On January 23rd, Dan Hensley virtually spoke during a Free Enterprise Society meeting. Hensley has experience with helping individuals keep track of their finances in cryptocurrency. His main venture in this field was bitcoin. Hensley is also the co-founder of 3speak. Him and his colleague, Matt Starkey, were the main creators of 3speak. Hensley also spoke on SPK network, self hosting, and tokens.
SPK network is currently in the works, or as Henley put it, in its “plumbing stages”. Roughly 160 thousand dollars have been put into proposal over the last year for developing the company. SPK is building upon web3. It is designed to be a censorship free social media platform. It is made for content creating platforms as well as video to be able to interact on a higher social level. In return this rewards providers with tokens. Creators are also able to have their own token economies. The whole point is for content creators not to have to go through censored platforms such as YouTube. In other words, more of the control is put into the hands of the community. When creators store and upload content they are able to earn rewards. Once you build a community or earn enough tokens, you can start making collectables. Monetization is a huge problem with the YouTube platform and this gives you more freedom.
Second, Hensley spoke about self hosting. Self hosting can be described as running your own website yourself instead of using an external source. This can typically cause a security risk and make the website more open to a virus. Within the speak network there will be things called communities. You only need two people to start one up. After joining a community, you can IPFS storage between PCs. This lowers the risk of failure. Self hosting also only works if your computer is running, so if you can transfer between members of your community, your post can stay running.
Lastly, the speaker talked about the tokens available. There are broca gas tokens and speak tokens. When you steak on the platform you can start earning broca tokens, which can in turn be used for different assistances provided. Then, if you use IPFS storage instead of a blockchain you can be rewarded with speak token.
I have watched YouTube for a while and all of the hoops they have to jump through for monetization and censorship seems dreadful. I love that someone is finally taking initiative on this problem and creating a safe space for content creators. Based off of everything Henley spoke on I definitely trust his company and everything they stand for. I think the fact that they are paying attention to operational details along the way is very important and they are being tedious in designing this company.
