Jarrod Dicker's Update - August 14th
The Verifiable System of Web 3.0Last week, we merged the most critical component for moving Po.et to mainnet: claim batching. I described last week why that is important (
https://blog.po.et/scaling-po-et-to-millions-of-users-75b01b95e4f1) and Eric published a piece (
https://blog.po.et/scaling-blockchain-cc6db2f88a48) yesterday that goes into how it works, how it builds value and how Po.et will be one of the first (if not THE first) protocols to batch claims to the Bitcoin blockchain at scale.
Claims are critical to our mission. It is technically how we're building a verifiable system for Web 3.0 and, ultimately, it is the core value of the Po.et protocol. So, knowing that, it needs to scale. So how does batching work? In Eric's words:
"A publisher (which is you!) creates and signs a claim, which gets hashed — a hash is like a unique fingerprint for some given content — and placed into a batch by a Po.et Node. That batch is itself hashed, and submitted to the Bitcoin blockchain. When the batch is confirmed (which could take some time — Bitcoin mines a new block about once every ten minutes), other Po.et Nodes detect the new batch hash, locate the batch, and verify the claims it contains."
This is how we build reputation on the Po.et protocol. And being the protocol for the world's creative assets (yes, the entire world) means scale is critical to our success. We need to support reputation for all. And this problem is solved. How? Again, take it away Eric!
"Recently, Po.et has been talking about providing a nutritional label for content. What does that mean?
Verifiable claims are claims that are cryptographically signed by their creators (called issuers). Anybody can issue a claim about content on Po.et, but they must digitally sign it with a private key and then the claim and the signature get bundled together in a JSON-LD document and anchored to the Bitcoin blockchain, which proves that a claim existed at the time the block was mined.
On its own, a claim that you own a particular creative work may not be very interesting. For example, I could claim that I wrote ‘Moby Dick,’ but anybody familiar with ‘Moby Dick’ would know that claim is false. A claim is not a fact. It is only evidence.
Such a claim would not stand up for long on the Po.et Network, because on Po.et, people can make claims about claims, so there’s a good chance I’d get called out.
All the claims about a particular work get aggregated together into a unified view of the work called an entity. That entity is the sum of all claims made about something that has a representation on the Po.et Network.
All of the claims I make and all of the claims about those claims get aggregated together into a holistic view of the content I post, and what the Po.et ecosystem thinks about the claims I make. Over time, that builds verifiable reputation.
The aggregation of claims about a particular piece of content (including the reputation of the creator) can act like a nutritional label for content. It tells you something about how trustworthy (or not trustworthy) that content is.
The Po.et team sees a future in which all content has that nutritional label, and when you aggregate and sort content based on how healthy it is to consume, the result is a better, more trustworthy web where good actors are rewarded for creating good content, and where lies are difficult and expensive to maintain.
The result of all this is that every time you post an image of a beautiful sunset on your favorite social network, the Po.et Network could pick it up, verify that you’re the owner, and then more claims can be made about it, like ‘it’s beautiful,’ or ‘it’s a sunset,’ or it fits a ‘relaxing mood.’
So if Po.et users post 1 million sunset photos per day, that could generate 3 million claims about them. Those claims could help media organizations discover and license content for articles or broadcasts, help a publisher find and license content for a book cover, or help ad networks identify and block inappropriate content. (But who doesn’t like sunsets?)
Virtually every crypto or decentralized app project is going to have to contend with the problem of scalability. If you’re relying on the Po.et Network, don’t sweat it."
So in short, we have you covered. We're also actively pushing forward on many initiatives and want to make sure that with every update we provide you with something actionable and new. We've spoken to some folks in the community and decided that for my "official" updates, we are going to move to bi-weekly. This is to make sure each update will be actionable. As we move closer to main, with new partner and product releases, we want to give as much information and value as possible with each update. This also means there will likely be more updates and engagements in between, as we'll be shipping and communicating faster as we progress.
Tomorrow we'll release our August engineering update with the latest milestone to mainnet. We also have some more content coming this week so keep your eyes out. These next weeks and months are going to be the defining moments in Po.et's history. Excited you all are along for the ride.
JD
