You, Me, and BTC Your Liberty & Bitcoin Podcast
Your three favorite hosts are back together again this week to talk about a new service and some interesting concepts. MoneGraph is that new service and it allows you to create digital deeds for online art. These deeds are Namecoin records that can be traded but not duplicated, meaning digital artists can actually retain or sell "original copies" of their work. This concept is definitely exciting, but we are not entirely sure it will be as great as many poeple hope it will be. In today's show we will discuss the strengths and weaknesses we found. We will also chat about the whole idea of art as a currency and how it may or may not be useful. Stick around for all that and more! Your hosts this week are Tim Baker, Daniel Brown, and John Stuart. Enjoy!
Thanks so much for checking out the podcast and getting back to us! It’s good to hear that your service hashes the actual file. That also cleared up the question we had about what would happen if the file moved. Thanks for illuminating that.
As far as the issue of the time factor in competing claims, we weren’t really putting the blame on anyone for that; it’s certainly not the fault of your service, it’s just something that’s bound to happen. It’s also good to hear that your system doesn’t need to be dependent on twitter.
As a musician, it’s great to hear that the service works with all types of files. I’m especially interested in the service as a way to prove the original creator. As an artist, I’m personally not interested in protecting my music to the extent many artists who adhere to tradition copyright practices and intellectual property claims. My music is all licensed under creative commons’ attribution license. I think your service provide a possible source of authentication for something like that. It could enable me to distribute my music for free, without the danger of someone else taking credit for it.
Thanks again so much for taking an interest in us. If you’d like to tell us more about anything you could email me at [email protected]. Also, if you’d ever be interested in being a guest on the show, we would definitely be willing to have you on. You could clear up and expand upon anything you might want to regarding Monegraph.
-John Stuart
Hey Guys,
Thanks for all the great discussion around monegraph. We’re happy that you are interested in the idea. I wanted to answer a couple of questions you had. First realize that the existing service is a simple one and that we are working to expand the functionality of monegraph, but the essentials are there. First about the file URL. Monegraph takes a hash of the file in question and that hash is the key element to identify which file we are talking about. That hash can be verified to ensure that we know the file in question even if it moves.
You are right to point out the time factor in resolving competing claims. If you want a strong title, upload the file then make a title right away. About Twitter, that is a first sketch towards an ID framework. Opinions and needs vary, but authors usually benefit from openly signing their work. (And that is certainly the case in the art world). Corporate social media platform provide one approach to identity disclosure. The crypto community has some decentralized approaches that could also fit in our system in the future. It’s also conceivable that you could use it anonymously. You guys are also right on in imagining the different use cases: owning a fine art digital image if you are into that kind of thing, providing an open method for licensing, and proof of creation (“I made this”) in your meme example.
Finally, while the name came from compressing the phrase “monetize graphics” the site already supports any kind of file type. You can put a URL to any sort of media and it will hash it just fine.
Email me if you want to know more.