A Token Mechanism for Sharing the Content, Control, and Cash Ecosystem of Decentralized Social Media
Token Whitepaper Ver A May 24, 2018 Draft
Phil Simpkins
http://mediaMoolah.com
Abstract
Social media was meant to be a sharing platform where individuals could share their interests, goals, and desires, to help form a community around their favorite activities, events, and paste times. This would have been best accomplished by a decentralized network without any central points of failure or control. However, certain market forces of the traditional social media platform and advertising campaigns resulted in a dependency on centralized frameworks and infrastructure. Further, the economic incentives of today’s social media resulted in an oligopoly, where a few large companies (Facebook, LinkedIn, Google, etc.) have ended up with the most end-user data in centralized data silos. These centralized data stores are enticing targets for attackers and have frequent data breaches, as was the case with the recent data gathering of Cambridge Analytica, [1] and Facebooks own admittance to loss of data [2]. Media Moolah is an open-source effort to give back the content to where it legally belongs, us the users. We want to decentralize the control of the data, and re-distribute the cash that has been horded by the single entity control mongers. Media Moolah will create a micro economy around each user and incentive minors to keep our platform safe and secure.
1 Introduction
Our mentors are right, we do not need another copy-cat social network, we need a new way to share our thoughts, and desires. It took less then 10 years for money to corrupt well intentioned companies, but they had us signup to give our content away for free, which we have protected rights that even the US government recognizes. They have violated our trust and made profits from our hard labor. I believe that Gary V. [3] is right, that we should give away our content to promote our brands, but we should not give away our rights and our profit potential, by doing so. Wozniak’s [4] comments about Facebook taking our data and making money without selling a product are correct. We as a unified team need to give the power back to the content creator. Power to the people, Profits to the people, Promotion to the people.
Advertising was a process developed during the era of radio. It evolved into the era of television. It’s tentacles have extended into technical advancements of social media as well. Now we are not saying all advertising is bad, but if the only folks that our profiting from ads are the centralized control mongers, then they are just a version of the previous advertising methods. We need an evolution of adverting, not just a method to pay the controlling organization more money, so that they just turn a blind eye. Let’s put the power of promotion to work for the users. Companies should pay you directly because they take your time away from the things you want to do. They should pay you for your data that you have generated. The promotional process of Media Moolah will reward you; the user. It takes a newly designed system, that operates smoothly around all the other parts to function in the best way to benefit it’s user. It cannot be a tacked on adaptive function that only serves to provide a oneway cash feed to manipulating companies. Media Moolah will harness this influential energy and will funnel these profits back to you where they belong. You will be compensated for your data creation, time for experiences, and sharing capability.
In A Sea of Cows, Be an Elephant
Whether you are a pirate, a lord or lady, or a king; in a sea of cows, be an elephant. In other words, be unique and do the things you love to do. When everyone else is doing the same thing, look around for possibilities and do what the market needs you to do. Don’t be a part of the herd, be the leader of your own parade. In a network with a chorus of Moo’s, make sure that your trumpet is heard.
Potential user scenarios:
This is PJ:
He has 2,000 friends, posts 5 times a week, and is engaged with his commenters.
On average he can earn 10,000 coins per week, this could add up to 40,000 per month, at 500 to $1, that could be $80 per month. You can see that if, Beth has 200,000 friends then this could really start to add up.
This is Ellie,
She has 500 friends, she is very selective, She shares with her friends and loves to check every day to see what they are doing. Ellie, posts when she does something fun and exciting, but she wants to make a little more moolah, so she can do more fun stuff.
Promotions come across her screen, but also she can get recommendations from friends that can give her 1, 5, 10, and even up to 250 coins. Amounts will vary and there are no guarantees, but the team has identified some algorithms of viewing that could generate $7 /hr and even more, but make sure that you take time to sleep.
2 Design Goals
Media Moolah wants to create a social media platform that uses Sharing, time = Money, and advertisements to make money for the users of the platform. As far as the competition, Media Moolah wants to be in the sweet spot, paying users for sharing, their time, and promotional interruption.
