A2029 - Art as Survival in the Turing Age

Story

2010

Salon.io

In the year 2010 we set out to create a tool that would allow regular people like artists, photographers and designers to present their work on the web in an easy way. Our claim was: “A whole new way of presenting artwork online.”

We kicked it off with a crowd funding campaign, which concluded with the pledge: “Help us to unfuck online publishing”
Little did we know how fucked the internet really was. Edward Snowden had leaked only two years later and while we’re slowly realising that we had been trapped into a surveillance system, the underlying platforms got even more centralised and restrictive on the contents that could be shared.

What we meant, when we said “online publishing is fucked”, were the limited possibilities that had been accessible for non-technical people to display their imagery the way they wanted.
While the common platforms like facebook and twitter do limit your creativity by basically just offering a slit where you can drop off your artwork without any means to control the context. More advanced content management systems like wordpress and others offered lots of options at the cost of simplicity and ease-of-use. What annoyed us most as content creators was the separation of the interface to add and shape content from the display of content. With Wordpress you're offered a backend with forms where you put in your content and upload your images and after that you have to switch to another view which shows you how your contents are actually presented to your visitors. As a creator you want malleability, you want to form the content and the context of its presentation until it feels just right. Of course Wordpress lets you do that … if you don’t mind switching between backend and frontend dozens of times while battling against the restrictions of your currently chosen template.

Instead we wanted to achieve a process that is more similar to writing or drawing with a pen on a blank paper, where you’re able to simultaneously read and write - without switching modes and without constraints other than the dimensions of the paper itself.

A simple (brutalist) website builder

What we came up with Salon.io was a new way of displaying artworks online, a tool where you’re presented with a blank, infinite canvas and the ability to do anything you want without the need to switch between viewing and editing screens. With Salon.io there’s no separation of editing and viewing. What you see, is what it is. Everything can be changed instantly. This allows creators to iterate on the presentation of their contents fast, often and with ease.

Today Salon.io has about 15.000 users and about 1000 paying customers. Although we got lots of praise for our service and amazingly happy customers we were not able to grow the customer base more rapidly. My unwillingness to raise capital led to lack of funds to operate on marketing.

2018
We still believe there’s a lot of value in delivering a online publishing service that offers creative freedom and ease of use to artists and content creators. We also believe that usability of Salon.io in regards of presenting creative works is still unmatched.

“Bitcoin started with the idea of a new form of internet”.

Furthermore we began to realise that the Bitcoin Cash and upcoming Tokenisation & Smart contract features present a huge opportunity to offer even more benefits to our service and our customers.

Today we strongly believe that by using Bitcoin we are actually able to build a better internet. An internet that is much closer to Ted Nelson’s original vision of Xanadu:

From Salon.io to Crypto.Salon
We imagine an arts & design platform where:
- we can tokenise digital content
- we can allocate value to digital content/artworks
- we can vote with skin in the game on digital content
- we have secure authorship of digital contents
- we have (fractional) ownership of digital assets
- we have provenance of digital assets
- we can rely on immutability and resilience of digital content
- we can give controlled access to digital assets
- we allow artists to monetise their artworks by letting them trade globally
- we are able to do crowdfunding based on fully compliant security tokens, representing common shares with dividends and voting rights
- we have a full circle tokenised economy that facilitates the exchange of values between artists, collectors, investors, curators and customers
- we have accountability and stewardship

When we break this down we envision the Crypto.Salon platform as a bundle of 4 essential web services: Tool, Content, Market, Education

- a Publishing Tool (easy, versatile, serverless, BCH-enabled, freemium SAAS)
- an Arts Discovery (fresh and daily, social, customisable streams, high traffic)
- a Marketplace for Tokenized Art
- Education and User Support

By following this path we will push the boundaries of the web and allow everyone to take make use of a new internet, an internet of value that appreciates art and authorship.

Crypto.Salon's Art & Design platform will operate on Bitcoin Cash and will eventually create an own Salon token on top of the Bitcoin Cash Blockchain. The token allows the tokenization of individual digital artworks as well as the allocation of sound value to human based art practice, based on Bitcoin (BCH), but not limited to.

The challenge is to establish transparent and fair incentives for rewarding art & design of relevance with real value. That is achieved through common methods like selling, collecting, trading, speculation, tipping and voting of art. Basically, the Crypto.Salon market will allow anyone to participate in the trade of (digital) art on a global level. Some will make a small side income, a view will be able to live off their tokenized art, while most will do it for the joy and to support art and artists in an easy and benefiting way.

But most importantly, Crypto.Salon will help your art to be seen AND appreciated, in a way, that wasn't possible until now.

After all, the ultimate goal is to create a token that is a measure of value for any kind of artworks.

The currency and technology which for us seems most suitable for this challenge is Bitcoin Cash.

Business Modell
1) Subscription/membership (Pay-per-use, SAAS fees)
2) Marketplace (Commission, Transaction/Listing Fees)

We are seeking for Angel/Seed funding in order to build Crypto.Salon.

We need
620 BCH (~ 300.000 EUR)

to rewrite Salon.io with added features, do marketing, sales & support in order to turn it into a self-sustaining business.

To built a marketplace for digital arts we are planning a crowdfunding based on fully compliant security tokens, representing common shares with dividends and voting rights.

We need
2000 BCH (~ 1.000.000 EUR)

Roadmap
2018 Q4 Angel/Seed funding
2019 Q2 Crowd funding

Blurb (collected from Craig's talks)

# Atomic Swaps
Instant Token to Token Swaps
Deliverable Contracts

# Access Chain
Access Tokens
Deliveries of Goods
Sales
Vouchers

# Oblivious Transfers
Voting Tokens
Allows the creation of pseudonymous identities
Shareholder Voting

Distributed Organisations

with common shares, dividend and voting rights
Full compliant security tokens
with real security and accountability

Pay-as-you-use services

Full Records, with hiercharchy
allows secure access to your artworks

A complete new paradim shift on how we do computations will start evolving

Bitcoin’s Atomic Age

This is the new future not only of money, of everything. Bitcoin was never just Bitcoin. Bitcoin started because of BlackNet. Bitcoin started with the idea of a new form of internet.

758
Distributed Peer Internet

Replacement to server based internet systems.

Blacknet. Started 1998. Birthed in concept, 2018

No passwords/One time passwords
No Server

Key hierachies

Hierachies of Documents#

Digital Rights Management
A method and system for verifying ownership of a digital asset using a distributed hash table and a peer-to-peer distributed ledger

Tokenized Economy

Trade something with value

Trading with anyone globally

Allow you to start trading anything that is tokenised
Allow you to Tokenize anything

that's what tokens will deliver the true gains of the digital economy a

we're going to start teaching you how everything you thought about Bitcoin is probably wrong

Building upon Bitcoin

Incentive Scheme