At London Fintech Week (Juli 26th, 2017), Brendan Blumer talked about timestamps during his presentation called Decentralized Funding and the New Corporate Structure.
In five years from now, if you don’t timestamp your articles on the blockchain, you’re going to be considered a fraud.
Brendan Blumer, CEO Block.One, 2017, London
That quote played an important role in the inception of WordProof. Here’s a transcript of that quote and its context:
I want to jump straight into examples, as I think examples are some of the best ways to understand what’s going on and how these things are functioning.
So, I want to look at SteemIt. It is a very interesting project, it is a content network, where everything that you see on SteemIt.com is actually on the blockchain. It is a blockchain itself. In fact, this website has no central server. It is actually a block explorer.
I don’t know if you guys have ever seen something like etherscan, where you actually can go in and read what’s going on on the blockchain itself. That is what this website is. Everything is on the blockchain, every piece of content, every interaction.
And it lives in a completely decentralized capacity, in which nobody can shut it down, nobody can take control of it, and it is accessible by everybody. It removes the ability to censor data completely.
Blockchain is becoming part of best practices.
In five years from now, if you don’t timestamp your articles on the blockchain, you’re going to be considered a fraud.
If you don’t put your content on the blockchain, you’re going to be considered a revisionist or someone that censors material.
Timestamping is becoming a part of best practices, and these organizations will become something that people can trust, at a degree that you can’t trust centralized entities.
So SteemIt is a really phenomenal project.
- Every time you actually create content and you put it on the blockchain,
- Every day a certain amount of tokens are emitted from the network, and those go to all the content creators, proportioned to how much the public has upvoted or liked that content.
- If you want to advertise on that platform, like you would promote a post on Facebook or Google AdWords, you need to buy tokens from those people that had created content.
Now you’ve just completely closed the economic loop. There is no profit, right? Profits can represent pricing inefficiency. When a shirt costs $5 and you’re paying $10, $5 of that is essentially wasted and has gone to the people who did the work to actually bring you that product, but when the community is doing the work itself, you don’t need to think about things like that.
So it becomes very difficult for centralized entities to compete on a pricing level and on an innovation level.
I often use this quote in presentations, like this one From WordPress to Blockchain, the Future is 100% Open Source at WordCamp Europe 2019 and 4 Solutions to Fix the Broken Web.
Other quotes on integrity in content can be found in this transcript of Dan Larimer when he discusses integrity in news during a Q&A.