Anil Dash’s piece on applying an underlying concept of Bitcoin to track digital art has me thinking about the potential applications of blockchains for news. As he writes:
What the technology behind Bitcoin enables, in short, is the ability to track online trading of a digital object, without relying on any one central authority, by using the block chain as the ledger of transactions.
What if we built a blockchain system for news? Recording and verifying facts, data, updates, quotes, people, etc like the Bitcoin protocol tracks transactions in a database that no one owns, but of which everyone always has the same copy. (Update: This is meant more as “inspired by blockchains,” but it would be different kind of system because we’re not dealing with transferring or owning the units.)
How useful would that be in the reporting and dissemination of information? With all the noise introduced during breaking news and even long, complex story arcs, it seems like there’s a lot of potential here.
The nature and task of art is different from news, but there’s much we can learn (stay tuned for more posts on that topic). Consider this from Anil’s piece:
Reblogging is essential to getting the word out for many digital artists, but potentially devastating to the value of the very work it is promoting. What’s been missing, then, are the instruments that physical artists have used to invent value around their work for centuries — provenance and verification.
Think of these two key terms he uses.
Provenance.
Verification.
In the context of news, provenance could be the source of information — or it could be who first reported something. Verification, of course, is already a common term.
The next question then is: What instruments do we have to give our work value?
Not methods. Instruments.
All this — you guessed it — also makes me think of GitHub for News (more here). That idea would make tracking updates, contributions, feedback and even facts more structured by incorporating them in a versioning system like git.
Neither GitHub for News nor Blockchains for News would solve all the problems they aim to tackle. Anil’s piece smartly notes in the art realm:
as with any new idea, it can be difficult to reckon with the implications. Steven Melendez asserted that monegraph could “eradicate fake digital art”, when this is exactly backwards. In fact monegraph makes it possible to have “fake digital art”, because prior to this we had no consistent way of defining an “original”.
So, where should we start?
UPDATE: More discussion and explanation…
@spetulla This would have nothing to do with funding, actually. It’s just applying the same fundamentals of the Bitcoin protocol to news.
— Greg Linch (@greglinch) July 18, 2014
@spetulla This would be more granular & in the background—the pieces underlying what’s reported or presented & how they’re stored/verified.
— Greg Linch (@greglinch) July 18, 2014
@mg Thanks! I think @Circa’s way of structuring news is a good model for the units a block chain for news would track.
— Greg Linch (@greglinch) July 18, 2014
@abenomixx @mathewi In the context of news, I think making the data/information transactions more public would be a feature.
— Greg Linch (@greglinch) July 18, 2014
@abenomixx @mathewi Interesting. I guess I see a news-specific implementation more about the ledger than only X, Y, Z people can access.
— Greg Linch (@greglinch) July 18, 2014
@paulmwatson @mathewi Right, this is more “inspired by block chains” than actual block chains — recording & verifying info instead of owning
— Greg Linch (@greglinch) July 18, 2014
@paulmwatson @mathewi Also from a sense of tracking the origin and development of data, facts, quotes, updates, etc.
— Greg Linch (@greglinch) July 18, 2014
@greglinch @paulmwatson @mathewi that was part of my long term vision / inspiration for http://t.co/zVWI6zGgUY – I hate the current system
— Manuel Aráoz (@maraoz) July 19, 2014
@greglinch @mathewi gotcha, establish sources and prevent/highlight tampering. Interesting.
— Paul Watson (@paulmwatson) July 18, 2014
@greglinch @mathewi yea, a ‘GIT’ or version tracking for news, whereby cryptographic proofs keep original stakeholders accountable to claims
— BenderDrummer (@BenderDrummer) July 18, 2014
@BenderDrummer @mathewi GitHub for News is a long-held interest http://t.co/UtWycLKVH8 http://t.co/kygmYueJrm Now only to marry the 2 ideas…
— Greg Linch (@greglinch) July 18, 2014
@greglinch @GlenFCochrane Parsers for news. I do think we need a news-specific data format.
— Sam Petulla (@spetulla) July 19, 2014
@spetulla @GlenFCochrane One recent attempt: hNews http://t.co/EGn7GrdIkh See also NITF http://t.co/eHwZFNGosM ANPA http://t.co/vhHlp0zxD5
— Greg Linch (@greglinch) July 19, 2014
@greglinch @spetulla @GlenFCochrane NewsML is pretty solid. IPTC taxonomies too. The gray-haired news nerds on whose shoulders we stand.
