**5. Machine economy**

The previous sections focused on explaining the results of proofs of concept and analysis of the applicability of blockchain in Industry 4.0, mainly in the improvement of processes and the creation of new products/services. In the current section, the focus will be to introduce a new economic paradigm that arises from the merger of industry, economy, and disruptive potential of blockchain, an area that precisely because it is still very experimental opens different lines of future research, the machine economy.

To understand the machine economy, we must first understand how we are facing a new paradigm of decentralization and disintermediation, which is already a small phenomenon in the world of currencies and will soon be a reality in many other areas. Entities such as eBay or Amazon already have to face the competition of OpenBazaar, an open-source blockchain software that offers near the same value as those companies. At the same time, the highly appreciated platform business models such as AirBNB or UBER are reflecting on what value to contribute beyond intermediation; otherwise they will be disintermediated by blockchain technology.

But the real potential of blockchain is not just to eliminate intermediaries; really these "cryptocurrencies" are digital tokens that represent a value [25]. Obviously the simplest application has been to create cryptocurrencies in which the blockchain issued those tokens instead of a central bank, but those tokens can represent whatever we want. Those tokens can represent the possession of a house or the identity of a person and all their history, but they can also represent the right to consume a service, to make decisions about the future of an organization, etc.

And this is where the real disruptive change begins; with the so-called crypto economy or token economy, an economy dominated by these tokens that is cryptographically protected by the blockchain will change the rules of the game and allow the total decentralization of the economy. In this new economy, the value will be tokenized, and these tokens will represent very different values as we commented.

This token economy is already emerging, it started with the cryptocurrencies, and we have also lived a new paradigm in the search for funding for business projects, in which under the name of initial coin offering (ICO) entrepreneurs with disruptive ideas find a new blue ocean of funding [26–28]. These entrepreneurs sell tokens that in many cases represent a service of that startup in the future, something similar to crowdfunding but totally globalized and without intermediaries who must manage those rights of future use of a platform. But these projects are going one step further than a simple decentralized crowdfunding; they are even devising new types of autonomous and decentralized organizations known as decentralized autonomous organizations (DAO) [29].

These organizations are created and financed by the community in order to offer an autonomous service thanks to blockchain. Imagine that we are tired of Google, Twitter or Facebook continues to earn money with our personal data, but we do not want to lose its functionality. Blockchain allows the community to finance and launch a new social media, or any other service, but without being managed by any for-profit entity, nor has a company registration number (CRN) in any country. It will be a virtual organization offering the service and relying on the community to perform those tasks that cannot perform by itself as investment decisions or strategy. So the community itself will run this virtual organization in a format similar to how a federation of worker cooperatives works.

This organization will be able to charge for its services and reinvest all the benefits in the development of improvements, new functionalities, etc. These organizations could also share part of those benefits with their promoters and community or

**95**

**6. Conclusions**

energy ecosystem.

sector.

*Blockchain: From Industry 4.0 to the Machine Economy DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.88694*

foster new micro-service ecosystems around it.

nance, decision-making, and profit-sharing.

on demand, the rubbish collection service, etc.

their own economy, the economy of machines.

uted machine governance model, between others.

of cars at their disposal.

these rules will have to be agreed by the community of users.

well as to pay for their recharges, tolls, cleaning, and maintenance.

simply offer these users free services. In this type of organizations, the "shareholder pact" has been programmed since its creation, "code is law." In fact, the change of

Machine economy is precisely to transfer this concept of DAO to the machines; we could be in front of a new evolution of the IoT. Let us imagine, for example, something we all know, a car. In a few years, it would not be difficult to imagine that there are a significant number of users who do not have a car and that there is a fleet

These cars could be sovereigns; they could have their own identity, history, and even their own "wallet" to store digital value (tokens) that they will use to manage and store the value they receive by offering their transport services to passengers, as

In this way, we turn this car into an economic agent itself, with its own economy, self-sufficient, and even with its own business model. What's more, this car would

Let us go a little deeper into tokenomics and the machine economy. These cars could be offered by a company, in a similar way to the traditional model. But thanks to blockchain, this could be financed as a kind of crowdfunding in which a DAO would be created with the initial investment, and gradually it would increase the fleet, grow geographically, and even replace old vehicles. The DAO would also be able to offer truly affordable costs to its customers and allow token owners gover-

In this way, transport could be outsourced to the machines; the same outsourcing exercise could be carried out to other machines—robots—for the washing of these cars, their maintenance, carried out by robots and even the printing of parts

The token economy aims to return the power to the citizenry, and thanks to being a fully digital economy, machines can be active agents of it, thus generating

However, nowadays the machine economy is mainly an experimental concept that requires solving different challenges. Some of these research challenges are (i) secure hardware-based digital identity, (ii) interoperability an data sovereignty, (iii) more scalable and computationally efficient DLT architectures, or (iv) distrib-

In this chapter we have analyzed the general applicability of blockchain technology to the new paradigm of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, and due to its particular peculiarities, we have made a brief analysis of the specific case of the energy

Based on our analysis and experimentation, we have selected three main lines of generic application for Industry 4.0: (i) traceability, (ii) interoperability and sovereignty of industrial data, and (iii) IIoT reliability. Moreover, in the case of energy, beyond exposing any particularity linked to IIoT or energy traceability, the analysis has focused on the prosumers and the value of their data in a new decentralized

As an outstanding contribution, the conclusions on the real value of blockchain in the industry should be pointed out, where abstracting from any specific scenario, the value of blockchain technology in this sector is analyzed in a universal way. The results are four main values of the technology, which in addition to being really the core of the analyzed cases could become applicable in other sectors. These

#### *Blockchain: From Industry 4.0 to the Machine Economy DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.88694*

*Computer Security Threats*

**5. Machine economy**

machine economy.

blockchain technology.

