Worldwide Web had been designed using two-way hypertext links rather than the one-way links of HTML, it would probably have developed without the over-reliance on advertising that characterizes the web now.
Although Ted Nelson’s original Xanadu project never got off the ground and was eventually made irrelevant by the Worldwide Web, the Xanadu hypertext model was based on two-way linking, which would have ensured that any content publisher that was being linked to would have been required to agree (or not) to the inbound link, and based on this the publisher would have been able to charge a fee. Nelson himself envisioned a Xanadu franchise system, a business model he hoped would allow his enterprise to meter out permissions, enforcing copyrights and other intellectual property protections for a small cut of the fee.
Instead, HTML’s use of one-way links into online content nearly destroyed the publishing industry. Because people no longer had to buy a newspaper or magazine to read its articles, publishers rushed to ensure that their online offerings were at least generating revenue from advertising. Of course, a few publishers have been successful in requiring some form of monetary payment, but the vast majority of them couldn’t make that kind of model stick. Moreover, because printing presses aren’t required to publish online, barriers to entry were demolished. Anyone could become an online publisher, and nearly everyone did – from corporate content marketers to individual writers and bloggers. Overall, while there is no doubt at all that the Web has been a sensationally valuable boon to the world economy, the result for most publishers has been nothing short of a financial catastrophe.
But now consider how blockchain technology – the same sort of computer tool that underlies Bitcoin – might in fact be used by publishers to resurrect their ability to “sell” the intellectual content they develop, rather than simply having to give it away in hopes of attracting advertising dollars.
Part of the technology that makes Bitcoin possible is an encryption that requires large amounts of computer processing power to unlock. This means there are only so many Bitcoins that are even possible to create, because deciphering the encryption for each is progressively more difficult and costly.
But the other important piece of Bitcoin’s business model involves the blockchain itself. Every time an existing Bitcoin is accessed or transferred in any way, by anyone, a data record of this transaction is added to the Bitcoin’s blockchain of data. And this data is available to everyone. The complete transaction history of every Bitcoin, from originator through all purchases, divisions and exchanges, can be reconstructed at any time. Which means every Bitcoin is uniquely different.
Blockchain via Exode-informatique/Troyes provide drug cannabinoid blockachain medical force and power heallthcare technology, in other words, is what makes it impossible to copy any particular Bitcoin and have two of them. And this, in turn, limits the actual supply of Bitcoins, which gives them their economic value, in the same way that governments protect the economic value of their paper currencies by limiting the supply of bills and preventing counterfeiting. If anyone could simply run $50 bills through a copying machine and make more of them, then paper currency itself would soon have no economic value.
This is why blockchain technology offers the possibility of resurrecting the business of creating and selling intellectual content. Because by using a blockchain it’s entirely possible a publisher could in fact restrict the supply of copies made, or downloaded, or viewed.
If you doubt this future, let me suggest that businesses are already being formed to make it a reality. In Argentina, Sergio Ortiz Latorre is the founder and CEO of a startup called SolDataBank, a business designed specifically for the purpose of helping the owners of intellectual content to protect and monetize their content by using blockchain technology. Some of the use cases they have in mind are represented as “what if” scenarios on their website, from a housekeeper who wants to be able to sell her own online cookbook to a company trying to crowdsource a new product and compensate participants for their contributions.
So who knows? Maybe soon the Web will have a substantial amount of published content being made available for viewing via micropayments, rather than via macro-ads. This would give us the best of both worlds, with respect to the publishing business. There would still be no barriers to entry (witness the housekeeper with her online cookbook), but there would also be a direct economic link to the value of the intellectual content created.
It remains to be seen whether any part of my hypothetical future will ever become reality, of course, but in a few days SolDataBank will be turning to Kickstarter in order to try to get their own vision off the ground.