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DECENT Whitepaper
Matej Michalko [email protected]
Josef Sevcik [email protected]
November 2015
v 0.0.2
Table of Contents
- Introduction
- The Blokchain Era
- Manipulation and Freedom of Speech
- Historical Approach
- DECENT: Characteristics & Advantages
- DECENT: Who can use it & why
- DECENT: Technical description
Use cases
Detailed procedures
Publishing
Example
Buying
Mining - Next Steps
- Conclusion
- Introduction
True innovation is rare, especially in the world of media. More
difficult is to determine which aspect of media thrives for
development most. Majority of mainstream media do not truly
innovate as they are happy with their current business models.
Most of the incumbents do not provide as many benefits to the
content consumers as they could because of lack of incentives.
Moreover, having the obligation to pass through a third party to
access digital content is unnecessary. Traditional media companies
as Medium, New York Times or Daily Mail choose what they
publish and which authors they allow to distribute their content
through their fully controlled centralized for-profit platforms.
Similarly, many jurisdictions do not provide freedom of speech;
people are prosecuted for expressing their thoughts.
This white paper focuses on the challenges and redefinition of the
way digital content is shared and freedom of speech is enabled over
the Internet. We propose DECENT: Decentralized Open Source
Content Distribution Platform enabled by Blockchain and
peer-to-peer technology. - The Blokchain Era
Bitcoin , presented in 2009 by Satoshi Nakamoto was a disruptive
1
change in the way people look at finances. By providing efficiency
(worldwide clearing and settlement within 10 minutes) and
cost-effectiveness (transaction fees at a few cents per transaction)
compared to the traditional banking system, it is getting a massive
exposure in media. Unfortunately, in spite of more than 6 years of
its existence it did not reach a position it could have attained
mainly due to the imperfections in its architecture and design. One
of them is the 7-transactions per second (tps) processing capacity ,
2
which makes Bitcoin hard to be deployed in real world applications
as it is unable to fulfil their requirements. For instance, VISA
handles about 2000 tps with a peak capacity of 56000 tps .
3 4
1 https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
2 https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Scalability#Scalability_targets
3 http://usa.visa.com/merchants/industrysolutions/retailvisaacceptance.jsp
Similarly, Bitcoin blockchain size of nearly 40 GB (August 2015)
with a steep linear growing curve renders it difficult to be
5
distributed in the future. It is inconvenient for most of people to be
forced to wait for downloading a few tens of GBs of data in order to
send even a tiny amount of money.
Hence, Bitcoin can be understood as a pioneering proof of
Blockchain technology concept that has some childhood diseases.
Blockchain, as a publicly distributed ledger of transactions, has a
great potential to be the next big thing since the advent of World
Wide Web. Various financial institutions are investigating this field,
some of them even have their own blockchain research
departments . Blockchain technologies can help banks to reduce
6
their operating and infrastructure costs in various domains of
application. By providing seamless automation, clearing and
settlement can run without any human interaction and under
control of an indestructible set of business rules. Similarly,
Blockchain technologies enable banks’ assets to be exchanged
without third party validation.
4 http://usa.visa.com/aboutvisa/ourbusiness/visatransaction.jsp
5https://blockchain.info/charts/blockssize?showDataPoints=false&show_header=true&daysAverageString=1×
pan=2year&scale=0&address=
6 http://cointelegraph.com/news/114889/10bigbanksthatareseriouslylookingintoblockchaintechnology
Figure 2.1: Blockchain Use Cases
7
Blockchain has applications in many other domains besides
finance, as illustrated on Figure 2.1. Proof of Ownership,
Decentralized Storage, Decentralized Peer Review are only a few of
them. The world is constantly discovering the immense benefits
decentralized applications can bring to it. - Manipulation and Freedom of Speech
Nowadays most of the media and content sharing places are private
entities that decide by whom and how their platforms can be used.
In order to publish content, one has to agree with their terms and
conditions and often loses proprietary rights to the content. Third
parties can bowdlerize, manipulate or even permanently remove
parts or even entire piece of digital content posted by creative
7 http://n6zgo3se7pe2sazc62u1v9qe.wpengine.netdnacdn.com/wpcontent/uploads/2015/07/12311024x699.png
artists. Reddit , Twitter , Facebook , Medium are typical
8 9 10 11
examples of those platforms.
Some of the countries, where freedom of speech is an issue, keep
an eye on the traffic to and from the country, in order to prevent
inconvenient content or to tag dissident servers or people. Online
media need to be licensed and the operations are supervised by the
state apparatus.
