From Wired
Sooner or later, every finance craze turns into performance art. In the 1990s, David Bowie securitized himself, turning his songwriting catalog into bonds. In 2008, a young Portland tech-support worker named Mike Merrill sold shares in himself through a “personal IPO.” And today, Evan Prodromou is minting the hours of his life into a cryptocurrency called Evancoin.Read more: https://www.wired.com/story/this-techie-is-using-blockchain-to-monetize-his-time/Like many developers and entrepreneurs—Prodromou founded Wikitravel in 2003 and is now the cofounder of the Montreal-based AI startup fuzzy.ai—Prodromou has an inbox that brims with requests for his time: Can I pick your brain about this project? Will you have lunch with me to give me some advice about my startup? These commitments are hard to juggle, and it’s tough to balance them against the hours you put in at a day job and those you dedicate to family or private life.
Evancoin turns these interactions into transactions. Want to pick Prodromou’s brain? As of October 1, the date of Evancoin’s initial coin offering (ICO), you can ask him for some Evancoin. He’ll probably give you some. Then you can use these tokens by “paying” for his time with them.
But they’re a kind of money, so you can also bank them for the future. Evancoin could gain or lose value depending on how it’s traded—how much demand there is for Prodromou’s time and what the supply of the currency is at the moment. You could also just sell your Evancoins for cash: As of this writing, each Evancoin, representing an hour of Prodromou’s attention, is worth about $45. (That’s well below his usual consulting rate, but he’s pleased nonetheless—it’s early days for the currency, and the market is acknowledging the worth of his time, then discounting for the risk inherent in the scheme’s novelty.) What if you sell your Evancoins to someone who wants to trade them for Prodromou’s time rather than for dollars? He’s game—as long as you’re not planning to ask him to do something “illegal, humiliating, or abusive to others.”
Yes, it sounds a bit crazy. “People wanted to know whether it was just a stunt,” Prodromou says. “And I’m not above a stunt! But in this case I’m really serious about exploring how cryptocurrency is changing what we can do with money and how we think about it. Money is this sort of consensual hallucination, and I wanted to experiment around that.”
The seed for Evancoin was planted a few years ago, when Bitcoin first got popular. “My friend and colleague Kevin Fox, who designed the original Gmail interface at Google, said, ‘Everyone should have their own personal currency,’” Prodromou recalls. “Of course, I immediately went out and registered Evancoin.com.”
Would this be a possible use case scenario one could use the upcoming Steem powered SMTs for?
Leave your thoughts in the comments below.
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