Michael Noel ~ Decentralized Social Networks Panel

I am the co-founder and chief executive officer for a company called blockchain consultants we rationalize workflows using distributed technology and decentralization I'm also the facilitator for a thing called blockchain weekly every week I interview someone who's doing interesting things in the blockchain space I do it for an hour I put it on my youtube channel I have 16,000 subscribers and I get between four and ten thousand views a week on YouTube which is not much for YouTube but in the blockchain space it's fairly respectable and I'm also the co-founder for a thing called the blockchain consortium out of Phoenix Arizona and we're simultaneously opening 14 different companies going through a reg CTF hoping you do sto tokenization in 2020 and you are my name is Bill Ackman I'm founder and CEO of mines we're an open source and moving towards decentralized social network we have about a million and a half users and yeah I guess I was introduced I probably all need to say much more than that my name is Mark I'm CTR mines and it said hey my name is superior saying here I'm working on kind of restructuring financial incentives around social networks I'm figuring out how we can reinvent these social networks that we spend so much of our time zone I'm Rob I'm the co-founder at cpa network at what what would network sapien network sapien network as in Homo sapiens interesting we're doing a lot of things with you know blockchain and humans and interaction and social networks and this is what it's all about we're trying not to be Zuckerberg but we're really as we build these social network networks beginning to resemble Zuckerberg a whole lot I think one of the things I want to open up and just talk a little bit it's you know kind of the red herring for me you social networks is proof of identity and how you're addressing that does that make sense you want to open it up with that I mean we might as well talk about the hard stuff first right so you want to want to take that one sure I think identity is complicated I think ideally we want to have a unified solution for a bunch of different platforms but in practice there are a lot of different requirements for each network that sort of make the development of an unified solution very difficult yeah I think it'd be really cool to to build out like a web of trust solution that was something that was explored a lot earlier on and then we move towards more centralized identity providers I think yeah that's probably the way that we should explore it I think identities interesting because ultimately you might not want to keep your you know main identity away just cuz you're in a social network you have a right to anonymity and people want to be anonymous and we provide those tools and minds and I think the blockchain also is is allowing people to do that it's kind of interesting though because you do have issues of spam bots and things like that who abused that power so you do have to kind of identify people in a way but I guess that's some of the challenges that need to be overcome I just wanted maybe mark to add what so we're about to launch a project called Nomad which leverages etherium addresses for sort of identity and then used the DAT protocol for peer-to-peer file hosting and so I was just curious if Mark could talk a little bit about what we're doing with identity and verifying it yeah I mean it's basically identity just a friendly username that translate back to the the DAT address where you can you can share the information so what we're doing with kind of a fully decentralized social network is we're providing the tools that when you need the consistency so you need to know everyone's name and how it translates to their addresses use the blockchain for that but using the blockchain to post people's posts images of their of their dinner or their cats and things not everyone in the world needs to have all that information so so we're using blockchain for when everyone needs to know everything to be able to talk to each other but for everything else in the in between where the consistency is not not required we're putting those on different different different networks and different communication protocols and then and that's good I mean it sounds like mine's has a pretty good kind of a wraparound and you talked a little bit about the the way up well we have multiple types of data points that that point to an identity and point to a realistic kind of a you know based on the the places that you've been placed on the places that you have logins for and your browser and brave or something of this nature we can we can come up with some kind of assumption that who you are right but that could be gained and gained fairly easily but proof of identity really has to has to be core when we come into social networks we're doing things interesting things like what with telegram I mean telegram was something that when telegram first came out we said why do we need another social network right we all said that right up until the time they did a hundred and seven billion dollar iceo right then we went oh my goodness what's going on here and then äôs did four billion but that's really crazy and we're still stuck in the same kind of traffic pattern here with you know we use we use Facebook we can get into different different logins at different places with Facebook but really Facebook can be gamed it all can be gamed we're really coming down to a point where we don't have a proof of identity I mean it's it's pretty simple right oh thank you I guess I'm a little when you say identity you mean a way of authenticating or proving I mean all you have to prove is to someone else who really cares about prove and give you all so there's more people on Facebook than there are people on Facebook right but why do you have to tell Facebook your real information well exactly right why do you have to tell them your your information and why can't you identify your information on a social network so that you can show it to people that pay you for it right I mean yes I suppose that's with people you need to know information and maybe there's there's ways that you can can do that but it's it's more of a at risk that you have to