Ezira: A democratic social media and cryptoeconomic network [White Paper Part 2]
I propose a new blockchain network, based on the advances of Steem and Bitshares, with advanced functionality. I am open to any and all public discourse regarding my proposal, and considering expressions of interest to join the development team. All earned funds from Steem posts will be powered up, and used to fund development. Follow to read the proceeding posts, as I publish the entirety of the whitepaper directly to the Steem blockchain for public consideration.
Ezira White Paper V 1.0: https://www.scribd.com/document/338834077/Ezira-Whitepaper-V1-0
1 Context:
Mainstream established social media websites do a lot of things right.
They enable free access to a global communications network of unprecedented scale. They allow users to connect with friends, and message them individually, or to make posts and broadcast to them all collectively. They give businesses a platform to promote their message to users, and build their brand image. Most importantly, they offer users the ability to receive value in response to content in the form of social validation. Social networks have successfully atomized and digitized the majority of human social interaction, and have built an information empire on networked relationships.
Social media giants, particularly Facebook, leave a lot of room for improvement.
They hoard vast quantities of private data, and retain all ownership over it. They utilize an unfathomable array of data to target advertising, through proprietary opaque black box algorithms. Popular content aggregators, particularly reddit, also have many drawbacks. While separated communities offer a sense of identity and culture to groups, they are also prone to being censored by powerful moderators, with little to no recourse from their users. Moderator powers to censor undesirable ideas allow operational actors to promote ulterior agendas, with the compelling appearance of grassroots support. Censorship only narrows the range of acceptable thought, and concentrates power over information.
Centralized platforms are vulnerable.
They are susceptible to DDOS attacks, server security breaches, and government backdoors. Their servers are vulnerable to being shut down by governments, and their financial services can be cut off with no recourse. This enables all manner of government coercion to take place, including forced censorship, over compliance with oppressive copyright restrictions in fear of lawsuits, and the provision of the private data of citizens to government agencies without their knowledge or consent. They are ultimately subservient to corporate interests, as they offer to sell their advertising services to businesses, while offering no financial return in exchange for the content that attracts user attention. It is from the energy and effort of billions of users that established social media giants extract value for their shareholders. Users are not social media customers; they are the product to be sold.
Fiat currencies are the single most important source of power of government institutions.
By controlling the issuance of money, debt, and credit, they are able to place populations of citizens under perpetual debt service, and involuntary taxation. Fractional reserve banking systems operated throughout most of the developed world require the continual expansion of debt, to repay the interest incurred on existing debt. Currency purchasing power becomes degraded by its continual supply increase, and intergenerational government debt is used to prevent total systemic collapse. Fiat currency is never created; it is borrowed charging interest that does not yet exist. The value of fiat currency is backed not by any real assets, but by the faith and credit of the issuing government. That is, its ability to coercively tax its citizens.
Fiat currencies are detrimental to building and securing wealth.
They are vulnerable to government operated asset seizure, account freezing, inflation, interest rate manipulation, and outright declarations of legal tender being worthless, as has been seen in India and Venezuela. They use archaic banking systems with redundant layers of bureaucracy and transactions can take days to be settled. International payments are even worse, requiring massive fees to pay for human operated multi bank transfers. Most importantly, fiat currencies do not allow citizens to control their money. Banks control fiat money, and follow your directions for as long as it serves their interests. They engage in speculative trading with deposited assets, and their defaults are bailed out on a nepotistic basis with government funds (taxpayer’s money) without any regard for citizen approval. Banks only hold a fraction of their balances in reserves. All money is created out of debt from nothing. The amount of money depositors think they have is not supported by the funds the bank actually owns to repay them. The truth is only ever a bank run away.
Cryptocurrency offers a revolutionary new basis upon which to build economies.
It allows permissionless transactions of sound money, with rapid settlements, across any borders. Cryptocurrencies can be designed to follow any programed consensus rules, and once these rules are in place they produce an immutable blockchain record of transaction history that is almost impossible to change or defraud. Blockchain technology allows for so much more than just cryptocurrency. It allows any information to be securely published and stored across a decentralized node network. This allows unprecedented peer to peer structures to emerge, the possibilities of which we are only beginning to glimpse. Blockchain has the potential to disrupt power structures, and allow massive populations of people to have real control over their information without relying on centralized service providers, and gatekeepers. The days of centralized control over currency issuance, financial services, content hosting, social media, and internet trading are numbered.
Established cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin (1), as revolutionary as they are, are only in their infancy.
Long block times, expensive transaction fees, massive electricity waste from proof of work mining, and the centralization of mining in large mining pools all loom as problems. Most importantly, established cryptocurrencies lack a mechanism for cohesive governance. They simply place all of the control over the software protocols in the hands of small groups of developers, with little to no oversight from the community. The often lack transparency, are slow to react to community sentiment, and are susceptible to conflicts of interest. Proof of work alone is not decentralization; it is a tyranny by the hash power majority.
Then came Bitshares (2) and Steem (3).
Bitshares and Steem use a delegated proof of stake algorithm that allows all value holders to vote on who should produce blocks. This ability to vote on how blocks are produced does something very important. It brings decentralized governance to cryptocurrency. It also mitigates mining centralization, and allows these elected block producers to act as compensated leaders of the platform, all while being accountable to user votes on a second by second basis. Bitshares introduced the user issued asset, a crypto token that is created easily by an account, and can be traded on the blockchain as its own distinct asset using the decentralized exchange. The market pegged asset, or smartcoin, enables the network to have secure collateralized stores of value that track outside assets. Steem utilized 3 second block times to produce real time transactions, allowing for fast paced social media interactions to be recorded at the blockchain level. Transactions are rate limited by the amount of value the account holds, allowing for free transactions. By making transactions fast, free, and lightweight, they can be used for any user interaction, not just financial transfers.
Steem, like the social media and financial technology that came before it, has some flaws.
Steem offers no asset that represents the equity of the network that is not inflated over time. Steem is created at a constant rate, and the Steem power used to vote has its value degraded by the issuance of new Steem. Steem offers no ability to encrypt posts, or make private posts with restricted visibility. Steem offers no ability to create separated communities, and is homogeneously combined into one. Tags are not distinctly created, have no page customization options, and only a limited amount of them can be used. Steem requires that post data be recorded directly into the blockchain, causing rapid expansion of the blockchain size. Files must be hosted externally, requiring breakable links for embedded images, and videos. Peer to peer content hosting protocols such as Storj (4) allow for data to be held by a network of peers, while encrypted and sharded. The most important drawback of Steem is its lack of built in value creation for its cryptocurrencies. There is nothing on Steemit that can be bought with Steem backed dollars or Steem. Content purchasing mechanisms, such as those described by Decent (5) allow for premium content to be sold between peers. Steem’s promotion system leaves much to be desired, and voting power is not a sufficient motivator to draw capital inflows. The average user will not choose to purchase additional units of currency to marginally increase their content voting power. Memberships, built in marketplace trading, premium content purchases, and post promotion offer much more value.
Ezira proposes to build on the important advances of Steem, and unleash an array of powerful new features and improvements, while offering more compelling demand avenues for its network cryptocurrencies.
How are you building Ezira's codebase?
Analysis of Steem is wrong in nearly every attempt.
I am planning to build Ezira's codebase using graphene. The White Paper is a conceptual and technical outlay at this stage. Which parts of my analysis of Steem strike you as incorrect? And are you referring to the parts in this segment, or across the entire white paper?