The above image was made with stable diffusion using the prompt 'Rewriting the "Rstory" whitepaper on an old typewriter colorful.'
Rstory began as a gratitude token minted by Insight Green, LLC on the bitshares and waves blockchains. When I left the company, I took Rstory with me. When bitshares and waves became unusable, I minted new tokens on EOS and ethereum blockchains. Recently, I decided to repurpose Rstory into an information access token. The idea is to create an better crypto alternative to the unsustainable economics of digital publishing.
When Rstory was merely a gratitude token, it probably would have been considered an unregistered security by regulators, making it illegal to sell. But as an information access token, it has clear underlying value, making it theoretically legal for me to sell as long as there's no expectation on the part of the buyer that the token value will increase due to the actions of others. If I sell Rstory, what I'll be selling is access to my work, in much the same way as an art museum sells tickets to its exhibits.
Even though this project is very fringe, I'm trying to get the details right. One of those details is revising the whitepaper. In all fairness, even calling the document I produced a whitepaper may be a stretch. Minimally sufficient is what I was going for, so I kept it short and not very technical. Here's what I came up with.
Whitepaper 2.0
Rstory was initially designed as indivisible units of tokenized gratitude to facilitate virtual philanthropy. In 2021, 2 million ERC-20 tokens were given away to two people working in service to the public good. The giveaways were publicly celebrated, but the idea of virtual philanthropy never caught on. Now, in 2024, Rstory is being repurposed into a token that grants its bearer access to select digital goods, namely Mark Bailey’s science fiction novels. The token may still be given away to people serving the public interest, but this is no longer its primary purpose.
Introduction
Printed newspapers, magazines, and books no longer dominate the media landscape. Most publishing these days is digital. The economics of paper-based publishing don't really work online. Revenue models based on advertising and subscription fees both fall flat in different ways.
While advertisements in printed newspapers and magazines can be ugly, they're also static. They don't move around or flash annoyingly or get in the way of the content we're trying to look at. Online ads, on the other hand, are literally malware that burns our computing power while helping shadowy data brokers track our every move.
Subscription models online are also used to collect our data, making it easy for the powers that be to know exactly who is paying attention to exactly what piece of news. This level of surveillance naturally facilitates repression. On a more practical level, the cognitive overhead of keeping track of login credentials and automatic billing schedules is substantial. Maintaining more than a couple of media subscriptions is costly and confusing. When every paper charges $10/month, consuming a diverse and balanced media diet quickly becomes outrageously expensive.
Some organizations use a donation model, making their information available for free and counting on direct contributions from readers to keep their operations afloat. It would be great if more news outlets moved to this model, but realistically it's very hard to convince readers to donate and keep donating. And there are many kinds of media products that are a poor fit for the donation model.
Rstory
Rstory represents an alternative to standard digital publishing models. Each Rstory token functions as a transferable key for accessing digital products stored on IPFS. Initially, token bearers will have access to 7 scifi ebooks by Mark Bailey. The same material on Amazon sells for around $30, giving the tokens measurable value.
Rstory wasn’t planned out in a board room. If it grows, that growth will be entirely organic. Rstory is not intended as a financial investment and traditional investors are likely to find it undesirable for a number of reasons. It's owned by a private individual. It has a supply of 20B across two blockchains. The price of Rstory might remain low indefinitely. These things disincentivize traditional financial investment in Rstory by design.
At the same time, an increasing number of digital goods could become accessible to token bearers in the future, adding value to the token. And if warranted by market conditions, one or more token burn events could reduce the total supply. These things could theoretically put upward pressure on the price.
Most crypto projects try to convince investors to buy and hold large numbers of tokens. Rstory provides the basic benefit of making Mark Bailey’s scifi novels available for free to anyone holding just one token. In the future, Rstory could theoretically provide additional benefits to those holding larger numbers of tokens, but for now there’s no incentive for anyone to buy more than one token.
Conclusion
Rstory provides an alternative model for digital publishing. It operates on the Ethereum and EOS blockchains. There are no influencers or investors popularizing the project. There are no plans for a major exchange listing. The whole thing was put together by a guy in Minneapolis who no one has heard of. And yet, overlooking this project would be a mistake. What it lacks in size, it makes up for in sincerity. The world needs more of that.
Read Free Mind Gazette on Substack
Read my novels:
- Small Gods of Time Travel is available as a web book on IPFS and as a 41 piece Tezos NFT collection on Objkt.
- The Paradise Anomaly is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
- Psychic Avalanche is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
- One Man Embassy is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
- Flying Saucer Shenanigans is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
- Rainbow Lullaby is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
- The Ostermann Method is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
- Blue Dragon Mississippi is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
See my NFTs:
- Small Gods of Time Travel is a 41 piece Tezos NFT collection on Objkt that goes with my book by the same name.
- History and the Machine is a 20 piece Tezos NFT collection on Objkt based on my series of oil paintings of interesting people from history.
- Artifacts of Mind Control is a 15 piece Tezos NFT collection on Objkt based on declassified CIA documents from the MKULTRA program.