What is writing worth on the Internet? What about your time reading? The fact is that these days neither is worth anything. Words are now free, easy to copy and distribute as much as you want. StoriedCoin (SDC) is a design to examine the question of value and writing on the Internet, focusing on bloggers and authors of longform (1,200-2,000 words) content.
StoriedCoin is a way to put a better value on the words you write and time you spend reading them. It reintroduces scarcity, providing measurable and exchangeable value. It is a decentralised and interoperable protocol of writing and reading value, utilising an open ledger and blockchain based currency.
Authors would use StoriedCoin in two ways, the first of which is as a means of using an open ledger to verify their ownership of what they have written and proving it’s versioning. Secondly, StoriedCoin links the record what is on that ledger to a value that is exchangeable and trackable. When someone reads something published on StoriedCoin they have the spend StoriedCoin in order to do so. The reader also only pays for as much as they read. This value is then paid in exchange to the author.
The most important aspect of StoriedCoin is that it provides a pay model for authors that doesn't require a paywall or advertising, along with an exchangeable store of value and attention.
The initial design is that there would be 100,000,000 SDC released on a blockchain. There is no computational mining like there is with Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, there is publishing to produce coins. These would be earned by writers who publish on the system and spent by readers reading what is published on StoriedCoin. For a reader to have SDC, they would themselves need to publish, or buy or exchange them for other currencies, crypto or otherwise. The design is for a separate token as we believe reading and writing should live in their own attention based market.
The Author writes a 2000 word article. The word count is important as it sets the initial set point of value. Initially 2000 words would equal 20 SDC.
The Author publishes the 2000 word article. It is first pushed first to the StoryCoin open ledger. This would be done via a CMS plugin, for instance in WordPress, or with Javascript running on the web page where it was published. The ledger records the actual content along with the author’s ID and the initial value of the piece, in this case 20 SDC.
The article on the website shows that it has been put on the StoriedCoin open ledger, its ID hash proving that which links to the ledger or a webpage showing that and how much StoriedCoin (SDC) it has earned thus far.
A reader goes to check a leaderboard of StoryCoin articles and can see which have the highest value, by author or article, etc. The reader chooses to read an article and clicks the link which takes him to the author’s web page where it was published.
The Reader reads the page, seeing how much StoriedCoin (SDC) he’s paying to read the article while he reads it. In this case, he has only read about 600 words and so is only charged SDC for 600 words. Readers are charged on a curve, meaning that it allows the reader to not be charged a lot at the beginning, and encourages the author to create good stories to the end. The reader would be charged by either the length or price of what they have read, whichever is less. They pay once in SDC for what they read. If they come back and read more they are charged only for what additionally they read.
The article has earned the author 100,000 SDC. A publisher sees how popular the article is and is interested in licensing it or buying the rights to the article outright. The total earned value of the article that the author has written is also on the open ledger. Likewise, the ledger can record any transactions of that article, allowing the author, who is recorded to own the article, to license or sell it.
The Author sells the article to the Buyer and the transaction is recorded on the open ledger. It can be sold, traded or exchanged again and again and likewise recorded on the ledger.
- You earn coins, not random stars, follows or page views all over the internet, that are not tied to any platform and that are completely transparent
- You get ‘paid’ in an exchange with your readers
- StoriedCoin you earn are exchangeable for other cryptocurrencies
- IP and ownership is open, transparent and verifiable
- Readers pay authors for their work with a measurable amount of their attention
- There is no need for ads
- Have a transferable measure of time and reading
StoriedCoin is a design and an evolving work in progress, and meant to examine and question how we read and write on the internet. As such there are many as yet to be explored cases, both good and bad. For instance, what about questionable or objectionable content? Is there a way to build a consensus system within StoriedCoin to deal with that? Many things yet to explore.
StoriedCoin has come about through the tireless design effort and perplexity of Jim Kosem halfman.com with compounding technical consultation, vitriol, probing questioning and tea provided by Mehmet Duran @cfq