Fact Checking Alarmist Fake News Now Easy With Trive
Guest essay by Mike Lorrey
NOTE: The author is an advisor to trive.news. He has also made a number of contributions to WUWT over the years including moderating during the Climategate era.
We have seen over the past decade plus of the climate wars how the alarmist establishment has exploited its advantage in the halls of power and wealthy influence peddlers in Silicon Valley and the Left Coast to seek to do its best to propagandize, promote, filter, dissimilate, dissemble and to downgrade the search rankings those fighting for truth in science like us at WUWT, JoNova, ClimateAudit, etc.
We saw how WUWT search rankings on Google steadily fell from its once commanding position on page one of search results to page 36, effectively making it impossible for those using Google to find our articles unless they specifically looked for our publication by title. As Al Gore joined the board of Google and Alphabet instituted a team of crack propagandists to intentionally tilt the scales of reality in favor of their propaganda, WUWT continued to consistently score far higher on Alexa than almost any other science blog, and ahead of every other climate blog, on the planet, despite this active interference in our search rankings that only impacted this sites ad revenues, minimal as they already were.
Without similar influence in Alphabet, Facebook, Twitter, etc, how could we hope to compete of control over the media? Despite their corruption of peer review into pal review, control over climate data sets that they’ve “adjusted” to match their failed climate simulations, blackballing and blacklisting skeptic scientists, we HAVE taken the advantage in the public debate if only because people have learned to be skeptical of the amount of fake news of all kinds circulating. The victory of Trump despite all the media claiming he was losing and would lose, convinced a large percentage of the population to not believe the media on anything.
While I’ve personally had successes legislatively (I wrote the New Hampshire state constitutional amendment to restrict eminent domain after the Kelo decision, an amendment which passed a statewide vote by 86%), I prefer technological solutions to legislative or judicial ones. While they’ve captured control of Web 2.0 to work to their propaganda advantage, I work in Web 3.0, the blockchain world.
Two fields I worked in prior to joining WUWT were futurism and cryptography. In the late 90’s and early oughties I belonged to the Extropy Institute think tank where I met and collaborated with individuals like Ray Kurzweil, Peter Theil, Max More, Robert Bradbury, Robin Hanson, among others. Among these were Nick Szabo, Hal Finney, Ralph Merkle, and Wei Dai, who I had discussions over several years about the problems with early digital currencies and how to fix them. I won’t get into the technical aspects, but simply put, I had a hand in developing the ideas that we called at the time “Bitgold” and most of you now are familiar with in a slightly modified form, as a fully developed application, called “Bitcoin”, the first functional, trustably trustless decentralized anonymous cryptocurrency. Since then I’ve worked in Virtual Reality and Blockchain tech, and advise a number of blockchain companies about their projects.
One of these is Trive.news, a blockchain designed to destroy fake news.
Trive uses the smart contract and immutable ledger features of blockchain to store permanent records of what facts are true and what are not, by combined adversarial and Nash Equilibrium engine process to fact check the claims made in current news articles through the wisdom of the crowds, incentivizing three main players: the researcher, the challenger, and the witness jury member, to do their jobs right.
Most of you have probably heard of bitcoin, but are not aware of what blockchain is or how it works. A blockchain is a new form of database that is distributed among many nodes, in which data transactions are stored not in relation to each others relevant artefacts or records, but in chronological order, where said transactions are cryptographically authenticated by a competitive and computationally expensive process we call “mining” but which resembles the sort of brute force processes used by Alan Turing in WWII to decrypt Enigma encyphered Nazi transmissions.
By using public key encryption to secure the transactions, and have the mining process competitive, we make this process secure against hacking by being “Byzantine Resistant”, which refers to the Byzantine Generals game theory thought experiment. As long as 51% of all miners agree on the authenticated block of transactions, the blockchain is secure against attack.
This makes any data that the miners authenticate a permanent, unalterable record that is distributed among many nodes. Blockchains are thus great for protecting the validity of the truth of various records, like land titles, election votes, bitcoin transactions, and yes, climate records (hint hint suggestion for you climate coders). It also helps to store a record of what really happened in any venue, including news, which is of high importance in a world where news stores online disappear or are altered regularly when the narrative conflicts with reality or a party’s new agenda.
This means when you find a news story online you think is of questionable validity, you can “trive” it. Either submit the URL on the http://verify.trive.news website, or download the chrome plug-in to do this on the fly as you are browsing.
