Introducing CCCoin

CCCoin is the ultimate token powered creation feedback loop.

It is a new image sharing platform that rewards creators and curators with CCC tokens, in proportion to the value they add to the CCCoin community. As the community grows in value, this puts upward pressure on the CCC token’s value — resulting in a virtuous cycle that attracts new contributing users.

Creators post images that are licensed under Creative Commons and curators upvote the best ones to the top of the feed. Contributors of the best content are rewarded proportionally from a pool of continuously minted CCC tokens.

Unlike most Ethereum apps, there are no transaction fees for end-users. The experience is as simple as Instagram, Reddit or Twitter.

All the data generated by the users of the CCCoin dApp is decentralized and stored off-chain in Mediachain.

We’ve built a front-end viewer that’s live today and you can use to start posting, curating images and earning token rewards.

Motivations

While developing tools and infrastructure to support blockchain dApps, we became familiar with several common shortcomings in the general dApp landscape. CCCoin made fixing these common dApp pitfalls to be among its core design principles:

not a zero sum game — Supporting artists doesn’t have to come at the expense of others. The sum of all participants’ wealth can potentially grow far beyond the sum of all monetary and non-monetary contributions that they put into the system. No class of participants has to be taken advantage of for others to gain.

— Supporting artists doesn’t have to come at the expense of others. The sum of all participants’ wealth can potentially grow far beyond the sum of all monetary and non-monetary contributions that they put into the system. No class of participants has to be taken advantage of for others to gain. not another stock image platform — CCCoin is free to use, for both creators and consumers, yet both creators and consumers simultaneously earn tokens.

— CCCoin is free to use, for both creators and consumers, yet both creators and consumers simultaneously earn tokens. not micro-tipping / micro-transactions — No high-friction micro deposit requirements. No losing tokens every time you support an artist. In fact, you may significantly gain tokens from doing so.

— No high-friction micro deposit requirements. No losing tokens every time you support an artist. In fact, you may significantly gain tokens from doing so. not Flickr / Instagram / Facebook / Twitter — Instead of a central organization extracting nearly 100% of the financial value being created by its users and then leaving them without a cent, as is typical of the most popular image sharing sites today, CCCoin instead aims to more fairly distribute rewards among image creators, curators, miners, and other resource providers. Want to monetize your creations in a new way? CCCoin’s permissionless rewards system doesn’t get in your way.

For a more in-depth look at CCCoin’s implementation and incentivization balances, head over to Github.

Proof of Creative Work

CCCoin can be seen as another step in a larger “human powered proof of work” movement in incentivization systems across the blockchain space, along with Numerai, 21, Steem, Userfeeds, Augur, and Gnosis. This movement proposes a new layer of incentivization, built on top of the first generation of machine-powered “Proof of Work” used for trustless incentivization of transaction ordering, as popularized by Bitcoin.

CCCoin is ensures that artists and curators receive a fairer share of the value they’re creating. It is an experiment in rewarding image creators and curators without needing intermediaries or relying on traditional content monetization models that have proven to be unsustainable or at odds with platform users. It is also an attempt to build a new media platform that is completely self-sustaining, decentralized, permissionless, trustless and open.

We believe that CCCoin’s approach to incentivization is a perfect fit for Creative Commons images, which are widely shared and reused across the internet, but until now have not had an effective way of supporting the artists who create them.

Our path toward self-sustaining, open, unrestricted creativity

Last year, we wrote about how creators have “an insatiable desire to create and to share openly, even without monetary compensation” and lauded the success of the Creative Commons license, which has grown to a corpus of over a billion works.

Yet, the CC ecosystem suffers from a broken feedback loop. Mainstream social media platforms have built up their walled gardens through the constant dopamine drip of likes, shares, retweets, and reblogs, but the Creative Commons community has no direct equivalent: the commons doesn’t benefit from network effects. Even if the original author is credited when a CC image is used, there’s typically no channel for that information to flow back, and no nexus for community to form.

We soon arrived at the problem of the Creative Commons works being fractured across dozens of siloed platforms, with no easy way to find who made what. To address this, we began aggregating information about CC work across the web into Mediachain, a decentralized, shared, neutral and open system where anyone can access, contribute, or reuse media metadata. Since then, we’ve accumulated the metadata for over 100 million CC-licensed images from over 30 image sharing platforms.

Using this data, we launched Attribution Engine, an image search engine that automates attribution through sophisticated natural language and visual understanding machine learning models. Attribution Engine recognizes an image based on what it looks like, automatically resolving it to relevant metadata, such as its author or source. This technology creates a channel for reputation and gratitude to flow directly to the creator through content itself, anywhere the content is shared.

While following parallel momentum of the Ethereum community, we discovered that many developers shared the values we strive for, like open data and permissionless collaboration. We became inspired by the potential of smart contracts to be a medium for value exchange in decentralized media applications, and as we spoke with developers in the Ethereum community, we realized Mediachain can play an important role in the emerging toolkit for dApps.

The next logical step was to build our own media dApp to demonstrate this end-to-end, so we integrated Mediachain with Ethereum to provide off-chain storage for anyone building decentralized applications. Together, Mediachain and Ethereum support scalable, decentralized, token-powered media applications that are open-first, contributing to the growth of a universal media library that anyone can participate in.

Try the CCCoin demo and check out the code

CCCoin’s preview is live today, so you can start publishing and curating images now!

Developers interested in exploring or reusing the image data generated by the application can access it through Mediachain.

All the code behind CCCoin is open source and available on GitHub. You can read about how CCCoin works in detail in the README.

Help spread the word by hitting like on this post and join the community on Slack if you have any questions or feedback!