Valerian Bennett is Managing Director of the Pop Network Foundation, which is devoted to serving to creators and communities discover their freedom
Valerian Bennett is Managing Director of the Pop Network Foundation, which is devoted to serving to creators and communities discover their freedom by decentralizing the streaming financial system. He’s a graduate of the BoostVC accelerator (Tribe 8) and restricted companion at Amentum Capital.
On December 23, 2019 as many around the globe have been settling into the Christmas vacation, a crypto catastrophe struck. Google-owned YouTube, the biggest streaming media website on the internet, began banning scores of content creators associated to blockchain and cryptocurrency.
The outrage was swift and justified.
Many on Crypto YouTube, like Chris Dunn and IvanOnTech, have spent years growing their model and constructing huge content material libraries whereas attracting a lot of followers…all to have the results of their very own labor arbitrarily taken from them. For some, like Alex Saunders, the purge had the impact of shutting down his main enterprise and financially threatening his household.
Even ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin had a few of his cryptocurrency analysis movies eliminated below the weird label of “Dangerous or harmful content material.”
Then, simply as rapidly because the purge occurred, it stopped. After days of unrest, YouTube announced the whole thing was a mistake and that every part would return to regular.
Q: So, why did the ban occur within the first place?
A: Nobody is aware of, besides Google and YouTube.
Q: And, why don’t they inform us?
A: As a result of they don’t need to. It’s their platform, their guidelines, and when you don’t prefer it you possibly can depart.
Q: However, the worth of YouTube is constructed upon the movies that customers submit. Absolutely YouTube should be accountable to its customers, proper?
That is the character of centralization. When adequate energy aggregates to a government, that authority inevitably drifts away from representing the supply of its energy and finally ends up current solely to protect and develop energy for itself. Within the Crypto YouTube case, it means arbitrarily hurting creators and their communities with out offering any recourse for grievance.
The important thing attraction of a decentralized financial system is that it takes energy and income away from giant establishments and firms, and places them into the rightful fingers of the individuals.
As Charles Hoskinson, creator of Cardano, summarized the episode, “Absolute energy and centralization ALWAYS turns into this.”
So, if absolute energy is destined to deprave completely then how will we get from below the thumb of concentrated authority and, as an alternative, create a system that’s constructed for, by, and accountable to its customers above all else?
The Freedom Protocol
Bitcoin supplied one reply for this with its introduction of peer-to-peer digital money. As a measure of resistance to the unchecked energy of banks and governments over the monetary system which all of us use, bitcoin created a decentralized system of cash. On this blockchain-based system, governments and banks usually are not solely pointless to maneuver cash, they’re irrelevant.
This transformative energy utilized to a myriad of industries is without doubt one of the causes there’s a lot real power round blockchain.
Might blockchain know-how make central authorities of social media, like YouTube, pointless and irrelevant whereas making a system that’s constructed for, by, and accountable to its customers above all else? Sure!
We strongly consider on this future. As a result of we’re constructing it.
Our mission at POP Network, a blockchain media platform, is to assist creators & communities discover their freedom by decentralizing the streaming financial system.
In contrast to YouTube, POP Community works peer-to-peer with blockchain crypto-economic incentives. Nodes share media independently somewhat than counting on a central server. The advantage of decentralization is that creators and their communities can now not be “de-platformed” as a result of, in essence, they’re the platform.
As bitcoin is to cash, POP Community is to media. Each function the precept of decentralization mixed with blockchain know-how to create a system meant to reward the contributors for the worth they create whereas retaining self-sovereignty.
On this imaginative and prescient of the long run, it’s crucial to notice each networks make one massive assumption: that “blockchain” and “decentralization” proceed to evolve collectively.
However, what if an alternate future unfolds?
If bitcoin is described as open, decentralized, permissionless, and censorship-resistant and is the prime instance of blockchain and decentralization evolving collectively within the monetary sector, then its inverse instance is now coming to life. Now we have the primary imaginative and prescient of what a closed, centralized, censorable state-sponsored digital foreign money would appear to be.
Say hiya to the “Digital Yuan.
Final fall The Folks’s Financial institution of China (PBOC), the nation’s central financial institution, mentioned the goal of their project is to switch all bodily cash with a brand new digital foreign money. Though the said function is to provide the federal government real-time affect on the financial system, the useful result’s improved state surveillance,…