Free Enterprise Meeting 1 Online Censorship
There are 2 core issues when it comes to centralized online communities. Account level censorship and content level censorship. Account level censorship means that the account holder has control over who can follow them. This allows for every account to exist and not get banned from a platform. Other users can still choose to unfollow other users enabling them to not see those accounts posts. Content level censorship takes the idea above and applies it to content, ie. posts. All in all these two issues revolve around censorship of users and content from centralized organizations. The blockchain allows for the freedom of users and content as long as the person has a computer. The Hive blockchain allows for this uncensored user controlled content posting. The problem with this and Web3 is that it is unpractical. We would end up with new Amazons or Google. Furthemore Hive can only store text data. Since our social media platforms mainly revolve around pictures and video, there is a problem with making the blockchain a better social media platform.
3Speak comes to solve this problem. Dan Hensley is a cofounder of 3Speak, a video storage platform that makes it possible to store large data. 3Speak works on the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS). IPFS claims to be “A peer-to-peer hypermedia protocol designed to preserve and grow humanity’s knowledge by making the web upgradeable, resilient, and more open. Using this technology 3Speak and keep content alive for years to come without a couple of big companies owning it. In the later development of 3Speak a user can earn NFT for storing good data. The 3Speak network would work by using 3 different tokens and incentivise people to store video data. Based on how many people watch the video, how many people store bits of the video, a price will be given out to the creators and the data storage holders.
This makes me raise a couple of different questions. We already have something called Bittorrent. How is this different from Bittorrent and how is it better? Some issues with Bittorrent is the legality of hosting such video clips. Would there be an issue? The nodes are “public” but really how public. I see the money incentive, whereas in Bittorrent there isn't a lot of money involved. It's a lot more community based. During the presentation I felt confused and it was hard to understand how the whole system works with having a little prior knowledge of the blockchain and torrent in general. Next, sometimes censorship is necessary, but preserving history is also necessary. Mr. Dan talked about certain videos being on certain tags, but if there are mass amounts of videos being uploaded how can those node operators categorize all of them. Some problems mentioned were hard to make money, still low number of validators, etc.
Finally Mr. Dan is also the co-founder of a blockchain game called Ragnarok. Ragnarok is a community run PVP game based on NFT. It has 3 components - chess, card game, poker. The users would be in control of the game times, money can be preserved in the game by it being stored on the blockchain. Many gaming platforms already have big competition teams and large prices. Gamers can make money on Twitch and Youtube already. How would you incentivise people to come to your game?
quote from https://ipfs.io/
