Block.One is a leader in the blockchain industry. Brendan Blumer is its CEO, and Dan Larimer its CTO. On June 1st, 2019, they announced Voice.com, the blockchain-based social media platform they’re building. As Brendan stated: Social media has not been a good friend to us. It was designed to use its users.
They also revealed the first Voice.com marketing message:
- Unfriend bots;
- Unlike shady algorithms;
- Unfollow being followed;
- Voice.
Like many of their presentations, this keynote was packed with wonderful insights and quotes. Their thinking truly helps the general blockchain industry forward, that’s why I invest time in properly transcribing them, to make their thoughts searchable and quotable!
Brendan Blumer on Voice.com at B1June
I want to go back to 2008. Stock market crashes, and so does our faith in Wall Street and the financial system as we know it. For a century now money’s revolved around these hundred-year-old institutions. Yet here we are watching Wall Street buckle overnight.
At the society, we start waking up to the fact that these institutions that we’ve been taught to trust our money with, the ones that we’ve been taught to depend on for day-to-day life, they just aren’t trustworthy or dependable at all, and real people are paying the price.
And, all of a sudden we start wondering; is there a better way? A fairer way for this whole system to function? Innovators get to work and bitcoin is born, cryptocurrency is born.
Now, it sounds quite technical, but it’s really just visionary. Cryptocurrency enabled a new approach to money, commodities, and finance in general. One that doesn’t need to depend on invisible middlemen, and can be built and run by its users, through transparent sets of checks and balances and we all know what happens from there. It just takes off.
But amidst this Bitcoin and cryptocurrency boom, an even bigger opportunity is what Block.One is focused on: the technology it’s all built on; the blockchain.
Blockchain isn’t just for finance. Shipping, healthcare, those drones that will soon be delivering your dinner. Virtually anything the internet touches, blockchain can improve when making the data systems underneath more securely and transparently than ever.
So, in 2017 we break blockchain out of the cryptocurrency world and build EOS.IO, the world’s highest performance blockchain software. Thanks to you, it’s the world’s most used.
It has one goal: to make blockchain available to all, so anyone can leverage its benefits, to restore trust in the systems we all rely on. And that’s sort of what we’ve been up to ever since; building a platform, a framework that enables people to create a better world.
Now let’s fast forward to today. Governments and brands are already leveraging blockchain to revolutionize how their organizations work, but omit all this extraordinary progress, our attention has been captured by a larger social problem, stemming from outdated technology and outdated business models.
Yet another broken system that we all rely on every day:
Social media has not been a good friend to us.
And as in 2008, real people are footing the bill for what an elite few have decided are the
rules of engagement. From data theft to misinformation to rampant cyberbullying; the costs are just all too real. And people? They’re upset.
Regulators are trying to keep up with a smattering of penalties. Lawsuits are being filed and social giants are scrambling to make things right by their users by professing new sets of values seemingly overnight, promising to do better by their users.
But, the fact is, you can’t rebuild a house when the foundation is crumbling.
The truth is, social media was designed to use its users.
Just look at the business model:
- our content;
- our data;
- our attention.
These are all incredibly valuable things, but right now it’s the companies, not the users, that reap the rewards.
By design:
- they run by auctioning our information off to advertisers;
- pocketing the profit;
- flooding our feeds with hidden agendas dictated by the highest bidder.
We’re rewriting the formula: we’re breaking through the smoke and mirrors and we’re blocking out the hidden players. We’re leveraging the EOS.IO public blockchain to build a more transparent and aligned social media platform for the world, and here’s what I mean by that:
- We’re building a platform where users directly benefit from their ideas of engagement.
- Where the value of good content gets circulated right back to the users and the community. Not just corporate bottom lines.
In other words, what we’re aiming for is a truly self-sustaining economy of thoughts and ideas, where what’s good for the platform, is good for the users too.
