Agreement Seeking: A consensus mechanism should bring about as much agreement from the group as possible. Collaborative: All the participants should aim to work together to achieve a result that puts the best interest of the group first. Cooperative: All the participants shouldn’t put their own interests first and work as a team more than individuals. Egalitarian: A group trying to achieve consensus should be as egalitarian as possible. What this basically means that each and every vote has equal weightage. One person’s vote can’t be more important than another’s. Inclusive: As many people as possible should be involved in the consensus process. It shouldn’t be like normal voting where people don’t really feel like voting because they believe that their vote won’t have any weightage in the long run. Participatory: The consensus mechanism should be such that everyone should actively participate in the the overall process.

“triple-entry bookkeeping”: one entry on the debit side, another for the credit, and a third into an immutable, undisputed, shared ledger.

Instead of all the economic value being captured by the shareholders of one or two large corporations that dominate the market, the economic value is distributed across a much wider group: the early developers of Transit, the app creators who make the protocol work in a consumer-friendly form, the early-adopter drivers and passengers, the first wave of speculators. Token economies introduce a strange new set of elements that do not fit the traditional models: instead of creating value by owning something, as in the shareholder equity model, people create value by improving the underlying protocol, either by helping to maintain the ledger (as in Bitcoin mining), or by writing apps atop it, or simply by using the service.

Precisely. There are also more technical criticisms to be made here, beyond the scope of what we can reasonably get into. Suffice it to say cryptocurrencies are normally implemented today through one of two kinds of lottery systems, called “proof of work” and “proof of stake,” which are a sort of necessary evil arising from how they secure their systems against attack. Neither is great. “Proof of work” rewards those who can afford the most infrastructure and consume the most energy, which is destructive and slants the game in favor of the rich. “Proof of stake” tries to cut out the environmental harm by just giving up and handing the rich the reward directly, and hoping their limitl

Finally, we distribute these freshly notarized records to mem-bers of the network, who verify them and update their independent copies of this new history. The purpose of this last step is basically to ensure no one person or small group can fudge the numbers, because too many people have copies of the origina