Why We’re Forking from Medium

And 7 guiding principles for content in the blockchain space

If a large part of the cryptographer’s job is to communicate securely in the presence of adversaries, then the 21st-century writer, in many ways, must also be a cryptographer. They compete against the usual adversaries — clickbait, click farms, keyword stuffing, misinformation, plagiarism — and must prepare for emerging threats: cloud failure, censorship, deepfake, bots.

In the cryptosphere, the state of content is especially precarious. Instant liquidity has signaled huge opportunity for both shillers and scammers alike. Most of the projects in the blockchain graveyard didn’t suffer smart contract or wallet breaches, but content breaches: fake websites, fake white papers, redirected DNS, spearphishing emails.

In the Ethereum ecosystem, open source initiatives like EthHub and Ethereum Research have helped crowdsource and curate quality content, and MetaMask’s phishing detector prevents users from visiting a list of known malicious sites. Projects like Civil, Kauri, and Steemit are even using the innovation of blockchain itself to revamp the infrastructure and incentives around content management. Writers like Andreas Antonopoulus and Gavin Wood have taught us to consume information carefully, rigorously. “Not all blockchains are created equal,” they write in Mastering Ethereum. “When someone tells you that something is a blockchain, you have not received an answer; rather, you need to start asking a lot of questions.” Our ecosystem now is asking more questions, better questions — about technical specifications, compatibility, decentralization, and trust…

To read the full manifesto, visit “A Crypto Content Manifesto.”