Just learned about Witcoin. A way to gain currency through knowledge

Attaching monetary value to knowledge exchange is a fascinating concept, but it could go two ways. I presume their goal is to create a platform where people could get trade-able WitCoins for Wikipedia edits (for example), ie get paid for contributing to a knowledge commons. My concern though is that it could be used to reinforce the ideology that knowledge is a capital asset ("intellectual property") that should be traded in money, rather than freely shared.

According to the site, the underlying tech is the Ethereum blockchain. Their "crowdsale" of coins looks like it's essentially issuing shares in the future value of WitCoin. There is a test platform supported by the European Commission, NIR-VANA, so it's (probably) not just a ponzi scheme. Certainly a project worth investigating further, thanks for sharing.

I presume their goal is to create a platform where people could get trade-able WitCoins for Wikipedia edits

This reminds me a lot about the system I described in my master's degree thesis, in which every book in the world becomes a virtual "whiteboard" on which users can post notes, links, images and ratings. The system would then allow anyone to view the whole web of connections and notes shared by all previous users and to navigate it as they please... Adding a knowledge-based cryptocurrency to the mix suddenly makes the whole concept a lot more interesting...

At the risk of drifting off-topic...

@michelekipiel have you looked into the work the W3C have done on web annotation standards? I hope these standards are supported by the growing federated web, for example the IndieWeb community, and the W3C Social Web Working Group work on ActivityPub. I'd love to see centralized comment silos like Disqus and Quora replaced with being able to comment on any website, using an account on any federated social media service, and centralized link-sharing silos like FarceBook and Twitter replaced the same way.

Very interesting stuff, thanks for sharing! I never heard of web annotation before, I'll give it a shot!

Plugins to annotate webpages have existed since quite some time. Don't know if they're still widely used (I don't use one myself).

Wiki (and their talk page) and the federated wiki go IMHO the same direction.