Media Moolah will form a micro economy around each user so that that we can earn money from several sources.
These concepts are discussed in “Who Owns the future,”by Jaron Lanier ,[3]. In this book, he explains that the control of data should be owned by the creator of the data and they should be paid for their content. Crypto currency is the best way to track this and determine who should make the profit from that data; of course, the creator of that data.
We will follow the principles in this book to guide us in the best way to evolve this project.
We will have a similar look and feel to other standard social network sites, but have the advantage of focusing on the ownership and profits of the users.
- The team will create a crypto technology that tracks, shares, and distributes crypto currency. We plan to call the crypto Geek Gold. It will start with the value of video views that has been established by YouTube at $2 per 1000 views.
- The team wants to decentralize the control of the content and data for each user. Everyone should own their own content they create. Our crypto will define who put it on the network first. If there is a dispute, we can go back to the crypto (and also the internet) and establish the original creator. Of course, the users will get paid for their content that they developed.
- The team wants to focus on sharing. Each user will have a share account that they can utilize to give tips to their favorite friends. We can view our favorite content and share directly with friends, You will earn shared coin from advertisers that are presented in your personal feed or from council miners that are mandated to share half of the coins they receive.
- The team has a goal to turn advertising and promotions in the favor of the users. It is your time, you should be paid for the interruption of the videos and content you want to view. Advertisers have been influencing us since the creation of radio. Transitioning to television and also to social media. Advertising has been a copy-cat, bolt on function to a product that we want. It’s time to focus on the desires of the user and consumer. We want great content and we want to spend time doing the things we love. Since time is money, any interruption to the time that we enjoy, should be compensated for our inconvenience.
3 Blockchain Protocol
Our Blockchains architecture, is used as a secure base layer to provide consensus on the coin allocation. This gives global consensus on the state of digital assets like social media views. Our crypto called Geek Gold will follow a similar example to Lisk with a “Earned” crypto and a “Shared” crypto. The differences of Lisk is that we will have 256 miners. Like the knights of the round table (or Jedi council) our crypto will have a council to validate the blocks, and our miners will be called “councilors”.
• Blocks: blocks will be formed to exchange groups of coins. The goal of the crypto blockchain is to provide similar and affordable mining without spending thousands for a rig. We plan to use a sidechain of Lisk or similar approach to how Lisk works [4], but have 256 Miners. The crypto process in Lisk is available for server validation of blocks in the blockchain and the underlying blockchain is conceptually simpler.
• Tokens: Our protocol proposes to switch the protocol token from just an earning token, but to also function as a sharing token for miners and users. This introduces new incentive mechanism for the growth of the ecosystem, establishes the economic stakeholders of the network, and preserves the economic stakeholders.
• Mining: The protocol introduces a mining system similar to Lisk. The miners will be called councilors. The mining system has three components: (a) a proof-of-sharing mining mechanism to incentivize people to participate in building the most shared blockchain, (b) an award mining mechanism to incentivize developers to build apps during the initial years, and (c) a web-of-trust sharing mechanism to incentivize users to participate in an ecosystem of decentralized social media networks.
The counselors will receive rewards for validating the exchange of the crypto. They will receive 5X rewards the first year with a declining incentive from 5X first year, 4X second year, 3X third years, 2X fourth year and continued validation reward (1X) for the life of the mining balance.
Allocation within the Media Moolah platform are free since many allocations will be small. Outside transactions will have a small fee based on the cost incurred to Media Moolah expected around 5% or whatever the selected coin exchange.
Media Moolah’s tech team is planning to establish it’s own internal crypto since the cost of exchanging small amounts of crypto are high. The initial base crypto will be planned for a side chain of Lisk, https://lisk.io, but we are considering alternative coins and continue to test other crypto’s including Ethereum, https://www.ethereum.org, and Mobius, https://mobius.network. We will release an extended paper on the explanation of the crypto algorithm at the end of June 2018.
4 Mining Incentives
Counselors (miners) are needed for the success of Media Moolah, they are valued members of our community and are a must to move Media Moolah forward. There are 3 ways that counselors can make money. The third way also includes a way for all users to make money.
