Public Service, Pandemics and Crypto Networks.
Information, education and inspiration in the era of Coronavirus.
Abstract. The Covid19 virus is the greatest public health crisis in a century and requires an equally unprecedented global response from individuals, communities, businesses and governments.
However today’s centralised and top town institutions of finance, governance and media are limited in their capacity to respond rapidly to the issue, whilst social networks supported by either advertisers or subscriptions give rise to misinformation or the privatisation of quality information with detrimental effects on society.
This paper outlines:
- A history of Public Service Broadcasting as a mechanism for coordinating, funding and distributing quality information that is universally accessible.
- Open Source as a borderless technology movement and methodology for releasing creative potential and purpose driven collective intelligence
- Crypto-Currencies with decentralised governance and self-sustaining treasuries as economic and social infrastucture for coordinating contributions and capital aligned with the public benefit.
TL:DR
- Quality information provided free, without state or commercial control is vital to the function of democratic societies, especially in times of crisis.
- Public Service Broadcasting fulfilled that role but no longer connects with young people and is not optimised for a world of information abundance.
- The Covid19 pandemic is an unprecedented global health crisis that requires rapid, simultaneous and sustained local and global coordination.
- There is hope. Open source development is the foundation of the digital economy and shows what can be achieved when purpose leads profit.
- The last major global crisis of 2008 presaged the arrival of the Bitcoin whitepaper and with it a new kind of digital native coordination system.
- Bitcoin made further experiments with blockchains possible, enabling the creation of hundreds of emergent economic and social systems.
- In 2020 we face an unprecedented moment in human history that will have profound and lasting effects on societies, economies and culture.
- Decred retains Bitcoin’s revolutionary values and evolves its design, to create a secure, adaptable and sustainably funded public benefit network.
- Decred enables efficient coordination of creative contributions and capital that furthers the public benefit values of the community it represents.
- Decred enables the foundation of a new global public service institution and network that can fund, coordinate and publish quality information.
1. An introduction to Public Service Broadcasting
Quality information provided free, without state or commercial control is vital to the function of democratic societies, especially in times of crisis.
The best known example in recent communications technology history is the Public Service Broadcasting (PSB) model that was pioneered in the 1920s by the British Broadcasting Corporation — better known as the BBC.
At its inception the approach was revolutionary and widely emulated throughout the world.
Neither commercial nor State-controlled, public broadcasting’s only raison d’etre is public service.
It is the public’s broadcasting organisation; it speaks to everyone as a citizen.
Public broadcasters encourage access to and participation in public life.
They develop knowledge, broaden horizons and enable people to better understand themselves by better understanding the world and others.
Public Broadcasting Why? How? — UNESCO
Absolved of commercial imperative, public broadcasting rose to become the 20th century’s most trusted and effective communications initiative, able to report on local, national and global news, elevate daring storytellers, document culture, societies and the natural world, spotlight emerging areas of research outside mainstream discourse of the time, continually fund bold technological advances in communication - informing, educating and entertaining young and old minds alike.
During the Second World War, a period of global crisis, the BBC’s output was a decisive factor in countering Hitler’s sophisticated propaganda machine.
The corporation hit upon an ingenious idea: tell the unvarnished truth, with accurate radio reporting of British defeats helping win the trust of German listeners.
Broadcasting of bad news helped with the reputation for truthful statement which was the basis of our service
BBC memo, March 1942
Despite attempts to jam programmes and prosecute listeners in Germany for tuning into enemy broadcasts, the BBC soon became one of the most significant sources of information for people living under Nazi rule.
Likewise, reports about the way British people were contributing to the war effort were used by the corporation to emphasise the country’s belief in victory.
This approach to the provision of sustainably funded, transparently governed and freely accessible information has had profound effects on the world.
Two generations have grown up in a world shaped in large part by the innovation of Public Service Broadcasting, becoming the template for a development process that would unleash the diverse creative ambitions of thousands more.
