Francisco Sant'Anna

Freechains

@_fsantanna

Freechains is a permissionless social media protocol with integrated reputation.

A user posts a message to a forum (a chain) and other users subscribed to the same forum eventually receive the message. Users spend reputation tokens, known as reps, to post new messages and gain reps as they consolidate. Users can like and dislike messages from other users, which transfer reps between them.

Freechains vs the Tragedy of the Commons

Social media platforms suffer from the tragedy of the commons: the more users are in the platform, the more it is used, the more it is abused, the more it decays. There is no principled moderation, no localized coordination, but only centralized and generic counter-abuse protections. Users act on their own interests, contrarily to the common good, leading to the collapse of platforms.

Freechains, on the other hand, relies on a reputation system that embraces subjectivity and locality to escape the tragedy of the commons:

1. Users can create forums with their own subjective rules (netiquettes).
2. Creators receive initial reps to redistribute to new users.
3. Users must have reps to post.
4. Consolidated posts generate new reps to authors.
5. Likes and dislikes transfer reps between users.

This set of rules supports local communities sharing the same interests (rules 1 and 2), prevents abusive behavior from free riders (rule 3), encourages authoring and steady growth (rule 4), and leads to descentralization of power (rules 4 and 5).

So, yet another blockchain?

As a matter of fact, Freechains requires a consensus mechanism to prevent free riders to double spend reps to abuse the system.

In this context, Bitcoin was the first protocol to support permissionless consensus. However, Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies in general are not suitable for social media:

• They enforce a unique timeline to preserve value and immunity to attacks.
• They lean towards concentration of power due to scaling effects.
• They impose extrinsic economic costs to use the protocol (mining or fees).

In particular, a unique timeline implies that all Internet content should be subject to the same consensus rules, which neglects all subjectivity that is inherent to social media.

Freechains, on the other hand, relies on the scarcity of posts to reach consensus (proof-of-authoring), which is based on human creativity and is restricted to each forum.

Technically, Freechains is not a linked list blockchain, but a causal graph of posts (a Merkle DAG) with an overlay consensus list that can itself reject branches of the DAG if they have inconsistencies (e.g., double spend).

We are currently working on a paper that describes the consensus and reputation mechanism of Freechains.

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• Do cryptocurrencies lead to centralization of power?
• Are extrinsic costs acceptable for social media interactions?
• Is proof-of-authoring reasonable as a scarce resource for consensus?

(Next: Freechains and Ostrom’s Principles)

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