CIVIL and the future of media?

David Siegel emails me:

CIVIL is a new start-up from Consensys, whose goal is to change journalism.

The Civil marketplace is built on a protocol that in turn is built on the Ethereum blockchain.

This ecosystem is built around a token-curated registry, using what we call a “skin-in-the-game coin,” the CVL. This is an application of mechanism design to blockchain-based tokens that can be acquired, exchanged, and go up in value, creating a new micro-economy for – in this case – truthy journalism. The basic unit of Civil is a newsroom. A newsroom is a person or group who can publish anything they like. They can charge readers using CVL tokens or credit cards or anything else. What makes Civil interesting is that anyone can challenge a story’s veracity.

To challenge a story, you send some CVL coins to a smart contract. The community then votes on the veracity of the story, or even the newsroom itself. Anyone who votes must stake coins. If the story is voted true, those who voted true take the pot – they win all the staked tokens. If the community finds it’s false, then those who voted for false share the purse. This skin-in-the-game mechanism is the next evolution of communities like Steem and is game-theoretically far more advanced than Reddit or Quora. It promises to eliminate fake ratings, reviews, and content farms pumping out propaganda. By creating token-based games that reward virtuous behavior – the first one of which was Bitcoin – today’s blockchain entrepreneurs promise to bring us a new era of less biased news, better blogging, more accurate ratings, and potentially better science.

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