Bitcoin and the immutable web

I've been thinking about what some of the next layer of apps that will be built on top of Bitcoin will be. Certainly, OpenBazaar is one of the more exciting applications and I believe has the potential to be the retail layer for ecommerce. Also, Storj has promise as a distributed Dropbox (although I believe it will possibly be replaced by a version that uses Bitcoin as the currency as opposed to it's own native token). Something that has yet to have been discussed much is what I will refer to in this blog as "The Immutable Web" (or unchangeable web). It's possible that the DATT project will turn into something like what I'm describing, but right now, they're describing the project as "A community with great content, where people get paid for their work.", which, while interesting is not exactly what I am going to describe here.

What do I mean by the immutable web? Well, to understand, lets say you had a piece of data, possibly text data, but any type of content will do, and wanted to ensure that people 1000 years from now were able to see it. How would you do it? Well, it would actually be quite hard to do reliably with today's technology. In particular, it's been very difficult to do this throughout history because during wars, the victors frequently destroyed libraries and other "content" throughout history. One of the often cited cases of this is the destruction of The Library of Alexandria. Some might argue that that doesn't happen anymore, but that's not accurate. Unfortunately, it is still the case that data is being destroyed by those that don't want information to be free. It's tempting to argue that this would not be the case when storing data with a popoular service like Facebook, Google, etc. For instance if you were to post a video on Youtube would it remain there for ever? Well, there's no reason to believe that data would be preserved and in fact, it seems unlikely to me that it would be preserved for extended periods of time. Also, it's definitely impossible if you violate any of the terms of service of Youtube, not just now, but into the future. For example, if you put bumper music in the background that someone claims to own, your video will be taken down. In particular, far into the future what if someone claims some kind of infringement after your death? What if someone doesn't like what you said or doesn't want people to know about something you said? To make a long story short, it's not something you can count on at all and I think it's highly unlikely that data on the web can be preserved, unless we create the immutable web.

Ok, I will answer my own question about what the immutable web is without giving any more examples. The Immutable Web is a decentralized distributed database of all content types which through the use of encryption and cryptocurrency allows for an incentive for storage providers to host content and protects that content by distributing it and hiding the actual location through encryption techniques (such as onion routing).

To be clear, I'm not talking about paying content creators in this case (or at least not directly). I'm talking about a distribution system for that content that offers proper incentives to host content and ensures any data that is put into this system permanently stays in the public domain regardless of whether or not anyone else finds that content to be objectionable.

So, how do we do this? Well, the main prerequisite that hadn't been around until recently was Bitcoin. Before Bitcoin, such a system would have been impossible because the incentive structure would be impossible. Now, that we have Bitcoin, we can setup such a system. So, how do we build it? It is a complex undertaking, but I see it as a merging of Bitcoin + Bittorrent + I2P. I'm not saying that it will actually necessarily use those technologies directly, but it will be an amalgamation of them. If we had a merger of these three technologies, you'd have a situation where consumers pay storage providers for the download of data in such a way where the consumer (or any observer) actually has no idea where the data is being hosted (due to the onion routing). With Bittorrent, we have this today with very popular content. For instance, if you want to download a very popular song or video, it will generally be available, because people are always downloading popular content and therefore, if at least 10 people or so are always downloading a file, it will always be available as these 10 people will be transferring chunks of the files to each other and onto the next 10 users as they intermittently join the swarm. The problem comes in with rare or less popular content. If you have a file that someone only downloads once per day, it's very likely that that file will not be available because once one downloads a file, one frequently disconnect from the network to avoid giving away free bandwidth or being discovered as participating in the network. The way that Bittorrent works is leachers download content from seeders in small chunks. Once a leacher downloads a chunk, it becomes a seeder for that chunk. Clients prefer to send chunks to other clients that have seeded recently so it's a system that incentivises cooperation. The problem is that once you have your file, there is no incentive to participate in the network further because you don't need anything. That's where Bitcoin comes in. If we could replace this preference algorithm with Bitcoin as the incentive (in the form of extremely small micropayments), there'd be an incentive to stay on the network and host content that is profitable. This would create a free market for hosts to store files to consumers. If you think about it, this is essentially what Youtube is doing, but in a decentralized way. They're hosting and serving all this data in exchange for serving ads to consumers. It's profitable for them to host even unpopular content that gets only one or two views. If we replaced this system with something like this Bitcoin + Bittorrent + I2P combo that I'm describing, we'd have a distributed version of Youtube which would be much more efficient, distributed, cheaper (since viewing ads is not free), and perpetual. Since hosts would only make money off of content that people actually download, there might be some content that eventually disappears, but since Youtube has a very long tail, I believe this same sort of long tail would occur in the system I'm describing as well. Also, unlike Youtube, such as system would be censorship resistant. There would be no way to enforce things like the DMCA and users would be free to mash up content as desired. Systems to flag duplicates and spammers would also be possible. Obviously, non video content would be able to work in this system as well.

One of the other interesting features of such a system is that all content could be timestamped into the Bitcoin blockchain so you'd know, provably, exactly when content was uploaded and you'd also know that it was not tampered with. Effectively, once you upload data into this Immutable Web, it would permanently be available in it's initial state. Data loss would be eliminated.

What would a system like this look like to users? It would probably look much like Youtube.com or Blogger.com, but it would be open source so different clients with various UIs would be available. It would be a gateway to all content available through all time. A business similar to bitcoin mining would form around efficiently storing copies of this data around the world. Incentives for low latency could be put into place to encourage decentralization of data as well.

The societal impacts of such a technology would be enormous. As they say knowledge is power, so now we'd put the power of all the world's knowledge into the hands of everyone. Some may be concerned that it would be impossible to maintain intellectual property. This may be a somewhat valid concern, but effectively, even with Bittorrent this is the case. From what we've seen it's just changed the way that content producers make money. While the music industry has lost revenue that they once made through CD sales, they can still make money off of live performances, merchandising, endorsements, etc. Bitcoin will also enhance the ability for musicians to do crowd funding and get donations. To me, it appears that the music industry has suffered greatly, but individual artists with talent have had an easier time to rise up through all the social media that is now available and it looks more like we're just cutting out the middlemen than hurting the artists. The same will apply to video as well.

So, in conclusion, the Immutable web will allow mankind to aggregate and distribute all the worlds content at extremely inexpensive commodity prices that reduce at the pace of moore's law. It's an exciting opportunity and it will be interesting to watch.