4.1 Proof-of-Sharing Mining
Sharing is vital to Media Moolah’s development design. Miners will receive a portion of their reward as a crypto that must be shared. Sharing is not a natural born response in humans, it has to be learned. Since this is the case, we at Media Moolah want to enforce this behavior in our product. Miners will receive other direct awards, but this part of the coin must be given to others or used for promotion with in the Media Moolah platform.
4.2 Award Mining
Miners are an intricate part of Media Moolah. They will validate the crypto and provide development input and product direction. Since they are key to the success of Media Moolah they should be compensated for their efforts. Miners will receive a portion of their reward as a crypto as a reward for their efforts and continued support.
4.3 Web-of-Sharing Mining
Every user receives a portion of coin to share. This signifies how important your time is. There will be a percentage of miners defined to share crypto with all users. We have initially set the value at 2.08% of the ICO, which is 6.25% of the miners or 16 of them. You as the user are the most import part of Media Moolah and we want to show you how important you are.
5 Decentralized Governance
Media Moolah will establish an earning crypto and a sharing part of the crypto. The crypto will be distributed in the following amounts
*2% of crypto estimated to be allocated to investors/officers biased
on evaluation of company upon the close of the ICO
In addition, a portion of the un-shared crypto (2%) still in the shared stack after a time duration (a week) will be re-distributed to the sharing stack of Media Moolah to be redistributed to users as shared crypto within the Media Moolah network. Earned crypto is yours to keep, shared crypto is yours to use, please share.
Miners will receive their reward when they validate a block at every 30 seconds.
6 Implementation & Future Work
Due to previous work developed by this team on www.carcalmly.com we are projecting the following time line.
The social network is expected to take 3 months of development and the tech crypto is expected to go live end of Q3 2018 but there are no guarantees.
7 Conclusion
Social media has been around for 15 years. It took a short time for it to adopt the standard operating practices of big business and form ivory towers of advertising and control mechanisms from previous older technology. It is time for us to harness the influence of promotion to focus on the users and establish the correct control and profits to the users where it should have been in the first place. Media Moolah will develop a crypto that will track your content, pay you for your time, and give you profits that should rightfully be yours.
Acknowledgements
The people acknowledged in this section do not endorse the Media Moolah token or the token sale, and do not recommend any purchase of the tokens or any related instruments, such as a simple agreement for future tokens or an interest in a fund sponsored by Media Moolah LLC and its affiliates.
We’d like to thank Nick Longo and Michael Girdley for being mentors and maybe telling us not to proceed; Marie Guajardo for her boundless energy and market validation; Drue Placette and Dale Bracey for helpful entrepreneurial advice; Javier Guerra and Christian Dibreli for their feedback on early drafts, helpful suggestions, or contributions to ideas presented in this paper.
As we said this is a draft and we are just getting start, but if you are invested, please upvote us or comment. Thanks Phil
References
[1] Cambridge Analytica, “Facebook and Cambridge Analytica: What You Need to Know as Fallout Widens,” March 18 2018, NY Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/19/technology/facebook-cambridge-analytica-explained.html.
[2] Facebook Breachs, “Facebook: ‘Malicious actors’ used its tools to discover identities and collect data on a massive global scale,” April 4 2018. The Washington Post, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/04/04/facebook-said-the-personal-data-of-most-its-2-billion-users-has-been-collected-and-shared-with-outsiders/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.93a0697ec030
[3] Vaynerchuk, Gary. “28 Inspirational Gary Vaynerchuk Quotes To Live By” , Jun 28, 2014, addicted to Success https://addicted2success.com/quotes/28-inspirational-gary-vaynerchuk-quotes-to-live-by/
[4] Wozniak, Steve,“Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak 'disgusted' with Facebook, deactivates account”, April 9, 2018 http://money.cnn.com/2018/04/09/technology/steve-wozniak-facebook/index.html
[5] Lanier, Jaron,“Who Owns the Future,” 2013, ISBN 978-1-4536-5896-7
[6] Lisk, https://lisk.io