Pound for pound, no country in the world has a better record in helping new creative talent to find its feet
At their inception they were revolutionary institutions. In Channel 4’s case they have a statutory remit to challenge the status quo, but over time, like every established institution their technological advantages have been usurped, their systems of governance have calcified and the creative invention of their contributors has waned.
2. A rapidly changing media landscape
The institution of Public Service Broadcasting was made possible through technological advancement, evolving organisational possibilities and cultural insight.
This design provided a foundation for sustainable funding of high quality information that was freely available and evolved through thoughtfully considered and adaptable governance structures that prioritised the public interest.
As communication technologies have evolved and globalised, the existing public service has struggled to adapt.
Mobile phones and social platforms have lowered barriers to entry for a new generation of creators, ensuring a rapid departure of youth from traditional television, whilst the average age of a primetime BBC viewer has risen to 61, and Channel 4 — originators of cult series Black Mirror, is 55.
Around the world, media fragmentation, evolution and competition have meant that nationally focused PSBs are no longer able to serve the public benefit credibly or effectively, especially for younger audiences.
Over 75s now watch more television than ever, whilst their grandchildren are deserting the medium in ever increasing numbers, opening up a vast cultural and economic distance between the age-groups.
The Digital Media Generation
Today’s teenagers have never known a world without smartphones, social networks and digital communities.
They are the best connected, informed and diverse of any generation in history, but more than that, they don’t just consume culture handed from above — they make, share and remix it too.
As a result, a new borderless digital media economy has emerged, flush with passionate creative endeavour, but monopolised by corporate interests, whose motives are detached from the far-sighted public benefit values that nurtured the talents of preceding generations and informed, educated and entertained viewers.
As the world becomes ever more connected, the public broadcasting model and the provision of freely accessible, quality public information, education and entertainment, finds itself at a crossroads.
Option 1 — Subscriptions and paywalls
Initially this approach looks to provide both sustainable revenues aligned with quality information. However this model has major downsides.
Privatisation of quality information
Although subscriptions aren’t that expensive, they do privatise quality information, leading to increasing asymmetry of opportunity.
Linking access to quality content with the ability to pay, ensures that there will be a barrier to entry for those from poorer backgrounds and/or without access to the traditional banking system.
An inability to access quality information perpetuates inequality at the most fundamental level, especially in times of crisis, when the effect of widespread misinformation, or lack of trustd educational resource is even more pronounced on individuals and society at large.
The boom in subscription video on demand (SVOD) platforms like Netflix has been heralded as the dawn of a new golden age of streaming media, but over the long term, winner take all market dynamics gradually shifts a platform’s relationship to its value creating contributors from cooperative to competitive.
Why Decentralisation Matters, Chris Dixon
For the BBC and other national PSBs such as the US National Public Radio (NPR) and Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), it now seems an inevitability that they will be pushed towards a subscription model as the public sphere continues to be further politicised and privatised, a process that further entrenches conservative thinking whilst pulling up the funding drawbridge when it comes to nurturing diverse perspectives from a wide range of backgrounds whose interests and communities exist outside of mainstream discourse and awareness.
Option 2 — Advertising supported
Down the other path lie corporate sponsors.
This approach might ensure open access to all but at the expense of compromising core values.
Brand sponsors exchange money with PSBs in return for something akin to abstracted trust.
Over time, a misalignment between what is good for people and what is good for the bottom line ensures that there is direct conflict with the public good, a case in point being a slippery slope towards chasing what is already popular, alongside the relentless capture, tracking and resale of audience data.
As Facebook and Google swallow more and more of the advertising market, the effect is compounded, with more compromises made to prop up the commercial model, leading to a further erosion in values, which creates a vicious cycle, deteriorating the very trust that makes the PSB model valuable in the first place.
As media and distribution have been digitised that inherent conflict has been turbocharged with the birth of the influencer economy presiding over a world in which everyone’s values are bought and sold on the open market.
