How innovative teams are organized in the digital age, speculating on the future development and governance model of Bitcoin

Chapter 0 Introduction

Bitcoin is not a company. Many people outside the industry cannot imagine this situation. Most of them think it is impossible. There must be someone responsible for this thing.

Does a product have to be completed by a company or a government agency? The answer is obviously not. The book "Innovators: How a Group of Technology Fanatics and Genius Programmers Subvert the World" reveals that in today's digital age, there are three ways to organize innovation teams.

Chapter 1 Government-led Innovation

The government is responsible for forming a team to coordinate projects to complete certain innovations, which is what we are most familiar with. For example, the Chinese government wants to build the most annoying national firewall.

The government controls a large amount of social resources and wealth, which enables the government to organize teams to complete some innovative projects that have no short-term or even long-term benefits. This innovative organization method was the most important method in the early development of computers and the Internet. The earliest computer "ENIAC" and the predecessor of the Internet "ARPANET" were both coordinated by the US government.

Generally speaking, the government will complete the innovation they want by organizing state-owned companies, funding academic institutions, and outsourcing to private enterprises. Government officials certainly cannot do specific things, but they will be responsible for supervising projects, allocating funds, coordinating resources, and so on.

Although government-led innovation has been widely criticized for wasting resources, being inefficient, etc., most of the innovation teams in universities are funded by the government, so government-led innovation is the most important organizational form of scientific and technological innovation.

Chapter 2 Innovation in Team Building in Private Enterprises

In order to compete for market profits, companies tend to create better products, which will prompt companies to organize teams to innovate. In modern society, the scale of enterprises is getting bigger and bigger. A large number of giants not only continue to improve existing products, but also develop new products to guide social consumption.

Nowadays, the world's giant companies will set up their own research centers, which are the institutions that pursue innovation most besides universities. Because they are committed to profit, innovation organized by private enterprises often has a more obvious impact on society. In the digital age, a large number of great innovative products are innovated by private enterprises, such as Intel's CPU, Microsoft's operating system, and Apple's mobile phone. These are the innovations that have the greatest impact on our lives.

Because innovations in private enterprises often directly affect people's lives, this type of innovation attracts the most attention and is widely reported by the news media.

Innovations by private enterprises are often accompanied by a large number of patents and regulations to build technical and policy barriers in order to obtain high returns.

Chapter 3 Volunteer Project

There is another type of innovation whose source is very strange. It relies on volunteers who share ideas and make contributions without asking for anything in return. Most of this group relies on the Internet to complete communication and collaboration to jointly contribute to innovation. They do things purely based on personal interests and passions. Most of them have no monetary incentives. Many people may only gain fame and satisfaction, but this is enough to motivate them to contribute.

Because of the development of the Internet, the scale and influence of this kind of innovation has become very large. Some of the most far-reaching innovations in the digital age are completed by volunteers. A large number of open source projects on the Internet belong to this category. The most famous and successful ones are Linux, Wikipedia, Firefox, etc. These are all free open source software. You can find most of the open source projects on the website github.com. You will find out why there are so many people in the world who write code for the public without asking for any reward.

The contributors to these projects are extremely admirable. The products they create are no less influential than those created by private companies, but they share them with everyone without asking for a penny.

Bitcoin is an innovation made possible by the contributions of volunteers.

Chapter 4 Three innovative organizational approaches will have synergies and conflicts

There are often conflicts in values ​​between the three types of innovation organizations, especially in terms of their views on patents. Private enterprises and volunteers have completely opposite views on patents. The most typical example is the war between piracy and genuine products. Many volunteers who crack the copyright restrictions of commercial software feel that they are righteous. Even if they have to face legal sanctions, they will crack other people's software for free. Government-organized innovation organizations have a love-hate relationship with patents, because in addition to commercial profits, there is another important way to reward scientists in this world, that is, reputation. Especially the Nobel Prize and many other awards, many of which are opposed to business. If your innovation is used to apply for patents to make money, then you will not get the award.

But these three methods are more of a synergy. In the software industry, open source systems and private enterprise proprietary software complement each other. Private enterprises will look for talent in open source project teams, and open source projects will also receive sponsorship from many commercial organizations. The code of open source projects will be used by private enterprises, and for open source projects to have an impact in society, they often need to be used, packaged, and improved by private enterprises. The most successful case is Linux, which is an open source project team of unprecedented scale. With the packaging and improvement of a large number of commercial companies, Linux has been able to compete with Microsoft's Windows operating system, and its influence is even not inferior to that of Windows.

The three parties can play a greater role if they work together in innovative organizational ways. The government can take on greater responsibilities and risks, private enterprises will have greater efficiency and influence, and volunteers can get more wonderful ideas and fill in gaps.

The Internet was secretly developed by the US military, commercial organizations provided a large amount of hardware to form the Internet, and then volunteers filled a large amount of content to build the World Wide Web. The Internet we use now also continues to work together with these three innovative organizations.

Chapter 5 The development of Bitcoin has gradually moved from a volunteer project to collaborative innovation

Two years ago, Bitcoin was a purely volunteer-run open source project. There was no government agency or commercial organization responsible for the entire Bitcoin system, and the code was all written by a group of geeks who did not take a penny, or relied solely on donations from others.

But in the past two years, more and more commercial organizations have participated in the development of Bitcoin protocol. Bitcoin developer Gavin is employed by MIT, a government agency; Jeff is also an important Bitcoin developer and now has his own company; Blockstream has hired the main developer of Bitcoin core dev; there are also a large number of Bitcoin code contributors distributed all over the world, some are technical personnel of a certain company, and there are also a large number of pure volunteers; in recent months, Bitcoin Unlimited dev has also received a donation of 500,000 US dollars and plans to develop into a non-profit organization. All these phenomena point to the fact that the development of Bitcoin has been a collaborative innovation of three innovative organizational methods.

The development of the Bitcoin protocol is now more about showing success to the outside world through the image of volunteers, but loose volunteers need commercial organizations to supplement their organizational and synergistic forces. Bitcoin is related to the financial industry, which is a major matter in any country, and the government has to be drawn in.

There is another reason that will lead to further collaborative innovation in Bitcoin development, that is, the current Bitcoin development governance model has excellent individuals unwilling to collaborate. Especially with the development of Bitcoin expansion, we can see that many talented developers are unwilling to listen to user suggestions. There was even a "Hong Kong Consensus" signed by miners and developers in Hong Kong, which was a mutual constraint between the two parties, but in the end, the developers destroyed the consensus. This governance model will eventually be replaced by a model that is more willing to collaborate. We are all social animals with independent consciousness. We prefer to have some kind of choice and communication and collaboration model together, otherwise we would rather be scattered.

Chapter 6 Conclusion

The development of Bitcoin was started and developed by a group of selfless geek volunteers, but it has already shown the shadow of mutual influence and collaborative innovation among volunteers, enterprises and governments. It is believed that in the near future these three innovative organizational methods will together develop Bitcoin into an innovation as famous as the Internet, just like the development and governance model path from ARPANET to the Internet and then to the World Wide Web.