Could We Use the Blockchain to Create an Immutable Record of the World’s Collective Knowledge?

Imagine a public record which acts as the world’s knowledge-base for all of life’s most pressing questions, where the answers are vetted by thousands – if not millions of people. All using the blockchain.

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This is essentially what Knowledge.io is trying to do with their recently announced project. Basically, a decentralized Quora or r/explainlikeimfive that incentivizes actual experts, instead of amateurs, to answer people’s questions by rewarding them with cryptocurrency.

“Prove it”, Says Knowledge.io

Knowledgeable employees are a valued commodity because they’re more likely to do a good job than an uneducated employee. Hence, there has been a focus on the idea of utilizing “human capital” in modern economies, to boost productivity and job completion quality.

Figuring out who is or isn’t knowledgeable, however, is a task in itself that isn’t all that straightforward. From pre-school certificates to high school diplomas, moving on to higher or tertiary education represented by college and university degrees, the practical quantification of what people know has always been through a piece of paper. And the quality dependent solely by the reputation and prestige of the certificate’s issuing body.  There are difficulties as a result of the current means of proving knowledge and skills that leave much to be desired.

Firstly, different institutions hold differing academic standards that ultimately determine whether or not a certificate is issued. Furthermore, it is often very difficult, if not impossible, to verify a person’s practical knowledge just by the existence of a degree alone; indeed it is often difficult to extrapolate any useful information about that person’s actual understanding of their selected field of study.

If a group of people graduating from the same year all have the same qualification, the only way to go deeper is to request for grades, which can be a lengthy and cumbersome process.

Secondly, as the quality of education is attached to reputation and prestige of the issuing institution, the cost of pursuing education there is significantly higher. In fact, the cost of higher education is increasing worldwide, anyway, and students are forced into higher debts each year. British students ran up study debts of $55,000 in 2016, up from only $20,000 five years ago. American students recorded an average of $35,000 last year, up 6% from 2015.

How Do You Quantify Knowledge?

Within the Knowledge platform, users validate each other’s knowledge and expertise, earning Knowledge tokens as a monetary reward for the information they provide. All this is validated through “gamified learning” – or learning centered around designed-incentives that motivate users to continuously engage the platform – and verification of expertise through objective measures.

The measures are determined by the Knowledge Score technology, which will be used to assign values to each participant, objectively evaluating their levels of knowledge across a range of topics. Complemented by vast, proprietary data sets available through its partnerships and a base of over 10 million questions across a topic spectrum, the possibilities are virtually limitless to generate a continuous supply of Questions and Answers.

Thanks to blockchain innovation, a user’s learning is validated, tracked and record permanently in a public, immutable ledger over the course of their life. Thus, Knowledge.io provides students the ability to both pay their own way through school and demonstrate their knowledge through their accumulated contributions to the platform as they are recorded on the blockchain.

Advancing the “Celebration of Knowledge”

Knowledge.io has its conceptual origins in the recognition, rewarding and celebration of knowledge. It assumes that all knowledge is valuable not only to the individual that possesses it but to the society that benefits from interacting with that knowledge.

The Knowledge.io platform plans to launch its’ crowdsale campaign with a pre-sale on 15 January, 2018. 10% of the total Knowledge Token supply (25 million) will be made available during the pre-sale, while a further 20% (50 million) will be put up for sale during the main public ICO to be announced at a later date.

For More Information, Visit Knowledge.io’s Official Website – http://knowledge.io/