> my company .... decentralized

Can you explain this step?

Good point. We are setting up a foundation to initially run the project, but even the foundation will be deprecated as we go forward. In fact its primary role will be to enable further decentralisation i.e. to make sure that no single party can monopolize the system through various consensus methods.

So you are building a write-only editor-less Wikipedia? Not sure how blockchain is related.

Anybody can already create news applications. Just put up a blog.

A blog is just one kind of news application, that generally uses articles (not data) for its content. However, we propose that once news is converted to data it can be used for many different kind of applications: Trusted news feeds (filter and sort the data); automatically created articles (combine the data); fact checking systems (compare the data); fake news detectors (evaluate the sources of the data); and much more. For this to work the data must be independently verified as accurate (matching the source) and available for access at all times, without fear censorship. Put all that together and there is only one technology that can deal with it.

verified how?

And what exactly are you verifying?

In its most basic form, we verify that data extracted from news articles matches what has been reported. So, when we extract the data "Trump, Speech, Alabama, Immigration" from an article, then it has to match the reporting in that original source, which may have included a sentence like, "Trump gives a speech in Alabama about immigration".

To avoid the verification process being gamed we split up the data and send pieces to random people across the across the network. So, someone may be asked "Is this article about Trump?" and the next person may be asked "Which state is this sentence about?". They may not even see the whole original article.

So what happens when your verifier fails? Do you prevent the publication of the text? That hardly seems decentralized.

Asking humans to review the accuracy of all published text will never scale.

The amount of verification required depends on the data. Simple data, such as sports results -- coming from high-quality sources doesn't require much verification, and can be automated. More complex data requires human verification, but that will gradually be replaced by distributed machine learning.

If an article says Trump gave a speech, how do you verify with machine learning, using a blockchain, that Trump literally gave a speech?

I don’t really understand your business. It’s a business, but also dencentralised. Are you trying to verify if news is fake or not? Why do you need a blockchain or machine learning for this? Do you have your own coin?

>If an article says Trump gave a speech, how do you verify with machine learning, using a blockchain, that Trump literally gave a speech?

To do fact checking you first need to know what has been reported. We verify that a source reported that Trump was involved in a news event where he gave a speech, and convert that to data (For example: Trump, gives speech, text of what he said, location etc, with links to the sources). Anyone can then use that data combined with their own algorithms or external data to evaluate the quality of the data -- primarily by evaluating the sources -- to create quality scores for that news event.

> don’t really understand your business. It’s a business, but also dencentralized.

We are setting up a foundation to oversee the blockchain, but it really only exists to distribute the initial funds and to provide initial guidance, until on-chain governance can be set up. Companies and individuals run the apps that use the data on the blockchain.

>Are you trying to verify if news is fake or not?

See above. You can use the data for lots of things. Detecting fake news is just one application.

>Why do you need a blockchain or machine learning for this?

There is no way to ensure that the data is verified independently across the network, and stored in a censorship and tamper-resistant way without a blockchain.

>Do you have your own coin?

The coin (NewsBlocks Tokens) will be used by apps to pay for the data. The payments are then sent to the people who added the data, without any need for middlemen or news agencies, using Smart Contracts.