ABSTRACT
All the early attention about Bitcoin regarded its potential disruptive capability for the global monetary supply. Many thought Bitcoin would disintermediate banks and be one of the biggest technological innovations of this generation. Blockchain is just one form of distributed ledger system to emerge. Ether is another cryptocurrency technology that uses a form of distributed ledger technology (DLT) usually referred to as Ethereum. Distributed ledgers have the potential to transform or even disrupt most every industry, and even improve how democracies function. eBay may be one of the first early successes in the peer-to-peer economy. Founded in 1995 in Silicon Valley by Pierre Omidyar, eBay is a classical Silicon Valley success story. Open Bazaar was formed to compete with the eBay model by facilitating similar transactions among peers, but with no intermediary monetizing the transactions. Uber and Airbnb are the platform death-stars that draw the most attention and ire from certain stakeholders around the world.
