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...

Since my post last Friday about alternatives to SOPA/PIPA, I have started to talk to a bunch of people about the idea of a decentralized content registry. Here are some thoughts and questions that I have been kicking around since then. A decentralized system could offer a new revenue stream for existing registrars and certificate authorities who are already at least partially equipped to deal with issues of verification. By having a competitive situation from the start the price for content r...

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...

Since my post last Friday about alternatives to SOPA/PIPA, I have started to talk to a bunch of people about the idea of a decentralized content registry. Here are some thoughts and questions that I have been kicking around since then. A decentralized system could offer a new revenue stream for existing registrars and certificate authorities who are already at least partially equipped to deal with issues of verification. By having a competitive situation from the start the price for content r...