This puts it in the queue to be trived. At present the financial incentives are not active as there is still development going on, but once complete, you put a bounty on articles you report. When enough people post enough TRV tokens as a bounty up, a researcher will grab the story and set up a claims sheet and do the research to verify or disprove the claims made in the article (and not just that article, but all other stories making the same claim, and stories referencing those stories.)
When the researcher is done, they submit their work, which is hashed and stashed on the Trive blockchain as an immutable record. The researcher then wins the bounty in an escrow. Now, others can check the work. If someone doubts the validity of the researchers work they can challenge it, and redo the work, finding new information. Both researcher and challenger can do original research (like doing their own climate studies) if they want to as evidence.
Now that there are two challenging sets of research, a jury is chosen. Jurors are paid no matter which side they pick, and they cannot have participated in a similar process with any of the other participants to prevent Sybyl Attacks by teams of biased individuals (like we’ve seen at Wikipedia’s climate articles). The jury examines the differing facts and votes on which is true. They can theoretically reject both sets of research if they choose. Whichever side the jury chooses gets the bounty, minus jury fees, and the juried facts are then hashed and stashed again to create a permanent record of this peer review process that is auditable by anyone.
It should now be clear to WUWT readers what this means.
Here we have a technology that ensures a provably fair fact finding process. But it goes beyond this. More in a part 2 coming up on WUWT.
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Absolutely no such thing as security in the digital realm. If it’s cyber, it can be hacked. How much time it takes is the only question. The only answer is to find a way to make security obsolete.
Christopher Paino
May 9, 2018 at 10:47 am
The main point of blockchain,,, you can hack if you dare, but you can not destroy data, and then you can run but you can’t hide…
If you hack, you get a “bounty” on you….regardless of who you are.
cheers
Security in blockchain is not just a matter of consensus, but of time. Blocks that have been authenticated for more than an hour will never be alterable by any means whatsoever, and those authenticated more recently are generally 99.9999%+ sure of remaining valid. Of the 1500 known public blockchains, I have only seen one, Verge, fall to attackers using a sybyl attack, and Verge’s XVG coin is a very thinly traded coin, with a very small community of miners involved.
Many have posited that the advent of quantum computing will make non-quantum encryption untenable. This is false. All this means is you need longer keys. Doubling the size of your encryption key gives you trillions of times more security. I give classes to people about how to make more secure passwords that are easy to remember. It is possible to use simple passphrases you can remember that are 20-30 characters that are secure against even quantum computing for trillions years.
You know, Raino, it was an argument like yours that inspired me to conceive that a proof of work money system needed a public ledger to be secure. The idea of a public ledger, to track the chain of custody of every coin from its moment of inception, was my own contribution to the project. Nick’s brilliant game theory, Hal’s cryptography, Ralph’s Merkle Tree math, and Wei’s wallet system all made it possible for those that followed to complete the development and release the Satoshi paper. No, a blockchain cannot be hacked so long as sufficient participants resist a Byzantine Generals attack or Sybyl attack, or any number of other attacks. Those attacks are possible given certain conditions, but they are not probable, and the more a blockchain is used, the less likely they are to succeed. Nobody has EVER hacked a 256 bit public key encryption system in sufficient time for the result to be relevant. The amount of resources you need to hack the cryptography consume so much resources and energy that it is less expensive just to mine the blockchain honestly, even though doing that is an expensive proposition. Unforgeable costliness.
I can’t see this working or at least not working the way the author seems to think it will. If you take
climate change as an example the overwhelming majority of scientists believe it is happening and
that it is man made. Thus any researcher or jury member is most likely to re-affirm the consensus.
And people here will ignore this as just another example of some wide-spread global conspiracy.
Another example might be whether or not Obama was born in the USA. A majority of republicans
still don’t believe that he was despite all of the evidence. Would a block chain record persuade someone
that Obama was born in Hawaii? Or that Trump has lied over 3000 times since taking office starting
with his claim that he had the biggest inauguration crowd.
I find it very unlikely that showing someone a record in a block chain will persuade anyone of anything.
Conspiracy claims will always exist, some true, some not.
The Climate Science conspiracies have actually been proven true, by top Climate Science like Jones, Hansen, Mann, Trenbrith, etc, who:
– conspired to dodge FOIA request
– conspired to delete emails
– conspired to delete data and methods
– conspired to corrupt the peer review process
– conspired to blackball scientists who questioned their beliefs
I find it very showing that either you are not aware of the truth, or simply choose to ignore the truth.
BTW consensus is not a part of the Scientific Method.
