DECENT

1. Introduction
True innovation is rare, especially in the world of media. More
difficult is to determine which aspect of media thrives for
development most. Majority of mainstream media do not truly
innovate as they are happy with their current business models.
Most of the incumbents do not provide as many benefits to the
content consumers as they could because of lack of incentives.
Moreover, having the obligation to pass through a third party to
access digital content is unnecessary. Traditional media companies
as Medium, New York Times or Daily Mail choose what they
publish and which authors they allow to distribute their content
through their fully controlled centralized for-profit platforms.
Similarly, many jurisdictions do not provide freedom of speech;
people are prosecuted for expressing their thoughts.
This white paper focuses on the challenges and redefinition of the
way digital content is shared and freedom of speech is enabled over
the Internet. We propose DECENT: Decentralized Open Source
Content Distribution Platform enabled by Blockchain and
peer-to-peer technology.
2. The Blokchain Era
Bitcoin , presented in 2009 by Satoshi Nakamoto was a disruptive
change in the way people look at finances. By providing efficiency
(worldwide clearing and settlement within 10 minutes) and
cost-effectiveness (transaction fees at a few cents per transaction)
compared to the traditional banking system, it is getting a massive
exposure in media. Unfortunately, in spite of more than 6 years of
its existence it did not reach a position it could have attained
mainly due to the imperfections in its architecture and design. One
of them is the 7-transactions per second (tps) processing capacity ,
which makes Bitcoin hard to be deployed in real world applications
as it is unable to fulfil their requirements. For instance, VISA
handles about 2000 tps with a peak capacity of 56000 tps .

Similarly, Bitcoin blockchain size of nearly 40 GB (August 2015)
with a steep linear growing curve renders it difficult to be
distributed in the future. It is inconvenient for most of people to be
forced to wait for downloading a few tens of GBs of data in order to
send even a tiny amount of money.
Hence, Bitcoin can be understood as a pioneering proof of
Blockchain technology concept that has some childhood diseases.
Blockchain, as a publicly distributed ledger of transactions, has a
great potential to be the next big thing since the advent of World
Wide Web. Various financial institutions are investigating this field,
some of them even have their own blockchain research
departments . Blockchain technologies can help banks to reduce
their operating and infrastructure costs in various domains of
application. By providing seamless automation, clearing and
settlement can run without any human interaction and under
control of an indestructible set of business rules. Similarly,
Blockchain technologies enable banks’ assets to be exchanged
without third party validation.

Decent