Every year the number of innovations that humanity masters worldwide is becoming more and more. The main task of any invention is to improve or simplify a person’s daily life. Despite this, controversial innovations are emerging in the world that were created to improve lives but at the same time, cause harm. Such innovations generally harm the market in one way or another. This paper describes three innovations currently disrupting the existing market: sharing services, web-based videos, and cryptocurrency.
Sharing services displaced traditional economic models a few years ago. Their essence is the sharing of a particular resource previously in individual use, its division between several individuals at once, whether it be a car (or even one place in it), a specialist, a room, a thing, etc. (Ferrero et al., 2018). Thus, the resource is exploited more time, and its users can save time and money because they do not need to buy or rent the help forever or for an extended period. There is no chain of intermediaries in this model of sharing. All actions are often performed through some online platform and are available for everyone.
An exciting example of the sharing economy is the taxi service Uber, which encourages consumers to ditch their private cars in favor of taxis. It now operates in 250 cities around the world. Carsharing services appeared – per-minute car rentals that promote the same principles. Just as Uber does not offer the car itself but a service for moving from one point to another, medical equipment manufacturers do not sell the equipment itself but the possibility of doing an ultrasound or MRI (Ferrero et al., 2018). Based on this, it can be concluded that the sharing economy harms the formation and development of the car market economy, as people often order a taxi or use car sharing. Society does not need to buy new cars for personal use, negatively affecting market demand.
The euphoria of being able to decorate websites with 3D graphics and videos is long gone. Today, video broadcasts on the Internet and audiovisual communication have moved to a qualitatively new level. Today, various applications and services have some crucial commonalities, thanks to which authoring and video playback are possible on any platform running all modern operating systems (Zimmermann & Jucks, 2018). All programs support both file and streaming delivery and provide some form of automatic versioning so that new forms and media types can be introduced without forcing users to download new components to view them specifically. All solutions can be played with a player program or a web page. They all have APIs through which third-party programs can create and play streaming content from their programs, websites, and media discs.
Naturally, despite the increased speed of Internet access and the proliferation of technologies such as cable or local area networks, web-based video cannot yet be compared in quality even with video recorded on an outdated tape or with television in the UHF band, let alone DVD and say nothing (Zimmermann & Jucks, 2018). However, web-based videos have finally reached the stage where we can work to improve the quality of the clip and not just fight to get at least moving pictures. Thus, web videos have replaced videos and films on DVDs, video materials that need to be viewed with the help of special activator programs, which negatively affects the market. Exactly as with the first example, society is less in need of buying licensed versions of videos, and being able to download or view them on the Internet. This combination of circumstances significantly reduces market demand, therefore, reduces income.
One of the newest and not fully understood innovations in economics is cryptocurrency. This concept entered the life of online users eight years ago, but only a few know its meaning and application. The idea of cryptocurrency accepted in society implies digital money that is stored in electronic wallets and transferred between them (Wątorek et al., 2020). In simple terms, cryptocurrency is a type of digital currency.
The cryptocurrency has practically no differences from the usual computer codes through which money transfers are encrypted. The only difference is that cryptocurrency, unlike standard money, is not just launched on the network but appears in it. A cryptocurrency banknote is a crypt that occurs without the intervention of any authority. Therefore, the cryptocurrency does not have an emission center (no bank issues banknotes). Crypto signs appear unusually by generating new codes; this is done by computer technology (Wątorek et al., 2020). There are no crypto-signs that are not owned by anyone; each of them is stored in the wallets of real users.
Cryptocurrencies are not accumulated in standard storage, and they are all distributed among users’ wallets. There is no commission for transfers; therefore, there is no need for mediation. From the standpoint of the economy, this is money that does not experience fear of inflation since its number is fixed (Wątorek et al., 2020). The exchange rate directly depends on demand: many currency buyers are equal to an increase in price, and vice versa. No one can regulate the course of the crypt, manage it, or change the amount. Thus, the cryptocurrency negatively affects the money market, as it is not amenable to any regulation by the states. People can store their money in cryptocurrencies, eliminating the need for bank accounts and negatively affecting the market.
References
Ferrero, F., Perboli, G., Rosano, M., & Vesco, A. (2018). Car-sharing services: an annotated review. Sustainable Cities and Society, 37, 501–518.
Wątorek, M., Drożdż, S., Kwapień, J., Minati, L., Oświęcimka, P., & Stanuszek, M. (2020). Multiscale characteristics of the emerging global cryptocurrency market. Physics Reports.
Zimmermann, M., & Jucks, R. (2018). Investigating the role of communication for information seekers’ trust-related evaluations of health videos on the web: Content Analysis, Survey Data, and Experiment. Interactive Journal of Medical Research, 7(2).