【思考】苹果、eBay和YouTube会被去中心化取代吗？

2018 年 1 月 16 日 互联网金融

如今，网络已经占领了我们的生活，互联网企业也因此拥有了前所未有的“权力”。

虽然科技巨头让我们得到了我们喜欢的东西——音乐、电影和购物——但区块链热衷者认为，个人的网络体验可以通过分散化得到极大改善。

如果网络巨头们去中心化，网络本身将变成一个截然不同的地方。

今天，网站和它的数据库是一个整体。在分散化的版本中，数据库不属于它的创建者；它属于整个社区，而社区可以在数据库之上建立许多不同的商业模式。

这样想一下：如果网络从一开始就是分散的，2003年你就可以在Friendster上创建你的第一份社交媒体资料。那么，当MySpace出现的时候，你就不需要再创建一个新的资料了，只要让MySpace有权访问您已经为Friendster所做的那个。Facebook也同样可以如此。

很明显，每个新网站都会增加新的功能和交互方式，但是用户从来不想再从头开始，失去其他网站的朋友或者在之前平台上创建的内容。

这些优势是否足以颠覆Dot-Com时代我们所熟悉的公司？

企业家和各种承诺注资的投资者——无论是以传统风险投资的方式，还是以当今空间上更为常见的投资方式，ICO——都已经下了很大的赌注。

ICO不仅为这些区块链初创公司提供了新的筹资机制，而且还为用户提供了与这些新型分布式网络进行互动的工具，因此新型互联网——“网络3.0”——的基础架构正在不断增长。

下面是区块链初创公司旨在通过使用加密代币来抢占其市场份额的三个网络垂直区块。

消灭eBay?

虽然eBay是一家互联网公司，但是在网络的早期，还有其他一些围绕着像漫画书类的特定产品设立的网站，这些网站上卖家可以直接卖给买家。

有人可能会到，集中市场自然会提供更好的客户体验，但是提供一系列不同产品的eBay却证明这是错误的。事实证明，在出售自行车零件的网站上出售漫画是最好的，因为有人可能只想来买一样东西，最终会同时购买两样。最重要的是，这只需要记住一个网站购买二手商品的网站，而不是记住多个。

虽然没有什么能够阻止卖家在专业网站和在eBay这样的一般网站上提供一种产品，但确保相同的商品不会被卖出两次，这就需要复杂的软件了，而eBay也不希望这种事轻易发生。

但是如果消费者两者可以兼得呢？例如，如果漫画书与其他所有产品都在同一个数据库中，但是围绕这些数据可以建立不同的网站？这样一来，产品清单就可以在不同市场上出现，但是如果一个产品在任何一个市场上出售了，会在所有的市场上都显示已经售出。

Listia的首席执行官Gee Chuang说，这是可能的，一个名为Ink Protocol的平台正在开发eBay的一种去中心化版本：

Ink Protocol的愿景是分散的点对点市场，把权力从运行它们的公司那里分离出来，并把它交还给买家和卖家，结果就是，更多的价值被分配给实际的用户。

为了创建这个系统，Listia计划从1月29日开始销售价值1500万美元的加密代币。Listia也会扶持现有市场的早期用户，在这个市场上已经有人在用代币进行点对点交易。随着区块链网络的启动，Listia信用将转换为加密代币。

OB1的OpenBazaar也有类似的目标，它是运行时间最长、最流行的去中心化市场之一， OB1还致力于使用户更易于匿名交易，并且只使用比特币进行交易。然而，这一点很快就会改变，因为OB1的首席执行官Brian Hoffman最近在第二次Token峰会上宣布，该公司将会发行代币，以应对比特币网络日益增加的拥塞。

谈到分散市场的好处时，Listia的Chuang说：“去中心化市场的卖家可以随时随地使用他们喜欢的任何平台，同时在他们身边任何地方都可以携带他们苦苦得来的声誉。”