have with those people but I guess you don't we have to have trust with the people but it has to be trust less it's like you told me your name I mean I'm just I'm trusting you that you told me the correct name I mean did the same thing what happened just cuz it's on a blockchain you could have lied well yeah well you know I told you the name that I that I have now you know now that I'm into the witness protection program right or I could tell your name of you know five different sock puppets that I offer right but we're really getting into a point now where and I think this is a problem I mean it's a problem that we're hitting in Nashville Nashville's having a real problem with proof of identity and trying to disintermediate some of the insurance companies and some of the stuff that goes on in healthcare it's coming it's coming into a real issue within a distribution and on just exchange when we're trying to do proof of delivering proof of you know proof of loading and proof of delivery who's doing that who's who in the zoo where are they at things of this nature we can storm at us but we really can't understand who it is that's there with a proof of identity and it just seems to me like you know social media is where this should come from because you had something to say so well going back to that I think like the reason why we're giving our identity in we're centralizing it and making it public I think for some reason like humans have moved towards a model where we're uploading as much we're uploading as much information as we can to try to get utility out of it so if we were to make it private and try to keep it to ourselves we're gonna be giving up pieces of the utility that these services offer so like Netflix for example if we kept our information private to ourselves without sharing it to the bigger AI that's giving recommendations we're gonna lose the utility of that and I think the majority of people don't really care about that privacy and they would rather have the convenience of it telling you which movie to watch or what should be on your newsfeed so for some reason we're moving towards that and I think trying to like hide our identity from people is is fighting the the momentum of where these social networks are headed right you know I'm not saying hide your identity at all in fact transparency is important within blocks Anna's would begin to build these decentralized you know as we begin to look at DLT and we begin to integrate DLT into workflows we've begin to understand decentralization and consensus and we begin to understand that decentralisation and consensus should come in to multiple organisms and multiple yeah we should build companies like this we share we shouldn't build companies like we're building them we should build them differently for DLT so we're moving in and as we do that transparency is part of that right but in order to get transparency in order to have transparency there's a couple of things that have to happen and Zuckerberg did this with Facebook you know first off he was the first guy in there just to start doing a lot of the stuff that we're doing now in social media and he's it is totally as game the situation and totally abused as his rights and I mean really game the system whoa I don't know if it is Zuckerberg fault I think if you look at the overall system that he's playing in so Facebook well we'll take Zuckerberg out sorry you can record please you can look at any Silicon Valley startup in the way that the rules are set up its to grow as fast as you can and so he's just really playing by the rules and incentives that thank God we're not in Silicon Valley well in a way we're kind of replicating the existing financial markets with like secure stop that that's the madness right exactly so so like I think the real opportunity in social networks is to reinstate around the social network so rather than just like tokenizing the equity and giving it to shareholders we need to find a way to distribute it to the whole ecosystem and align the incentives so that whatever it is that we're creating is aligned with like the global consciousness of where we want society to go not just the corporation that's controlling the system I wouldn't say that it's not his fault I mean he he structured just because Silicon Valley's doing it it's not like it doesn't take away responsibility he created a proprietary centralized platform that no one has any idea what's going on so it's definitely on the founders of all different projects - you know embed principles into how they're building their products and I think that's our responsibility right and I think a lot of times we just look towards Silicon Valley and say look that's the way it's done that's the way we're doing it instead of looking at it from a standpoint of everything's broke right and starting off I think proof of identity for me the big thing and I'm gonna I'm gonna get off of proof of identity now we'll move on to something else but I think that proof of identity should be you know a social construct and it should be something that is on a chain and shared by social media and I think you guys should you know cooperate with one another and trying to figure out the keys to this and figure out the proof of identity so we can move into you know healthcare and things of this nature and distribution and logistics stos I mean we're gonna do kyc AML I'm gonna be doing some some stos let me spend a ton of money on KY caml right and I shouldn't have to write this make sense so let's talk a little bit about minds yeah interesting interesting project by the way by minds org right or comm both okay well good for you and you're the CEO you're the CTO how do things where'd you get started and what started all this I mean we always just had a feeling that there was going to be an open source and open source social network and you know over time so you know we're not decentralization purists minds.com is using central servers right now sort of you know there's three main you go the centralized model give the Federation model and then you have the fully peer-to-peer decentralized model which like that and ipfs and these types of projects are pursuing so we're sort of taking a holistic approach looking at all of them anyone