Powered by Witnet the “Digital Knowledge Arks”

Witnet , when paired with DSNs like Filecoin or Sia , will enable the creation of “Digital Knowledge Arks”: decentralized, immutable, censorship-resistant and eternal archives of humanity’s most relevant digital data. A series of truth vaults aimed to ensure that access to knowledge and truth remains democratic and verifiable forever.

Motivation

Churchill’s famous dictum may appear to no longer hold true in an age where the Internet wields enormous potential for any person to share their beliefs and opinions with the rest of the world. However, centralized systems for the archiving of human knowledge are still very vulnerable to manipulation or destruction by corrupt governments and other malicious actors who could greatly benefit from altering history . As a society we have the responsibility to find a better way to preserve our cultural heritage from any odds that the future may hold. And we need it to be highly resilient, decentralized, self-governed and censorship-resistant, guaranteeing that knowledge will be accessible to everyone, everywhere, at any time, without discrimination of any type. Only in this way we will be able to ensure that access to human knowledge will remain democratic forever. Douglas R. Hofstadter, in his 1979 Pullitzer-winning book “Gödel, Echer, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid” , states that provability is a weaker notion than truth . In this Information Age, verifiability is indeed very fragile because of the ephemerality inherent to digital media: one statement can be verifiable right now but lose its verifiability right after .

Let’s visualize how fragile verifiability is:

Regarding Witnet, the only possible truth is the verifiable one . Indeed, verifiability is hard-coded into the design of the protocol. The mere act of performing distributed retrieval of data is in itself a form of verification, specially if several web sources are queried via multiple acquisition paths as described in the Witnet whitepaper . In the same manner, the fact that a final agreed claim emerges from the aggregation of all the claims brought by a plurality of miners proves itself that the claim was verifiable at the time of the attestation. In a similar way to Witnet, Wikipedia has a strong policy stating that the only valid truth is the one you can verify . Nevertheless, due to the ephemeral nature of the web, even a well documented Wikipedia article may be rendered questionable or even not suitable under the Wikipedia policies and guidelines if many of its sources disappeared from the web.

We are clearly in need of some infallible way to ensure that some information that is verifiable today will remain verifiable tomorrow.

The current most popular approach to preserving the availability of some data is using the Wayback Machine service run by the Internet Archive initiative to request an on-demand snapshot of any web site in which the data is published. However, centralized solutions offer little to no guarantee of the very ingredients that make contents verifiable:

Information as a Knowledge Commons

The commons is the cultural and natural resources accessible to all members of a society and held in common, not owned privately. Although the term originally referred to common land, nowadays it is taken to mean any shared and unregulated resource such as atmosphere, oceans, rivers, fish stocks or even an office refrigerator. Those resources identified as commons are often said to be vulnerable to social dilemmas and governance problems that lead to competition for use, free riding, commodification, pollution, degradation, and ultimately non-sustainability. These dilemmas are highlighted by the tragedy of the commons. The concept of tragedy of the commons was introduced by ecologist Garrett Hardin in a 1968 article of the same name, inspired itself by an essay written in 1833 by the Victorian economist William Forster Lloyd. The tragedy illustrates the argument that free access to a finite resource ultimately damage the resource through over-exploitation, temporarily or permanently. This occurs because the benefits of exploitation make some of the users want to maximize their own use while the costs of the exploitation are borne by everyone. This, in turn, causes demand for the resource to increase, which causes the problem to snowball until the resource collapses. However, knowledge forms part of a different kind of commons : non-substractible ones . Unlike environmental commons — e.g. a water spring — multiple users can access the same resource with no negative effect on its quality or quantity. When a teacher gives a lesson, knowledge is not split between the students but replicated across the minds of all of them. While substractible and non-substractible commons are similar in their shared nature, there is a radical difference in the source of their value as resources.

The value of substractible resources is based on scarcity, whilst the value of non-substractible resources is based on abundance.

Likewise, preservation of substractible and non-substractible commons involve very different actions. Preservation of a substractible commons often means guaranteeing its availability by regulating access or imposing reasonable use rules on the resources, effectively making it somewhat less open to the public. On the contrary, preservation of a non-substractible commons means guaranteeing its availability by making it accessible to the greatest number of people and effectively making it more open to the public. The culture heritage mentioned before is none other than the knowledge commons : the set of all knowledge and wisdom that our civilization has accumulated over the centuries and belongs to the whole of humanity.

The knowledge commons is our legacy from the past, what we know today, and what we will pass on to future generations.

The Digital Knowledge Arks, as well as Witnet itself, aim to form part itself of the digital commons as defined by social researcher Mayo Fuster: “information and knowledge resources that are collectively created and owned or shared between or among a community and that tend to be non-exclusive, that is, be (generally freely) available to third parties. Thus, they are oriented to favor use and reuse, rather than to exchange as a commodity. Additionally, the community of people building them can intervene in the governing of their interaction processes and of their shared resources” . Witnet and the Digital Knowledge Arks intend to leverage the current profusion of emerging blockchain technologies and projects to engage the people in the enrichment and preservation of the knowledge commons . It is conceived as a commons-based peer production initiative as defined by professor Yochai Benkler: “collaboration among large groups of individuals […] who cooperate effectively to provide information , knowledge or cultural goods without relying on either market pricing or managerial hierarchies to coordinate their common enterprise” .

Preservation and its Principles

As mentioned earlier, preservation of knowledge commons entails guaranteeing the availability of knowledge resources by making them accessible to the greatest number of people, effectively making those resources more open to the public . There is one program from the Stanford University Libraries that we would like to acknowledge here for its notable contribution to defining the principles of long-term preservation of knowledge commons. Its name is pretty explicit about what is the cornerstone of its vision: “Lots Of Copies Keep Stuff Safe” (LOCKSS) . The preservation principles of the LOCKSS program— which we endorse and make them our own — focus on:

Using Witnet to Agree on the Facts to be Preserved

Anyone interested in storing information in a Digital Knowledge Ark shall:

Persisting Facts and Knowledge in Perpetuity

Perpetual storage is already possible in one way or another in most existing public blockchains. For example, Ethereum smart contract can be used to keep data inside their state , which can be simply organized in a key-value mapping that allows entering a new record by calling an external function. The contract must calculate the hash of the data, use the hash as the key for storing the data and return the hash to the sender. Then the sender or anyone else who knows the hash can retrieve the data by calling a constant function using the hash as its sole parameter. Note that although data retrieval is made through a constant function and therefore can be performed an unlimited number of times at zero gas cost for the requesting party, data storage has side-effects (modifies state). This implies that the cost of the storage request increases linearly with the size of the data to be stored. While it can be a very acceptable solution for storing small data units in perpetuity, at scale, storing bigger data units (even in the order of a few kilobytes) becomes really expensive and impractical in most cases. Instead, archiving of big data units should be done by using decentralized storage solutions specially designed for storage of high volumes of data. There are already a bunch of promising projects that could be used for that purpose. Among the ones that better fit the requirements of the Ark, five deserve special mention here: