Philosophy Mondays: Human-AI Collaboration
Today's Philosophy Monday is an important interlude. I want to reveal that I have not been writing the posts in this series entirely by myself. Instead I have been working with Claude, not just for the graphic illustrations, but also for the text. My method has been to write a rough draft and then ask Claude for improvement suggestions. I will expand this collaboration to other intelligences going forward, including open source models such as Llama and DeepSeek. I will also explore other moda...
Intent-based Collaboration Environments
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Web3/Crypto: Why Bother?
One thing that keeps surprising me is how quite a few people see absolutely nothing redeeming in web3 (née crypto). Maybe this is their genuine belief. Maybe it is a reaction to the extreme boosterism of some proponents who present web3 as bringing about a libertarian nirvana. From early on I have tried to provide a more rounded perspective, pointing to both the good and the bad that can come from it as in my talks at the Blockstack Summits. Today, however, I want to attempt to provide a coge...
Philosophy Mondays: Human-AI Collaboration
Today's Philosophy Monday is an important interlude. I want to reveal that I have not been writing the posts in this series entirely by myself. Instead I have been working with Claude, not just for the graphic illustrations, but also for the text. My method has been to write a rough draft and then ask Claude for improvement suggestions. I will expand this collaboration to other intelligences going forward, including open source models such as Llama and DeepSeek. I will also explore other moda...
Intent-based Collaboration Environments
AI Native IDEs for Code, Engineering, Science
Web3/Crypto: Why Bother?
One thing that keeps surprising me is how quite a few people see absolutely nothing redeeming in web3 (née crypto). Maybe this is their genuine belief. Maybe it is a reaction to the extreme boosterism of some proponents who present web3 as bringing about a libertarian nirvana. From early on I have tried to provide a more rounded perspective, pointing to both the good and the bad that can come from it as in my talks at the Blockstack Summits. Today, however, I want to attempt to provide a coge...
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The blockchain holds great promise for developing decentralized protocols and applications such as marketplaces (e.g., openbazaar), registries for digital and physical assets (e.g. mediachain) and social networks that have no value extraction by a controlling company. Everyone who wants to develop such applications though faces the same foundational problem: how to refer to resources and people without resorting to existing centralized systems.
On the existing web we use URLs to point to resources and identity is provided by companies such as Google, Facebook and Twitter. For decentralized applications we so far have IPFS to point to resources, which uses pointers that are not human readable, and we don’t have an identity solution at all.
Blockstack is a system on top of the Bitcoin blockchain that solves both of the problems. It has been developed over the last year and a half by the team at Onename and the Blockstack community. Blockstack provides decentralized namespaces that can be used to point at resources and at identities.
Many things are exciting about Blockstack including the fact that it is fully operational today. But also that it has been designed from the ground up with the capabilities that we would and should expect from such a system, including:
name lookups on a decentralized naming system
name registrations and transfers without centralized registrars
automatic binding of names to owning cryptographic keypairs
automatic cache invalidation
immunity to DNS cache poisoning
robust certificate pinning capabilities
resistance to censorship of name registration and resolution
If you want to really dig into what informed the underlying design decisions you can read this academic paper by the team.
So if you are working on decentralized applications or are excited about their potential, please go and check out Blockstack.
The blockchain holds great promise for developing decentralized protocols and applications such as marketplaces (e.g., openbazaar), registries for digital and physical assets (e.g. mediachain) and social networks that have no value extraction by a controlling company. Everyone who wants to develop such applications though faces the same foundational problem: how to refer to resources and people without resorting to existing centralized systems.
On the existing web we use URLs to point to resources and identity is provided by companies such as Google, Facebook and Twitter. For decentralized applications we so far have IPFS to point to resources, which uses pointers that are not human readable, and we don’t have an identity solution at all.
Blockstack is a system on top of the Bitcoin blockchain that solves both of the problems. It has been developed over the last year and a half by the team at Onename and the Blockstack community. Blockstack provides decentralized namespaces that can be used to point at resources and at identities.
Many things are exciting about Blockstack including the fact that it is fully operational today. But also that it has been designed from the ground up with the capabilities that we would and should expect from such a system, including:
name lookups on a decentralized naming system
name registrations and transfers without centralized registrars
automatic binding of names to owning cryptographic keypairs
automatic cache invalidation
immunity to DNS cache poisoning
robust certificate pinning capabilities
resistance to censorship of name registration and resolution
If you want to really dig into what informed the underlying design decisions you can read this academic paper by the team.
So if you are working on decentralized applications or are excited about their potential, please go and check out Blockstack.
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