I run a company with 20 remote team members. There's a weird perverse incentive to "show face" and be available when working remotely vs. making yourself unreachable so you can focus on things that matter.
We joined the Holopod beta to see if we could reduce the anxiety people had of being "away" without it being correlated with not working.
So far we like it. It helps people feel more comfortable being unreachable for a period of focused work. As a founder, I get a sense that it can help make people do the stuff that matters, vs. wasting time chatting on Slack.
We'd still like to see more features around supporting different time zones (we're spread across 9 time zones, so it can be easy for people further east to just keep working when getting pinged by people further west).
We have a beta user who ran into this problem. He posted tasks, no one took them. He upped the price by 2x, and one task was taken. He upped the price again to 3x, and all tasks were taken.
We run something called a "collaboration network" that is using our early beta product. The product isn't feature complete yet, just task management with a token incentive model. So we're doing early experiments but can't quite pull of more complex ones—yet.
I think the token allows for more market-based economies. Maybe that's a market economy within a firm, or a market economy within a coworking space amongst members, or in open source projects.
Sure, you could use fiat or a non-blockchain "token", but I believe this open market, with price discovery, adds more value then it detracts.
Great question. This is the biggest opportunity for software, in my opinion. The boundaries between the firm and the market are, in part, governed by transaction costs. (There are more reasons. You mentioned you're interested in reading more, so I'd recommend this: https://www.amazon.com/Economic-Nature-Firm-Reader/dp/052114...)
Technology has the opportunity to decrease transaction costs amongst a group of participants. Consequently, this could then lead to lower trust amongst participants—one of blockchain's leading selling points.
It's all theory, so we'll see how this plays out, but it's the one thing I think is most exciting: can technology lower transaction costs and thus blur the lines between firm and market.
It's a good question. From what I've read, they act like securities leading up to the event, but only for a one off event. Afterwards the instrument (ticket) has no value. That makes it unlike a security.
> I do not agree that pre-selling a purely functional token is necessarily an offering of securities under Howey or otherwise
Are you a lawyer? Because it wasn't the opinion of the author; it was the opinion of their lawyers.
> offering it to the public is not "securities fraud" in and of itself.
Right. In the US, you can abide by the new-ish JOBS act for crowdfunding from non-accredited investors. You'd be selling a security. The problem with token sales is that they are trying _not_ to be securities. This may not be "fraud", but it is likely in violation of securities laws.
> this article is not useful to anyone else trying to make a similar decision.
The takeaway is that no project going forward should do a pre-functional token sale.
We joined the Holopod beta to see if we could reduce the anxiety people had of being "away" without it being correlated with not working.
So far we like it. It helps people feel more comfortable being unreachable for a period of focused work. As a founder, I get a sense that it can help make people do the stuff that matters, vs. wasting time chatting on Slack.
We'd still like to see more features around supporting different time zones (we're spread across 9 time zones, so it can be easy for people further east to just keep working when getting pinged by people further west).