Case Study: Decentralizing the Flat Earth Society

The Problem

Despite Wikipedia’s insistence otherwise, we all know that the earth is, in fact, flat. Thankfully, we have an edit patch to correct the wikipedia, so somebody has downloaded the entire wikipedia, corrected it, and hosts it on his server. Unfortunately this person believes that the earth revolves around the sun, when we all know that the earth revolves around Jupiter. So we stopped donating and he shut down. Now everybody has to download, maintain, and edit their own wikipedia. We try to communicate edits, but there are way too many conflicting opinions on how many alien spaceships reside in the Kuiper belt even though most of us agree that it is exactly 741. It’s also expensive to keep the entire wikipedia and seems unnecessary as not one of us accesses more than 0.1% of it in our lifetimes, but we still want to have access to all of it without being exposed to the lie of earth roundness. Nobody knows where to send donations, the hosts are unreliable, and we never know what data we are accessing. If that wasn’t bad enough, our social media platform is being censored to remove all mentions of the parallel earth orbiting exactly 180 degrees out of phase from us, but we’re stuck with them because they have all of our data. Members were also incensed to hear that they sold this data to the aliens. Frankly, the flat earth society is in chaos! We need the ability to perform computations on data that exist in multiple locations, using code that resides in multiple other locations, and depend on no central party, while maintaining secrecy, enforcing safety, rewarding good participation, and maintaining a record of trust. We need a decentralized general-purpose computing paradigm that makes decentralization automatic, easy, fast, and secure.

Stay tuned for the next post in this series about how we are using decentralized computing to fundamentally transform the Flat Earth Society, and maybe the round-earthers too if they are willing to get with the program and decentralize.