Today Algorand and Blockstack are announcing that they are collaborating on the Clarity smart contract language. Clarity is a decidable (i.e. non-Turing complete) language inspired by lisp. I am extremely excited about this development and have spent a few hours this week writing a smart contract in Clarity. I have long argued that Turing complete smart contract languages are problematic because the only way to really understand the system as a whole is to run it and see what happens. Still t...

I have written repeatedly about why I don’t think “encrypt all things” is the right answer for constructing a democratic society going forward. I am, however, a fan of the idea to “sign all things.” What I mean by this is that ideally all my emails, blog posts, etc. would be automatically digitally signed using a private key. Anyone with the corresponding public key could then verify that I really did write this email or post. Why does this matter? Because with digital tools it is also incred...

When we invested in Onename in 2014 it was with the conviction that decentralized applications will require human readable identity systems for some applications. Take the DAO for example. As of writing this post it has raised nearly $110 million dollars including some from me. The allocation of this capital will be decided through voting. Now imagine the difference between voting on a proposal made by 0x8f585e5578a9695151fe51ac92f560c8a9cc9a14 (my DAO address) versus one made by albertwenger...

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 reso...

There is a lot we can learn from github and its identity model about the role of individual identity in the future of firms, networks and markets. When Linus Torvalds released git in 2005 he made a crucial innovation in version control widely available: git makes the full development history available locally to every developer (or put differently it is a distributed system). Over time this has made git the most widely adopted system of its kind. That in turn opened up the opportunity for git...

About 8 months ago Joel Monegro, who is one of the analysts here at USV, wrote a great post titled “The Blockchain Application Stack.” The post lays out how the bitcoin blockchain can be combined with overlay networks and decentralized protocols to create a new application ecosystem. A lot of work has been accomplished since then by a great many individuals and organizations to bring this stack into sharper focus. If you want to learn more about the progress, I highly recommend that you head ...