What is Story Block?

tl;dr: Story Block is an all on-chain, continuously developing, collaborative, experimental narrative.

The advent of writing is one of the most defining moments in history because it allowed for record keeping, for knowledge to accumulate, and for stories to be shared. We have found ourselves upon the era where primary sources are forever accessible.

Story Block has been developed as an exploration of the creative possibilities that can be had within the bounds of being completely on-chain. Story Block follows a simple concept of a story being written by multiple individuals by concatenating, or linking in a consecutive series, each contributor's sentence till the story ends. Anyone who would like to participate in the creation of this narrative would mint an NFT with a sentence they would like to contribute. The individual will then mint the NFT which, will have a token number of one higher than the previous sentences. The creator’s sentence will then appear on Story Block's website.

By owning the NFT, the individual reserves the right to alter the sentence they have minted at any time to anything else they may wish. If someone were to sell their NFT on a secondary marketplace, the new owner then would have access to edit that sentence but not the sentence's location in the story. This adds an additional element of evolution for this creative endeavor as those who would want to alter the beginning or end of the story to perhaps elicit a different tone or direction. The idea is to not restrain the creative inputs any further than the limitations imposed by hard-coded components.

However, this does introduce an element of potential chaos that could disrupt the integrity of the narrative at play. The Story Block smart contract has a built-in moderating function to ensure that the sentences written do not contain any harmful elements. A published story is typically sent to an editor before finalizing after all and through these mechanics Story Block has a foundation for a decentralized, collaborative, fully on-chain story to be told.

This is ultimately what defines Story Block: what story will the users of Ethereum create?