Introducing Erasure Bay

Erasure’s new information marketplace

Erasure Bay is an open market for information of any kind, built on the Erasure protocol. It’s Numerai’s first non-finance product. It’s our bid to save the Web.

“Davos is a good place to announce that Facebook’s days are numbered.”— George Soros

It’s the fake news era. Facebook’s complicity — in election fraud and genocide, in data leaks and mass addiction—has been called criminal, but clearly the problem isn’t Facebook.

The problem is the architecture of the Web. The Web’s solved information scarcity; we can all communicate. It’s not solved information verifiability; we can’t trust what’s said, who said it, or how the data’s used.

Erasure can help.

When Bitcoin launched it looked like a new type of money. It took time to realize that it’s also—if you stare, until the gestalt shift—a new type of Internet. On the Bitcoin network, information is uncensorable, trusted, and lasts forever. Erasure’s question: can we bring this to the Web?

Like Bitcoin, Erasure looks like a finance tool. But also like Bitcoin, the goal is broader. Erasure seeks to inject the trust-building primitives of crypto — staking, time-stamping, and public-key identities — into the Web itself, to make civilization’s central tool for coordination more trustworthy.

You trust that news isn’t fake on Erasure because:

Reputation is permanent — all activity is etched into the blockchain, including what you knew and when, tied permanently to your identity Money is at stake — sellers of information back their claims with capital, which buyers can burn to the ground, as recourse outside the law Transactions are atomic — money (cryptocurrency) and goods (information) are exchanged in an instantaneous swap

Erasure Bay is the second dapp on the Erasure protocol. It’s a marketplace for information of any kind. It’s Numerai’s demonstration of the power of Erasure to improve the Web itself.

How it Works

“If it’s useless and decentralized, it’s still useless.”— Richard Craib

Erasure Bay brings the “decentralized Web” down to earth. We picked a light color for our logo, and featured cryptokitties in our commercial, because we want Erasure to be so easy kids can use it. ;-)

Erasure Bay will be a series of firsts for many. Post data to storage that no one owns. Stake money on your claims. Encrypt them, then reveal them, to prove you knew something. Sell them under a smart contract that must be enforced. Watch your money get burned. Hell, browse a website with no server — that’s just a frontend on top of commonly owned infrastructure.

Twitter enabled people to feel what global communication was like. Erasure Bay will enable people to feel what verifiable communication is like.

To what end? Stories we like:

Deal ideas: You’re exploring ways to get exposure to the fast-growing macroeconomics of a developing country as an investor. You put up a bounty for deal ideas from local analysts. Someone replies with a bank special situation — price target of 5x in five years. You’re intrigued. You see this address has been predicting bank earnings for months on Erasure Bay with lots of success. You believe they know of what they speak. Plus, they’ve staked money on their claims. You know they’re here for business. And it’s nice that you can move money to the analyst instantly (because cryptocurrency) and you’re guaranteed to get the information (because smart contract).

Due diligence: You’re a venture capitalist making a deal. It’s become standard to put up anonymous bounties on Erasure Bay for evidence of fraud at any company you invest in — it’s just good due diligence practice. Suddenly, someone claims they have something (this has never happened before), and that changes everything.

Whistleblowing: You’re witnessing crime at the factory you work at. You post on Erasure Bay. A journalist begins communicating with you, and you get the story out and justice is served.

But we hope to be surprised.