Forging Decentralized Knowledge — Every Revolution Needs a Spark
If crypto twitter had a personality it would be schizophrenic.
I joined web3 because of the promise of building a fairer, more rewarding digital economy. The chance to create a new type of network owned by their users and builders rather than their shareholders. I believe that many of you joined for similar reasons. To build something different. Something better.
Is this what you see when you scroll through twitter?
The twitter timeline is awash with memecoins, ponzi schemes and influencers shouting out random projects before dumping on their followers. Informative content is often drowned out by a deluge of shitposting.
The blockchain industry of today is not the blockchain industry of 2021. The talented builders in the blockchain industry have chewed class over the last 2 years and built fast, powerful networks that address a wide range of real world use cases. Solana has amazing networks like Helium, Hivemapper, GenesysGo and Jupiter. The technology is reaching maturity. It is a question of when, not if, blockchain technology onboards its first billion users.
Yet, crypto twitter’s dysfunctional information space is slowing down the rate of progress and polluting outsiders perceptions of blockchain technology. Community initiatives like LamportDAO’s Solana Scribes Hackathon — the first content focused hackathon on Solana — are a step in the right direction and signal growing awareness of the need to improve our information landscape. Unfortunately, the dysfunction in our information space is a product of systemic, structural issues in our communication platforms. More content alone will not solve the underlying problems.
Fortunately, blockchain technology provides us with the tools to create a parallel information space that caters to and rewards substantive information on the transformative technologies and applications being built in web3.
In this essay, we will analyze the challenges posed by our current information landscape and identify their root causes. We will then outline a potential solution that utilizes blockchain technology to incentivize a decentralized network of ecosystem participants and content creators to develop and sustain a decentralized web3 wikipedia.
Computer Culture vs Casino Culture
At a surface level the disconnect between the technological fundamentals and the content dominating crypto twitter’s attention parallels an inherent divide in the crypto community between speculators and gamblers on one side and builders and believers on the other. In his new book Read, Write, Own, Chris Dixon labels these communities the casino culture and computer culture respectively.¹
The casino culture is made up of speculators who are just here to make money. They typically operate on short time horizons and invest based upon momentum and hype rather than fundamentals. In contrast, the computer culture is made up of builders and investors who believe in the potential of blockchain technology to create a better internet by enabling fairer networks. While they are still interested in making money, practitioners of computer culture tend to have longer time horizons for their investments and invest based upon fundamentals rather than hype.
Importantly, the computer and casino cultures are not black and white nor mutually exclusive. Instead they should be understood as extremes on a spectrum. The mindset of the vast majority of web3 investors and users falls somewhere between these extremes and can shift over time. The conception of computer and casino cultures is a useful simplification that enables us to analyze the content of our information space more effectively.
Both cultures and sets of motivation add value to the space in their own ways.
The blockchain sector needs visionaries and builders capable of designing and developing transformative, scalable, and valuable networks through blockchain technology. This is how the industry as a whole advances and attracts more converts.
Speculation plays a vital role in the blockchain industry’s development, as Matt Huang highlights in his essay “The Casino On Mars,” driving not only attention and investment but also talent inflow and infrastructure growth. Even when speculative bubbles burst, the industry retains much of the attracted capital and talent, fueling further innovation. This cycle of speculation followed by stabilization has historically been essential for technological advancement, a phenomenon Carlota Perez documents across various sectors from telecommunications to electric power, underscoring speculation’s importance in the evolution of new technologies.¹
Blockchain technology’s core innovation is secure digital property rights. Digital property rights enable trading and speculation as you cannot trade without ownership. This means that speculators looking to profit from trading digital assets are a core segment of the early adopters of blockchain technology.
A Tragedy of the Digital Commons
In order for speculators and builders to cooperate effectively in actualizing the potential of a disruptive technology there has to be a balance. Currently, the web3 information space is saturated with casino content which drowns out the ideas of builders. We are in a new era of content abundance and scarce attention.² Thus, the attention devoted to memecoins and ponzi schemes comes at the expense of substantive long-form content.
Casino culture dominates the web3 information space for two primary reasons. First, it is much easier to create than computer content. Bullposting about random memecoins requires less effort and less intelligence than writing a thoughtful blog post about the incentive structures of various blockchain networks. Second, it is significantly easier to consume casino content. Reading NFT project bullposts, looking at price charts with squiggly lines promising valhalla and laughing at memes of dogswifhats requires less attention and energy than reading detailed analyses of different blockchain networks.
I’m building in web3 because I believe in the long-term promise of blockchain networks. Their unique ability to build valuable networks that distribute most of the value to users and complements. Yet, I often get caught up scrolling through memes on Twitter, saving informative threads and in-depth posts for a more attentive read later, which results in a backlog of saved content that often remains unread.
