The Baby and the Bathwater

Journalists dismiss blockchain at their peril

Over the past few days I noticed two leading technology journalists, Rory Cellan-Jones, the BBC Tech Reporter, and Christopher Mims of the Wall Street Journal, summarily dismissing blockchain projects.

Now I know that journalists are busy people, who are under no obligation to profile any company, but as an entrepreneur currently pitching a blockchain project to journalists, I’m not sure what disturbs me more: The casual dismissal of a new technology, the wilful ignorance, or the smug virtue signalling to their followers.

Answer: all of the above.

It’s disheartening to see blanket dismissals of a technology because of some — even many — low-quality projects that use the technology. Should we dismiss email as a technology because many emails are spam and scams? Should we have stopped using the internet when crappy projects got financed in the dot-com boom? Should we stop reading the news because some of it is fake?

As users, we assess technologies all the time, and if the positives outweigh the negatives, we get value. We still use email despite the spam. We use the internet despite ever more popups. We even use Facebook, despite its data problems. And we dearly hope someone can come up with something better.

Surely it is the job of technology journalists to help the public understand technology, by giving us honest assessments of projects as they find them? It’s no surprise that trust in the media is at an all-time low when we see journalists virtue signalling to their followers rather than filtering and judging projects on their merits.

NewsBlocks is not just something we thought up to capitalise on the blockchain trend. To us, “blockchain” is not a buzzword, but a technology that matches the evolution of our business.

Back in 2013, we created software that allowed contributors to add and verify news to Newslines without having to go through a central authority. Now that’s known as a ‘consensus protocol’. At the same time we considered using Bitcoin to pay contributors, but the technology was not advanced enough (we ended up using PayPal and paid its 3% fees).

By late 2017 we realised that the technology had caught up to, and exceeded our earlier vision, and we started to investigate how we could issue a cryptocurrency to handle micropayments.

Then, when one of our advisers said that we had to go further than simply using the token for payments, we had an epiphany: What if instead of keeping Newslines’ data for our own use, we created an open database of news data that anyone could use to create their own apps?

NewsBlocks primary innovation is not blockchain or Machine Leaning — it’s that news is data. Everything else follows from that. If you collect data from people you don’t necessarily trust, how do you verify it? How do you make sure all the data follows the same format? How do you make sure that no-one can take control of the data and censor it? How do you make it tamper-proof? Blockchain technology makes all this possible.

We are not using “blockchain” as a buzzword to try to lure investors or to portray our project as something it is not. We are not trying to ‘reinvent journalism’. We are not using the blockchain because we ‘believe’ in it. If a more useful technology comes along for our purpose we will use it. We are using the blockchain because it is useful.

The question anyone who doubts our use of blockchain should ask is:

What other technology allows the creation of a tamper-proof, failure-tolerant, censorship-resistant archive of all the world’s news, that has been converted into data and independently verified, and that anyone can use to create news applications?

We are not against criticism. We invite anyone, journalists or otherwise, to try to find problems with NewsBlocks so we can either defend our approach, improve our thinking, or abandon areas that we thought might work, but won’t.

The reason journalists are receiving so many emails is that there is so much innovation in the blockchain world. If journalists aren’t willing to help us tell the difference between the good and bad, then what’s the point of their existence? If they are not prepared to do the work, they should get out of the way, and let people who are prepared to do the work have their chance.

Readers deserve more than attitude. Smug posturing is no substitute for knowledge transfer. I ask journalists to stop these kind of lazy dismissals, or risk being bitten in the ass when one of the blockchain projects they have casually dismissed takes over.

See also: Does NewsBlocks need a Blockchain?

Update: In response to this article, the BBC’s Rory Cellan-Jones posted a tweet with a link to an article in the Financial Times criticising Civil, which had just failed to reach its token sale funding target.

As though to prove my point, rather than discuss the merits of our application of blockchain technology he points to about the failings of a completely different project (most of which I agree with); lumps us in with those who are trying to ‘save journalism’. We are not, we’re converting news into data, and if that happens to help journalism then that’s fine with us; all while ignoring our project.

None are so blind as those that will not see.

Mark Devlin is the CEO of NewsBlocks.