IMEOS Interview

A few days ago, the IQ token was successfully airdropped. As a Chinese community partner of Everipedia, IMEOS’s US correspondent Francis Sangkuan interviewed Sam Kazemian, The president and co-founder of Everipedia. The interview covered potential politically sensitive issues when the project entered the Chinese market, the voting mechanism for content items, Everipedia’s vision of the knowledge base, and issues such as protecting users’ personal privacy.

Background

Everipedia is the next generation encyclopedia rebuilt for the modern age. With over 6 million articles and counting, it’s already the world’s largest English encyclopedia by content. Everipedia is free from ads and free to use for everyone under creative commons. （https://everipedia.org/）

Interview

IMEOS: As Tedde mentioned at EOS Hackathon in Hong Kong (June 2018), Everipedia is going to put lots of resources to establish different language options in many new countries. There is a Chinese idiom called “开门见山”，means you open a door and immediately see the mountain. Now we already come to the door, China, and see the mountain, the very first problem in front of you, the Censorship in China. So far, Chinese Wikipedia is fully blocked by the Chinese government, mostly due to political concerns. And basically, Everipedia is even more liberal than Wikipedia. In Everipedia’s white paper, you described why Everipedia, as an EOS-based decentralized platform, is much harder to block by any state or organization. However, many political topics are in the zero-tolerance list of Chinese government, and in many occasions, Chinese have a good reputation for being efficient.

So if the government decides to ban something they really don’t like, with an enormous effort, what will be your backup plan? Do you make the platform more difficult to block, self censor, manage to lobby the government, sit back and chill, or something else?

Sam: The network is meant to be a peer to peer platform in its entirety. The only reason that Wikipedia is easily blocked is because they block the DNS. This obviously won’t work for any distributed network, but it’s technically still possible to block traffic on the packet layer using advanced techniques. But, if we actually become a target of that sort, then I think we’ve already won by that point haha. The size of the community at that point would be so large and resilient that I’m sure new approaches could be designed.

IMEOS: On the other hand, there are many very different moral codes, different religious beliefs in the world. According to the white paper, the editing and creation of articles are decided by the community.

And, we say, when vote for a topic A, the majority of the voters will get rewarded, and the minority, those who get defeated in the voting, will be punished (they have to wait longer time in order to retrieve their brain power). Doesn’t it make a certain type of belief keep getting strengthen in the community over time? What’s your opinion on Tyranny of the Majority?

Sam: Yes, so this is definitely the main prevailing philosophical dilemma here and in many other stake based systems. The main question should be “Is the system designed in such a way that those with economic stake have proportional incentive to advance the ends of the system?”

Essentially, regardless of what someone with a large amount of IQ stake believes, we should design the system so that they have incentive to advance accuracy of each article/facts because in the end, that is how economic value accrues to token holders.

This is a tough tokenomics question, but I think that using the lessons learned from steem and other early innovators, we can design a decentralized system which behaves in this way.

IMEOS: The IQ airdrop was planned to be in middle of June. What’s delaying it, and what’s the new due-time?

Sam: Yes, it has been delayed a few weeks because we are trying to finish some administrative side of things so that everything is done properly. We have to make sure everything is done properly and accounted for.

IMEOS: As one of the most famous EOS based DApp projects in the market, what do you think about the current RAM price movement? Does the speculation, the hype, cause any negative effects on your side?

Sam: Even though we are building an application that might need a good amount of RAM on the main network, I think a certain amount of speculation is always healthy. Markets bring allocative efficiency to any sector and creating a market over a scarce network resource is a good thing.

However, the system has to be designed in such a way that usage is primarily incentivized over rampant speculation. Otherwise, the prices become too unrealistic for actual developers. I like the proposals that different people in the community have made, including Dan, for solving the RAM speculation. I’m confident it won’t be a problem in a couple of months.

IMEOS: Everipedia wants to create the world’s first repository of on-chain knowledge. When people talk about big-data, they usually link it with AI, machine learning, deep learning. In what way is Everipedia going to merge those ideas/technologies into your future vision?

Sam: Yes! One of the main use cases that not many people understand yet that gets me the most excited is being able to have on-chain knowledge to build complex smart contracts. For example, right now if there is any transaction that requires information from the real world, there needs to be an oracle solution for that particular dapp.

However, if Everipedia grows enough so that the security of the information requires large stake to alter/vandalize, then dapp developers can be reasonably sure that they can rely on information in Everipedia articles as on-chain sources of truth for off-chain facts.

This gets me extremely excited because it is one of those things that is easy to miss in the media or marketing of the project, but it’s the most important technical implication that is always on my mind. We essentially want to be the source of truth on-chain so that dapps can rely on this repository of knowledge.

IMEOS: Privacy issues increasingly become a public concern in this big-data generation (Facebook, Cambridge Analytica, etc,). Do Everipedia users have to worry about any privacy issues? Will Identity & Reputation System cause personal information leaking?

Sam: Actually, I think that one of the best things about using EOS as a platform is that we can use the blockchain for the user authentication layer. This means that it’s pretty much impossible for us to collect any kind of private information on the UX layer.

In fact, we plan to open source the UX we are using now and encourage others to develop other front ends for editing and voting on articles. This way, the entire system is truly decentralized and no entity can collect information on the UX layer.

That just leaves the reputation and ID system in the EOS mainnet itself. We’re confident that is in good hands of the community since the entire implementation is open source.

My personal belief is that this type of rep and ID system will be the new “facebook login” of most dapps but without the risk of a centralized party having unilateral access to your identity.

IMEOS: Why do you choose us (IMEOS) as your partner in Chinese community?

Sam: We’ve heard great things from the Chinese community about IMEOS and think there is great synergy! Also, we are really interested in expanding content in different languages and there’s no better partner than IMEOS :) We are very excited to work together!

IMEOS: Thank you for your time with this Q&A interview!

Chinese version（采访中文版）