The world will take over 1 trillion photographs in 2018. Almost all of them will remain digital and never be printed. Blockchain enables us to provably buy, sell, trade, and destroy those digital or "virtual" photographs as if they were all physically tangible photographic prints. A step further, you can now edition each virtual photograph, producing and selling anywhere from one to one million+ copies of each virtual photo. Our ability to track and prove the scarcity of these virtual photos will greatly eclipse our ability to prove and track scarcity and authenticity of physical photographs and artwork. This is not a prediction, it is already happening, and virtual photos are selling for as much as $1million.
Photography, just like other creative industries, is build on the ability to share and spread the content. This unique characteristic is what makes photography so prone to stealing.
Unfavorable Sales Conditions for Artists
Currently there aren’t many options available to photographers or designers who want to earn money in a fair way, selling their digital work. This is particularly concerning for amateur photographers and hobby artists who have not yet attained a high level of name recognition, which would enable them to sell their works at higher prices. For this group of artists, there are stock photography microstocks such as Shutterstock and Adobe Stock available (see 1.4.1).
Although artists can reach lots of potential buyers by putting their digital works on these platforms, they only receive a tiny percentage of the sales price. Current centralized photo stocks can receive up to 90% of the profit margin[2]. Also, the platforms have stringent requirements for the sellers. Due to these challenging conditions, the artist is obliged to publish a substantial number of images in hopes of being able to compete against high levels of competition.
Other problems include sellers being unable to set their own pricing, long waiting times for verification of the content, a large number of rejections of the work by the photo stock platforms, as well as long time intervals between payments.
1.2 Photochain DApp as a Solution to the Artist’s Problems
By developing the Photochain platform, we present the possibility for artists to sell their works directly to their customers, on their own terms. Mediated by Smart Contracts, when a sale is made, the seller is paid, and the buyer receives the purchased picture immediately. Thus, Photochain doesn’t require a centralised authority to ensure the correctness of transactions. This reliability is inherently contained in the blockchain technology.
The Photochain platform has been engineered from the ground up, to solve the problems of traditional stock photography platforms. For ongoing development, the wisdom of the community oversees the platform and machine learning is employed to find solutions for other problems (see 2.3.1).
1.3 Photochain’s Mission
Photochain has clear advantages for contributors and customers. Contributors at Photochain benefit from an extremely low fee - only 5% of the selling price. Keeping 95% of the final sale price allows contributors to offer their work cheaper. Consequently the market becomes more affordable for customers. This type of fair market not only benefits the users, but should benefit the photography industry as a whole, as the possibility of increased income incentivizes contributors to perform better.
These profound market changes are only made possible by using blockchain technology, Smart Contracts, machine learning and Photochain’s own user community. Most of the processes become automated and decentralized, significantly reducing costs of platform governance. It’s unavoidable that more and more stock photography contributors and customers will prefer to use Photochain.
The development of the Photochain platform is an ambitious and organically growing process. Our main aims for the project come under three significant prongs:
• P2P Marketplace
It’s very important to us that only the artists themselves can determine the value of their work and they’re given the opportunity to offer their work to many potential buyers.
• Crypto Economy
Photochain appeals to a broad audience of people that aren’t yet adopters of blockchain and cryptocurrency technologies. The relatable use case of "Photochain" will appeal to this audience. The easy-to-use GUI and the trading process facilitates the onboarding process and supports the Crypto Economy in becoming mainstream.
• Photochain Digital Copyright Chain: DCC
Over the course of the project, more and more artists will be able to strengthen their copyright using the Photochain platform, since their works will be linked to their name. This link is manifested as a transaction in the Ethereum blockchain and is therefore visible to all users at all times. This means that the artist’s ownership of the image can be accounted for. The database with all manifested links has been constructed in a decentralised way,. We call this database a DCC
https://photochain.io/
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1C4UPA9-9o2cOLJOEYMIVwN_Fi3Ebtn2YcRua58hQ7_0/edit?usp=sharing
https://twitter.com/photochain_io
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