[Cryptography] The Truth Social Network: A Decentralized Social Network

btc_joe btc_joe at protonmail.com
Sat Oct 31 22:52:08 EDT 2020


I’ve been working on a new system for engaging in decentralized social media using an open-source protocol.

The paper is available at: https://www.thetruthsocialnetwork.com/White-Paper/

Some context:

You can find a very raw proof of concept of the idea at my other site [www.beateasyjoe.com](http://www.beateasyjoe.com/). Take it with a grain of salt, much of what’s in the paper was worked out in recent weeks/months, and will require a lot of work to implement (thus why I figured I would share and hopefully raise some intellectual capital). A little over a year ago the idea began as a way to prove ownership of various traditional social media accounts from my personal website. Then it evolved into how I could tailor content from my site in a manner similar to social media using digital signatures. Then I realized I had to incorporate a way to enable interactions. Then I realized I needed timestamps and some type of protocol. And eventually the goal became to not only enable decentralized social media, but further, to enable the creation of historical records. There are also some potentially huge ideas that could be created on top of this thing.

Abstract: A decentralized social network would allow participants to engage in social media directly without relying on trusted third parties. The need for permission-based access to various walled garden platforms would be eliminated. Recreating the vast majority of social media functionality largely depends upon solving the problem of decentralized, pseudonymous identity. We propose a solution to the above by utilizing the cryptocurrency Public Key Infrastructure (PKI). By choosing a single public address, participants can create censorship-resistant historical records of content. Content is provably linked to an identity through the creation of digital fingerprints, which are timestamped and committed to blocks (which are themselves timestamped). Participants can reference their own and others content by simply including it’s unique fingerprint within their message. Any file that can be hashed (audio, video, zips, pdfs, etc) can be included within messages. While files themselves are not stored in these identity blockchains, a record of them is, as their hashes are committed to fingerprints.

Full Paper available at: https://www.thetruthsocialnetwork.com/White-Paper/

btc_joe

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