超越 YouTube

YouTube是全球最大的视频搜索和分享平台。

虽然该网站为内容创作者创造了一条新的职业道路，但这些创作者与其中央管理者之间的紧张关系却变得激烈。

YouTube降低了视频制造商的收入份额，内容创作者因此受到影响。并且如果YouTube怀疑视频显示冒犯性或不恰当的行为，则使用自动化从视频中提取广告，并且在其广阔的网络中捕捉一些合适的视频。与此同时，消费者则抱怨网站上的广告太多了。

新一代创业公司认为，分散平台将允许内容创建者使用加密标记直接与他们的受众进行交互。与此同时，用户将获得更多货币化他们关注的选择——他们可以查看广告，发布个人信息，甚至贡献一部分计算能力来运行系统。

分布式视频共享平台Flixxo的首席执行官Adrian Garelik在十一月表示：“在全球拥有超过2.5亿用户的BitTorrent已经被证明能够以去中心化和引人入胜的方式提供高质量的内容。

Bittorrent于2001年发布，通过将用户连接到他人设备上的内容副本而不是中央服务器系统来进行工作。而且Garelik设想通过赚取更多加密货币来激励人们提供更多托管内容，从而使洪流网络更加强大。

Garelik说：

通过创建这个激励网络，任何类型的内容都可以以点对点的方式分发，并具有很多货币化的可能性。

Flixxo的创立者表示，对等文件共享平台的用户需要更有效的点对点支付系统来使平台更实用。这似乎是那些想要依据区块链来将文件共享去中心化的初创公司所共有的想法，这些公司包括Stream、Theta和Livepeer，每家都有自己的代币。

而这还不是全部。实际上，各个级别的在线视频堆栈都有一些玩家。

另一家去中心化视频公司Paratii在一篇博客中解释道：

我们所看到的并不是一个金字塔式的堆栈，其中一件技术的选择不可避免地会使另一件技术“失效”，相反，我们所拥有的是孤岛协议，它们能或多或少地互相操作。

颠覆苹果音乐

购买和下载那些让你在健身房活力满满或者在漫长的一天工作之后能让你身心放松的这些你生活中完美的配乐可能需要好几年。

你喜欢的音乐品味不仅对你来说是特殊的，控制在线音乐市场的公司同样认为它们很重要。这是因为，用户加入像苹果音乐这样的市场后，他们通过创建播放列表、关注艺术家并标记自己喜欢的歌曲建立了属于他们自己的知识产权。

而追踪和控制这些数据对于市场来说是有利可图的，所以他们让这些偏好很难再转移到其他服务上。

Consensys公司的Ujo音乐是一家基于区块链的音乐供应链提供商，该平台的Jesse Grushack说：

“我们现在被锁在了由巨头公司控制的这些系统中。”

不只是Ujo，许多初创公司都同意这种说法。包括Viberate在内的一些基于区块链的公司也已经开始试图垫付音乐产业的不同阶层，他们希望通过智能合约来消除音乐家们寻租代理商的需求。

更多的主流人物认识到了音乐行业采用区块链和加密货币的潜在好处。冰岛歌手Bjork在11月宣布，她即将上市的新专辑将能接受四款不同的加密货币，而前环球音乐集团的一名高管在10月份筹集了120万美元，用于一个名为Blokur的音乐版权管理平台，该平台使用了以太坊区块链。

虽然其中许多平台还没有宣布要销售加密代币，但Grushack承认Ujo可能即将会发布代币。

目前，该公司专注于“便携式粉丝徽章”的概念——一种将身份和数据结合在一起的类似于代币的工具——所以作为粉丝，你可以将所有你喜欢的音乐家、歌曲和流派连接到不同类型的音乐市场端口。通过这种方式，Grushack说，音乐家能真知道谁是粉丝，然后可以直接向他们推销新的内容。

不仅如此，这种门户网站的设计也是为了让不同的参与方共享权利，例如在一首歌曲中，每个参与的音乐人根据他们所投入的工作获得的报酬。虽然这在现在也是技术上可行的，但这个过程将需要相当多的中间人，他们都想分一杯羹，使得当今的艺术家们毫无价值。

Grushack说：

目前苹果正在逐步停止对音乐的购买，因此，我们现在的情况是，我们所购买的一切都是以租赁模式出现的。如果我们回到那个我们购买音乐的系统中，无论平台是什么，区块链都可以实现让我们能拥有音乐。

英文原文

The web has taken over our lives, and with that, online enterprises have grown into huge monoliths of power.