So we are awash in casino content which is much more visible than computer content. This exacerbates the blockchain industry’s persistent public relations issue. The media amplifies sensationalist stories about scams and hacks which overshadow the relatively boring technological advances and improvements in product market fit achieved by blockchain protocols over the last year.
This skewed focus reinforces misconceptions about cryptocurrencies, pigeonholing them as tools for gambling or illicit transactions rather than highlighting their potential for disruptive innovation.
In order for crypto to onboard the next billion users and achieve breakthrough success, we need to build a more cohesive, coherent and most importantly substantive information space, and this information has to be easy to access.
Enhancing the information landscape with informative content is crucial for 3 key reasons:
- Accessibility for Newcomers: The next billion prospective users of crypto need to be able to find clear, concise and valuable information on the ethos of blockchains and what makes them unique from corporate networks, the protocols and products being built and how they can get involved. Greater accessibility encourages broader involvement.
- Empowering Users: Given the complex nature of web3, users benefit significantly from high-quality information that empowers them to make informed decisions and engage with promising networks. This knowledge enhances user effectiveness and is vital in a decentralized ecosystem where the community’s input directly influences a network’s value and success.
- Boosting Industry Productivity: The current fragmented information space hinders the blockchain industry’s development and innovation pace. An efficient information ecosystem is critical for fostering growth, as it enables developers to discover existing solutions, investors to find worthy projects, and projects to identify potential collaborations.
To fully unlock web3’s potential, we must create a more effective information space, but this requires addressing its underlying issues first. The prevalence of casino content is symptomatic of broader structural problems, such as reliance on external algorithms emphasizing virality, transient information, fragmentation, and its general lack of structure. We will cover each of these individually.
Reliance on External Algorithms
Blockchain content mainly circulates on social media, particularly Twitter, where it’s subject to the biases of platform algorithms. These algorithms promote easily consumable, viral content. Social media’s preference for brief, engaging posts means that simpler, casino type content overshadows more complex computer content.
Transient Information
Social media’s emphasis on recent content creates a transient information landscape that impedes the development of enduring knowledge.
Fragmentation
Blockchain related content is spread across twitter, discord, GitBook whitepapers and random blogs. The highly fractured and siloed nature of the web3 information space makes it extremely difficult to search as well as limiting the cross-pollination of ideas.
Lack of Structure
Despite web3’s commitment to decentralization, its lack of formal structure actually underlies many issues in the information space. Jo Freeman’s influential essay The Tyranny of Structurelessness highlights that no group is without structure; it naturally emerges among people, shaped by their individual talents and backgrounds. Failing to set up a deliberate structure simply means that an informal structure will emerge, formed from intragroup friendship networks. This basic fact can be readily seen on crypto twitter. Crypto cabals — ranging from memecoin groupchats to insider groups — are the informal power structures of the ecosystem.
Most of these groups are not malicious, yet they make the ecosystem more difficult to understand and navigate, especially for newcomers. Counterintuitively, structurelessness becomes a way of masking power leading to the rise of cabals. It also means that these elites are not accountable to the ecosystem since they derive much of their power from informal relationships rather than formal mechanics that can be influenced by the community.
Collectively we believe that these structural faults suggest it will prove exceptionally difficult to build a true home for computer content on our current platforms. The problems discussed above will become even more acute as the ecosystem expands and attracts more normies during the bull market.
Fortunately, blockchain technology offers us the tools to build a more cohesive parallel information space for computer culture.
The Path Forward
Ideas are the lifeblood of the blockchain industry. We need to create a better digital townsquare for substantive ideas if we want to maximize our chance of creating better networks and ultimately a better internet.
This information platform should be: easily accessible in one location, community-curated, constantly evolving and based on reputation and transparency. Properly designed, this portal could not only serve as a repository for valuable knowledge but also as a dynamic, evolving platform that reflects the rapid development of the crypto industry.
Web3 has the potential to have a peerless information space. Properly structured, its decentralized, bottom-up organization can enable vastly more intellectual creativity, discourse and debate than traditional hierarchies. We can use blockchain technology to create a formal decentralized power and recognition system that enables people to understand and compete to improve the ecosystem’s information space. What we need is a meritocratic system for rewarding valuable contributors with recognition, rewards and increased voting power.
More ambitiously, blockchain platforms provide the ideal environment to foster collective intelligence through emergence, thereby enabling the Solana community to build a collective knowledge base that continues to grow and evolve, taking on a life of its own. As David Pines, the co-founder of the Sante Fe Institute explains, emergence refers to the collective phenomena or behaviors that arise in a system that are not inherent in its individual parts.³ This principle is what allows systems composed of simple units, such as brains with neurons or ant colonies with individual ants, to manifest higher-order intelligence.