We’re building a platform where real people connect with real people, not bots, not hidden trolls. The bottom line is: social media is where the majority of discourse and news sharing happens today, and it’s never been more important to know that who we’re interacting with and who we’re getting our information from, is a real person that’s accountable for what they say and share.
We built this to type accountability into the platform. And finally, we’re building a platform where everything, from who backs content to how content services, is out there in the open for everyone to see. This transparency is one of the beauties of blockchain, that we made sure was a core part of the experience.
Everyone – the user, the platform, the contributor – plays by the same rules. No hidden algorithms and no invisible interests. Just a level playing field where everyone gets an equal chance to be heard, where everyone has a voice.
Texts in the video:
- Unfriend bots;
- Unlike shady algorithms;
- Unfollow being followed;
- Voice.
Now, to show you how this all comes to life, let me bring Dan back up.
Dan Larimer on Voice.com at B1June
Thank You Brendan.
Social media was intended for good, putting people in charge of what content they see and share.
Through social media, we learn what other people really think, but it’s become less about what you want to see and more about what big companies, anonymous bot operators and internet trolls want you to see.
We are here to change that, and guess what we’re going to use to do that? The Voice token. We believe that everybody deserves a voice. This is why the voice token has the fairest token distribution model in the world.
It isn’t created by buying it or burning electricity. It can only be created by being a real person, producing real content, liked by real people. When you participate, you earn.
The voice token is used to reward unique users, content creation, and content discovery. You use these rewards, to raise your voice on the platform.
On a lot of social platforms, setting up an account is pretty fast and loose.
You come up with a username and password, provide an email address or phone number and you’re in.
If we’ve learned anything from trolls, catfishing, and bots, it’s that fake users can have some pretty dire consequences.
What are we doing about this?
Voice authenticates users to ensure that every account on our platform belongs to a real person. It’s designed to prevent abuse.
Bottomline it seeks to ensure that real people can actually talk with other real people on our platform. Let me show you how this works.
After I’ve proven that I am in fact Dan Larimer and logged in to Voice, I can go and do what we do in all social platforms: share content that matters to me. That content can take any form on Voice; whether it’s a long-form think piece, a video, a photo, or maybe a short
blurb. And after I posted my article, others who find it can like it.
Unlike other platforms that use “like” to benefit the platform and not the author, voice rewards the author with tokens.
The more users who like what you say, the more you earn and the more visible your content becomes. Bot armies and anonymous trolls cannot manipulate this, therefore they cannot manipulate you.
So, what can you do with the voice token you earn?
You can use it to increase the visibility of your own content or use it to allow others to discover content you find valuable.
Let’s say I come across content posted by Brendan. I can comment, but I can also increase the visibility of the comment and his article; I can simply voice it.
If I voice it, I spend my tokens to move my comment to the top of all the other comments and if someone else decides to Voice it after me, I get my tokens back and some extra too.
The point is, on Voice you don’t need a million followers to have an impact.
It’s the people, not the editors or the algorithms, directly deciding what makes it to the top; which ideas get Voiced, if you will.
And this is just one way to use your tokens and a first look at Voice. Voice.com is now live and you can sign up for beta access today.
So, what does this mean for EOS? It means everyone that signs up for voice, will also, get an EOS account that they can use with Voice and other apps on the EOS blockchain.
Identity enables a whole new social media experience, and we know that blockchain-based identity will revolutionize much more than social media. This changes everything, and we cannot wait to see what people do with it.
Before I wrap up, I just wanted to thank everyone for traveling from all around the world to be with us here today. The passion and energy of this amazing community never cease to amaze me.
Brendan:
As a company, Block.One is committed to continuing to bring alignment and transparency to the world through our product design and today we start one voice at a time.
So thanks, good night and we’ll see you all on Voice.com.
Related transcripts:
- Full transcript: Brendan Blumer – What’s the future of Blockchain?
- Full transcript: Dan Larimer – Blockchain is about Integrity by Design
- Full transcript: Dan Larimer – How Blockchain is Evolving (Q&A)