Reg – consensus is a vital part of the scientific method. It informs researchers about what is known and what isn’t and thus represents the starting point for
research. Biologists do not have to continually demonstrate that DNA forms a
double helix or that the genetic code consists of 4 letters for example. Rather they buy sequencing machines that spits of the genetic code for them and rely on consensus that what the machine is doing is correct. Without consensus science could not progress.
Germinio May 9, 2018 at 2:44 pm
LOL at how you ignore the first part of my response — typical, really.
Regarding scientific consensus: hypothesis are tested, some become theories. Theories are then tested through experiments and observations, either to be upheld or rejected. You seem to have no understanding of the Scientific Method — something established centuries ago, something I learned in Middle School.
Consensus in Science is not achieved through surveys. It is established through replication of predictions.
Reg – I ignored the first part of your original comment since it did not appear to be make much
sense nor was it relevant to the discussion. With regards your comments on the scientific method
you state that “Theories are then tested through experiments and observations” which is what is
consensus science means. Nobody has the time to replicate all of the tests of particular theories
but instead relies on the existing consensus of what is known when starting a new research topic.
Another example is that of Morley of the famous Michelson-Morley experiment. After his initial experiment disproving the aether he went on to conduct many more experiments with Dayton Miller which he claimed to show the existence of the aether and which disproved special relativity. So
if I wanted to research special relativity would I need to start with testing whether or not the aether existed or could I rely on the consensus view that Einstein was right and proceed from there?
@ur momisugly Germinio May 9, 2018 at 4:05 pm
Reg – I ignored the first part of your original comment since it did not appear to be make much
sense nor was it relevant to the discussion.
—-
How so? I provided concrete examples of how Climate Science has been corrupted, and at the highest levels.
How does this not make any sense to you you?
Are you really that incredibly thick?
Reg,
If you want to discuss the alleged conspiracy concerning “climate-gate” then perhaps you should
start with the fact that 8 seperate enquires found no evidence of fraud or scientific misconduct. I would suspect that you would disagree with the conclusions of those enquires so the next more
relevant question would be how with Trive help with this at all? If all of those reports were on Trive would you believe them or would you decide that Trive was corrupted as well?
Neil, does the University of Auckland approve?
Germy, I’ve read the climategate emails, have you? The so called “enquiries” that supposedly “cleared” the coconspirators are about as reliable as James Comey’s clearing Hillary of wrongdoing months before she was interrogated, or Congress clearing her of culpability for the Benghazi attack and murders. Those in power protect their own, and if you don’t know that, or refuse to admit it, you are part of the problem, or else actively complicit.
Anthony your lack of integrity is disappointing. Are you going to reveal the identities of everyone
who posts on this site or only those you dislike? If you want real names then you should ask for
them instead of letting people use whatever alias they like.
mikelorry – you are missing my point. The question is not whether or not the enquiries’ conclusions are
accurate but rather why should I believe Trive compared to the House of Commons? The basic issue is
trust and Trive does not seem to solve that. Why would anyone trust Trive? Having a permanent record
of who said what established authorship it does not guarantee accuracy.
The House of Commons “enquiry” never actually established any facts. They did not document their claims, they did not actually DO anything resembling any form of due process. They claimed they looked at the evidence, and they declared nothing was amiss. Attempts by citizens to FOIA their internal records have been ignored as “confidential”, and every “enquiry” is clearly a white wash by ANY nations standards of jurisprudence, never mind any process of peer review. Anyone who claims the enquiries are not whitewashes is either lying or hasn’t actually paid any attention to the details. People should believe Trive’s conclusions on such a story because it will document all the facts, point to all the evidence, and the jury will be blindly picked randomly and the jurors will view all evidence on a double blind basis. By comparison, the enquiry of Commons was rigged by hand picking the enquirers to deliver a predetermined conclusion to serve the interests and narrative of the ruling party.
@ur momisugly Germinio,
If you want to discuss the alleged conspiracy concerning “climate-gate” then perhaps you should
start with the fact that 8 seperate enquires found no evidence of fraud or scientific misconduct.
____
I’m am happy to discuss the Climate Gate Emails with you. I have actually read them, have you?
Why would I need someone else to explain that to me?
Do you require everything to be filtered down to your tiny little mind view?