can set up their own minds stack and you know those could potentially Fedder a twith activity pub and then you have what we're doing with that which is totally sort of its own separate network but yeah I mean look Bitcoin is is open source money Wikipedia is open source encyclopedia it's kind of happened with social so that's where we're coming from good and what so you're what tell us a little bit about the technology that you're using so yeah it's kind of two sides and scenes throughout the blockchain conference you know probably mention we do use etherium as our rewards based system and how that came about was when we first launched we had a points-based system which was kind of an internal currency that users could spend on advertising and it was on an internal ledger that we had and then around this time last year maybe a little earlier we we just won't why not put this on the blockchain it makes perfect sense take take it out of our everyone else was doing it so and did you know take it take it out of our hands and let the users take it off the network and exchange with other networks as well so now our tokens on the blockchain and yet we're also playing around with with fully decentralized social networking tools where where you can talk to someone with no middleman at all and that that's that's the really cool stuff unfortunately there's such a barrier to entry of users to do that and the existing models you either have to pay to post to the to the blockchain and people just aren't gonna do that that's not gonna accept the masses or you you have the federated model where like the mastodons or whatever where you have to you post and relay and you get these weird usernames and things like that yeah I you know D tube I mean that started out good and now the silence is deafening and a lot of those different types of projects that you know had some promise or are going the wayside you know I I hope we have it I mean it's it's it's really important how about your project I mean what makes you unique so yeah we're working on a project called assembly we're trying to use it to organize the impact track so essentially using social graphs in the missions around the impact track and where people can create projects that tie together multiple missions and then rather than having like the the prize money go to just like a couple projects competing with one another similar to how kind of our financial markets work what if we could just distribute it to the social graph of all of these people collaborating together so using game theory to incentivize collaboration rather than competition we're exploring new token models around really financial markets so Sapien network uses an etherium based token to incentivize content creators to increase for greeting content but beyond that to create more generalized incentive models to incentivize users for sharing their data if they want to with advertisers well giving users full control over their data and going back to identity I think that's going to be a big problem to tackle I think the address as identity leaves a lot to be desired in the user experience I think your average social media user is not used to managing their own private key for example and being unable to recover their account if they lose it so I think there's a lot of work to be done there well you know we choose to go to the moon and do the other things not because they're easy we choose to do them because they're hard these are the hard things that we have to begin to tackle right I think it is not you know one solution to rule them all either like you can have central centralization and decentralization work together so you can have servers with user names and you can have if people want to go into the decentralized world you know sometimes you want to delete stuff can't necessarily do that on fully decentralized stacks that's true you can hide it you can obstacle you know that the point is that we have one person on the panel we've three different social media networks we had one person on the panel that mentioned look where were were incentivizing users and we're allowing advertisers to pay users for their data which is important we'll move into that just for a little while right when I don't know if we're going to talk Zuckerberg or Facebook or whatever we'll we'll just put social media right so when I say social media I go social media everyone knows that Zuckerberg right so when we go social media right and someone's making money on our persona right you're you you you you have a way that you're being able to incentivize and pass that back to the user yeah so it's a work in progress ideally we would have a community-driven project where different projects would contribute to a way to manage data and incentivize data sharing I think it's really hard to get away from data sharing in this current age of technology data is intrinsically very valuable and I think any social network will struggle to succeed without exploiting data to some extent but I think we can really empower users and give them control over that process yeah I think it's just all about consent and just inverting it so right now they're just following you around wherever you go physically or in your browser and targeting you based on that information without asking you and there's no way to turn it off so granted you're probably gonna make less money turning it the other way around and getting people to opt-in but that's just how it has to be yeah I think you know I think it has to be different than what it is I'm not sure what it's going to turn out to be but I I think I think we can all agree it's got to be different than what it is right so okay well yeah okay good we have a canoe we have it we have a dissenting vote here so so there's like there's this like really cool article called meditations on Moloch and there's a new Dow being created around it and it's it goes into the different life views of like whether you're humanist or data issed and there's a strong argument to be made that were we're majority datus and humanists I guess you get your meaning of life through words like in words looking inwards whereas data is the only reason they do things is to kind of share experiences with others so the I guess