Within such an interconnected system, the interplay and mutual reliance among the nodes, coupled with a selective evolution process, drive the formation of a cohesive group intellect. By embedding a well-structured system of reputation and rewards within the transparent framework of blockchain technology, we can position the Solana ecosystem to develop and express a unified vision for the future of this innovative field.⁴
The resulting narrative would be a dynamic, collective tapestry, shaped by the ideas and decisions of the Solana community through a transparent and merit-based voting mechanism, all resting on a solid and ever-evolving knowledge foundation.
This is our goal at LivingIP.
What About Wikipedia?
Any discussion regarding the next evolution in crowdsourced knowledge platforms has to begin with Wikipedia. Wikipedia is the seventh most visited website and functions as the de facto source of truth for our internet age.⁵ Wikipedia’s centrality in the internet information space and the number of external websites that link to wikipedia mean that it is often the first or second search result on Google.
Unfortunately, despite Wikipedia’s commitment to the open source movement and collaboration, the community of editors and administrators have an extreme bias against crypto. Their negative stance on blockchain technology has led them to stop accepting crypto donations because it was a tacit endorsement of a technology that is “extremely risky” and “inherently predatory”.⁶ This bias against crypto extends all the way up to the founder of wikipedia as you can see from this tweet.
The wikipedia editors’ dislike and bias against crypto has led to an extremely poor information space about crypto on the site. I know several knowledgeable engineers that have tried to improve wikipedia’s page on Solana only to have editors roll back their changes and disregard their sources. The result is an extremely poor and out of date article. Solana’s wikipedia article is essentially just a list of times the network has gone down and lists the current market cap as $7 billion — it’s currently $50 billion. You can find it here: Link.
However Wikipedia is by no means the last word in collectively authored sources of truth.
Despite its unprecedented success, Wikipedia faces several challenges. Its editing community is predominantly male and hails mostly from affluent, Western, liberal backgrounds, introducing biases.⁷ The English Wikipedia is largely managed by a core group of approximately 3,000 very active editors and 500 administrators, who exert a disproportionate influence on the consent of Wikipedia, which is often shaped by their personal views.
Wikipedia’s model, based on anonymous contributions and informal consensus-building, is prone to challenges. It has seen instances of manipulation by entities ranging from organizations to national intelligence, aimed at swaying content for strategic interests.⁸ Furthermore, the platform has been embroiled in edit wars over sensitive subjects, such as the “Jai Shri Ram” phrase in India, which not only demonstrate content disputes but also mirror deep-seated societal and political rifts. Additionally, the prevalence of “sockpuppet” accounts enables individual users to covertly influence articles for personal agendas, compromising the integrity of the information presented.⁹
Many of these issues are caused by the anonymity of contributors and the lack of structure among the editing community which allows powerful administrators and very active editors to wield outsized influence. For a longer discussion of some of the difficulties faced by wikipedia please see: link, link and link.
These challenges underscore the need for a more structured, transparent approach to information curation, one where contributions and changes are accountable and merit-based. Blockchain technology presents an opportunity to evolve Wikipedia’s model into a web3 platform that integrates transparency, reputation, and blockchain governance, addressing the core issues of bias and influence that currently hinder the platform.
A Web3 Wikipedia
Our platform harnesses the Solana blockchain to embed on-chain reputation, transparency and meritocratic governance into the heart of our protocol. Here’s how we refine these concepts:
Reputation:
Contributors gain recognition for their submissions through on-chain attribution of credit, linking their contributions directly to their digital wallets. Optionally, they can associate their Twitter profiles for broader visibility. This approach not only validates their expertise and engagement within the community but also enhances accountability, making it simpler to identify and mitigate biases.
Longer-term this reputation will be made open source enabling other platforms and applications to both read and write from it with the permission of the user.
Voting and Transparency:
Whereas edits on Wikipedia are immediately integrated into the pages “master copy” with many edits being rolled back only hours later, change proposals on our platform are automatically buffered and submitted for community voting. These voting periods vary depending on the scale of the proposed update, ensuring the community has ample time to review the change and cast their vote. Additionally, we employ a meritocratic voting system where a user’s voting weight varies depending on their reputation. This process democratizes content validation, ensuring only high-quality contributions make their way to the platform.
Our system meticulously records voting outcomes, immortalizing them in compressed NFTs (cNFTs) at the end of each voting cycle. This transparent record feeds into the reputation algorithm, rewarding users whose contributions and voting decisions align with community values. As a result, active and insightful community members gain increased influence, ensuring that our platform’s content quality is safeguarded by those with proven dedication and expertise.