In almost every area of our lives, we have the incentive to do the wrong thing.
If we all had the incentive to do the right thing, we would all be in a radically win-win situation, with a totally new world.
3. An unfolding global health crisis
The privatisation of the public sphere and rise of social networks has left the internet without a compelling solution to the creation of global public benefit institutions, at a point in time when universally trusted, transparently funded and culturally relevant information is desperately needed.
The Covid19 pandemic is a crisis of like no other and requires rapid, simultaneous and sustained coordination at all levels — through individual, local community, national and global action.
In the UK, the request to car manufacturers to shift production to ventilators demonstrates the scale of the challenge at hand.
Beyond the short term health emergency there lies catastrophic economic chaos, something that could ultimately cost more lives than the pandemic that has sparked it.
There is no doubt that almost everything about our modern way of life will change as a result.
Covid19 might be the unexpected trigger, but the fragility of existing systems and ways of living have been obvious for a long time.
The human experiment finds itself at a transition point between an old world and a new world, as societies rapidly approach the point of no return, facing a vast array of problems that established financial, technological and cultural institutions are helpless to respond to.
Without a solution, once again it is clear that at the end of the reckoning, it will be those with the least that will once again draw the short straw.
The danger to the global poor has been almost totally ignored by journalists and Western governments.
No one knows what will happen over the coming weeks in Lagos, Nairobi, Karachi, or Kolkata.
The only certainty is that rich countries and rich classes will focus on saving themselves to the exclusion of international solidarity and medical aid.
To ensure a successful transition to a brighter future, open access to trusted information, from reputable sources, without commercial or state interference is vital, as is the ability to connect, coordinate and reward the collective intelligence of the crowd — in fact the they are two sides of the same coin.
4. The internet as public benefit technology
Now for the good news.
When empowered to follow their own curiosities and passions, it turns out that digital technologies enable people to achieve incredible things in short periods of time.
The internet and the world wide web — and the extraordinary revolution they have sparked were released as free, open source software, with a central ideal of open access for all.
“Facebook is built on open source from top to bottom, and could not exist without it.” — Facebook
That public benefit spirit is also known as Commons Based Peer Production.
Commons based peer production (CBPP) is a new model of socioeconomic production in which people work cooperatively on commons-based (publicly accessible) resources.
The Internet has dramatically lowered communications costs, and the costs associated with providing access to information goods. These developments made CBPP possible because they allowed people who shared a common interest to find each other, communicate, share work on a common project, and distribute the product of that work to anyone who wanted it.
The low costs associated with communication, production, and distribution meant that there was no need for an organization with capital to take ownership of the projects and run them in a way which would generate revenue.
The most well described and significant examples of CBPP are Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) projects, other examples include Wikipedia, OpenStreetMap and The Pirate Bay.
Richard Red, The Crypto Commons
As ventilators, masks and gloves become the new gold dust the online community are moving fast to help open source designs that can then be manufactured rapidly without recourse to the usual supply chains.
Times of crisis also enable great innovations, as minds are focused, dogma is challenged and people look for another way to tackle the challenges at hand.
5. The arrival of Bitcoin
On the eve of the 2008 Financial Crisis, the mysterious Satoshi Nakamoto introduced the world to Bitcoin — a coordination technology that enabled participants who do not know each other or trust each other to organise and reward useful work in emergent digital communities.
Now the internet could not only transport information and media, a revolution in distributed trust also enabled a native mechanism for transferring value that was rapid, borderless and transparent.
Satoshi’s mythology
Satoshi Nakamoto released the Bitcoin whitepaper at a point in time when old institutions were facing a crisis of trust, to a group of cypher-punks who were motivated to challenge the status quo.
Alongside the technical implementation, he embedded a key cultural trigger, timestamped in the source code.
The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks.
