An Economic Tool for Crowdsourcing Truth
Using tokenized incentives to value the world’s digital creative assets
Po.et is a shared, open, universal ledger designed to record metadata and ownership information for digital creative assets. Po.et is a continuation of Proof of Existence, the first non-financial application of the blockchain. By creating an open platform on the Bitcoin blockchain, Po.et aims to create the most institutional, globally-verifiable record of digital creative assets. This record will be a framework for building smart, interoperable media applications using a shared, standard and extensible metadata format.
Proof of Existence is a service that verifies the existence of a piece of content at a point in time. As a standalone service, proof of existence is valuable for proving the authenticity of a digital document at a later date. However, it doesn’t allow users to understand anything about the accuracy, truthfulness or usefulness about a particular digital asset.
For Po.et to be valuable as a content attribution, discovery, and monetization platform, we must be able to answer the following questions:
- How do you take an open, trustless and decentralized system that anyone can write to at basically no cost and determine what information is useful, trustworthy or accurate?
- What’s to stop anyone from copying a famous work, timestamping it to Po.et, and claiming it as their own?
- How do you filter the “good” from the “bad”? Facts from “fake news”?
We believe the answers to these questions could possibly be crowdsourced from the community by aligning the economic incentives of content creators, publishers and curators via competing token-curated marketplaces.
Potential Vision for Token-Curated Marketplaces
We envision a variety of marketplaces existing to determine the usefulness, trustworthiness and accuracy of digital creative assets registered on the Po.et network. A marketplace is any curated selection of Po.et assets. Marketplaces can be broad enough to encompass every article on Po.et or narrowly focused (e.g. only high-resolution photos of puppies wearing sweaters by Norwegian photographers).
Marketplaces exist as a signaling mechanism to promote the discovery of high quality content. Inspired by the work of Mike Goldin and the AdChain team, Po.et marketplaces economically incentivize Po.et users to curate and crowdsource the usefulness, trustworthiness and accuracy of content.
For example, a marketplace could be created to curate photos of cute puppies that are free to republish. If this marketplace serves an economically important role (for example, providing content for many Instagram accounts), there will be a benefit to joining this marketplace.
Each marketplace could implement unique methods for deciding which content is valuable or trustworthy. Ultimately, it is up to the end user or licensees, to decide which “truth” most resonates with their own and their consumers. The more valuable a marketplace is, the more their vision of “truth” will resonate with the end users. The value of marketplaces and the ranking of content within a marketplace will act as valuable measurements that an end user can use to decide which content they trust.
Marketplaces may be curated by token-weighted voting in accordance with predetermined policies. The beneficiaries of these marketplaces include publishers, content curators or anyone looking to license the rights to digital creative assets. As a result, an unlimited number of different marketplaces could be curated, each using a different value proposition. Today’s centralized content platforms like YouTube employ teams of content analysts who manually review inappropriate, flagged or infringing videos. However, each marketplace could empower and incentivize a decentralized set of moderators from the community.
Ways to Create a Marketplace
Anyone can create a marketplace by deploying a smart contract with defined marketplace rules (minimum deposit, challenge period, voting base, etc.). The voting base represents the subset of users who are able to vote on dispute resolution and approval of content in a given marketplace. Examples of possible voting bases include: voting open to all marketplace members; voting by a pre-selected subset of marketplace members; and automated arbitration via artificial intelligence or third party APIs.
To join a marketplace, a content creator would apply to the marketplace’s designated smart contract with some staked token. A content creator’s stake will remain locked until they desire to remove their content from the marketplace or are successfully challenged. A “challenge” is a claim asserted by any marketplace member that a piece of content does not belong in the marketplace or somehow violates marketplace rules. Challenges are then ruled on by the market’s designated voting base. If a challenge is successful, the content creator will lose their stake. In more expensive marketplaces, challenges will likely be rare because content creators will only apply if they are confident they won’t lose a challenge.
Free market forces and competition will ultimately tell us which styles of marketplaces and curation are most valuable. It is up to the end consumer to decide which marketplaces align best with their subjective truth and provide them with the most value.
Examples of Marketplace Approval Scenarios:
- Alice is alerted by her marketplace’s plagiarism detector that Bob’s newly posted article is 99 percent similar to an article previously posted by Alice. The marketplace they belong to requires that any similarity over 85 percent be automatically challenged and opened up to a vote by all marketplace members. Marketplace members will then be able to vote on whether they believe Bob plagiarized Alice’s article. If the majority of votes cast believe the article was plagiarized, Bob’s tokens will be forfeited and distributed among the members who voted with the majority. Marketplace members are incentivized to vote correctly in order to maintain a high quality marketplace and to preserve the value of their tokens.
- Alice joins a marketplace that curates high resolution images of nature. In this marketplace, the rules state that Bob is the only member of the voting base. Alice decides to post an image of a skyscraper to the marketplace. Bob notices the picture of the skyscraper and concludes Alice has violated the rules of the marketplace. Bob then challenges Alice. Because Bob is the only member of the voting base, he needs no other approval to remove Alice’s image and confiscate her stake. In this case, Bob is ultimately incentivized to be a “fair” autocrat to retain value in his marketplace and encourage new submissions.
Examples of Marketplace Monetary Policies:
- Curation Markets: (Inspired by Fred Ehrsam tweetstorm on the subject of curation markets). Curation markets use economic incentives to create crowd-curated feeds on any topic. Members of the marketplace are incentivized to build the best feed in order to attract attention, licensing revenue and improve the value of their marketplace token. A curation market must have its own unique token minted by an algorithmically-controlled central bank. Marketplace tokens could be purchased for token and stored in a smart contract. As a marketplace becomes more useful, more content creators will want to join the marketplace to have their content discovered, and the value of the marketplace tokens increases. Content creators can convert their marketplace tokens back to the base token at any time. If the rates for the marketplace token are higher than when the content creator originally joined the marketplace, they will have earned extra tokens. Alternatively, if the rates for the marketplace token are lower than when the content creator originally joined the marketplace (due to decreasing popularity of the marketplace), they will have lost some of their original stake.
- Minimum deposit per piece of content. Content creator must stake a minimum amount of tokens per piece of content they would like to appear in the marketplace. Applications and challenges are settled per piece of content.
- Minimum deposit per content creator to join a marketplace. A deposit allows a content creator to submit as much content as they would like. If any of their content is successfully challenged, their stake will be confiscated and all content will be removed. This is an especially strong way to hold content creators accountable for complying with marketplace rules.
As with everything in blockchain projects, the example token models above are very experimental and will evolve over time. We’re presenting the ideas here to get everyone thinking about the potential solutions that can be built with token curated registries and would love to hear your ideas!
Special thanks to Mike Goldin, Fred Ehrsam and Simon de la Rouviere for their inspiration and cutting-edge ideas on crypto-economics.
References:
https://medium.com/@ilovebagels/token-curated-registries-1-0-61a232f8dac7