We will also leverage these features and data points to create sophisticated user profiles, integrating each participant’s actions and contributions into a verifiable personal track record. By attributing every contribution to a user’s blockchain wallet, and optionally linking to their Twitter profile, we can ensure transparency and accountability. The platform’s innovative voting system records users’ decisions, providing insights into their engagement and alignment with community values. This data enables the creation of detailed profiles showcasing users’ contribution history, voting patterns, and their standing within community percentiles.
These profiles serve as dynamic web3 resumes, highlighting domain expertise and participation, thus fostering a meritocratic ecosystem. Users gain visibility based on their contributions and voting behavior, with the most active and insightful members receiving greater recognition. Such profiles not only demonstrate a user’s capabilities and achievements but also offer a valuable tool for networking, collaboration, and establishing credibility in the broader web3 space.
The Benefits of a Cohesive Information Space
Solana Scribes has the potential to be an inflection point for the Solana ecosystem. A sea change during which the Solana community began to truly reward valuable content and content creators.
Or it could prove to be a flash in the pan.
We believe the ultimate effect of Solana Scribes will come down to whether the information created for the hackathon persists, aggregates and continues to evolve to the benefit of the whole ecosystem.
Or whether it fades into obscurity and irrelevance, lost under a deluge of casino content.
Solana Scribes is truly a monumental achievement. Solana teams and projects have collectively invested over $140k into Solana Scribes tracks. This fact alone proves how valuable high quality information and content is to teams.
Imagine how much value a decentralized, community curated information portal would unlock for the ecosystem as a whole.
Our platform is designed to foster a win-win scenario for the ecosystem by making valuable knowledge readily accessible in a centralized location and creating the incentives for users to continuously update and improve this information.
Contributors will be recognized and rewarded for their submissions and participation in content governance. This enables content creators to build a portfolio of their ideas and contributions, which can be utilized to advise projects or seek employment opportunities.
The protocol also enables projects to harness their community’s creativity more effectively. We are developing tools to enable projects to identify and reward top contributors directly through targeted airdrops, streamlining community engagement. Instead of running discrete content competitions, projects can post bounties on contributions to sections of the web3 wikipedia pertaining to new product features or their company as a whole.
We anticipate the platform’s network effects to intensify over time. An increase in high-quality content will attract more readers, thereby increasing the platform’s value to both projects and creators. This will not only enhance visibility for contributors but also encourage projects to reward those who enrich content related to their initiatives.
Properly structured, this feedback loop will accelerate, establishing a vibrant, self-sustaining information hub for Solana and eventually the broader web3 content. This hub aims to complement existing platforms like Twitter and Discord, creating a rich, parallel space for in-depth web3 discourse and collaboration.
Conclusion
The essence of transformative web3 projects lies in their purposeful pursuit, a guiding vision that unites and propels their communities forward.
Our mission at LivingIP is clear: to demystify blockchain technology and elucidate its pivotal role in crafting the future of our digital world.
However, realizing this vision requires more than just innovative technology; it demands the collective effort of a community. The intricacies of our reputation and voting systems are such that the success of our platform hinges significantly on the engagement and contributions of our initial user base. We seek knowledgeable and dedicated individuals who can discern and contribute valuable content, setting a robust foundation for the platform.
This founding group of users will not only shape the immediate future of the web3 wikipedia but also lay down a legacy that will resonate throughout the evolution of the Solana ecosystem and the broader web3 landscape. Their contributions will significantly impact reputation scores and set a precedent for future participants.
We aim for Solana Scribes to mark the beginning of this enduring journey. Hence, we extend an invitation to those who have excelled in the Solana Scribes Hackathon, encouraging the top three contenders from each track to join our genesis cohort. By integrating your Solana Scribes projects with LivingIP, we can transform the insights and innovations from the hackathon into a cornerstone of the Solana information ecosystem.
Together, let’s build a repository of knowledge that not only stands the test of time but also nurtures the growth and understanding of blockchain technology for generations to come.
Our platform will be live by mid March, give @Living_IP a follow on twitter to stay updated.
- Carlota Perez, Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital: The Dynamics of Bubbles and Golden Ages
- Graham, Mark, and William H. Dutton (eds), Society and the Internet: How Networks of Information and Communication are Changing Our Lives
- https://medium.com/sfi-30-foundations-frontiers/emergence-a-unifying-theme-for-21st-century-science-4324ac0f951e
- https://twitter.com/m3taversal/status/1571137746487607296
- https://d3.harvard.edu/platform-digit/submission/wikipedia-who-is-the-authority-for-the-truth/
- https://fortune.com/europe/2022/05/02/wikipedia-wikimedia-foundation-no-crypto-donations-environment-climate-bitcoin-ethereum/
- https://www.wired.co.uk/article/wikipedia-world-view-bias
- https://www.transcend.org/tms/2023/12/wikipedia-and-propaganda/
- https://thecritic.co.uk/issues/march-2023/who-watches-the-wikipedia-editors/
