Trusted Community Content with Blockchain

Online Identity & Forgery

 

One major issue with the internet is that one must construct a new identity for each website that they wish to create content for. This piecewise distribution of a creator’s identity hinders their public image because consumers may not be able to immediately access their other content on other platforms. The creation of universal identification keys for content creators seems a natural step in order to allow users to see the full breadth of a creator's content. 

Another major problem with today’s internet is the problem of identity. One may falsely create content under a different person’s name or steal their content and present it as their own. Creator’s current inability to stop forgeries or doppelgangers can be solved by creating universal identification keys. With each creator having their own keys they will be able to have a digital signature to prove that they had created the content. 

Next, allow all created and signed content to be placed on a blockchain that will serve as a timestamp for the creation of content. With a trusted signature and timestamp, there will be no dispute who had created what first. This blockchain will annihilate controversy over who created what content first and will give a sense of trust to the community who create content. Plagiarized content may be automatically weeded out using a program that searched the blockchain history for repetition. Any repetitions will be caught before the content is added to the block and rejected for upload onto the communities internet. Thus, forgeries will not be allowed onto the blockchain so all members of the community can trust that all content is original to the individual creator that posted it. 

The program that searches for repetition will search for close resemblance like any other plagiarism software, but it will allow for things like parodies. It is important to establish trust within the online community because validity of identity and authorship is essential to creating a productive and meaningful realm for discourse and cat videos. 

 

Quality & Judges

 

Once content has been added to a blockchain, meaning that it is unique and assigned to a creator, we have to establish some kind of system to inform the viewer of the quality of the content. While roaming around the internet, there are nearly no indications for the truthfulness or accuracy of information contained within content. Due to this crisis of validity, there is rampant misinformation and so-called ‘fake news’. Therefore, if we are to truly help the internet and form a trusted community, we must solve this issue. 

The solution we present can be summed up as: the establishment of content profiles that call upon public experts of the community to rate the content according to four general categories and provide content of opposing viewpoints, both displayed to viewers. All creators, when they are given keys, will have the option to create public profiles listing their categories of interest and any institutional affiliation. If an affiliation is given, it will be verified by previously verified creators of the same affiliation. 

Upon uploading content, a creator will be prompted to assign categories to their content, which will be voluntary and may be changed after upload. When a creator produces content, uploads it, and is accepted by the previous section’s methods, that content will be sent to members of the community that have the highest quality of content in the given categories. These members will be called ‘Judges’ and will review the content and give it four scores based upon its accuracy, clarity, controversy, and depth. Individuals who have the highest quality content will be the staples of the community's consensus on what is good and bad content and are therefore the best judges of content’s quality within their respective category. Judges will also be prompted to provide content that has the opposite point of view if they exist, but to do so will be voluntary. Both the quality scores and the opposing content will be made visible to the consumer while viewing content. Quality scores will be averaged while opposing content will be made available within a list akin to a comments section. All content and information concerning content will be held within a blockchain. 

 

Judge Incentive & Universal Cryptocurrency

 

To review online content and to provide quality scores as well as opposing content is laborious and requires incentive if the system is to be widely adopted. The adoption of a universal cryptocurrency (UC) will be necessary in order to provide an incentive for the judges. When a judge gives a quality score to some content, they will be paid in UC. The quantity of payment will depend upon the size of the content that is reviewed. Somewhat differently, when judges are paid for providing opposing content, this will be a flat rate because there will not be any way to prove how much work went into finding the opposing content. Furthermore, the computational power required to reference the entire blockchain for forgeries will also require considerable effort and investment, which must also be incentivized. Those who invest, lets call them controllers, in order to catch forgeries will also be rewarded with UC for their work. The blockchain that records the content may be best served by a proof of work protocol where UC is the reward. One issue that may occur from this reward of UC is that creating UC from essentially nowhere while either keeping it fixed or increasing otherwise will cause an extra inflationary pressure within the UC. Given that the amount of content uploads per day increases, the more controllers will be needed. The more of these controllers verifying content, the greater the amount of cryptocurrency being created will be. Therefore, the UC will inflate at an accelerated rate. This issue will need to be addressed if the currency is to be stable for use on the internet and if it’s to be used as an incentive for work. 

The UC will be universal in the sense that it will be valid currency on all internet platforms. Members will then be encouraged to produce high quality content in order to validate and review content as well as provide opposing views for monetary gain. This system will financially incentivize the creation of original and truthful content for the community’s viewing. The viewing community will then enjoy a sense of trust within the internet because they know that the content they are viewing is not plagiarized, may see what experts think of the content, and even are given opposing viewpoints in order to come to a more full perspective of the topic they are interested in. 

 

A New Search Engine

 

Additionally, to optimize this new internet structure, one must alter the way that search engines optimize results. Currently, search engines optimize popularity as a form of public consensus of the helpfulness of information. Given a vast network of information that is given numerical scores, one may see that there is a simple way to search this network: to optimize the numeral values of the quality scores. Say a consumer inputs a phrase that they want to search for. That phrase may be broken down by some machine learning software into categories and keywords within those categories. The search engine would then search the internet’s categories for the keywords and some number of content. Next, remember that all the content will have four quality scores. Let the search engine optimize the clarity and accuracy scores while allowing the consumer to pick their optimal controversy and depth scores that the engine will optimize as well. What will be the end of this process will be a list of content that is rated so that the most clear and accurate are highest as well as the content that is approximately as controversial and complex as the consumer wanted. 

Allowing the consumer to control the level of controversy and depth of content will allow them to search for content that is at their level of understanding and within their comfort zone. Additionally, optimizing clarity and accuracy immediately will have the effect that content is easier to read and is actually factual. The establishment of content  on a blockchain network will also allow for the security of the scoring and will aid in the trust of the search engines. 

 

What’s Next?

 

Everything discussed here may be built into a single web service like a website. Building a website to handle all of these ideas will go against the decentralization of the internet but it may be a good test to see the computational and social validity of the ideas. The website would resemble a centralized internet within the internet itself. For a trial run, it would suffice and would not be very hard to construct relative to overhauling the entire backbone of the internet. Being on the current internet, this trial run would benefit from the vast array of existing users on the internet. 

For this system to be feasible, one must wait for a choice cryptocurrency because of the necessarily universal nature of the UC. If one adopted a UC with vulnerability to attackers, then it would undermine the entire system since it runs on the incentivisation of correctors and judges to maintain the trust in the content.  

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