If there is one event that clearly demarcates the shift from the Dark Ages to the Age of Enlightenment, it is the adoption of the heliocentric model of the cosmos. But while the actual Dark Ages are over, we still very much live in the Economic Dark Ages. Can the advent of blockchain technology be the “Galileo moment” that finally leads us to the dawn of a new economic age of mass prosperity?

The adoption of the heliocentric model was not merely an advancement in astronomy; it was a fundamental shift in how people understood the world they lived in. In the 1,400 years prior to that shift, the dominant view was that of the Ptolemaic model, a theory that attempted to reconcile the geocentric view of the world with the observation of planets appearing to move in retrograde.

This geocentric model contributed to the belief that the laws that govern the heavens were fundamentally different from the laws that govern life on Earth. The shift to a heliocentric model, therefore, helped us realize that the universe is governed by one set of laws. This realization paved the way for Newtonian physics, the Scientific Revolution, and ultimately, modernity.

Today, economists have their own “geocentric” myth, but this time, it’s not about the universe revolving around the Earth; it’s about all economic activity revolving around scarcity. That’s because the consensus among economists today is that unless something is scarce, it has no exchange value in the market and, therefore, no economic value. And yet, it’s clear that vast swaths of human activity are valuable, despite not having exchange value in the market.

What makes modern economics so medieval in nature, then, is its inability to unify all of human activity under one coherent theory. Much like the geocentric model before it, the implication in modern economics is that there are two realms of existence: the economic realm, governed by the laws of supply and demand, and the non-economic realm, governed by social or cultural consensus.

Without a unified economic theory, we are forever forced to choose between doing what is profitable in the market and what is valuable to society. And while there is some overlap between these, too often, they come into conflict. With the rise of exponential technology, this conflict grows into full-blown crises—from the crisis of trust in media and institutions, social polarization, climate crisis, automation, and AGI, among others.

Pursuing a coherent economic theory to unify all human activity (as well as resource allocation) is, therefore, not some empty ivory tower intellectual exercise. Much like heliocentrism and Newtonian physics before it, such a theory has the potential to bring us out of our Economic Dark Age into an age of economic prosperity and abundance.

So what does a “heliocentric" economic theory look like? What would economic activity revolve around if not scarcity? The Galileo moment we need to look at is the advent of blockchain technology—or rather, one very specific aspect of that technology: its ability to value non-scarce products.

What does this mean? The laws of supply and demand in a market always apply to the goods that are being exchanged. It doesn’t matter if people invested a lot of time and resources into creating a product—if the product itself is not scarce, it has no (exchange) value in the market. Blockchains don’t follow this rule.

Blockchains need network security to ensure that only valid transactions are included in blocks and to prevent attacks on the network. But network security is a non-scarce common good; it benefits all network participants but cannot be commodified. Yet, blockchain networks like Bitcoin and Ethereum have managed to fund their network security to the tune of over a trillion dollars. And they did it self-sustainably—without relying on government subsidies or philanthropic contributions.

How did they do it? Instead of scarcity, blockchains put consensus at the center of their economic activity. All nodes in the network agree on a set of rules for how a new block is added to the blockchain. Network participants who follow these rules and effectively secure the network are issued cryptocurrency by the network. Because the currency issued dilutes the holdings of all network participants, they are all aligned in their interest to not devalue their holdings while maintaining the integrity of the network.

Scarcity, of course, still plays a major role in blockchains. The scarcity of the cryptocurrency itself—or, more importantly, the demand for it—is what incentivizes participants to want to secure the network in the first place. But here, too, there is a catch! This scarcity is determined by the rules that all network nodes agree to—by consensus.

So now we have the first hint of economic activity that revolves around consensus rather than scarcity. But network security is just one very specific activity. How far can we push the envelope in turning valuable, non-scarce activities into market-valued ones? Well, perhaps we can push it all the way.

Obviously, we should not expect to hard-code every beneficial network contribution and its associated value directly into the protocol. That would be absurd. Instead, we can extend existing consensus frameworks to encompass any beneficial contribution to the network. This would require the network to follow specific rules for verifying contributions that benefit the network and assigning them economic value.

What makes such a process self-sustainable is the aligned interests of all network participants; they all benefit from maintaining the value of the network’s native currency while maximizing economic growth in the network. Achieving both of these objectives necessitates agreement on the value of non-scarce contributions.

Putting consensus value at the center of economic activity would create a dynamic where people no longer need to choose between doing what is profitable in the market and what is beneficial to society. Instead, every activity that benefits the community would necessarily be profitable—the greater the benefit, the greater the profit. This alignment between people’s self-interest and the common good could resolve the many crises we face today and usher in an age of mass prosperity.

Mike Natanzon is the author of The Abundance Economy and founder of Abundance Protocol, a consensus value mechanism based on Proof-of-Impact.

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