Reg and Mike:
Can you explain to me how Trive would solve the problem of trust using the climate gate emails as an example? If I understand it correctly somebody would ask Trive whether the emails demonstrate that there
was a conspiracy to make the public believe in global warming. Trive would then send out a request for a
researcher to answer the question. And then what? If the researcher comes back with the statement “there
was no evidence of scientific misconduct” and provides as evidence the results of the various enquires
then what happens? There is a verifier who checks the research and the quality of the evidence and again
most people would accept the results of 8 seperate enquires and so it would then appear that Trive would
mark the story as false. However I would guess that neither of you would agree with this assessment so
it would appear that the Trive model is never going to work since people will just continue to believe whatever they want to believe.
The same issue would appear whenever stories about climate would be checked. The vast majority of actual climate researchers would back the consensus view and so you would expect if there were any experts on Trive that it to would reflect the consensus opinion on any matter.
The researcher would create a claims sheet of each claim made in a story about the emails. The emails are source material. The news stories about them are what we trive. So a researcher would look at a story for instance about “hide the decline” as “Mike’s Nature Trick” and the researcher would see what the story is claiming Mike’s Nature Trick was. Thats a claim on the claims sheet. Then they would look at the emails about Mike’s Nature Trick, and look at the article in Nature by Michael Mann that term refers to, and thus the fact that the term “mikes nature trick” and “Hide the decline” are in the email is provable by reference to the email itself, including the email header info documenting it came from the email account it is attributed to, etc. They can verify that the Nature article has the chart in question and what the chart is displaying.
That all gets hashed and stashed on the blockchain. If someone challenges the documentation of those claims, they perform similar research showing how the original researcher is wrong. Then the competing documentation about the claim goes to the jury to decide which set of documentation and conclusion is what really happened. Their vote becomes the permanent record on the blockchain, and ALL news stories that repeat the original claims made by the story that was trived are either emphasized, if the original story was telling the truth, or the text is greyed out if the original story was telling a lie, thus effectively demonetizing the story since nobody will read a story with no visible text, and nobody will view the ads on that page.
Mike –
Thanks for that. But the case you are describing is a simple case of facts. In general people argue about
the interpretation of them. And here Trive would appear to be useless. Nobody is likely to worry about
whether or not Mann used a certain method to produce but whether or not that method is valid. If somebody
were to ask Trive whether a story alleging that the climate gate emails revealed scientific misconduct
how would you get a response that people trusted given that every enquiry about the emails has exonerated
the authors and yet people still disbelieve the results? Why would people trust Trive over any other fact-checking service?
Sorry Germy but you are yourself generating fake news there. You are not telling the truth in claiming that every enquiry has exonerated the coconspirators. Particularly in the blogging public, there have been any number of quite open and honest enquiries performed by people without a government agenda who have publicly posted content from the emails, including the context of those comments, and the information the comments relate to (like the Nature article), so that anyone can form their own opinion without relying on some stooge in government to tell them what to think. Now, I get it that some people like yourself may wake up every day looking forward to some government apparatchik to pronounce what you are supposed to think that day. We get it, that’s common with the types of people who look at Orwell’s 1984 as an instruction manual and not a warning. But those of us who can think for ourselves don’t need to be brainwashed by some priestly panjandrum of political pomposity pronouncing prescribed positions from government on high. The state may be your god. It is not ours.
Mike – Again I am not concerned with the actual validity of the various enquires but rather how Trive would
handle the fact that clearly there are people like yourself who disbelieve the conclusions and there are plenty of others who are happy to accept the word of governmental enquires. Again why would anyone believe Trive over any other fact-checking service? And even if it was popular how could it get around the fact that most people probably would believe the government and thus in the pool of researchers the majority would support the consensus view?
What is so hilarious about Bitcoin is that it assumes the Quantity Theory of Money is true. But QTM is merely an emotionally-potent oversimplification (similar to: CO2 goes up; temperature goes up).
People make the same stupid-ass mistake about gold — that gold is valuable because it’s “scarce” (that is, the scarcer something is, the more valuable it is).
Gold is not scarce. In fact, in terms of stock-to-flow, it is the most abundant commodity on Earth … by orders of magnitude!
Gold is valuable not because of its quantity, but because of its quality, and that quality is that gold is the most marketable commodity.
Yes Dorothy, there is something called the Quality Theory of Money. Bitcoin ignores that reality. And that is its flawed premise.
See: Bitcoin’s Flawed Premise
http://www.maxphoton.com/bitcoins-flawed-premise/
Max – you are confusing two difference functions. Bitcoin works very well as a
medium of exchange – especially if you want to buy drugs or other illegal commodities. What it is not good at is as a store of wealth and there I agree with you that anyone buying bitcoins thinking that they will always see an increase in value is a fool.
