How illegal and immoral content will be handled on MIX Blockchain

Originally published at medium.com

There are certain kinds of content that you do not want on your device because it is against your morality, can land you in jail, or is just not socially acceptable.

With the original vision of the World Wide Web you would simply avoid visiting websites that host such content. Sites with user generated content must remove such content in a timely manner. Today’s centralized services typically take care of filtering out the “bad” stuff for you.

With MIX there is no authority to decide what you can and can’t see and because it is feed-based, content will automatically be downloaded from feeds you subscribed to. Obviously this could be problematic.

The solution is simple: the Trusted Accounts smart contract.

Each user on MIX Blockchain can maintain a public list of accounts they trust. Content is only downloaded onto your device from accounts you trust, or optionally from accounts who are trusted by accounts you trust.

If you trust 250 accounts and each account you trust trusts another 250, that’s potentially 62500 accounts that you trust. Of course there would be overlap with many accounts trusting the same accounts. The quantity of accounts that are trusted by each account would probably follow the power law (long tail) distribution with a small number of accounts trusting a lot of accounts and many accounts trusting just a few.

MIX client software (such as dWeb) would display content from an untrusted source as “untrusted”. The user will be able to choose to view the content and then trust the account if they want to.

Client software may wish to maintain the whole list of accounts the user trusts, and the accounts they trust, for optimized reads or alternatively a caching system could be implemented.

Additionally, users could maintain a private blacklist of accounts whose content will not be retrieved even if the account is trusted by an account they trust.