Publicity & Privacy

In any system simultaneously as public and private as the entire Internet, the core practice of privacy and consent is one which allows an individual to be as public as they like (as opposed to a public individual trying to be as private as possible, as is the case with a blockchain address). By default, in registering addresses and storage domains, CCTS does not explicitly require an individual to doxx themselves in order to utilize it; it is entirely feasible for an individual to use CCTS as an encrypted storage and access proxy, never registering any unencrypted public domain data.

Where CCTS shines, however, is in this third option of associating an authorized paygated public domain as a source of content; i.e., an image preview on a stock photo site, a book or research article snippet from a publishers website, a content creator behind a paygate, etcetera. By establishing a “home” for a file, CCTS explicitly creates an allow-list (inside home domains) and deny-list (outside home domains) that can be used as provenance and escalation basis.

This introduces the necessary discussion topic of reverse privacy, where the on-chain address of an address can be inspected to extrapolate a user’s on-chain registration activity. An abstracted example:

By inspecting Address 0x001337, we observe that it is registered to Bob12345 on Patreon, and that Bob12345 has some additional content in encrypted storage and on Patreon that cannot be accessed without a paywall. However, this does not the reveal the actual content, nor does it reveal information outside of the public domain. In all these cases of gated content, a single source of truth becomes established up to the degree the individual party is themselves public.