The ability to fake something is equivalent to the ability to rewrite the past. As our ability to fake things increases, more and more of our knowledge then comes into doubt.
I think we'll end up in a world where the only way to prove what the past really is if we hash and stuck on a blockchain somewhere. One can then see PoW as a constant tax being paid to maintain a literal link to a past when deepfakery did not exist.
Fancy making a bot which crawls the web, makes a massive merkle tree, and then puts the head of the tree into a bitcoin transaction?
You could then monetise it by charging a nominal fee for the path from any given bit of data to a timestamped bitcoin transaction.
The disadvantage is the cost to do this involves "get access to all data on the web", but perhaps you could partner with the web archive or something to do it?
From what I see of history, as humans we already do this by killing of all "invalid" copies of history (books, art, humans, etc...) and replacing them with the new "fixed" versions.
Now that making copies is as easy as owning a camera or USB drive it is dis-information that is the new way to change history.
> I think we'll end up in a world where the only way to prove what the past really is if we hash and stuck on a blockchain somewhere
LOL. Blockchain to the rescue! Except. Which fork is the right one? The one with the most hash power? How can you be sure that one is right? Which ethereum fork is the "correct" fork? Which bitcoin fork is the "correct" fork?
Blockchains don't help for shit with proving something existed. The are fully mutable data structures--it just requires more effort than a simple UPDATE statement.
I think we'll end up in a world where the only way to prove what the past really is if we hash and stuck on a blockchain somewhere. One can then see PoW as a constant tax being paid to maintain a literal link to a past when deepfakery did not exist.