argument is that we're by giving all of our data up we're gonna we're kind of incentivized to keep sharing whether it's like snapchat or Instagram we're trying to share as much as we can and upload as much as we can so if we if we like extrapolate eventually we're gonna have censors and give more data and more data and the only way that we give value to the system is by uploading more data so if we keep going down that track we're gonna get a lot of utility and whatever a I systems are being created they're gonna keep giving us what you know they're gonna make our lives a lot easier but we're gonna we're gonna be giving up our decision-making power to these systems and I think that's like a bigger question of like what do human beings like what is the purpose of like why we're here so that's like a more philosophical question but sure we've got like 10 minutes we can explore the entire what you know what's the concept and what's the proof of life and yeah well dive right into that one it's go for I agree I mean but it's still in the beginning all about consent so maybe you're gonna agree you know you're gonna voluntarily livestream your whole life and you know get paid for that process but it's that's different from your phone just you know gathering that without telling you constantly constantly gathering where you're at and you know I mean we can you know there's ways to you know you you have half the key and you have to have the other half to be able to see my data I mean we can do that kind of stuff we were to understand what that is but I'm not seeing it implemented today you know I wanted to open it up does anyone have a question not but don't don't mint if it's you know Zuckerberg Oh social media okay go ahead hang on second here just a quick comment for yours Daniel Dennett check him out he talks about memes they've existed forever right they're not just on the internet ideas exist of their own right the other thing I was gonna say it I fully I feel confident that in the short term on and off chain cooperating together is going to be the key to early success in not maybe in the consumer space but in the bigger corporate industry government spaces so that's all I have to say they're not really questions but if you want to discuss some yeah we actually do on and off chain so we reward tokens for all your activity and contributions and then and we do that off chain because it would be way too expensive to do it unchain but then we give users the option to transact on chain if they want to and we try to incentivize them to do that but yeah I mean that feeling way you're gonna be able to give a UX that is acceptable eventually we will have Oracle's and and things of that nature that'll do that we don't have interoperability but that's another thing about interoperability between social medias you guys are siloed off into different silos you're on aetherium your honor 3 ok so your honor all honor theorem we should be able to work something together go ahead so my name is Ross I just want to have a kind of an interesting question about censorship I want to go back to our roots as a nation as a country where we were founded upon our founding father that we are all created equal doesn't matter if it's the smartest not so smart or it's maybe the cook dude whatever we supposed to be treated equally but we have a censorship on on our social media people being the platformed because there may be views are too strong or they're not so comfortable for our general population so I know a lot of the networks been kind of challenged in basically throwing people off or kind of telling them well your post is gonna go way down on a list not gonna be really seen because it's comfortable so question but censorship how do you view censorship and really where do you think so it's going so people are not the platforms and really hurt no matter what thank you yeah I think on censorship you have to go off of the law if it's if it's legal in the US then it is it is legal and you can't take these kind of partisan positions like they you know the mainstream social networks are taking and also they have they don't even follow their own content policies Apple has a term on their App Store which just says objectionable content I mean what does that mean it's it's the most bizarre phrase everything's objectionable to someone I'm sure so it's very hard to be compliant with Apple and if they take a slight offense to anything then they will shut it down it depends on what they decide is objectionable yeah and then you know ideally getting it out of the network's decision in the first place of what can be taken down or not we're sort of that that's probably the worst part about running running central servers is is having to do content moderation so you know on dot and blockchain it's it's not even possible and we have another question excuse me well good yeah I think if you look at the way that we view trust in content censorship in the real world it's like the information doesn't flow outside of your network until you gotta go explore it so using a web of trust you could create some form of system that everyone would see something different but you would only see what you're plugged into so I think ultimately to address censorship will need decentralized governance I think relying solely on legality still requires some authority to arbitrate what is legal I think we all need a way to collaborate and decide what is acceptable in a decentralized manager it you're you're right I mean but we have to start working on these things I mean proof of identity it's got to become before we have governance in the Weber trust I think we're heading in the right direction with whoever trust I don't know but I think what a trust makes sense to me it's just we haven't we haven't hit there yet you know yeah the hardest part I mean it's been tried a lot but the hardest part is they call it rebooting the web of trust and like how do you grow it with the advantage of centralized system is you can hyper grow it very easily it's almost like you're taking this low road with the web of trust and I don't think any ways further than the long way is the short way and the short way is the long way [Laughter] hi streamer if the USP of a decentralized