1.2 Stakeholders
The whole internet: Web 3.0
For the past few years there have been rumours of the beginnings of a new form of web: Web 3.0. This form of web promises the beginnings of a fully fleshed virtual world where people own their own data, where there are no oligopolies that control the tech world and instead groups of users will have direct input into how control is distributed and how the internet should evolve. This project is not going to promise any of that, in all likelihood it will not be the start of a digital revolution that results in the destruction of Google and Facebook, instead this project will likely be a part of the slow transition towards some form of future that intends to be as the one I mentioned.
How will this actually effect the everyday person? Well, simply put, it'll change the nature of what is possible on the internet and how they will interact with and use the internet, not in any kind of groundbreaking sudden way but they will notice it more in the wave of new technologies that they can use that come along due to "Web 3.0". This will be like how the addition of backend servers and user-specific code that changed what it did based upon who was viewing the website allowed the generation of internet that created social media, entertainment streaming systems and many other systems that were not possible with non-personalised, static websites. No one actually knows what the next generation of web3 apps will look like and whether or not they will be introduced to the benefit or detriment of humanity.
Content Creators
One group who will massively affected by this shift will be content creators, as currently the measure of who owns a piece of content is whoever uploaded it to a given platform first, and if it reaches a larger scale, whoever has the most money to win a legal battle.
The shift to blockchain oriented platforms will allow content creators to upload their content to a platform which will then "mint" the content on the blockchain (likely including a smart contract clause to give the minting platform a small cut of the revenue for all future transactions) and will act as a proof of ownership for the content across multiple platforms. Although this will require platforms to agree on a general protocol in order to be able to accept each others ownership certificates, but this should hopefully be able to be implemented by having the protocol being implemented from the launch of the blockchain, which I aim to do as part of this project.
A massive benefit of this kind of content ownership is the use of something called a smart contract. A smart contract allows rules to be made so that anytime a transaction or transfer is used on that ownership certificate whatever is being done to it must abide by those custom rules. Some key rules that I aim to include in the default ownership certificate are:
Upon mint, an owner can enforce a rule which ensures that anytime anyone sells the ownership certificate they receive a percentage of the transaction price.
An ownership certificate can be set to expire, this is in the case of an entity wishing to sell an ownership certificate for an item for a temporary period and it would then expire after a set date. This could be used to deal with subscription based pay model for some software that would expire every 30 days and require a new certificate which is given upon the user paying the monthly charge.
Now although it is worth bearing in mind that if someone other than the original content creator mints the ownership certificate, it will likely result in a legal battle and simply transferring the certificate to the actual owner would leave the uploader's smart contract attached, which would allow them to continue to collect a cut of the actual owner's revenue when they shouldn't, so the smart contract must also be directly editable during a transaction (assuming that the sender signs this) but only sections added by the sender should be editable.
The benefits of this model, if it is implemented correctly, is that content creators will be able to not only have a certificate of ownership for their content, but also be able to sell that certificate, allowing them to "sell" their videos or even gift them. An example of this is if an investor wanted to get in on a creator's success, they could purchase pieces of content from them and hopefully gain the revenue from them in the future, alternatively if a content creator wanted to give a charity the revenue from a video they could gift them the certificate of ownership, or edit the certificate to specify to send the revenue directly to the charity if they still wanted ownership of the video.
In the latter scenario the ownership certificate could even be split up into multiple sub-sections, this could work by only allowing the current owner of each section (for example, there could be an "owner" of the content and a "revenue" holder) to change this section in a transaction, so if you wanted to change the revenue holder for a piece of content you would have to be the current revenue holder.
Developers
With the decentralised method of storage and data, developers and programmers could choose to build their platforms with the traditional methods of web2.0, or they could choose to decentralise their storage, which would be a lot cheaper initially but would mean that the nodes storing their data would receive some of the revenue they generate every time they add or remove data.
Now although it would make sense for nodes to charge developers for storing data on themselves over time as well as charging for adding and removing data, this wouldn't actually need to happen, as one of the main things that makes a node more valuable to other nodes is how many blocks it stores, because the more blocks a node stores, the more other nodes will want to add it to their pool to ensure they always have a connection to all the blocks on the blockchain. Therefore storing more data increases their usefulness to users and other platforms and in turn they will receive more transaction requests and make more money. This means that by storing more data the nodes should receive more transactions/blocks to process and get paid for, hence they are indirectly being paid more both when anyone wants to change that data and just by receiving more seemingly unconnected transactions that are due to them being more valuable as nodes.
Crypto Miners
Crypto miners are individuals who use their computers and servers to "mine" cryptocurrencies, typically being ethereum or bitcoin. This means that they are acting as nodes and giving up their computing power in exchange for transaction fees and block rewards, effectively they are being paid by the blockchain for letting it use their computer. The issue with the current state of crypto currency mining is that it is mainly used for proof of work, which works almost like a lottery, with thousands or even millions of computers trying to solve a problem and only the one that solves it first gets paid for their work, this has led to lots of miners grouping together as clusters to mine together and when any one computer in the cluster mines a block it's split amongst every computer in the cluster. This can create an unreliable and insecure scenario for people who need to be able to pay for energy bills and the running cost of their computer in order to make mining worth it for them, and if it isn't worth it then the amount of nodes on the network decreases and that's bad for the security of the blockchain.
The problem I look to solve regarding crypto miners is to make their income more sustainable through the proof of worth system. This is the hypothetical system that I designed for this project and it's advantages include that it should reward miners more frequently, in smaller frequencies and they should have to use less energy to be rewarded. This means that the ROI of their energy costs should theoretically be much higher and more consistent (although it will obviously also rely on the cost of the coin which may not be consistent).
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