A Solution to Fix the Internet

Randy
HackerNoon.com
Published in
4 min readMay 24, 2019

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…without getting rid of the things you love about it.

The current trend of the internet is built on an advertising model:

Services like Twitter and Facebook are paid for in information — your information.

Everything you do is being watched, recorded, and sold for profit behind the scenes.

You are paying for these services by giving them your attention.

They are recording everything they can gather about who you are and what you like — and giving that information to whomever they want.

In return, you get to use their software.

Our identities are being recorded.

That information – the information that not only makes you-you, but also provides the keys to unlocking everything you hold safe –your money, your family, your passwords) is up for grabs for the highest bidder.

The ad-model internet is broken.

We simply can no longer trust the thousands of applications we subscribe to-to keep our private information safe.

Time and time again, they have proven that they are either selling you out or being hacked

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/youve-got-hacked-aol-confirms-significant-number-mail-users-hit-n91701

Either way, you — the user — suffer for having made the mistake of using their software.

The problem is — without selling your data to advertisers — how do service providers like Twitter and Facebook get paid?

Micropayments

Twitter users post over 2 billion tweets per year

Twitter earns nothing from this

We can go as far as to speculate the number of total interactions per year on the platform is in the trillions

Now imagine if every one of those interactions cost the user a fraction of a penny to Twitter

And, if the information was received by the community as valuable — the content creator would earn a profit

A micropayment economy is an information economy

Quality information is paid for by the users in the form of money, sent peer-to-peer or direct-to-account.

Not only would Twitter make billions, but content creators would be able to profit directly from their posts.

They no longer have to sell their souls to advertisers for a buck.

We can do all of this on Bitcoin. Cheaply and efficiently.

Entire applications can be stored on chain.

Data become trustlessly uploaded and stored – and unchangeable.

Immutable but not not-mutable.

You can remove information or tweets from a popular interface (like Twitter), but you cannot delete it from the underlying library (Bitcoin).

Data storage becomes decentralized — so it has no central point of failure. In other words, it lives forever.

Everything everyone can ever think of putting online is stored forever on a database that cannot be altered or destroyed.

And, if you want, it can only be found by you (you just need to know where to look).

On an immutable application Myspace never loses 50 million songs:

https://www.cnet.com/news/myspace-reportedly-loses-50-million-songs-uploaded-over-12-years/

It completely removes human error and criminal activity. Everything is safe, everything is stored. Every input or change is searchable and verifiable.

Cloud storage on the blockchain is paid for by the people who store the data.

And profited on by those who run the nodes (or download the entire chain).

Imagine Google but on the scale of everything — every word, every change. That is what businesses that run full nodes will be capable of.

Unfucked search of the entire internet library.

With micropayments, enabled by a ‘Bitcoin Internet’, the fluctuation of the underlying currency becomes negligible:

Users paying $0.05 to tweet or store a file on chain won’t care much even if the underlying currency doubles in value.

With a Bitcoin Internet — the entire internet turns from attention-based to value-based.

The more value you provide, the more money you earn — and you earn that money directly from the people who benefitted from the value you provided them.

Proof of Work as an economy. Work is paid for by the moment.

No work? No pay.

There are no free rides on this bus.

All of this is possible with Bitcoin, but the current version of BTC has locked us out — we simply cannot build on it.

We cannot store data on BTC. We cannot build decentralized applications.

We can barely even use BTC for payments. And it’s only getting worse.

This is why people are so excited about BSV.

They have built a version of Bitcoin that makes Google, Facebook, and many others look like anthills to a human.

They plan to build the Bitcoin Internet and lock the protocol in stone when it has scaled to a point of 10x the capabilities of Visa and Mastercard.

Locking the protocol in stone enables businesses to build knowing:

A transaction signed today will remain valid 25 years from now

Speculations about Satoshi are irrelevant.

It simply does not matter.

What matters is Bitcoin itself, and the endless possibility it holds when allowed to run free of centralized developer groups like blockstream.

What we want is a trustless internet that builds trust in the internet.

People that own and have the choice to profit from their own Data.

Information that can never be censored or removed.

The Value-Based Internet is here.

It’s called The Metanet.

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