Even in Western democracies where people are generally free to
express their opinions, the manipulation takes place at the level of
unnecessary middlemen running the media. There is a lack of
direct relationship between authors and content consumers
(readers, listeners, viewers, ...).
Moreover, authors do not have enough opportunities to monetize
their work or the existing content distribution platforms are too
complicated to be dealt with. For instance, bloggers can either use
the service of a third party provider such as Medium or start their
own websites. In the former case, the bloggers are unlikely to get
financially compensated for their work, unless they are between
the most rated ones on the server. In the latter, they would need to
get users to their websites, which is usually a hard task and requires
skills from multiple domains, such as SEO or inbound marketing.
Later, they would also need to find their own business models, such
as installing Google Ad Sense and of course agree with their terms
12
and conditions of use. Those are the things authors usually do not
want to deal with. Their main job is to write (producing music,
video, software) and not to be bothered with ads.
Online e-books’ resellers, such as Amazon, charge tremendous fees
for online book publishing and distribution. Amazon’s 35% or 70%
royalty rates keep the poor writers with 65% or 30% of the revenue
13
paid by readers, respectively.
One can now see the non-freedom of speech, manipulation of
media and unnecessary middlemen making profit on
author-reader relationship is a real issue.
8 https://www.reddit.com/
9 https://twitter.com/
10 https://www.facebook.com
11 https://medium.com/
12 https://www.google.com/adsense/start/
13 https://kdp.amazon.com/help?topicId=A29FL26OKE7R7B - Historical Approach
The problem of manipulation and censorship stems from historical
reasons. In the age of print media, only few people and companies
had access to publishing and distribution of content. That led to
imbalance between opinions, colossal manipulation and misuse of
the information distribution monopoly.
In 1517, Pope Leo X started to sell indulgences. The campaign was
successful for some time. A radical change came when an ordinary
German priest Martin Luther put a document called “The
Ninety-five Theses” on the door of Wittenberg cathedral.
Thanks to the word of mouth and availability of printing press it
got quickly spread within whole Germany in a few weeks.
Eventually, Martin Luther’s ideas against indulgences got a serious
traction all over Europe . This would not be possible a few decades
14
ago without the Guttenberg’s 15
th century invention of effective
printing press. That was one of the first major events that showed
the benefits of fast distribution of information on the freedom of
speech. Similarly, some 300 years later, Ronalds, Cooke &
Wheatstone and Morse’s electrical telegraph was a harbinger of
15
mass personal communication era. With the unique system of
coding it allowed transmission of any kind of text information. At
the end of the 19
th century, telegraph lines already covered all
inhabited continents . Another disruptive invention was the Bell’s
16
telephone that boosted telegraph system to the domain of voice
17
communication.
In parallel, Marconi and others’ works on wireless telegraphy
18
enabled the transmission over air. This undermined the
importance of physical cables as the only transmission media. Any
hard links were no longer needed. Thanks to their invention,
people were able to listen to either government owned or
commercial radio stations.
14 http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/luther_martin.shtml
15 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrical_telegraph
16
17 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone
18 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_telegraphy
Although printing press, telegraph, telephone and radio were major
advances in the easiness of access for everyone, they do not
provide any security layer, as wax sealed letters or polyalphabetic
ciphers used hundreds of years beforehand. Besides of military
purposes, massive proliferation of encrypted communication has
not yet come. Most people are not aware of the consequences that
non-encrypted online communication has. Government agencies
are buying data from software platforms, in order to pursue their
goals. Edward Snowden’s case in 2011 only pointed out to this
19
issue. PGP encrypted emails provide only a partial solution to this
problem due to the lack of scalability and user convenience.
20
Generally, a holistic approach to decentralized, non-manipulable,
secure, trusted, efficient and cost-effective digital content
distribution is needed. - DECENT: Characteristics & Advantages
As there is no comprehensive solution to the problems mentioned
above, we came up with the idea of an open platform solving all of
them. DECENT is a Blockchain based decentralized autonomous
organization that will run with no third party intervention. It is a
21
Decentralized Open Source Content Distribution Platform for
creative people, authors, bloggers, publicists and the fans and
followers allowing borderless publishing of any text, picture, video
or music content. DECENT is acting as a resourceful and
independent unit. It allows information sharing without any
boundaries and restrictions. The platform is dedicated to the
freedom of speech. It is served by the P2P network and secured by
cryptographic and Blockchain technology. Sharing information is
easy and protected. No third parties can control or influence the
content. Main characteristics of DECENT are:
Independent
DECENT is owned directly by its users and will never be affiliated
with any economic, media or political party.