For most people it does not work very well for a medium of exchange. None of the people or companies I do business with accept it.
At best, it is a Ponzi Scheme. Great if you get in early and get out before the sky falls.
I
That is your choice. I know plenty of merchants who won’t accept checks, or credit cards. For the unbanked in the developing world, bitcoin and other crypto is becoming an indispensable requirement to save money and transact trustably with mechants and customers. There are well over 30 million unbanked persons in the US also whose lives can be improved by using crypto.
actually bitcoin is an excellent store of wealth and has scaling issues at becoming a global medium of exchange due to overuse. Yes there is short term volatility in bitcoin just as there is in gold and other scarce commodity assets.
There will only be 21 million bitcoins minted, EVER. There are already 16 million bitcoin in circulation. There are currently 15 million millionaires in the US alone. If every millionaire in the US decided to buy just one bitcoin, how high do you think the price would go?
And no, Bitcoin is the exact opposite of a ponzi scheme. The US Dollar is a ponzi scheme. It is not backed by anything other than a thugs gun to your head. Bitcoin is backed by the cryptographic math that makes it unforgeably costly to create, impossible to counterfeit, and there will never be more than 21 million.
BTW Reg: Do you do business with Dell Computers? With Overstock.com? I can name dozens of major corporations that DO accept bitcoin that you are probably not aware of.
Your quality of money theory also applies to bitcoin. You can do a number of things besides currency transactions on the bitcoin blockchain. You can store hashes of various offchain assets, like smart contracts on a side chain. In fact this was one of the largest uses of bitcoin before the Ethereum blockchain became operational. The RarePepe is another example, where you can validate the ownership of off-chain assets like artwork (and yes, even gold or silver assets).
When we created the original ideas that evolved eventually into bitcoin, all of these applications were foreseen. Nick Szabo has been talking about smart contracts since 1992. The entire REASON we developed proof of work (First implemented as code by Hal Finney long before the Satoshi paper) was we realized that gold and silver backed digital money was inherently weak because having metal lying around is a point source security risk, so PoW was created to simulate mathematically the macroeconomic behavior of sound money without needing metal to back it.
Furthermore, bitcoin is of HIGHER quality than gold because not only can you store it more securely than gold (compared to bitcoin, gold is bulky and massive and you need to secure it in vaults that are easy to find and rob, I can store a billion dollars in bitcoin on one USB drive and hide it ANYWHERE, securing the contents with an unbreakable password), and I can move it faster and more securely than gold (I can transfer a billion dollars in bitcoin in a single transaction on a single block, and send it to anyone in the world in ten minutes, with maybe an hour or two confirmation time at worst, with a transaction fee less than what you’d pay for a Western Union wire. Five to ten bucks to transfer a billion. There is no other currency or money system on Earth, other than another blockchain, that can beat that. THAT is quality.
But this isn’t money, it’s information. Maintaining it’s integrity after it is stored is a noble objective but I’m not seeing anything to guarantee that the information was correct when it was initially stored.
I maintain that critical information should be stored on unalterable media such as paper or film. You can make several copies and have it stored in vaults. With no wires attached and nothing electronic involved with the storage it simply cannot be hacked. Ditto voting – hand marked paper ballots that can be physically counted and recounted.
Mike,
An interesting concept. I’m curious as to whether or not you have had an opportunity to review Hashgraph technologies. Hashgraph claims to be superior in some respects (specifically in speed of developing consensus an in true Byzantine fault tolerance) to Blockchain based technologies. If you have reviewed the technologies what were the primary drivers to selecting Blockchain over Hashgraph for a project such as Trive news?
For reference: https://www.hederahashgraph.com/
Hashgraph technology is interesting as it does allow for a much faster transaction authentication rate than a proof of work algorithm and blockchain. However, it is not yet proven that hashgraph is secure against attack as a public system distributed widely. It is certainly secure as a private permissioned system.
There is a divergence going on in blockchain technologies (which is a broad term applying to subsequent innovations like hashgraph, blocktree, etc) in which there are public distributed systems that everyone can access and trust, and private permissioned systems which are more secure but are ultimately controlled by some corporate entity and while you can trust the system is secure from outside attack, you remain subject to the whims of the company that controls it and so that remains a form of centralization that is a security weakness for the individual user at the mercy of the corporate owner.
Thanks! I enjoy reading and learning about cryptographic systems in general, but in my profession I don’t have much time to devote to actually performing a study. I do appreciate opportunities such as this forum that give me the chance to communicate with individuals who know more about the subject than I.