A growing movement aims to build a “decentralized database of facts,” which will be used to settle debates, perform fact-checks, and prevent would-be tyrants from gaining power by lying about the past.
The intent is noble, but as we explored earlier, the “facts” that can be written to a blockchain are vanishingly narrow in scope, and useless without human interpretation. If this distinction is conveniently forgotten or obscured, a tyrant could easily claim blockchain-level indisputability for propositions that don’t qualify, for reasons only experts understand.