It is a piece of software that you can run. However, once people
19
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/nationalsecurity/nsapayinguscompaniesforaccesstocommunication
snetworks/2013/08/29/5641a4b610c211e3bdf6e4fc677d94a1_story.html
20 http://recode.net/2015/05/13/encryptingyouremailwhatispgpwhyisitimportantandhowdoiuseit/
21 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decentralized_autonomous_organization
download and start running it, its creators no longer hold any
control over it. Similar to how Bitcoin is developed, DECENT
foundation updates and improves the code which is open source so
anyone can see the changes made to it. Anyone can fork it, alter it
for his/her uses or simply not update it. The whole power lies with
its users.
Borderless
Our aim is to eliminate all political and geographical barriers in the
publishing segment, so people around the world will have the same
opportunity to express themselves freely. Thanks to its P2P nature
firewalls are ineffective, since the content isn’t served only from
one but many computers at the same time. Therefore it is
practically impossible for any organization or government to block
it.
Stable
DECENT is fully decentralized and not dependent on any single
server thanks to utilizing the blockchain. With no single point of
failure the access to the information is boundless.
Fair
On DECENT platform every author starts at the same level. They
work to build high reputation through the quality and engagement
of the content published. Readers take into account author’s
reputation when deciding if the content is worth purchasing. The
bottom line is – the better content, the higher chance for authors to
gain exposure and high profits.
Profitable
Readers can buy content directly from their favourite authors.
There are no cuts taken by DECENT and never will be. Developers
are free to build their own apps and monetize them by their will.
All without paying any hidden fees to middlemen or any third
parties like media houses.
Spam free
Our spam-free mechanism makes the extensive publishing very
expensive for spammers, while keeping the resources available for
legitimate authors.
Secure & Anonymous
Authors can publish the content anonymously. If the authors do
not want, no one can reveal their identity. Similarly, all the content
shared via DECENT is fully encrypted and available to the people
of authors’ choice: either paying ones or non-paying ones.
Recommendations-enabled
Thanks to DECENT recommendation authors and their pieces of
work get feedback from verified content purchasers. This feedback
is embedded in the blockchain all the time and good authors can
get decent reputation over time. - DECENT: Who can use it & why
Book, blog, podcast and video Authors
No third parties, no censorship, no publishing fees.
There is no third party who authors have to deal with when they
want to publish. The phrase “get published” has no meaning in
DECENT ecosystem. DECENT gives the power back to the Authors
where it belongs. It is completely up to you as an author to decide
what the price of your book is. You can give it for free, or put a
price tag on it. DECENT takes no cuts from your profits, while
providing the infrastructure for people to find and get your books.
Free speech activists and supporters, whistle-blowers
Anonymous, inef ective national firewalls, no censorship, content is
impossible to take down.
On DECENT you can be completely anonymous along with your
supporters. Thanks to its P2P nature it cannot be blocked by a
firewall, because your content isn’t served only from one but many
IP addresses at the same time. Thereby, it is practically impossible
for any government to block. If anyone who seeds your content is
shut down, there are many others who have the same content and
share it too. Moreover, even seeders themselves do not know what
content they are seeding, so it cannot be pinpointed to any specific
person or server, therefore impossible to shut down. Thanks to
utilizing the Blockchain it is practically impossible for anyone even
the author to delete or alter the content in any way.
Cryptocurrency miners, data centers
Make money, use your hardware more ef ectively, support free of speech.
If you are already running a data center or a mining operation, you
can start “mining” DCTs. As many people realized with Bitcoin, if
you get on board at the beginning you are in for big bucks. You will
also take part in creating a whole new way of how data is
distributed across the Internet.
App builders
Lot of traf ic for your web or Android/OS app, Blockchain based system,
open source platform.
Application programmers can implement DECENT protocol and
make apps for traditional use cases to create their own Amazon,
Medium or any other content oriented website or application. As a
programmer you can also find completely new use cases for it.
Thanks to DECENT’s transaction layer the content can be both free
and premium. It provides you with stability and transparency
thanks to the Blockchain and takes care of the whole backbone -
data keeping, metadata, recommendations, bandwidth, etc., it is
only up to you how you want the front end to look. The whole
code is open source, so you can change it or fork it if it suits your
needs.
Publishing houses, media oriented webs
Low costs, No need for data management, infrastructure, transparent, low
bandwidth requirements.
