At the end of February, the WordPress community gathers in Miami for WordCamp Miami. For WordProof, it will be the first time we physically present our solution in the United States, as I’ll be speaking at this wonderful conference. The main topic will be how WordPress and blockchain can lead to a more trustworthy internet.
The event was held at Florida’s International University. Here’s the video of my talk:
How would you compete with a CMS with tens of millions of users, and tens of thousands of contributors like #WordPress?
How to fight disinformation? Yesterday, Nieuwsuur broadcasted an item highlighting three initiatives to decrease the impact of fake news. WordProof.io is one of them. Thanks to Rudy Bouma and Fleur Damen for making this important item.
A fragment from Ledger Leopard‘s webinar on Self-Sovereign Identities with Jimmy Snoek from Tykn and Sebastiaan van der Lans, WordProof‘s founder. Olivier Rikken, CEO of Ledger Leopard, hosted the webinar. We discuss Self-Sovereign Identities and Decentralised Identifiers (DIDs) for Content. See it as a certificate of birth for content, respecting its history, authors, and workflow.
Learn more about Self-Sovereign Identities at SSI Meetup.org. Amazing webinars by Drummond Reed and other thought leaders on decentralized identities.
If you are working on Self-Sovereign Identity for content too, please reach out to us as we’d love to collaborate. Any feedback on current thinking is very very welcome. Let’s fix the broken web, together!
With Self-Sovereign Identities and Decentralized Identifiers for content, a Certificate of Birth for Content can be achieved, respecting its history and workflow. All in a totally Open-Source manner.
Here’s a fragment from the Q&A in Europe’s ‘Blockchains for Social Good’ Finalist’s Day. Frank van Dalen, partner in WordProof, answers a question on adoption: “why would tech giants adopt it?”. This post transcribes his answer, including links to relevant sources.
Why would tech giants adopt WordProof’s Timestamp Ecosystem?
Actually, it’s really a challenging question. Why would tech giants take our stuff? And let’s not be naive; they won’t, I mean:
They make money out of fake news;
They make money out of fraudulent advertisements.
They want to do it their way because they’re centralized bodies.
The Role of Regulation
We as an open-source community really have to push them into the right direction. Luckily for us, we have a lot of help from the European Union with legislation coming in, directives coming in, but still what we see on a daily basis is that those tech giants are lobbying, saying “what you’re asking is something we cannot do. You ask us to distinguish fake from real news, but how would we know? If someone tells me something about Africa or Asia, how do I know what is real and what is not real?”
This is where at timestamps come in, but timestamps as such will not be a solution either. Because where does it come from? Do we have the right tier level in place to actually know who gave it and that this individual or the organization is legit?
Tier Levels and Social Media
But how do we deal with a legit organization that is still spreading out fake news? We see that in politics happening all day long. This is where the consumer comes in and needs to be able to say like, “listen, I don’t want to see anything from this organization, even though it’s in tier level seven. I know who it is. I don’t want to see it.”
And Facebook, and other tech giants, should be able to say: “Everything below tier level three, it will be published as we are not about censorship. It will be published, but will not get distribution beyond your own list of friends.
Search Engines and Timestamps
And when it comes to Google, the search engines, how does Google know who really owns the stuff? So, what we are working on is [integration in] Schema.org. That we actually provide tools in the [search engine’s] language to fulfill their promises, to create a secure internet. Because that’s also what they promise.
Decrease Advertising Fraud with Blockchain Timestamps and Identity
So, and about fraud. We’ve seen all those advertisements about buying Bitcoins and we are talking to people from [large media companies], where the CEO is constantly showing up in those Bitcoin fraudulent advertisements.
This is where that multi-tier level comes in, where the model in the advertisement, the advertisement agency, and the commercial is timestamped. Because only when we get created triangle, we will have a really sustainable mechanism to say like, “this is legit and this is not”.
