Censorship resistance, borderlessness, independent media, new models of distributing content—these are just a handful of reasons decentralized media has allure. But such a system hasn’t appeared yet.
That’s where DECENT comes in. It’s a peer-to-peer network for media, be it blogging, photos, music, software—whatever. There are three different roles people can have on the network. Authors, unsurprisingly, post their content to the network. Publishers work kind of like Bitcoin miners—they earn for DECENT coins for providing disk space and CPU. Readers can pay to consume media and rate authors.
The peer-to-peer media platform is superior to popular blogging platform Medium in a few key ways, according to DECENT Founder and Director Matej Michalko. He pointed out that users must comply with Medium’s conditions (or risk content removal), and that it’s often not easy to monetize when using third party applications. But by ridding the system of “unnecessary middleman” and adding micropayments, users skip both of these problems.
But there are political implications as well. “The other goal of DECENT is to eliminate all political and geographical barriers in the publishing segment, so people around the world will have the same opportunity to express themselves freely,” said Michalko. “ As DECENT will have no single point of failure and it is hard to being blocked by a 3rd party, it will allow anyone all over the world to publish (and monetize, if they wish) their content without the manipulation of middleman.”
The platform works with the help of a transaction layer, a distributed storage layer that keeps content online 24/7, a reputation layer that includes an author’s reputation in the blockchain (forever!), an anonymization layer, and a fine-tuned recommendation layer.
“DECENT uses a lot of underlying cryptography inside to make everything work: decryption key sharing, various zero knowledge proofs, we also developed our own proof of retrievability to provide highly scalable, anonymous distributed guaranteed storage,” said Michalko. “It automatically scales on content popularity.”
Then there’s one other hurdle that DECENT took care of. Cryptocurrency micropayments are not yet widespread because they are not easy for average people to use, and same goes for DECENT coin. “As most of the users are not familiar with it, we will provide a gateway to pay with other crypto / FIAT in order to reach mainstream audience,” Michalko said.
Michalko said the white paper will be available later this month, and they expect to launch the platform early next year.
It’s a big idea. Will it catch on? Time will tell.
