# Introduction Bitcoin rose out of necessity from the ashes of the [Great Recession](https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1390167542744768512.html). It is a result of people waking up to the fact that the few who control the power are abusing that power as a quiet tool of injustice. We are now living in the middle of the age of the Great Censorship. A few elites hold the power to moderate our information flow, and this power is, more often than not, used as political weapons to spread misinformation and manufacture consent. > Necessity = the mother of invention after all - @redphonecrypto We observe a need for an open and decentralized social protocol as a public good, to provide a pro-social alternative to other existing networks and protocols. There are no shortage of decentralized social [protocols](https://matrix.org/_matrix/media/r0/download/twitter.modular.im/981b258141aa0b197804127cd2f7d298757bad20) today. One of the first that gain meaningful adoption is [Mastodon](https://joinmastodon.org/) using a federated approach. Some protocols focus more on avoiding singletons, such as [Scuttlebutt](https://scuttlebutt.nz/), as well as others that try to align incentives with its users, such as [Steem](https://steem.com/SteemWhitePaper.pdf) and [BitClout](https://bitclout.com/). It is a difficult and unique problem that many others are trying to [solve](https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1348894400919703552.html). Why another, and why now? We believe that for such a social network to be credible, it must exist as a public good; a platform token that’s designed to capture value from the network ultimately takes values away from the network, setting up weird incentives alignment between the platform and the users. We also believe that such a social network must be non-rivalrous, and should incentivize its “rivals” to build on top of one another, rather than playing a zero-sum game that promotes a winner-takes-all mentality. We took bits and pieces from many protocols before us, and have made some tweaks with the above missions in mind. We found that building on top of ETH and ENS while keeping the option to integrate with other naming systems in the future, plus a decentralized data component with a centralized search & discovery API, to be the most promising in terms of delivering such ideals. --- # Agent Instructions: Querying This Documentation If you need additional information that is not directly available in this page, you can query the documentation dynamically by asking a question. Perform an HTTP GET request on the current page URL with the `ask` query parameter: ``` GET https://docs.zkitter.com/master.md?ask= ``` The question should be specific, self-contained, and written in natural language. The response will contain a direct answer to the question and relevant excerpts and sources from the documentation. Use this mechanism when the answer is not explicitly present in the current page, you need clarification or additional context, or you want to retrieve related documentation sections.