Introduction
DARA: An Immutable Publishing Network
We propose a solution for an uncensorable and immutable publishing network which respects authorship and ownership while permitting creators to sell or license their work if they so choose. We call it DARA (Decentralised Agnostic Recording Assistant) and it operates as a decentralized business (or DAO) leveraging the latest in peer-to-peer and blockchain technology.
DARA token holders are incentivised with dividend rewards derived from a profit-share of tokens earned from premium features. Token holders protect DARA's stored information by voting on critical proposals through decentralised governance mechanisms.
The DARA Chromium browser extension and application is the first step towards building a complete publishing platform for writers, journalists, authors and other content creators. It permits users to copy and save their existing work from Substack, Medium, Wordpress and other blogging platforms, to DARA.
Future developments will include user profiles, publishing tools, and options for monetisation.
The DARA immutable publishing network is very much a work in progress. As such this document serves as a general purpose primer rather than a highly technical explanation of our evolving solutions.
More technical information will be added to this Wiki in 2022, following the release of the DARA extension in the Chrome Web Store.
ABSTRACT
Censorship, plagiarism and data loss are common in the World Wide Web. In combination they slow down learning and the pursuit of knowledge.
Over time all technologies are surpassed. Since The Immutable Network is primarily concerned with preserving information over vast periods of time, it adopts a platform-agnostic approach to development.
COMPONENTS
In order to create a decentralized and immutable publishing platform we combine a variety of well-understood and solid components.
DAO: Enabled through blockchain smart contracts a DAO (Decentralised Autonomous Organisation) is the heart of The Immutable Network. It enables the decentralized governance required to vote on proposals.
Blockchain: To protect records of user saved data in an immutable database of IPFS hashes and blockchain addresses for verification, we use blockchain ledgers to store timestamped records of hashes and addresses.
IPFS: A decentralized protocol for file exchange. While not intrinsically “immutable” the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) offers the most resilient and affordable storage solution today. File permanence (“immutability”) can be achieved by running our own cluster of iPFS nodes.
NFT: In order for authors to sell, license or create paywalls around their wok we will implement NFT (non-fungible tokens). NFT for the DARA publishing economy.
Profit-Sharing: To incentivise participation in DAO voting we propose a profit-sharing model. Small percentages will be taken from premium transactions paid on the network and shared between DARA token holders and DAO Fund.
DAO Fund: In order to pay for our IPFS cluster, our incubator program, and any other costs associated with keeping the information we protect immutable, a percentage of the token supply is kept in The DAO Fund. These tokens can be allocated with proposals approved through DAO voting.
Freemium: The adoption of cryptocurrency platforms and products is hampered by complexity and cost. By using a freemium model which offers some free functionality alongside premium services we can onboard larger audiences, and achieve greater revenues.
DARA
By combining these key components we can create a truly decentralized publishing platform with some unique properties offering significant advantages over current centralised models. Medium, Substack, Wordpress, Facebook, all of whom are subject to varying degrees of censorship, offer poor revenue-sharing, if any.
DARA allows people to save, protect and even monetise their works in a free and trustless manner.
You can find some older DARA papers and documentation on our website, but these have mostly been deprecated since DARA has evolved. The exception is The Immutable Codex, a short document which lays out in simple terms the unique platform-agnostic philosophy of the project.
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