So it's Wikidata but with "blockchain" stamped on it to raise more money?
1) More efficient than centralized curation - Social media companies receive millions of requests to take down copyright information or spam sites. Today, you have centralized teams vetting each request individually and can take months to review. For this use case, DIRT is a valuable alternative to vetting information because it reduces the noise in each submission. 2) Commercial data - For markets where people can profit for spreading misinformation, open editing is not the best approach. You could create a wikipedia list of stores that sell hand made jewelry. Sellers can benefit from inclusion on the list, and would want to join the list regardless of whether they meet the criteria. The likely outcome is that the list would not be useful.
We’re believers in the blockchain and decentralization, but decentralized information curation is not needed everywhere. However, in markets where there is a critical, single point of failure, where you need transparency because you cannot trust any single actor, and where you have a high demand for data accuracy, DIRT can be very useful.
And what would prevent hand-made jewelry sellers from uniting against a single legitimate seller?
The only solution is to provide sources and have them manually reviewed by a trusted party, because voting only gives a majority opinion (weighted by how much money one wants to spend on that issue), not the truth.
The other owners of the tokens! That's the conceit of a TCR. The owners of the tokens have an incentive to maintain their value. The value of their tokens comes from their ability to get you onto the list of that token. The value of being on that list comes from the prestige of the list (i.e. its track record of honesty/quality).
> And what would prevent hand-made jewelry sellers from uniting against a single legitimate seller?
They could do this, but again, they'd be doing it at some cost to the prestige of their list.
If you need to find trusted data, a curator exists only if the market for that information is large enough.
If there were an economic incentive to challenge facts published by the NYT, would Blair's deception have persisted for several years? It's even possible that a subject in one of his stories would stake tokens to challenge the accuracy of the story. Blair could then respond by voting against the challenge with a large number of tokens, but would other parties join Blair or the challenger? They would probably investigate further and effectively join the challenge as neutral arbiters. The incentive on both sides is to provide persuasive information to win votes. The direct token incentive for the neutral parties is two-fold: vote with the winning side to gain tokens, and increase the value of the tokens they hold by helping the registry to become more popular so that demand for the tokens increases. If consumers of the registry value accuracy, that incentivizes the entire network to fiercely defend the accuracy of the data.
Curious how this will play out. Threshold for contributing is non-trivial, so the wasteland scenario is my academic guess. The contribution scoring and ranking will help, but can you be anonymous?
Today, if a publication or data source posts information about you or your business, there is no means to correct this data. You can post about it on Twitter or email the service, and wait for a response. You can't just fix this information. With DIRT, we create a way for people to at least be part of the curation process.
Different types of data require different governance models. Some datasets are not as critical to protect and could have a low token stake. For other pieces of information, you want every writer to have more skin in the game and thus have a high stake for writing. Our bet with building a protocol is to test what incentives will curate the best data.