On-chain registry of official media resources.

[Dexaran]

Title: Decentralized registry of official media resources.
Author: Dexaran, dexaran820@gmail.com
Status: Draft
Created: 3-05.2018
Resolution: https://github.com/Dexaran/media-resources-registry

Abstract

The following describes a smart-contract that improves the degree of decentralization of the project by reducing the influence of owners/moderators of "official media resources". Official media resources can form public opinion and thus strongly influence the fate of the project. If the control over official media resources is concentrated in the hands of a certain group of people, then this greatly damages decentralization in the community.

Motivation

Decentralization is one of the basic concepts of the crypto industry. Nevertheless, the following aspects of any projects are fully centralized and can be easily censored:

• Logo
• Branding/Project name
• Official twitter account
• Official reddit
• Official Slack/Discord live chat
• Github repositories and source codes
• Official emails

Most media resources have owners who can determine the fate of the project by forming public opinion. Of course, the official logo and the name of the project are not so important. However, many decisions in the community are taken not by the community itself, but by a group of people who control official media resources, i.e. which can make the "official announcement".

When it comes to making such critical decisions as performing a hardfork, it is necessary to notify exchanges and mining pools. In the end, whether hardfork will occur or not, depends on the exchange and pools that will support it or not. In many respects success depends on WHO will announce the forthcoming hardfork for the community and WHO will notify the exchanges (WHO = what media and whether they are "official" or not).

On the other hand, in a decentralized community there should not be unequivocally official resources, as any member of the community is as much official as the others.

The key issue here is who to consider to be "official", i.e. who has a permission to speak on behalf of the whole decentralized community.

The community can not make a decision on what media resources of this project are considered official and which are not. The community also can not express disagreement and change one of the resources if the interests of the owner of this resource are at conflict with the interests of the community.

Resolution

This proposal introduces a Media Resources Registry smart-contract. This contract is intended to preserve a list of official resources that are approved by the community on-chain without 3d party interference.

This contract has a couple of methods add_entry and remove_entry which serve to add/remove official resources.

It should be decided that only those resources that are currently represented in the described contract are official and are approved by the community. It is absolutely necessary to make such an important decisions as approving a resource to be "official" on chain. Otherwise it will lead to a centralization.

Anti-Scam protection

This proposal can also improve the protection against scam websites and non-official links that can hurt users. It is possible to query the contract to ensure whether a given link is registered as an official resource or not.

It is also possible to create a user-friendly web UI that will represent this information. This can help to avoid confusion and uncertainty about what resources provide officially reliable information because fraudsters rely on this uncertainty to deceive users.

Implementation

Ethereum

The proposal is to deploy the contract and announce its value and purpose to the community.

The contract has an access restriction mechanic, thus it is advised to use the official donation multisig for the first time. However, in the future, this contract will require an on-chain voting system to serve its primary goal. For example ECIP52.

It's best to add links without beginning (https://, http://) and endless (slash /) and lowercase to the contract.

Callisto

This proposal is currently implemented in Callisto for testing and adoption reasons.
There is one owner address at the contract that will be replaced with the proposed on-chain governance system as soon as the governance contract is deployed.