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> Imagine a world where people don't have property rights. In this world, you cannot own a house, and all your belongings are kept in a storage facility owned b
by owens99 9y ago
> Imagine a world where people don't have property rights. In this world, you cannot own a house, and all your belongings are kept in a storage facility owned by a few corporations. And in this world, walking into any store or theater implies that you disclose all your personal information, places you've been, other things you've bought to the business owners. You are tracked 24/7, your belongings are stolen from storage facilities, and you can't do anything about it.
Most of us would not stand for this in our real, everyday lives. But on the internet, we tolerate and even expect it. We become dependent on nameless, faceless, remote parties just by connecting. On the internet, we are powerless. Our existence on the internet is defined by others, whether that other be a mega-corporation or a government.
Now, we can change that.
Beautiful mission statement.
- orblivion 9y agoI like that it's an anti-corporate sentiment, but with an appeal to property rights. I almost suspect it's a deliberate clever way to appeal across the spectrum.
- throwanem 9y agoIndeed it is! I'd love to know more about the technology backing it, but right now my options appear to be either the app developer tutorials, which reveal nothing, or deep-diving the core code, which I lack anything remotely resembling time enough to do. What am I missing?
- gnusouth 9y agoHere's a page with papers about how it works: https://blockstack.org/papers https://blockstack.org/papers The problem that the blockchain solves is essentially one of decentralised consensus on mutable data. Decentralised consensus on immutable data is "easy" (see Bittorrent, IPFS), but getting everyone to agree on who owns "yoursite.com" and what data it points to fundamentally depends on a universally agreed key-value mapping. Using a blockchain allows everyone to agree on such a mapping, with some nice extras thrown in like blind auctions and public key crypto. Namecoin and the newly launched Ethereum Name Service work similarly. The big question given the inefficiency of proof-of-work blockchains is whether there are other ways to do decentralised mutable data. I'm currently working for MaidSafe, whose approach is based on a more traditional DHT and voting amongst randomised groups of nodes. We're still in alpha however, so for now the working systems are all blockchain based.
- throwanem 9y agoSo...this whole thing is basically a DNSSEC competitor?
- gnusouth 9y agoYes, but arguably more decentralised
- throwanem 9y agoAnd more expensive, and slower, and only functional at all after buying into an entire parallel infrastructure that doesn't appear to interoperate with what the rest of the world uses, and all you actually get out of it is name service. This is not a new Internet. This is a good way to waste time, effort, and money on something that's had a lot more thought put into the comprehensiveness of its rhetoric than into the comprehensiveness of its actual offering.