Improving and Decentralizing Search and Discovery

Decentralized hosting is already solved. But how do we decentralize discovery? Google, Medium, Youtube, Reddit, Hackernews, Facebook, Goodreads, Amazon and Ebay are all essentially ways of discovering stuff, which use some kind of proof-of-work to let people vote: In googles case the work is setting up a server, for the others the work is making in account. In googles case the vote is a link, for Medium, Youtube, Reddit, Hackernew and Facebook it’s some kind of up/downvote, like/dislike, for Goodreads, Amazon and Ebay it’s a rating.

It’s essential that people have to pay to vote. As it’s now— time to create an account, to search and to upvote, to submit something. There are a few problems with this:

• People who’s time is less valuable have greater influence.
• Bots can vote without paying time. Preventing this is already hard for centralized services, it would be impossible for decentralized one’s. (Algorithms for spam prevention need to be updated all the time. Trusting someone on this algorithm would let him abuse it to censor.)
• It’s hard to qualify, to vote somethings up more than others, to express how important something is.

I suggest as an alternative that you vote by burning bitcoins. I.e. you send bitcoins to an address that’s provably randomly generated, then you sign a message with the private key corresponding to the address, the bitcoins in which you burned — the message would contain a text or the hash of a video or image — corresponding to a submission — and a tag — corresponding to a subreddit or a discussion you want to comment on. This would then be considered an upvote.

There’s no reason why this shouldn’t work as easily as upvoting something on reddit. The amounts could be negligibly small.

As an added benefit, this would contribute to increasing the price of bitcoin, by decreasing its supply.