Comment by decentralised | Hacker News Reader

Comment by decentralised | Hacker News Reader

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I think I can explain the Civil proposition but I'm not associated with the project or Consensys so I may be incorrect / plain wrong.

It starts with a Token, a Token Curated Registry and micro-payments / paywalls..

The token has a double purpose: - Allows token holders to vote on which news sources should be in the Civil registry (ie, the trustworthy news sources). - Allows token holders to pay for content using micro-payments to access articles (ie, think Brave browser and Metamask enabled paywalls)

The token curated registry is basically a whitelist of news sources/ agencies / newsrooms that are trusted by the token holder community + this organisation dubbed the "Civil Council" (veteran news and media people associated with the project) consider to be trustworthy in their reporting / fact checking etc.

The plan seems to be for people who consume media to pay for content deemed to be of high quality by accessing the traditional sites / platforms (ie, unlike FB the plan is not to make a profit by aggregating other people's work in your own platform) with a type of "paywall" that requires a payment in civ tokens.

Hope this helps, but if anyone wants to discuss the cryptoeconomics of TCRs and how this primitive can improve the signal/noise ratio in polling or voting systems... let me know :-)

Thanks!

"""with a type of "paywall" that requires a payment in civ tokens""" In my opinion this is the most important part. Why would the Civil paywall work better than a non cryptocurrency based paywall?

Especially, if they want to accept regular payments as well?

They seem to be focusing on the wrong problem - how to govern a registry of news sources. While the real problem is how to get readers to pay for content.

My pleasure!

I think the idea is that people feel that news sources can't be trusted in general so don't want to pay for access to a "news" article in particular. The idea of the registry is then to represent social validation by a community incentivised by their own selfish best interests (ie the token would appreciate hence they can resell for a profit...) to be accurate and judicious about their curation efforts.

The paywall tech could be something like what SpankChain is doing for cams, for instance. Technically it's an interface that allows token holders to sign a message to access a content URI by placing the tokens in a state-channel contract. If the consumer does "enter" the site, the tokens are deduced, otherwise they remain available for future use. Users should be able to pay with fiat but behind the scenes the balance would still be kept in tokens for the payment infrastructure to remain trustless.

(caveat: I'm speculating on a solution that doesn't exist yet and I'm not involved in building)

> The idea of the registry is then to represent social validation by a community incentivised by their own selfish best interests

This just leads to censorship by the most powerful users in the system.

Depends on the voting mechanism and game theory.

Starting with the game theory: If the TCR shows a specific bias (ie: political inclination) or some form of censorship, less people will want to own the token because the "fairness" promise is broken and that should reduce the token price.

If the curated items (newsrooms in this case) have low adoption (few people use tokens to purchase viewing rights) then the tokens will lose value too.

For token holders this should motivate them to be judicious in their curation efforts.

The voting mechanism also plays a significant part on the whole system. Traditional TCRs use a partial lock commit reveal scheme that allows us to find the Schelling point for a challenge.

Personally I'm quite partial to other voting systems that reduce the impact of token ownership disparity like the one Glen Weyl, Buterin and others have called "Liberal Radical" and its simpler root the quadratic voting mechanism. The way this works is that only the square root of voter's balance counts as voter's voting "weight". So 1 vote costs 1 token but 2 votes cost 4 tokens and those with less "power" have a higher representation relative to their balances.

edit: typos

I don't think the voting mechanism is the problem. The problem is the humans who vote. For example, let's say that Civil attracts 10 publications to its platform, all of which are liberal leaning (which seems to be the case). So, when a conservative newsroom wants to join, what do you think will happen?

The Civil Constitution [1] has no guarantee of freedom of speech. Instead they say they are "committed to the ethical practice of journalism," which is open to be arbitrarily abused by the majority of voters, irrespective of the voting system.

I don't actually understand why there is any voting at all.

The author of the original article says he believes that Civil's leadership has 'good intentions" but if they can't understand that their system will not solve the problems they set out to solve, then perhaps they don't deserve to gain the funding and attention they have actually managed to get.

[1]https://docs.google.com/document/d/178BBxXh60bEsFN5E5AYaZnej...

What I think will happen is that voters are incentivised to make good on the promise of the platform. If they reject a conservative site based on anything dubious then the whole effort will lose credibility.

Don't forget that some form of voting is necessary for the token holders to have a say in the governance of the business. That's one of the premise of blockchain native businesses, the decentralisation of equity and power.

The voting and incentive mechanisms are the cryptoeconomic properties of the project and what I can discuss intelligently. The Civil constitution is out of my scope but I trust the incentives are there to allow high quality media to enter the list regardless of political bias.

>If they reject a conservative site based on anything dubious then the whole effort will lose credibility.

That's not determined. They may well gain credibility by rejecting alternative views.

>Don't forget that some form of voting is necessary for the token holders to have a say in the governance of the business.

Bitcoin doesn't have any governance, and it seems to work fine. Adding governance layers just seems to lead to more problems.

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