Crypto-collective knowledge management

Google search and Wikipedia in particular are great examples of how the internet has enabled immense scale and speed: every crawlable page on the web, every sufficiently noteworthy topic, etc, returned to you within a second. But choosing the extreme end of scale is at odds with the key property of personal knowledge management: relevance. A scient... See more

The benefit of Wikipedia’s page-based organization is that there’s little ambiguity about where to find information about a topic. Likewise, TokenPage offers owners a strong power: determining the canonical knowledge of a topic.

A major drawback of TokenPage is that a user can attack a page just by spending enough money. For example, a user could own the “Yankees” page and simply write “The Yankees suck”. Despite the low quality content, the page may retain its value to the malignant owner because others, like Yankees fans, would be willing to pay to “fix” the page.

Twitter has many drawbacks. It isn’t good for readers to build knowledge: tweets aren’t organized and the content is difficult to work with. Generally people copy Twitter content somewhere else to work with it. It also isn’t good for writers to build their reputation: tweets are listed chronologically, interleaving personal and professional, rather... See more

Wikipedia is the best known example of a page-based approach to knowledge management. Each topic has a dedicated title and page, accessible on English Wikipedia at en.wikipedia.org/{title}. A given topic has, at any given moment in time, a consensus about what is important and truthful.

If a block is typically just text, why would anyone pay RefGold instead of just copying the text? A few reasons: 1) voluntarily, as a small tip to appreciate the block owner, 2) because the reference is recorded, the block owner may choose to share backlinks to public references, so this serves as an advertisement for the payer, 3) new types of jou... See more

The core idea is simple: the reuse of a block pays a microtransaction to the block owner and records a transaction of its use on a public ledger. The term “ref” comes from Roam, where the reuse of a block is called a reference and the original block maintains a back-reference to the reuse (AKA backlink).

PKM tools assist with the use and organization of personally-relevant knowledge in digital form, including user interface affordances such as outlining, links, embedding, and search. CKM is the idea that such tools are also useful for managing knowledge relevant to multiple people. Although the term hasn’t been used widely until recently, many exam... See more

I’ll restate the problem with TokenPage: there is a tension between groups such as Yankees fans, Red Sox fans (AKA Yankees haters), and those who just want to maintain accurate knowledge, which bids up the price of a TokenPage orthogonally to the page’s intrinsic value, and may lead to wild swings in the page content when ownership changes hands. T... See more