Yet, while tech giants give us access to the stuff we like – music, movies, shopping – blockchain enthusiasts think an individual's web experience could be greatly improved by decentralization.

If the web's giants decentralize, the web itself will become a wildly different place – it's hard to even wrap your head around, just like it would have been impossible to imagine meme culture in 1999.

Today, a site and its database are one entity. In the decentralized version, the database doesn't belong to its creators; it belongs to its community, and that community can build lots of different business models on top of the database.

Think of it like this: if the web had been decentralized from the beginning, you could have made your first social media profile on Friendster in 2003. Then, when MySpace came along, you wouldn't need to create a new profile, you'd just give MySpace permission to access the one you had already made for Friendster. Same thing for Facebook.

Obviously, each new site would add new features and ways of interacting, but users would not have needed to start over, lose friends from other sites or the content created on prior platforms.

Are those advantages strong enough to upend the Dot-Com era's familiar incumbents?

Entrepreneurs and the various investors who have committed capital – whether that be in the form of traditional venture capital, or perhaps more common in the space today, through initial coin offerings (ICOs) – have made their bets that it is.

And with ICOs providing not only a new fundraising mechanism for these blockchain startups, but also a tool for users to interact with these new distributed networks, the underlying infrastructure for a new internet – a "web 3.0" – is growing.

Below are three verticals on the web that blockchain startups are aiming to take market share from through the use of crypto tokens.

Eliminating eBay?

While eBay is an internet O.G., in the early days of the web, there were also other sites built around specific products, such as comic books, where sellers sold directly to buyers.

One might imagine that focused marketplaces would naturally provide a better customer experience, but eBay, which offered an array of different products, proved that wrong. It turned out that it was better to sell comic books on the site that also sold bicycle parts, because someone might come looking for one and end up buying both. On top of that, it was just easier to remember one site for buying used stuff, rather than many.

While there's nothing stopping a seller from offering one product on both a specialized site and a general site, such as eBay, it would take sophisticated software to make sure the same item didn't get sold twice, and eBay doesn't want to make that kind of thing easy.

But what if consumers could have both? What if the comic books, for example, lived in the same database as the all the other products, but different websites could be built around that data? In that way, a listing could show up in a variety of marketplaces, but if one listing sold on any one marketplace, it would show as sold on all of them.

That's possible, according to Gee Chuang, the CEO of Listia, an existing marketplace that's developing a decentralized version of eBay called Ink Protocol:

"Ink Protocol's vision is to decentralize peer-to-peer marketplaces, taking the power away from the companies that run them and giving it back to the buyers and sellers. As a result, more value is distributed back to the actual user."

In an effort to create this system, Listia plans to sell $15 million worth of crypto tokens, starting on Jan. 29. Listia will also seed early users of its existing marketplace, where people already earn Listia credits for trading items peer-to-peer, with the token. Listia credits will convert into the crypto tokens as the blockchain network launches.

It's a similar goal to OB1's OpenBazaar, one of the longest-running and most popular decentralized marketplaces, except that OB1 is also focused on making it easier for users to transact anonymously, and has only used bitcoin for transacting. Yet, that could soon change, as OB1's CEO Brian Hoffman announced at Token Summit II recently that that company would be pursuing a token offering in response to increased congestion on the bitcoin network.

Speaking to the benefits of a decentralized marketplace, Listia's Chuang said, "Sellers in decentralized marketplaces have the freedom to use any platform they like at any time, while bringing that hard-earned reputation with them everywhere they go."