In Bitcoin’s case the useful work to be contributed was that of checking and time stamping transactions in the network into a ‘chain of blocks’ — a mention in the whitepaper that birthed the entire blockchain industry.
Miners around the world were incentivised to use software to solve complex maths puzzles, whilst simultaneously checking each others work, with the reward for a successful ‘proof of work’ being the network’s native currency — bitcoin.
An entirely new global accounting system, optimised for digital networks, was born, that no longer relied on a trust being assured by an intermediary such as a bank.
The technical decisions made Bitcoin possible, but it was the cultural narrative that made it a movement.
The birth of the blockchain ecosystem
Bitcoin was built on open source technology which means that the source code is auditable and can be duplicated and tweaked — aka forked, by anyone with an internet connection and a special mix of competence and curiosity.
As a result the Bitcointalk forum quickly became home to individuals and teams — anonymous and under their real names, who were capitivated by the sudden realisation that they could create new money themselves.
One of these individuals was a young Canadian called Vitalik Buterin who proposed Ethereum, a project that would go on to accelerate broad mainstream awareness of the nascent blockchain industry.
11 years since the publication of the Bitcoin whitepaper, ‘blockchain’ has become a multi-billion dollar business all of its own, replete with its own media ecosystem, global calendar of events, attended by corporations, consultants, VCs, and self-proclaimed gurus.
6. Cultural Evolution of Crypto Networks
Currently the crypto ecosystem puts huge emphasis on the categorisation of a project — currency, store of value, smart contract platform, attempting to define competitors through monetary theory, economic design, product insight or potential use case.
Differentiating cryptocurrencies through analogies to software products is undervaluing the fundamentally social nature of crypto networks, with the ‘best’ technology, block size or economic model trumped by a story that connects.
Bitcoin’s growth resembles that of a social movement.
Social movements are purposeful, organized groups striving to work toward a common goal.
These groups might be attempting to create change (Occupy Wall Street, Arab Spring), to resist change (anti-globalization movement), or to provide a political voice to those otherwise disenfranchised (civil rights movements).
Social movements create social change.
Generationally influential brands of recent memory have been those that have understood that building long term trust is not about marketing, it is about riding the wave of cultural movements and then seeding that story through influential networks that share common values.
It is something that Nike and Apple have understood for decades, with Steve Jobs summarising the strategy in this legendary talk.
These were brands born into and made famous in an era when TV was dominant and a cultural narrative could be defined and controlled.
There is a mistake made by most product companies, especially in a social era, that marketing is analogous to building a community, when in fact the latter is far more about cooperation and collaboration, taking a role closer to the facilitator of a community’s intrinsic ambitions, rather than authors of a marketing message.
While brands have traditionally been planned and designed directly by corporations, the rise of networked media has challenged the coherence of centrally-managed brand identities.
New blockchain-based decentralized organizations take this a step further by giving users financial incentive to spread brand narratives of their own.
Headless Brands, Toby Shorin, Laura Lotti, Sam Hart
Blockchains are coordinating systems for community networks, where cultural narratives are the key driver in the winner takes all tendency of network effects.
Assuming general technical competence, it is likely that over time a cultural narrative also known as a movement, will be a far better indicator of crypto currency valuation than any direct comparison of the monetary policy or capabilities of the underlying technology.
Protocols die when they run out of believers.
Naval Ravikant
In the beginning there was Satoshi.
Satoshi Nakamoto’ss founding 2008 document set out a proposal for A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System.
Since its arrival the narrative has evolved over time as documented in Visions of Bitcoin by Hasufly and Nic Carter.
Bitcoin narratives
- E-cash proof of concept
- Cheap p2p payments network
- Censorship-resistant digital gold
- Private and anonymous darknet currency
- Reserve currency for the cryptocurrency industry
- Programmable shared database
- Uncorrelated financial asset
Visions of Bitcoin are not static.
Technological developments, practical realities and real-world events have shaped collective views.