social network is essentially that he could redistribute value back out to its users in a sort of a cooperative model our people actually prepare our projects prepared to actually monetize and help monetize that data right and actually create and generate value which to distribute because the put there the issue might be that you're like hey look we could do we could distribute the value but unfortunately no one really wants to buy this and we haven't figured out how to do that yet so huh you know and it kind of just fails on that basis are you ready to be kind of almost you know advocate for your users in that sense I think d2 did a really good job of that but they have I mean like I say the science has been deafening DTF has a couple of different monetization strategies right I have people they have content creators that get paid tips from different viewers and things of this nature they also have the same monetization strategies that YouTube has that they're beginning to to build some bulk bulk on but I think I I don't think we're there yet what are your thoughts well my thoughts are if you raise venture capital and you're kind of going down that VC model euros gonna have to generate returns for your investors so the great thing about crypto is it it allows you to kind of bootstrap a new system where you don't need to go down that that road but I don't know I'm curious what you guys think I think people need to how do you value what a single piece of data is worth I mean it's really the data and in an isolated form it's not well too much it's when it's in the Conover the aggregated form that then they build what my dad is worth a lot more than yours right that's whatever no yeah well yeah band you're gonna tell me that your date is a lot worth a lot more of them it's okay so it's how do you price the individual part and then once it's already out there it's out there so I think people really need to be a bit more cautious about what they maybe they are sharing and and don't have an illusion of privacy also just giving people I mean the idea that okay you're gonna get some sort of monthly direct deposit for I mean well Facebook just in Google they just got in trouble with Apple because they were paying college kids like twenty bucks a month to follow absolutely everything they're doing on their phone so you know from that perspective I forget who might have been Fred Wilson who tweeted he was like so does this mean that that's what data is worth twenty bucks a month but it's more what we're focused on is giving users tools to make money from other users directly who do value their content and that's helping people earn I think cryptocurrencies do provide the opportunity for alternative monetization models but I think ultimately we'll need to develop a solution to allow users to share their data if they so desire and to be fairly compensated for it I think we've got some interesting thoughts and some interesting ideations anyone else have any questions no no questions you sure yes so I guess my question is I ideally what do you guys think a web 3 based social network would look like or function like because it's very easy to sit and beat up the sins of Facebook because they've got plenty don't get me wrong but they do provide a utility that a lot of users still enjoy using them so when we move things to a web 3 model exactly you know what do you see that looking like where's the value place for its users two minutes so I think the no pressure the core value proposition is incentivizing users for providing value to the network for sharing their content for example yeah I think that that's it's a really like this company that everybody works for that it's not really a company but everyone who contributes to it whether you're liking content or anything you're basically gaining a piece of you're contributing micro equity to this company you mean like decentralized what a concept I guess the user experience of how people are gonna interact with these applications is gonna change massively just as when the smartphone came out you know no one even knew what an app was until we started you know different layouts to web browser wars so I think there's probably gonna be a big change there and how it's approached and also how users are going to interact with this stuff especially you know if it is fully decentralized how that data is loaded it's Facebook and all these are the networks and even mines are they have huge backends that are pulling all these feeds together so essentially that that's gonna have to be you know spread out for everyone else to do so maybe the way those feeds are loaded or the way people interact with them it's probably gonna change I expect I think we can send people they'll go away from Facebook right you could go to dak colon slash slash Nomad minds.com no but no it's a prototype it's up so you can see what it looks like and yeah that's what we're working on this weekend so we're gonna we're gonna do an Android app that is able to access Nomad too so we got a little over a minute left and that was a perfect segue into shameless plugs so give it give us your shameless plug again that's it dad : / you have to access it through the Beeker browser I think brave and chromium are gonna support that soon but they don't yet yeah I guess that that's one of the issues like people don't want to have a beak a browser to have to go to a social network that that these are the learning curves that that give the barriers so this is why we're probably being mobile first now that's gonna get people through the door and and that's what we're working on this weekend if anyone's working on the impact track during the hackathon will be up around the impact table and we'll show you what we're working on check out sapien Network I want to thank each Denver the superior Assam event Denver has always been too close to my heart as far as blockchain and the community out here is just next to none in my estimation great a great event thank you guys for coming out to Denver and thanks for spending a little time with us here talking about social media networks and what might happen in the future and thank you guys for attending the panel my name is Mike Noel and I appreciate your time thanks [Applause]