemporary questions about the purpose, scope, and application of innovation policy.
This timely book is an innovative look at how blockchain technology will transform the structure of social and economic life. The security of blockchain supports the provision and maintenance of reliable databases and the creation of rule-based governance protocols. Leading contributors expertly review the impact of blockchain on existing structures of law, monetary systems, supply chains and business organizations.
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Volume compiles studies of the production and reproduction of market-supporting social infrastructures through the prism of knowledge commons.