In a January 23rd virtual talk, Dan Hensley spoke to the Oklahoma State University Free Enterprise Society. Dan's experience is in cryptocurrency finance, specifically with bitcoin. Dan Hensley is a co-founder of 3speak, a censorship-free blockchain-based video platform that allows users to own their own content and put it on whatever platform they wish. 3speak is based on web 3.0, the newest form of the internet.
After listening to the talk for this week, I learned about a new world of internet platforms. Hensley said he is working on SPK Network. SPK is a self-hosting and decentralized video platform. The owner of a video will be able to host their own video on the SPK Network, where it will be uploaded to many servers rather than a centralized network like YouTube. This is beneficial because one organization does not control the users.
The videos become tokenized. Creators and the community control what content goes up and stays up on the server. Dan Hensley also talks about how users can earn money by storing, validating, serving high throughput content, or encoding videos and content. This differs from traditional web services because it gets rid of the need for mining cryptocurrencies like bitcoin.
Personally, I am torn on the reality of switching to this new type of internet. It is exciting that the users and creators on the SPK Network will be in control of the platform and get paid to use the service. This peer-to-peer-based platform is a trend in the right direction because of the decentralization of platforms. There will not be censorship from an overarching authority such as the YouTube team that decides on whether or not to take videos down. Rather it becomes a community vote to allow videos to stay up. Paying creators is also a huge bonus to using these platforms. On YouTube, there is a lot of red tape and hoops that creators have to jump through to monetize their videos. Removing these barriers is what the SPK Network will use as a competitive advantage.
The downsides I see include a complicated storage structure and internet load. With traditional storage, it seems all content is stored on a centralized pool of servers for a designated purpose, or for a specific company. This new way of storage is very confusing to me on how it works which is part of the reason it remains a concern for me. I also am concerned about the reality of using these online tokens and cryptocurrencies. Once again, it seems complicated to take the tokens earned on the SPK network and turn that into money to use in real life.
Overall, I think potential issues with the new web 3.0 will sort themselves out. Any technology beyond common knowledge appears as magic. I see this as a revolutionary new way of using the internet to connect with other people and am excited to see where it goes.