— Scott Klein (@kleinmatic) July 19, 2014
@greglinch this is a wiki/vcs not a block chain (like you say in the post), I admire the idea PoW just cuts down on spam, doesn’t add value.
— Jeff Larson (@thejefflarson) July 19, 2014
@thejefflarson Thanks! It seems like there’s some kind of opportunity to learn from the nature of the system re built-in verification.
— Greg Linch (@greglinch) July 19, 2014
@thejefflarson For example, @maraoz‘s project http://t.co/SwoV2rKfav (cited by @anildash here http://t.co/bJqjOY5zM1)
— Greg Linch (@greglinch) July 19, 2014
@greglinch @pmarca Something like Filecoin (http://t.co/xAilX4MSB5) or Maidsafe (http://t.co/MRIbVrHxXl) using blockchain for file storage?
— Younes Bensadik (@younix) July 19, 2014
@younix @greglinch @pmarca fyi maidsafe isn’t blockchain based – different approach
— Nik Custodio (@nik5ter) July 19, 2014
@greglinch @pmarca Underlying cryptocurrencies is the binary true/false of mathematics. A sum has the same answer wherever you calculate 1/3
— Majordamo (@MajorDamo) July 19, 2014
@greglinch @pmarca truth in journalism is always subjective, so I’m not sure you could have a system that worked the same way.
— Majordamo (@MajorDamo) July 19, 2014
@MajorDamo @pmarca Completely agreed. This would be tailored to journalism — more like a structured peer review-like system for news.
— Greg Linch (@greglinch) July 19, 2014
@greglinch @pmarca peer review system, maybe “You have logged this ‘scoop’, so it is yours to publish, once your competitors have verified”
— Majordamo (@MajorDamo) July 19, 2014
@greglinch @pmarca but I like it. Intuitively, it seems it could work.
— Majordamo (@MajorDamo) July 19, 2014
@greglinch @pmarca it wouldn’t have to be perfect, just be able to provide a metric for the integrity of a report.
— Majordamo (@MajorDamo) July 19, 2014
@MajorDamo @pmarca Exactly. And give more structure and standardization to how news is reported, gathered, disseminated.
— Greg Linch (@greglinch) July 19, 2014
@greglinch yeah but every git commit is a verification. You can even GPG sign them. Blockchains are designed to stop spam from attackers.
— Jeff Larson (@thejefflarson) July 19, 2014
@greglinch a verification network is a good idea, but you don’t need to stop attackers in news the way you need to with money.
— Jeff Larson (@thejefflarson) July 19, 2014
@greglinch @thejefflarson Block chains don’t help w/ real world verification unfortunately. BCs represent a shared transferrable scarcity.
— Ted Han (@knowtheory) July 19, 2014
@greglinch the only thing that matters in bitcoin is the transaction. It is a record that something mathematical happened.
— Jeff Larson (@thejefflarson) July 19, 2014
@greglinch @thejefflarson Value in block chains is entirely representational/social
— Ted Han (@knowtheory) July 19, 2014
@greglinch @thejefflarson So even if you were to say they represent “facts”, best you can do is “so & so thinks this is true”
— Ted Han (@knowtheory) July 19, 2014
@greglinch @thejefflarson It’s interesting to explore social mechanisms of belief, but i dunno that you need a block chain to do it.
— Ted Han (@knowtheory) July 19, 2014
@greglinch @GlenFCochrane @spetulla we were actually talking about your bitcoin post in @Circa office today. Could apply if you atomize news
— David Cohn (@Digidave) July 19, 2014
@greglinch @pmarca Like @el33th4xor‘s virtual notary (http://t.co/Q6dms1RtEC)? It even ties into bitcoin’s blockchain.
— Robert Escriva (@rescrv) July 19, 2014
@greglinch Already done: http://t.co/FNb6ZQpcPl http://t.co/p349RywbuZ
— Emin Gün Sirer (@el33th4xor) July 19, 2014
.@greglinch Re: your Bitcoin-Journalism ideas. It seems like a Bitcoin use case could be as a ledger for public data. http://t.co/IZ6O2L18DV
— Sam Petulla (@spetulla) September 8, 2014
Also, just for fun and more Bitcoin background: By reading this article, you’re mining bitcoins
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