Blockchain: Blueprint for a New Economy

automatically tweets a link to that image

in the correct format. Second, to record

the title, after Monegraph tweets the link

to the image, it provides a block of code

for the user to copy and paste into the

Namecoin client. The user initiates a

new transaction in the Namecoin wallet

and adds the block of code as the key

and value in the Namecoin transaction

(you can see the transaction here:

http://bit.ly/monegraph_verification).

Only one copy of a digital image can

ever have a valid Monegraph signature.

Monegraph images are just ordinary

image files, so they can be duplicated

and distributed like any other images,

but only the original file will pass

validation against the Monegraph

system.

A related digital art and copyright

protection project is Ascribe, which is

aimed at providing an underlying

infrastructure for IP registry. The

company is building what it calls an

“ownership layer” for digital property in

the form of a service to register and

transfer copyright. Although existing

copyright law offers creators protection

against infringement and the right to

commercialize, there is no simple,

global interface to register, license, and

transfer copyright. The Ascribe service

aims to address this, registering a digital

work with the service hashes and

timestamping it onto the blockchain. An

earlier step in the registration process

uses machine learning to detect and

resolve any prior-art challenges.

Ownership rights can then be

transferred, which enables secondary

markets for digital IP. The service

handles digital fine art, photos, logos,

music, books, blog posts, tweets, 3D

CAD files, and more. Users need no

prior knowledge of the intricacies of the

blockchain, copyright law, or machine

learning to benefit from the service. The

bulk of Ascribe’s users are marketplaces

and white-label web services that use

Ascribe in the background, though

individual users can use the site directly,

as well.

Digital Asset Proof as an

Automated Feature

In the future, digital asset protection in

the form of blockchain registry could be

an automatically applied standardized

feature of digital asset publication. For

certain classes of assets or websites,

digital asset protection could be invoked

at the moment of publication of any

digital content. Some examples could

include GitHub commits, blog posts,

tweets, Instagram/Twitpic photos, and

forum participations. Digital asset

protection could be offered just as travel

insurance is with airline ticket

purchases. At account setup with

Twitter, blogging sites, wikis, forums,

and GitHub, the user could approve

micropayments for digital asset

registration (by supplying a Bitcoin

wallet address). Cryptocurrency now as

the embedded economic layer of the

Web provides microcontent with

functionality for micropayment and

microIPprotection. Cryptocurrency

provides the structure for this, whether

microcontent is tokenized and batched

into blockchain transactions or digital

assets are registered themselves with

their own blockchain addresses.

Blockchain attestation services could

also be deployed more extensively not

just for IP registry, but more robustly to

meet other related needs in the

publishing industry, such as rights

transfer and content licensing.

Batched Notary Chains as a

Class of Blockchain

Infrastructure

It is important to remember that this is

only the outset of what could blossom

into a full-fledged blockchain economy

with blockchain technology enabling

every aspect of human endeavor, the

blockchain being like the Internet, and

the blockchain as the fifth wave of the

Internet. In this vein, it is possible that

all current blockchain-related activity

could be seen as early-stage prototypes

looking back from some future moment.

What are piecemeal services now could

be collected into classes of blockchain

services.

From the point of view of overall design

principles for the blockchain

infrastructure, we would expect to see

these classes of sector-specific

functionality arriving. Not just separate

blockchain notary services, but a new

class of notary chains themselves as part

of the evolving blockchain

infrastructure. Notary chains are an

example of a DAO/DAC, a more

complicated group of operations that

together perform a class of functions

incorporating blockchain technology. In

this case, this is the idea of notary chains

as a class of blockchain protocols for

attestation services. For example, it

might be more efficient to post batches

of transactions as opposed to every

individual transaction (requiring the

greater-than-zero mining cost). Notary

blocks could be composed of the hashes

of many digitally notarized assets; the

blocks themselves could then be hashed

so that the notary block is the unit that is

inscribed into the blockchain, making

more efficient use of the system rather

than every single digital artifact that has

been notarized. Because hashes are a

one-way function, the existence of the

block-level hash in the Bitcoin

blockchain constitutes proof of the

existence of the subhashes. 105 Moving

blockchain design into such an