As an online publishing company you can use DECENT as your
PaaS (Platform as a Service) infrastructure solution. Your content
storage, distribution and payments are taken care of by our
platform. Thanks to utilizing public ledger, it is all completely
transparent. All you need to do is to program your own app or web
interface.
Data center providers
Low costs, high transparency, PaaI.
DECENT used as PaaI (Platform as a Infrastructure) can completely
replace the data center you need to run for yourself or your
customers. This solution is transparent, decentralized, all files are
encrypted, stored at more locations and can be made available
freely or for a fee. - DECENT: Technical description
DECENT is an autonomous Type I Decentralized Application
(Dapp) enabling digital content publishing. It has its own
22
independent blockchain , which is a public distributed ledger of all
23
the transactions that will occur since the genesis block (beginning
24
of the use of DECENT protocol).
DECENT has 3 functional roles:
● Authors: content makers, writers, music producers, etc
● Content Consumers: readers, listeners, viewers
● Publishers: miners
22
https://github.com/DavidJohnstonCEO/DecentralizedApplications/blob/master/README.md#classificationofdapp
s
23 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Block_chain_%28database%29
24 https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Genesis_block
Figure 7.1: Content Consumer Types
One can see illustrated on Figure 7.1 the type of Content Consumer.
Content Consumers are a generalization of Readers, Listeners and
Viewers.
Authors produce content and upload it to the network. Publishers are
the key element in keeping DECENT network up and running. The
incentive for their time and resources are DCT digital tokens,
similar to BTC sent to Bitcoin miners.
DECENT uses a modified Proof of Stake (POS) mechanism in
25
order to achieve consensus of various nodes in the network. This is
based on the stake of space/time ratio provided by publishers
(“miners”) and their CPU time spent by distributing keys.
Use cases
Think about the way media works nowadays. Authors have to go
through publicists, recording studios or governments who
determine whether the content can be, should be or is good
enough to be released. As an app builder one can see there are too
many restrictions.
DECENT offers to app developers a safe and secure way for their
apps’ users to share the content freely. Not only will it provide
direct reader - author payment system through blockchain and
data distribution. It also includes the recommendations that secure
the quality and popularity of the content.
The typical use case of DECENT can be publishing of articles and
stories, similar to Medium . The author uses the application to
26
write and organize articles or add media files. When the author is
happy with the result, he or she presses the “Publish” button. Later
the author can specify the price for the content, select a part of the
article that will be free to read and add metadata. The application
will encrypt the content, find the publishers (independent
computers connected to DECENT network running publishing
software to keep the network running and receive a reward for
doing so), calculate the publishing fee and after confirmation, it will
instruct publishers’ computers to download the content and
broadcast relevant metadata over blockchain.
Once content consumers find the content of their interest, they may
be notified that their favourite author has published a new article,
they will get recommendation based on their preferences or they
will simply browse newly published content. They can choose to
download and read the “free to read” part. And then they can
decide to buy the rest of the article by paying a small fee specified
by the author. DECENT protocol processes the payment that will be
25 https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Proof_of_Stake
26 https://medium.com/
attributed to the author and the content consumer’s application will
get the decryption keys for the rest of the article.
Over time, the publishers will be rewarded for storing the content
and will get their fair share of publishing fee the author has paid.
Everyone is welcome to build applications or clients on the top of
DECENT protocol with their independent business models. This
will enable the authors to share their content. It can be any kind of
digital content: video or audio files, texts (books, articles, news) or
pictures. And it actually offers all sorts of possibilities and
opportunities, for example:
● Medium like blogging and publishing
27
● Soundcloud like music publishing
28
● Amazon like e-book publishing
29
● Software publishing
● Shutterstock like photo sharing
30
● Electronic newspaper publishing
● Costless academic paper publishing
27 https://medium.com/
28 https://soundcloud.com/
29 http://www.amazon.com/
30 http://www.shutterstock.com
Detailed procedures
Figure 7.1: DECENT Flow Diagram
Most of the actions in DECENT are performed by adding a
transaction to the blockchain. While logical chain of events
continues to grow, every network node verifies it and contributes
in the voting mechanism.
Publishing
Publishing is a process when the new content is stored in the
network and information about it is spread among the community.
The detailed process is as follows: - An author creates content in the form of computer files and
selects two integers n and m such that n>m>2. - The author’s application generates unique AES key and
31
encrypts a part of the content that is not “free to read”. - The author’s application selects distribution protocol -
currently bittorrent with distributed tracker is the only
32 33
supported protocol - but more are on a roadmap - and
creates a distribution package containing a free to read and
encrypted content. - The author’s application splits the encryption key into n
shares so that m shares are required to retrieve the key .
