Powpress

The "Push Web" Engine, powered by Bitcoin.

Powpress is a publishing system aimed at changing the way the world wide web works, using Bitcoin. The goal is to reverse the "pull model" of the existing web into a "push model".

In practice this means you can write your blog post once and distribute it anywhere while preserving your authorship. Furthermore, you may not even need your own server.

The Web is a "Pull" Model

Ever since the web was invented, hyperlink been one of the fundamental building blocks of the world wide web. This is how all websites work and is core to the algorithm used by the most powerful web search engine in the world--PageRank.

In this model, a publisher has a single canonical web server and "pulls" all traffic into their site. This restricts ways the content can be monetized because there is only one user interface for one website. Also the publisher must keep the site alive at all times.

So now we know that this is how the web works, have you ever asked why it works the way it does?

There are many reasons, but one important reason is that the WWW model does not have a way to preserve authorship when replicating content. Because the web was not built with authentication in mind, there was no way to prove authorship of a document as it gets replicated across the web.

The easiest way to deal with this problem is simply to not use content from another source and instead give them credit by linking, and therefore the etiquette of linking to another website to give credit has become the norm.

As mentioned above, this restricts monetization opportunities for the publisher as well as many other drawbacks we take for granted.

The "Push Web", powered by Bitcoin

What if we can preserve authorship when replicating content across the web? This would change the dynamics of hyperlinks and may fundamentally change the way we work with documents on the world wide web.

For starters, the etiquette we've taken for granted--hyperlinking to another document to give credit--doesn't have to be the case. We can preserve authorship while replicating content across the web.

Imagine composing a piece of content and frictionlessly distributing your content everywhere while preserving credit.

We can do this with Bitcoin.

In the following diagram when you compose a blog post, it stores the original content inside a self-contained Bitcoin transaction which also contains a Paymail signature of the entire data chunk. This transaction itself can then be distributed anywhere, and all the websites like bob.com, frank.com, carol.com, eve.com, dave.com can frictionlessly act as syndicators. The content cannot be tampered with without changing the transaction ID because Bitcoin transactions are derived by hashing the contents.

In this paradigm, you don't even need to own a website. You can compose content locally and publish everywhere. And because your content is signed with your Bitcoin wallet's Paymail signature, your authorship is preserved everywhere and therefore you can monetize your content wherever the content goes.

There can be various business models such as but not limited to tipping or paid content.

How Powpress Works

So how does Powpress work in practice to implement the "Push Web"?

Powpress.org itself is not a distribution channel. It's simply an editor that hosts your drafts for you. You compose content using Powpress, and each version gets stored as its own Bitcoin transaction. Here's how the editor works:

Once you're ready to publish, you can publish it to 3rd party applications.

Currently Powpress only supports Powping (which takes the same approach and uses the same protocol), but technically it's already based on an open protocol so any application can interact with it. The plan is to open up gradually, so we can see more web applications communicate with one another.

Just remember that currently you need to be signed into the same Paymail account on both Powping and Powpress for the publish to go through. But eventually there will be models where you can distribute other people's signed content, which is the beauty of this model.

If you're interested in learning more and collaborating, please join Powping and ask questions https://powping.com/c/a167e76a7d87ac5c8b764cf569b4a2d6d12c31bec3ff424bfee195a3192ceb9d

Information wants to be Free

There's an expression "Information wants to be free". Normally people use it to say all people should be able to access information freely.

This does NOT mean Information wants to be free as in beer (no payment), but free as in "information gains more value by being as widely spread as possible".

In the past there was no easy and scalable way to capture the value that has been created through a wide distribution of information, but with Bitcoin it becomes possible for users to let go of their data ("let it be free"), trace and monetize the widely distributed information if they want.