Then followed the Bitcoin Narratives
The ability to fork Bitcoin’s open source codebase opened the floodgates to a wide range of projects that sought to improve on or amend specific features of the original design to create entirely new networks.
After Bitcoin, this group became known as altcoins, alts and later shitcoins with each defined in relation to the original — each one effectively in narrative debt to Satoshi’s Bitcoin since all benefited from the project’s cultural trigger, global brand recognition and subsequent liquidity.
The below is a limited selection of the hundreds of projects that have launched in the last 11 years.
- 2011: Litecoin — The Silver to Bitcoin’s Gold Narrative
- 2012: Mastercoin— The Crowdfunding on Bitcoin Narrative
- 2012: Ripple — The Bitcoin without Mining Narrative
- 2013: Bitshares— The Assets on Bitcoin Narrative
- 2013: Dogecoin — The More Fun Bitcoin Narrative
- 2013: ZeroCoin/Zcash— The Private Bitcoin Narrative
- 2014: Monero — The Private Bitcoin Narrative
- 2014: Dash — The Private Bitcoin Narrative
- 2015: Decred— The Better Bitcoin Narrative
- 2014: Ethereum — The Programmable Bitcoin Narrative
- 2018: Tron — The Faster than Bitcoin Narrative
- 2018: Libra— The More Stable than Bitcoin Narrative
A narrative summary
- Satoshi Nakamoto’s Bitcoin introduced the world to an entirely new digital coordination system. Its open source code can be copied but a founding story, vision and cultural trigger— 2008’s financial crisis, made it a global phenomenon.
- Altcoins duplicated, experimented and improved on the initial design and grew dutifully in Bitcoin’s narrative shadow. Over time greed overtook open source values, as altcoins made some rich and many envious.
- Ethereum was an idealistic vision that grew from cypherpunk origin. Created by a boy wonder and funded by reformed bankers, it was responsible for an ICO bubble that seduced millions of new believers.
- Justin Sun’s Tron played the influencer card, seizing an opportunity to exploit ordinary people who had no relationship to the origins of Bitcoin or the cypher-punk and open source values that made it possible.
- Blockchain goes mainstream with Libra, as Facebook, Big Banks and Governments set the stage for a world of digital currencies linked to fiat, that will be widely adopted, despite concerns over privacy and further centralisation of power, if only because they will be easy to understand and simple to use.
11 years on from Satoshi, there are armies of speculators, billion dollar ‘valuations’ and no lack of world changing ideas, but all have failed the test of being in any meaningful way useful when it comes to the tricky question of actually benefitting the world.
So where does that leave us?
Right back to where Satoshi started.
7. A world in crisis.
It is said that history doesn’t repeat, but it does rhyme, and the global pandemic has familiar echoes of Bitcoin’s origin narrative.
Satoshi architected the perfect genetic code necessary to a new species of money, Bitcoin.
He then waited for the precise moment to plant the new species, the 2008 Financial Crisis.
At that moment, he distributed the whitepaper to the only group that cared — the Cypherpunks.
And finally, he nurtured Bitcoin to a stage where it no longer needed him
Dan Held, Planting Bitcoin
11 years since the crypto-currency experiment began, the world faces a new economic crisis that dwarfs the scale of the first and brings with it an even more immediate effect on the world.
An invisible enemy that cares little for borders and is hospitalising unprecedented numbers and killing thousands — framing the deaths of health workers making the ultimate sacrifice in stark contrast to images of 2008’s out of work bankers.
This time the crisis is first and foremost a public health emergency, whose human stories can be shared and told through a fully developed digital media ecosystem.
When Bitcoin arrived in 2008, Facebook was just four years old, YouTube was three, Spotify two and Netflix had switched to streaming just a year earlier.
Satoshi used the financial crisis to inspire a powerful mythology that created the most secure economic network the world has ever known.
Now, as 2020’s chaos unfolds popping the speculative bubble of the crypto-markets with it, a new communications paradigm can empower a new narrative, that puts people, community and the public good front and centre.
