This is not so crazy. The more I look, the more I find activists, lawyers, investors and entrepreneurs around the world who are exploring options along these lines, often while seeking to address some of the deep problems of internet culture. Community ownership could be a way of rooting out the abuses that we often see with the billion-dollar... See more

It's remarkable that arguably the two most successful online multiplayer creations of the last twenty years relied on unpaid workers. Both Wikipedia and Bitcoin have scaled to absurd sizes on volunteers' backs, inspired to work without tangible reward. Many successful open source software projects have done the same.

A number of monetisation models for open-source work have been put forward in the last decade, but none of them has been able to scale and solve the problem in a fundamental way. The reason being, open-source work is a microeconomic singularity — a paradox in capitalism that can’t be corrected with donations, cryptocurrencies, or freemium models.... See more

Intrinsic and extrinsic motivators both exist and need to be carefully balanced. There is a long tradition of open-source development, and adding financial rewards can derail a project. (See: there is yet to be a successful "token-powered Wikipedia")

What happens if there was a system in place for the community of supporters to own a piece of the project's success and reward the most valuable members as well?