Blockchains may bring truth back to the news landscape

When self-published hypertext went global with web pages and blogs, there were high hopes for a truly democratic news landscape. Many believe we have instead got:

• populism
• insularity
• and paranoia.

How technology disrupted the truth | Katharine Viner | Media | The Guardian

However if one looks at it from a grander perspective, it was a given that the old model of mainly hierarchical trust had to go. Luckily, there is a new trust model in the works: Blockchains.

• They allow signed reports to be time-stamped in a way that everybody agrees on. This gives agreed causality, i.e. you can agree that X was reported before Y.
   
• They prevent the signing party to divulge different reports to different people, i.e. it enforces actors to be coherent. This is called solving the double spending problem.
   
• They allow people to watch the message flow that builds up the blockchain, to detect if some stuff gets delayed and other stuff favored.

Blockchains are not all that easy to understand at first, but what they basically do is to assign different people to be notaries of what has happened, in a way that is hard to predict, a bit like in a lottery.

This will not be an easy path forward, there will be false starts and faulty blockchain models, different models need to be tested and people must get used to:

• Signing stuff and
• Learn how to use and trust a web of trust

We all must learn the skills of:

• Weighing evidence,
• Establishing causality chains and
• Gauging the reputations of those who report the news

But I believe this is the way forward and it is given the confusion we live with on-line now, high time we get this baby rollin'!