A movement has started
Whilst China has kept a tight grip on the stories coming out of Wuhan, Twitter has become home to the global conversation, with the most up to date information distilled and produced by a new type of influencer — experts in epidemiology, complex systems and mathematical modelling.
Legions of experts from around the world have crunched numbers, answered questions and spent their spare time communicating directly with those interested to understand warnings of impending chaos, that has revealed the inadequacies of established institutions of academia, government and media.
A new movement is finding its voice as open source technology, digital communications and the collective intelligence of the crowd comes together to solve problems the old world can’t.
From Nextstrain modeling DNA data, Open Source Facebook groups for medical supplies, community aid groups sorting home deliveries for the most vulnerable and and even some stern public information messages…
With millions quarantined at home, there is also a rising requirement for shared streaming entertainment, to sit alongside trusted and transparent information and education.
2020 will be a turning point in human history, a shared cultural event that has the potential to spark a revolution in every aspect of our lives.
8. A human centric crypto-currency
In 2015 a team of developers with experience contributing to the Bitcoin project set out to evolve Bitcoin’s design and create and fund technology for the public benefit through a project called Decred (Decentralised Credits).
The project mission is to develop technology for the public benefit, with a primary focus on cryptocurrency technology.
Sharing Bitcoin’s cypherpunk philosophy advocating cryptography as a tool for social change, social impact and freedom of expression, they set out to address three fundamental issues that they believed held back the long term potential of the nascent network.
- ‘Proof of work’ security model. Instead of relying purely on miners to secure the network they added ‘proof of stake’ to the mix via a hybrid system, enabling holders of the network’s currency to also check transactions and share in the reward for securing the network.
- Lack of adaptable governance. The hybrid system enabled opt-in governance participation via a ticket system, allowing the community to approve blocks, changes ot consensus rules, and control project level decisions via Politea. These systems help avoid protracted disputes and chain splits — where a sub-community breaks off and creates an alternative version of the currency.
- Unsustainable funding. In Decred miners receive 60% of the block reward whilst stakers receive 30% for securing the network. The final 10% of the reward is directed into a network treasury whose spend is directed by a governance platform called Politea, ensuring the community can be sustainably funded over the long term.
Decred owe its existence to Bitcoin, but the decision changes in its core design have created an entirely new breed of human-centric crypto-currency, that empowers, rather than enslaves.
In comparison to Bitcoin, the Decred implementation has made several significant changes.
It has expanded the rules of the contract which adds extra dimensions to the social layer.
Decred enables people who hold the currency to collaborate and decide about the future of the project.
Decred’s ability to coordinate and fund contributions from people around the world means that it can create, shape and evolve it’s own distinct cultural narrative — and provide the foundation for a thousand more.
If Bitcoin demands your work, then Decred rewards your creativity.
9. Decentralised Autonomous Organisations
In the 4 years since launch, Decred has amassed a small but intelligent and open minded community who are recruited and paid for their contributions in DCR, the native currency of the network.
Anyone, anywhere, under their real name or anonymously, can submit a proposal on Politea that is then discussed and iterated, before currency holders who lock up their DCR currency for an extended period of time vote to accept or reject it.
Just as Bitcoin introduced the world to something completely new, so Decred pioneers a working Decentralised Autonomous Organisation — aka a DAO.
DAOs lower the costs of coordination at both a local and global scale, removing many of the bureaucratic elements of existing organisations, enabling contributors to spend less time sourcing or managing stakeholders and more time contributing useful work.
Successful Politea proposals now fund over 70 contributors and project teams from around the world who build technology, contribute code, research and produce educational documentation, create podcasts, videos and enable the organisation and coordination of events around the world.
It funded a researcher — RichardRed to produce Cryptocommons.cc, (referenced earlier). Crypto Commons is an open source resource that gives an academic appraisal of the existing crypo-ecosystem, demonstrating the potential of the project to fund more than just code in the public interest.