So well, they don’t automatically [adopt], probably not. But we’ll provide them the tools to actually do so. And we’ll tell the European union they can just continue with the legislation because there are answers, even though the big [tech giants] are saying there are not.
Here’s a fragment from the Q&A in Europe’s ‘Blockchains for Social Good’ Finalist’s Day. Frank van Dalen, a partner in WordProof, answers a question on WordProof’s business model and the road to adoption. This post transcribes his answer, including links to relevant sources.
How do your business models allow you to build technology so that we can all feel safe?
WordProof’s business model is pretty straight forward. You can do it open source, and you can do a SaaS solution, then it does have lots of features to it. There is a free plan and there’s a paid plan, but the question is why would people actually do it?
Protect Fast and Fluid Content in Online Environments
Secondly, we talked with a really big media developing companies and what they said to us is: “We have [television formats], brands, for which we can hire a whole team of lawyers and notaries to protect our brand. But we are more and more moving towards the online environment. And this is cheap and very fluid content, but we still want to protect it and we cannot have a whole legal team. Let alone that those people are making this content and not willing to write down the concept”.
This is where they recognize the timestamping comes in [as timestamping is an affordable and open solution to achieve protection].
Thirdly, we have a lot of publishers who say like, “We make really great content, but sometimes even with our consent stuff was published on another, media, which is bigger”.
Guess what, Google thinks that they created it. So they are now knocking on our doors like, can you help us? And actually small matters again.
It’s those kinds of concepts that are driving scalability. And when it comes to the technical part of scalability, last year we did a real-life test. Can we do 100,000 timestamps within a couple of hours without systems collapsing?
We did not do it in our test environment but we went to a real media publisher and they were like, “you’re not going to ruin our system, are you? Are our readers going to notice?”. We promised them no they won’t, and they didn’t. We timestamped more than 100.000 pieces of content to show it is possible in a real-life environment.
So yeah, let’s see where we are in two years from now.
WordProof is one of the 23 finalists selected out of the 178 applications received for the 5 x €1.000.000 EIC Horizon Prize on ‘Blockchains for Social Good’. Monday, February 10th, was Finalists’ Day. 23 initiatives gave a pitch and demo. Here’s the full transcript of WordProof’s pitch, presenting the impact of our solutions on social good aspects and the underlying economic model.
On January 31st, The Government Blockchain Association organized a summit called The Future of Money, Governance, and the Law. At this event, government leaders from around the world discussed their 2020 plans focusing on blockchain technology and cryptocurrency. Among Tim Draper and blockchain’s inventor Scott Stornetta, Dan Larimer was a keynote speaker. As always, his keynote was stuffed with insights, analogies, and examples.
Here’s a fully searchable transcript of his keynote and Q&A, enriched with a table of contents:
Right before my talk at WordCamp Europe 2019, I had the pleasure to be interviewed by Sunita Karmacharya from DevotePress. In this article, I share a transcript with a table of contents and some valuable links on the topics we’ve discussed.
On January 16th, 1 day after Drupal’s 19th birthday, the dutch Drupal community organized the 30th edition of Drupal Tech Talk. I had the pleasure to present a Pecha Kucha (20 slides x 20 minutes, what better way is there to start 2020?) on open-source, blockchain, and WordProof!
Firstly, here’s the video of the presentation, followed by every slide, the sentences I’ve used (in Pecha Kucha’s, I script every single line) and its source, where relevant. Enjoy!
Read further for a full transcript per slide of this Drupal Tech Talk on blockchain timestamps.
Firstly, I found this list of powerful eCommerce statistics to guide your strategy. Then I added stats on disputes in eCommerce, which I found through WordProof’s participation in Europe’s Blockchains for Social Good contest. Lastly, I enhanced the relevant stats with what impact blockchain will have on them.
After the stats, I dive deeper into how timestamping eCommerce content and orders can drastically reduce disputes between buyers and sellers. Accordingly, timestamps will improve eCommerce as a whole.