The previous sections focused on explaining the results of proofs of concept and analysis of the applicability of blockchain in Industry 4.0, mainly in the improvement of processes and the creation of new products/services. In the current section, the focus will be to introduce a new economic paradigm that arises from the merger of industry, economy, and disruptive potential of blockchain, an area that precisely because it is still very experimental opens different lines of future research, the

To understand the machine economy, we must first understand how we are facing a new paradigm of decentralization and disintermediation, which is already a small phenomenon in the world of currencies and will soon be a reality in many other areas. Entities such as eBay or Amazon already have to face the competition of OpenBazaar, an open-source blockchain software that offers near the same value as those companies. At the same time, the highly appreciated platform business models such as AirBNB or UBER are reflecting on what value to contribute beyond intermediation; otherwise they will be disintermediated by

But the real potential of blockchain is not just to eliminate intermediaries; really these "cryptocurrencies" are digital tokens that represent a value [25]. Obviously the simplest application has been to create cryptocurrencies in which the blockchain issued those tokens instead of a central bank, but those tokens can represent whatever we want. Those tokens can represent the possession of a house or the identity of a person and all their history, but they can also represent the right to consume a

And this is where the real disruptive change begins; with the so-called crypto economy or token economy, an economy dominated by these tokens that is cryptographically protected by the blockchain will change the rules of the game and allow the total decentralization of the economy. In this new economy, the value will be tokenized, and these tokens will represent very different values as we commented. This token economy is already emerging, it started with the cryptocurrencies, and we have also lived a new paradigm in the search for funding for business projects, in which under the name of initial coin offering (ICO) entrepreneurs with disruptive ideas find a new blue ocean of funding [26–28]. These entrepreneurs sell tokens that in many cases represent a service of that startup in the future, something similar to crowdfunding but totally globalized and without intermediaries who must manage those rights of future use of a platform. But these projects are going one step further than a simple decentralized crowdfunding; they are even devising new types of autonomous and decentralized organizations known as

These organizations are created and financed by the community in order to offer an autonomous service thanks to blockchain. Imagine that we are tired of Google, Twitter or Facebook continues to earn money with our personal data, but we do not want to lose its functionality. Blockchain allows the community to finance and launch a new social media, or any other service, but without being managed by any for-profit entity, nor has a company registration number (CRN) in any country. It will be a virtual organization offering the service and relying on the community to perform those tasks that cannot perform by itself as investment decisions or strategy. So the community itself will run this virtual organization in a format similar to

This organization will be able to charge for its services and reinvest all the benefits in the development of improvements, new functionalities, etc. These organizations could also share part of those benefits with their promoters and community or

service, to make decisions about the future of an organization, etc.

decentralized autonomous organizations (DAO) [29].

how a federation of worker cooperatives works.

**94**

simply offer these users free services. In this type of organizations, the "shareholder pact" has been programmed since its creation, "code is law." In fact, the change of these rules will have to be agreed by the community of users.

Machine economy is precisely to transfer this concept of DAO to the machines; we could be in front of a new evolution of the IoT. Let us imagine, for example, something we all know, a car. In a few years, it would not be difficult to imagine that there are a significant number of users who do not have a car and that there is a fleet of cars at their disposal.

These cars could be sovereigns; they could have their own identity, history, and even their own "wallet" to store digital value (tokens) that they will use to manage and store the value they receive by offering their transport services to passengers, as well as to pay for their recharges, tolls, cleaning, and maintenance.

In this way, we turn this car into an economic agent itself, with its own economy, self-sufficient, and even with its own business model. What's more, this car would foster new micro-service ecosystems around it.

Let us go a little deeper into tokenomics and the machine economy. These cars could be offered by a company, in a similar way to the traditional model. But thanks to blockchain, this could be financed as a kind of crowdfunding in which a DAO would be created with the initial investment, and gradually it would increase the fleet, grow geographically, and even replace old vehicles. The DAO would also be able to offer truly affordable costs to its customers and allow token owners governance, decision-making, and profit-sharing.

In this way, transport could be outsourced to the machines; the same outsourcing exercise could be carried out to other machines—robots—for the washing of these cars, their maintenance, carried out by robots and even the printing of parts on demand, the rubbish collection service, etc.

The token economy aims to return the power to the citizenry, and thanks to being a fully digital economy, machines can be active agents of it, thus generating their own economy, the economy of machines.

However, nowadays the machine economy is mainly an experimental concept that requires solving different challenges. Some of these research challenges are (i) secure hardware-based digital identity, (ii) interoperability an data sovereignty, (iii) more scalable and computationally efficient DLT architectures, or (iv) distributed machine governance model, between others.