Decred is a remarkable experiment in distributed human organisation and employment.
Decred, The Resilient Stronghold, Checkmate
Decred as infrastructure for community DAOs
The underlying technology that makes Politea possible has laid the groundwork for a scaleable network of Decentralised Autonomous Organisations, that can fund, coordinate and elevate globally distributed communities — small and large, that are self-organised around shared goals.
Decred is a secure, adaptable and sustainably funded public network that uses its own native currency to incentivise creative contributions that will further the founding values of the community it represents.
10. Public Service Publishing in the internet era.
On the eve of the banking crisis Satoshi introduced a revolutionary new digital coordination technology and now, against the backdrop of societal chaos, Decred offers us the chance for a stepchange in decentralised contribution—coordinating globally distributed communities driven by shared values and purpose.
Community coordination
Utilising alternative implementation’s of Decred’s Politea system and emerging DAO infrastructure, we see an opportunity to create foundations for new cultural movements.
We are aiming to build a broad and trusted resource across a wide range of categories that benefit the public good — information, education and entertainment— to develop new kinds of digital native institutions that are optimised for a streaming media age.
Introducing Decent on Decred
Decent brings together a network of projects that are transparently funded and credibly sourced and enabled by the Decred technology stack, utilising the DCR currency, emerging DAO infrastructure, timestamping, ticket voting and the Lightning Network for micro-payments, donations and grantmaking.
The unique design of the Decred system enables external capital from a wide range of sources to flow into and through the project, pooling into the central treasury fund.
Capital that is staked in a Decred wallet gains both voting weight over community proposals through ticket voting and also earns yield in DCR through staking rewards — currently between 6–8% p.a.
Tickets that vote are called pseudorandomly — meaning they are produced by a mathematical model, but retain provable randomness. This design has the effect of mediating any agendas of the voting stakeholders.
This ensures that if the project presents a compelling narrative that encourages an ongoing flow of external capital to purchase DCR, then the overall public benefit mission of the project will be protected.
The future will be streamed
Many crypto projects have focused on building crypto-incented social networks or message boards. However the digital media ecosystem of 2020 is dominated by streaming media services.
Today, 80% of all internet bandwidth is consumed by video streaming.
It’s easy to understand why: video is engaging, educational, illuminating, and empowering.
To inspire rapid cultural change and to challenge the new media status quo, any solution needs to make use of the streaming of on demand and live video.
Projects such as LivePeer are using blockchain technology to solve the biggest barrier to the scaling of new streaming services — namely the cost to transcode video.
Video is insanely expensive to stream — and even more expensive to live stream.
Today, this process costs around $3 per stream per hour to a cloud service such as Amazon, up to $4500 per month for one media server, and up to $1500 per month before bandwidth for a content delivery network.
Composibility of crypto networks
Much has been written about Ethereum’s interoperability and composibility— the ability for different projects in the ecosystem to connect with and build on each others work. This approach enables the ecosystem to build out faster but at the expense of security and stability, since all projects inherit and compound each others issues.
Rather than leveraging risk through independent components of a single blockchain, we believe that a cross-chain composibility strategy, that builds on the key strengths of securely designed projects will enable a more resilient and scaleable approach.
Decent’s ecosystem design
Decred is the most secure, adaptable and sustainable crypto-currency design currently in existence. Through its thoughtful design it enables transparent allocation of capital, with prior agendas mediated through pseudorandom ticket voting, whilst its digital governance system Politea enables the coordination and funding of creative contributions from anyone, anywhere.
Livepeer is building open source video infrastructure services on the Ethereum blockchain that will enable a new generation of streaming services to compete with established players.
Together, they offer core building blocks that can from the foundations for public service streaming media institutions, optimised for digital networks.
What might this system enable?
Wikipedia
Wikipedia was launched on January 15th 2001, with the goal of making a publicly editable encyclopedia.
