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Bowie Bonds (wikipedia.org)
20 points by tosh on May 7, 2020 | hide | past | favorite | 6 comments



Reusing my old comment, holy crap, David Bowie was incredibly prescient.

> ”The absolute transformation of everything that we ever thought about music will take place within 10 years, and nothing is going to be able to stop it. I see absolutely no point in pretending that it’s not going to happen. I’m fully confident that copyright, for instance, will no longer exist in 10 years, and authorship and intellectual property is in for such a bashing.”

> “Music itself is going to become like running water or electricity,” he added. ”So it’s like, just take advantage of these last few years because none of this is ever going to happen again. You’d better be prepared for doing a lot of touring because that’s really the only unique situation that’s going to be left. It’s terribly exciting. But on the other hand it doesn’t matter if you think it’s exciting or not; it’s what’s going to happen.”

If only we could hurry up and abolish intellectual property so we could get on with restructuring the economy around the inevitable.


It's cool to see decentralized financial platforms like Ethereum already enabling a democratization of the kind of thing Bowie was trying to do with the Bowie Bond:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/shlomosprung/2020/01/10/spencer...

https://bankless.substack.com/p/the-democratization-of-value

https://asone.andysimon.co/



If you don't want to create an account for Financial Times: https://archive.md/ubmyY


I still don’t understand how/why it’s tax free. Who is paying the taxes on the royalties? Nobody?


I think that the artist would pay taxes on the royalties as they come in, but would not have to pay taxes on the lump sum when they issue the bond.




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