For all of the freedoms that the internet has brought us, there have been as many constraints. In some cases, the autonomy of the internet has diminished our preference for ownership. We only have to look towards the dominance of music streaming platforms to confirm that when offered it, free access wins over paying for goods.

The advent of the internet and mobile technology entirely changed the primary way in which content is distributed. With access to artefacts available in abundance, authorship over the distributed images inevitably became harder to keep a track of. And this is precisely what services like Ascribe are intending to change through a utilisation of Blockchain.

Blockchain is one of those things that takes longer than a simple sentence to understand. But we don’t need to fully understand it in order to reap the benefits. “We are using Blockchain because it has characteristics that are extremely important to us, like time stamping, immutability and authorisation,” explains Masha McConaghy, Chief Community Officer of Ascribe. “Immutability is this idea that you are putting something into the blockchain that can’t be deleted, this information is permanent and this idea of decentralisation means that there is no centralised corporation that controls it.”