Nearly 20 years on it is a true wonder of the digital age, a modern day Museum of Alexandria — with over 6,036,830 english language articles, 38,568,171 registered editors, and 138,711 active editors.
It is one of the last remaining vestiges of an older world wide web, driven by public service over profit.
Wikipedia, criminally under-appreciated, a nonprofit compendium of human knowledge maintained by everyone.
There is no more useful website.
It is browsable and rewards curiosity without stealing your preferences and selling them to marketers.
Heroes of the 2010s, Mother Jones
Wikipedia’s editorial output is sustained through global community contribution and was originally funded by donations, both of time and money.
Over time as the project has gained cultural impact, it has taking funding from other sources, whilst still protecting its public service mission, leading to the creation of the Wikimedia Endowment which has the target of raising $100m from 2016 to 2026 with fundraising currently standing at $56m.
Access to knowledge is a fundamental human right.
The Wikimedia Endowment is our enduring commitment to a world of freely shared knowledge, now and in perpetuity.
Wikipedia faces challenges
Much of this money is to help the project navigate a new communications reality, both in terms of the type of content produced, how it is created and published and where the next generation of users will come from.
Millennials increasingly need their information delivered via small video-clips and other multimedia.
Wikipedia has a huge challenge if it wants to connect with users in the long-term, to keep up with changing needs and making content engaging, open and inclusive.
The fund allows Wikipedia to evolve, but the way the money is used is detached from the wider community it represents.
What could it have achieved if it had been built on top of a sustainable funding source that was governed by all of the stakeholders, not just a few?
What if its financial model relied not on a traditional endowment, but scaled in line with its cultural contribution and network reach?
What if it was optimised for the streaming media ecosystem of 2020?
Intrinsic funding of digital institutions
Decred’s design enables intrinsic funding, governance and public benefit mission, creating the conditions for value creation that has the potential to far exceed Bitcoin, in terms of economic and cultural productivity, whilst measurably improving the world.
How much cash could Bitcoin have had, if Bitcoin had Decred’s design and a Treasury Fund?
Up to $18 Billion.
What could Wikipedia have been with the content budget of Netflix?
What could the collective intelligence of a global network of stakeholders and contributors achieve?
Foundations for the development of a fairer and more transparent global society that builds a new world from the chaos of the old?
Which organizations are suitable DAO candidates? Charities, NGOs, and non-profit organizations.
A DAO structure can effectively help non-profit entities to save operational expenses associated with keeping themselves transparent and to enable a global team structure that can easily scale.
A final thought
Like every good story we return to where we began, considering the history of Public Service Broadcasting.
How might that initial outline compare when seen through the lens of Decred and Decent?
Neither commercial nor state-controlled, Decred’s only raison d’etre is public benefit.
DCR is money for a world without borders.
It speaks to everyone — we don’t need to know your name, age, gender, sexual orientation, or ethnicity — you will only be judged on the quality of your contributions.
Decred’s cryptocurrency technology is designed to encourage access to and participation in communities that benefit the public good.
Decent’s mission is to develop knowledge, broaden horizons and enable people to better understand themselves by better understanding the world and others.
About Decent
Decent co-ordinates a global network of established and emerging creative talent for whom a public benefit principals are core to their values.
Filmmakers, writers, photographers, artists, multi-disciplinary designers, VFX teams, developers, community builders, open source developers and engineers, driven by a public service mission.
Decred community contributions
In late 2019 Decent began contributing to the Decred community since it was becoming obvious that the project’s team were guided by the same public benefit mission as our team and there was clearly an opportunity to contribute meaningful value.
Our experience
Our experience sits at the intersection of digital storytelling, community development and emerging technology platforms, whilst our core interest is on developing projects that exist to serve the public interest.
Since 2015 we have been researching and investing in a range of crypto projects that have focussed on addressing three key areas — governance, sustainable funding and communities that prioritise the public good.
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