Why Write Anything at All?

Introducing Creations on BSVSearch

Content is no longer scarce. Articles, images, video, music: in the age of AI you can have any of it in seconds, and more of it than you could read in a lifetime. So why write? Why pick up a camera? Somewhere, something has probably already generated a better version of whatever you were about to make.

This year China hosted sports events for robots: humanoids sprinting, boxing, playing football. Underneath one of the videos somebody asked what the point of becoming an athlete is now. Why train for years to run a race a machine will eventually win without trying?

The answer someone gave stayed with me. Robots will eventually outrun us, and nobody will care. We watch athletes because they are human. The 100 metres matters because a person is at the edge of what a person can do, with everything that person is riding on it. A faster machine does not make that less interesting. It makes it more so.

I think the same is true of what we write and read. We are not interested in text; we are interested in people. When I read something, I want to know that a specific human thought this, that they have something at stake in saying it, that they could be wrong and would have to live with that. I want to find a piece of myself in how somebody else sees the world. No amount of generated prose gives me that, because there is nobody behind it to find.

That is what Creations on BSVSearch is for: a place for humans to publish what they know, what they have lived, and what they think, and to be paid for it by the people who read it.

What you could bring

When I say "write", I do not only mean essays. Everyone has lived through something that somebody else is about to face for the first time. Most of what is worth reading is not an argument. It is one person telling another how something actually went. For example:

• Reviews. The tool you used for ten years. The restaurant, the album, the course, the car. Written by somebody who paid for it and has no reason to flatter it.
• Tutorials and how-to's. How you set up your workshop, your home network, your recording chain, your accounts. Step by step, with the mistakes left in.
• Expertise. The thing you do for a living, explained by somebody who does it rather than somebody who writes about it. The plumber on water pressure. The nurse on what to ask the doctor. The accountant on the question every freelancer gets wrong.
• Analyses and research. A dataset you worked through. A market you watch. A paper you read so the rest of us do not have to.
• Professional publications. A practice newsletter, a clinic's patient guide, a firm's briefing for its clients.
• Stories. Fiction, a serial a chapter at a time, poetry. Your grandmother's story before it is lost.
• News. What happened in your town this week, from someone who was there, with no wire service in between.
• Opinions. Argued, signed, and standing behind their author.
• Explainers. How a thing works, written to be looked up later.
• Interviews. The conversation with the person in your field everybody else should hear from.
• Experiences. The move abroad, the bankruptcy, the first year of the business, the recovery, the long walk.
• The stages of life. Leaving home. Raising children. Caring for a parent. Starting again at fifty. Retiring. Every one of them has been written about in general and almost never by the particular person a reader needs.
• Local knowledge. The guide to your city that no tourist board would publish. Where to fish, where to park, which office to go to and what to bring.
• Field notes. The season on the farm, the dig, the voyage, the build. Written as it happens, kept as a record.

If it is true, if it is yours, and if somebody somewhere would be glad to have read it, it belongs here.

Publish a piece, or publish a publication

Every piece on Creations is an article, and every article is yours to price. Leave it free and it is open to everyone, with a tip address if you want one. Put a price on it and it opens for whoever pays it, directly into your wallet. The floor is 2,000 satoshis, a few cents.

But you do not have to publish one piece at a time. You can gather your work into a collection and sell a subscription to it: one payment, one window of time, everything in the collection while the window runs, including what you add later. Nothing renews itself, because nothing here can take a second payment from a reader. What a collection is called is up to you:

• A newspaper. Your town, your beat, your industry, issue by issue.
• A magazine. An edition at a time, with a cover, a running order you choose, and a theme.
• A newsletter. The weekly letter your readers already want, without an email list to maintain.
• A blog. Dated, personal, of its moment, and paid for by the people who keep coming back.
• A book. Written in HTML rather than printed, read in a browser, sold for whatever window you choose, up to a year. A memoir, a manual, a textbook, a cookbook, a city guide.
• A series. A course in lessons. A long investigation in parts. A serial novel.

An article can sit in more than one collection, and it can be for subscribers only or sold on its own as well. A reader who subscribes to your magazine gets every issue you publish while they hold a subscription. Articles only, for now: a book here is a book of text.

Two more things belong to you here. Every article carries a switch: may this be used to train AI? The default is no. Most human writing is being taken for that purpose today without anyone asking; here it is asked. And a piece can be licensed for reuse in one named project, a film, a book, a website, at a price you set, with the terms kept on record.

Why not just post it on Twitter or Facebook?

Because of how they get paid.

The social media giants are free to use because they sell your attention to advertisers. That single fact decides everything else about them. A platform that sells attention has to capture as much of it as it can, so its algorithms are tuned to whatever keeps you scrolling, and what keeps people scrolling most reliably is outrage. The angriest, most immediate take wins, every time, by design. It is not that the people running those platforms want you enraged. It is that their revenue depends on it, and incentives beat intentions. A tutorial that quietly helps a thousand people is worth nothing to that system. An insult that makes a million people furious is worth a great deal.

Creations runs on a different incentive. There is no advertiser and no engagement algorithm in the middle. A reader pays a writer directly, in BSV, from their own wallet into the writer's. BSVSearch shows the price, watches the chain, and opens the door. The reader's payment never passes through it. The only question the system has to answer is whether a piece was worth paying for to the person who read it, and the quiet tutorial does very well by that measure.

A few other things follow from building it this way. A person reads every submission before it goes up, so there is no spam and no generated filler. What a reader bought, for how long, at what price and under which terms is kept in their own purchase record, which the writer cannot change afterwards. And a writer who withdraws a piece from sale does not take it away from the people who already paid for it.

Paid by the people who read you, from anywhere on the planet

"Planetary" is the word I keep coming back to, and I mean it literally.

The big platforms are global in reach but not in reward. Creator payouts run through payment processors that operate in a few dozen countries, with minimum balances before you see a cent. And because advertising pays far more for an American's attention than for a Nigerian's or a Filipino's, the platforms' centre of gravity drifts toward the audiences the ad money cares about. "Global" conversations end up being American conversations with the rest of the world in the replies.

Payments on BSV change the arithmetic. A reader in Lagos can pay a writer in Ghent a few thousand satoshis, directly, with no bank, no processor, no country list and no minimum. Amounts too small for any intermediary to bother with become a living for someone whose readers are scattered across five continents. BSVSearch's platform fee comes out of the price the writer set, and it is stated before they set it. The writers who get rewarded are chosen by the people reading them, not by where the advertising money lives.

That is what makes Creations planetary rather than merely international. Not a single national perspective with foreign guests, but a place where a guide to Jakarta, a recipe from Oaxaca and a farm diary from Flanders are on exactly the same footing, paid for in the same way, by whoever found them worth reading.

(And yes: I used an AI as a tool while drafting this, the way I would use a spellchecker or a thesaurus. The opinions are mine. That is rather the point.)

Come write

Creations is young. It is open to invited writers, it handles articles only, and much of what it could do is still to be built. Articles come first because a piece of writing is the easiest thing to put a fair price on and, until now, the hardest thing to get paid for.

If you know something, have lived something, or can tell something that somebody else needs, get in touch and ask to be one of the first. Bring your reviews, your lessons, your stories, your town. Put your price on them, or none, and let the people who find value in them say so directly.

Humans will always want to read other humans. Let's make this the place where that is worth doing.

Marquez