34 - The author’s application finds n suitable publishers. One of the
possibilities is to utilize DHT Kademlia network and crawl
35
the network for nodes that are ready to store content of a
given size while minimizing the distance between the torrent
info hash and node IDs.
36 - The author’s application encrypts the n encryption key parts
created in step 4 with public keys of the n publishers assigning
one share to a single publisher. - The author’s application instructs publishers’ nodes to
download the content at the same time. - The author’s application generates the content submit
transaction. The transaction will contain all content’s
metadata, such as title, synopsis or tags, and network relevant
data such as validity, price, list of publishers, and list of shares
encrypted for each selected publisher. - The publishing fee is deducted from the author’s account. It
depends on the size and time the file should be available.
This fee is used to pay publishers for providing storage and
bandwidth. It also acts as anti-spam prevention. Publishing
large amount of content will soon become expensive.
10.Publishers will download the content and issue the
proof-of-retrievability transaction to confirm the content
37
has been successfully published.
Example
31 FIPS Publication 197: “Announcing the Advanced Encryption Standard”. Retrieved from
http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/fips/fips197/fips197.pdf
32 http://www.bittorrent.org/
33 http://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0005.html
34 Shamir, A.: “How to share a secret”. Communications of the ACM, November 1979, Volume 22, Number 11
35 Maymounkov, P. and Mazières, D.: “Kademlia: A Peertopeer information system based on the XOR Metric”
36 http://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0003.html
37 Shacham, H. and Waters, B.: “Compact Proofs of Retrievability”. Retrieved from
https://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~hovav/dist/verstore.pdf
Buying is the process when a content consumer decides to buy some
published content. It has form of a contract, starting
Buying
Buying is the process when a content consumer decides to buy some
published content. It has form of a contract, starting with
promise-to-pay and finishing with payment from the content
consumer to the author when the publisher was provably delivered the
content. The detailed procedure is as follows: - The content consumer selects content they wish to buy and
their application downloads the distribution package using
the chosen protocol, i.e. forming the magnet link using the
info hash and downloading by means of bittorrent with a
distributed tracker. - The content consumer’s application generates request-to-buy
transaction. This transaction will effectively block the
required amount of tokens from their account. - The publishers’ nodes see the request-to-buy in the
blockchain. They will decrypt the respective share (from the
content_submit transaction) with their private key and
encrypt it again with content consumer’s public key. - The publishers’ nodes will generate delivery keys transaction
containing the share encrypted with consumer’s key and
proof-of-delivery. - When there are enough shares delivered through the
Blockchain:
a. The publisher will pay to the author from the reserved
amount and assign a part of the newly generated tokens
to the publishers for providing the keys; and
b. The content consumer will decrypt the shares with their
private key, reconstruct the decryption key and decrypt
the content. - Finally, the content consumer can rate the content by
submitting rating transaction into the Blockchain. These
transactions can be collected by different rating and
classification engines and used to generate various
recommendations for the content consumers.
Mining
When a publisher generates the block using PoS, he or she will: - Verify all transactions, including proof-of-retrievability and
proof-of-delivery. - Distribute payments to the author (see buying process).
- Distribute payments from the publishing fee to the publishers
based on the stored content (proof-of-retrievablity). - Distribute payments from the newly generated tokens to the
publishers based on the delivered keys (see buying process). - Keep a part of the distributed tokens for themselves.
Figure 7.3: DECENT App Diagram
Figure 7.3 illustrates holistic view of DECENT network. Content consumers have
access to rating client, transaction engine, embedded torrent client with an
anonymization layer, own wallet, local copy of Blockchain and locally stored
content. - Next Steps
DECENT is a non-profit project supported by DECENT
Foundation, which will never have financial benefits from
DECENT platform. Its main roles will be the issuance of digital
tokens, holding of developer tokens, management of bounty
payments and determining the DECENT direction. Future
development of DECENT Protocol will be covered via the pre-sale
in Q3 2016. More details about the pre-sale and updates of this
white paper will be published soon.
For more information, please visit http://decent.ch or
http://sale.decent.ch. - Conclusion
One can see that the market of Digital Content Distribution is dominated by
oligopolies worldwide. Centralized Digital Content Distribution Platform take
unnecessary fees from authors and/or content consumers and have the ultimate
right to manipulate (or refuse to publish) the created by authors, according to
their Terms of Use.
DECENT offers a Blockchain based open source decentralized solution to this
problem, free to use for everyone.