The 451 Project
"It was a pleasure to burn."
Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 — 1953
We live in an amazing world and we are witnessing a fundamental shift in how we use computers with the AI (LLM) movement. We have digitized everything over the last 30 years, yet, we are more anxious, more distrustful, more unsure than ever about all of this data that flows at us. Is this real? Is this trustworthy? We want transparency and we don't get it. We want robust distributed systems that are not readily manipulated, and our technology giants will not build them for us. We want audit trails, and data that is published for the long-term and we want a system that presents counterfactuals when someone presents an untruth.
The 451 protocol is a framework for creating trust and transparency. Because the world deserves to know what it cannot see and the ability to trust what it can.
Components
The 451 Project has the world's most public, private blockchain. The Green Blockchain is not powered by Proof of Work, or Proof of Stake that require extensive usage of compute and power. The Green Blockchain uses a simple "Proof of Life" algorithm. All blockchain blocks are written in a very public way to open and visible S3 containers from multiple, large, S3 providers. This blockchain uses a Raft consensus mechanism for determing the last operative block.
The 451 Project, by nature, is designed to be a distributed platform based on DIDs (Document Identifiers). The goal is that if the 451 Project were to go out of business tomorrow the content on the platform would remain avialable for its users and society.
The 451 Platform includes an escrow account that effectuates the 20 Year + Publishing Guarantee. This guarantee states that even if the 451 platform craters and becomes defunct the escrow account ensures that the S3 content repositories continue on.
The platform allows every user to have multiple personas. Every persona is public by nature, although that does not necessarily mean you know the human behind the persona. What it means is that if a person presents an idea through publication that persona is bound to stand by that idea, or repudiate it. That means the incentive is to tie your persona to a real person, but it is not necessary that you do that.
Discovery within the 451 Project is done through an open algorithm. You can modify this algorithm specifically for you, but the goal is to remove uncertainty and false statements from getting traction. That means that the 451 Project is cognizant that knowing what an objectively false statement is the hardest job that is done.
All information committed through the 451 Protocol is automatically connected through the project's Large Knowledge Model (LKM). The LKM is a web of knowledge that links all published information in a way that solidifies the truth.
The Rationale
Over the last 30 years we have digitized everything. We have lowered the bar to putting one more thought on the internet so low that it is more important to grab attention than to create quality. Large companies have spent close to one trillion dollars building tools for creating and distributing video, audio and text, but we have lost much of that value chasing people's attention and forgetting about trust.
The 451 Project is designed to take the chaotic, wild west, atmosphere of the internet and impose a civility that comes with requiring secure identity, voracity, and foundation building to document creation and to event publication.