IPFS And Its Triangle

Last night I did not sleep very well. After a short slumber, I woke up in the middle of the night and saw a shining triangle in the dark above me.

I often see triangles, when I have sleepless nights, but this one was special. — You can see what I saw in the picture on top of this page.

I could hear a dark and solemn voice talking to me:

If you are in possession of all the three edges in this triangle, you will make an awful lot of money.

Fine!, I answered. I will write that down next morning and inform the rest of the world about the wisdom I magically acquired tonight.

So here it is: If you want to sell any digital data, you will need a file sharing system and some sort of encryption. The last ingredient will be a blockchain that provides simple smart contracts and the ability to send and receive digital currencies. If all this works together well and gives you linear scalability, then you will have everything you need. You will rule the world.

There is one simple drawback: My idea is not reality, and it might not be that simple to turn it into a reality.

“Just do it!” does not really help me in that situation. The challenge is larger than my modest strength can handle. So when I woke up in the morning, reality got me back pretty quickly. More than only the simple triangle I saw during the night is needed. There is another triangle that I visualized some weeks ago:

This magic triangle implies, that there will be no success, until our hardware is interconnected in the net, and there is some sort of superior (artificial) intelligence that can steer the interactions between those hardware components. And finally, the promises of the blockchain technology would guarantee, that actual business between “things”can happen, and human intervention will be minimized. This may sound unclear at the moment, but the missing clarity is just due to the fact that I am trying to talk about things that have just started flourishing. Nobody can tell you yet, how the fully developed blossom will look like.

I will try to get it as clear as I can. In the past I meditated a lot about selling digital media online, so I will take this business case as an example to the obvious challenges we are facing here:

• It should be possible to sell any digital media partially or complete. Today’s technology is good enough to provide such a feature, but sadly it is not yet ready for the real world. Do not think in terms of books, films or songs. You had better think of more abstract terms like streams, or maybe files. But even files are not indivisible. They can be split up and divided in many ways, and still their information will not be lost or diminished. Nothing stops up from storing and selling the pieces, not the whole thing.
• Ownership of any digital document could be documented easily, if we had a standard way to register the hash of a document in the blockchain. Again: This feature is present. It is implemented! But it is not widely applied. It just does not live up to its real potential.
• There are so many readers already: Any smartphone can serve as a reader. Any tablet. For longer texts we have the kindle reader or others that do not need to be mentioned here. But there is no interoperability between. Everything is centralized and proprietary with respect to its sales process. We are just missing out on that.
• The hardware used for reading is just not “blockchain-aware”. Not yet. It cannot be triggered with a smart contract. It cannot be used to pay in a cryptocurrency for a book. So what?
• Something completely new might evolve in the future. We might not yet be aware of that, but the beginnings might be visible already. Take the business concept of Medium for example: That is for sure a new kind of journalism, but it could be the beginning of a new development, and not its end. I cannot be clearer about that, because I just do not know. Nobody knows, but we should try to get a feeling for what is going on here.
• Another example of what might turn up is the basic attention token They have their own “magic” triangle and call the edges user, advertiser and publisher: The attention the publisher gets from the user is measured by their browser and paid for in a transparent way by the advertiser. This is another example for a concept that is in no way related to the publishing world that was based on paper and printing.

Sometimes it is intimidating for me to think about these topics that seem to be so much larger than me. Or even write about them in a language that is not my native language. With this I am experiencing another strange characteristic of digital publishing: What I write could be read around the globe, in almost any country. But most likely it will be lost in the endless stream of new publications done in the internet everyday, and almost nobody will read it.

Nobody could read me, though potentially everybody could. Again, the situation is completely different to what it used to be in the pre-digital world, where any article needed to be printed before getting a minimum chance to be read. The ease of publication is very much annihilated by the shere volume of (unedited) new content arriving in the net everyday.

Is this reason enough to loose confidence? — No. The focus has just shifted. It is no longer relevant if you are published or not. What counts is how many people are reading you, watching your movie, listening to your music or seeing your picture. The importance of the number of printed copies is nonexistent. New counters are relevant: How many views? How many reads?

That makes me shiver. Writing feels like standing on an empty stage, talking into the dark to an audience you do not know if it really exists. The audience may be the whole world — or nobody — or just a magic number between infinity and zero … who knows …