We already have this, though: cooperative businesses. The most common being credit unions. Some grocery stores operate on this principle.

It's a good model and has been scaled up to large multinational corporation size in the Mondragon Corporation, but we don't need blockchain or cryptocurrency to do it.

I've been incredibly well-served by both credit unions and cooperative grocery stores.

Corporations exist to serve the interests of their shareholders. If you are a customer or employee of a corporation that you are not a shareholder of, then that corporation is not necessarily trying to do business in my interest but quite possibly could be operating at the expense of my interests in order to serve the interest of the shareholders. We hope that these interests are aligned, but often we see that they aren't. Cooperative businesses naturally align these interests by making the workers or consumers (or both) shareholders. And they remain voluntary.

It addresses many of the drawbacks of unionization, of traditional capitalist corporations, and socialism. It really should be copied more widely. Given my positive experiences with the cooperative business model, I would gladly seek out such businesses if they were more widely available.

“Why do we need Facebook? Friendster already did social networks. Why do we need google? Alta Vista already did search.”

Crypto allows you to tokenize assets on a much more efficient, streamlined approach than structuring an entire business model in a formal co-op. The two are similar only in vague terms.

That'd be missing much of the benefit, though. If you don't restructure the business as a co-op, then the consumer or worker is not likely to see the same benefits. The structure of the co-op gives its small-time shareholders a similar level of acknowledgement/voice that big-time shareholders would have in a conventional business (and similar to what a union does for workers, except without the large amount of friction and unnecessary antipathy between management and the workers). Simply tokenizing ownership would not have this benefit.

Well that would depend on the token and its implementation details wouldn't it. If you own x% of the pool you get a voice at the table with x being adjustable. Or alternatively all the small token holders can choose a rep or series of reps to vote on decisions on their behalf.

Agreed! But now you're talking about changing the structure of the business somewhat. That is no longer "mere" tokenization. Something along these lines could work.

SingularityNET.io uses this approach somewhat:

> "Democratic Governance. Although token holders will not have equity or voting rights in the Foundation itself, they will be allowed to vote on specific decisions affecting the Platform. The decisions subject to holder vote will be limited at first, but will eventually expand to a point where the token holders and the Foundation share nearly equal control of all aspects of the Platform’s functionality. Even in the Platform’s early stages, following the token sale, token holders will be able to rate the AI Services they use, affecting the success of those services and providing feedback that is necessary for the service to improve. This role further contributes to the continued improvement of the Platform and its offerings, without any involvement of the Foundation."

In a coop, the members have full voting rights in all aspects. This is the better model.

The blockchain is nothing more than an analogous open-sourcing of persistent and [usually] immutable data I/O, similar to how code is open-sourced today. The early naysayers of the free software movement may have said "But how will programmers get paid?"

Well, we have plenty of successful business models for open source software now. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_models_for_open-sourc....

I agree that at the current point in time, blockchain-based projects are experimental and risky. Even Steemit, known to be one of the more successful late-gen blockchain projects, is not without its critics to this day. But there will emerge successful business models just as with the free software movement.

What do you get from fractional ownership of an orange?