Personal tokens and the changing nature of work

The value of time

How much is an hour of someone’s time worth?

To answer for themself, most people would use their annual salary to deduce the dollar value of their time. This approach provides a rough approximation, although it remains flawed. Many employees lack the negotiation skills or self-awareness to receive proper compensation, simply accepting the going rate for similar jobs. Furthermore, salaries are a lagging indicator of performance. The quality of a person’s work can improve measurably in between the typical multi-year period between salary bumps.

If you’re hiring a contractor or consultant, you can have an even harder time determining a fair hourly wage, oftentimes being left at the mercy of arbitrarily quoted prices. If you’re lucky you’ll have a referral or someone to attest to the quality of what you’re paying for but that isn’t always feasible.

However, these problems may be alleviated with the advent of the personal token. By tokenizing an hour of your time and then making it freely tradeable, the market can determine how valuable it is. If your services are deemed to provide value for those redeeming tokens, the market will naturally be willing to pay more for them and vice versa. We are currently in the early stages of seeing this play out with a handful of people tokenizing their time (among various other things). Below you can see the fluctuating market value of some of the people who have decided to tokenize themselves.