Want to know how much I get paid every time someone cites an academic article I wrote? Here's a hint.  It rhymes with nero.  See, in academia, authors have to cite a lot of other researchers' work in order to present their own research.  This is not the problem.  Once written, all that research gets edited, grouped by theme or relevance, and bound up in multi-author volumes and professional journals.  This, too, is not the problem.  No,  there's a system in place - when you need to access my research, you have to pay for it.  You need to go to buy one of these multi-author books or pay for a subscription to the journal.

"But," I can hear you say, "how is that a problem?  Those editors and copywriters and layout designers work hard to make sure that everyone's research is available to those who need it!"  And that...is true.  You're right.  All the people who do the work of compiling and formalizing all that research do need to be paid for their work.  But none of that money gets passed down to me, the original author.  And that is a problem.

Fortunately, it's one with a solution.  And I think that solution is coming from sites like this one, where the people doing the work of writing and creating are getting paid for their efforts.  More specifically, they're getting paid without the readers having to be the ones to dip into their own pockets (unless they choose to).  What's even better is that this model applies to a lot more than just blogging or (hypothetically) academic publishing.

I can both envision and hope to see a future where creators of all stripes are able to post their work on sites like Publish 0x (or Hive or Steemit or wherever) and be rewarded for their hard work without putting the onus on the consumers of their work to pay them.  It's more equitable, it's more practical, it's more viable.

Which leads me to this blog. I’m excited to be writing again after a long fallow period.  I'm fascinated by blockchain technology and enjoy thinking and speculating about how it's going to shape the future.  I plan to write about blockchain and cryptocurrency, of course, but I also want to be a part of expanding this platform into something bigger. I want to see Publish Ox become as big, or at least as popular, as LiveJournal or Wordpress were back in the day.  And that means writing about anything and everything people are interested in (or at least the things that I'm interested in - punk rock, linguistics, and Hanna Barbera cartoons from the early 70s).

And that's as close to a position statement for what I want to do on this blog as I'm going to get.  It's an exciting time right now; we're seeing new technologies evolve before our eyes and we're seeing the world adapt and change in reaction to them.

Thanks for reading.

Photo used in the header by Thom Milkovic on Unsplash