Move over YouTube

YouTube is the number one place in the world to share and search for video.

While the site has created a new career path for content creators, the tensions between those creators and its central administrators have become heated.

Content creators suffer as YouTube decreases its revenue share with video makers and uses automation to pull advertisements from their videos if they suspect the video displays offensive or inappropriate behavior, catching some suitable videos in its wide net. Consumers, meanwhile, complain that advertisements are becoming too prevalent on the site in general.

A new generation of startups believes decentralizing their platforms will allow content creators to interact directly with their audiences with the use of a crypto token. At the same time, users will get more choice in how their attention can be monetized – they can view ads, release personal information or even contribute part of their computing power to the operation of the system.

"Bittorrent — with more than 250 million users worldwide — has been already proven to be capable of delivering good quality content in a decentralized and compelling manner," said Adrian Garelik, CEO of Flixxo, a decentralized video sharing platform that closed its token sale in November.

Released in 2001, Bittorrent works by connecting users to copies of content held on other people's devices, rather than a centralized server system. And Garelik envisions making the torrent network more robust by giving people more incentive to host content by earning cryptocurrency.

"By creating this incentivized network, any kind of content could be distributed in a peer-to-peer fashion, with a lot of monetization possibilities," Garelik said.

According to Flixxo creators, users of peer-to-peer file sharing platforms have been in need of an effective peer-to-peer payment system to make the platforms more useful. And that seems to be a thought shared by a number of blockchain-based startups looking to decentralize file sharing, including Stream, Theta and Livepeer, each that has its own token.

And that's not all of them – there are handfuls of players at each level of the online video stack.

As explained by another decentralized video company Paratii in a blog post:

"What we see forming is not a single pyramidal stack, where the choice of one piece of tech inevitably 'disables' another. Rather, what we have are protocol silos, with more or less interoperable layers."

Disrupting Apple Music

It's possibly taken years to purchase and download all that music that gets your heart racing when you're at the gym or mellows you out after a long day of work – the perfect soundtrack to your life.

And just as special as all that is to you, those tastes are just as important to the companies that control the online music marketplaces where you get that music. That's because, as users participate in marketplaces like Apple Music, they build up their own intellectual property by creating playlists, following artists and flagging their favorite songs.

And that data is lucrative for the marketplaces to track and control, so much so that they make it difficult to move those preferences to another service.

According to Jesse Grushack from Consensys's Ujo, a blockchain-based music supply chain provider:

"We are being locked into these systems controlled by corporate giants."

And many startups, not just Ujo, agree. A handful of blockchain-based companies have started up looking to disrupt various layers of the music industry, including Viberate, which looks to eliminate the need for musicians' rent-seeking agents with smart contracts.

Even more mainstream names are seeing potential benefits in adopting blockchain and cryptocurrency in the music biz. Icelandic singer Bjork announced in November that she'd be accepting four different cryptocurrencies for her forthcoming album, and a former Universal Music Group executive raised $1.2 million in October for a music-rights management platform called Blokur that uses the ethereum blockchain.

While many of these platforms haven't announced crypto token sales, Grushack admitted that Ujo might issue a token down the road.

Currently, though, the company is focused on the concept of a "portable fan badge" – a token-like instrument that links identity to data – so that as a fan, you could port what musicians, songs and genres you like across all different kinds of music marketplaces. In this way, Grushack said, the musician would really know a person is a fan, and could then market them new content directly.

And not only that, but the portal is designed to make it easier for any number of parties to share rights, for example of one song, where each musician that participated gets paid out based on the work they put in. While this is technically possible today, the process would require a significant number of intermediaries who would all want to take a cut, making it worthless for artists today.

"Right now Apple is in the process of phasing out purchases for music, so that leaves us in a scenario where everything we consume is in a rental model," Grushack said, adding:

"If we did transition back into a system in which we bought music, being able to own that music and relationship regardless of the platform is something blockchain enables."

译者：LenaWaal

来源：巴比特资讯