Continuations

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...

One of the apps on your phone is unlike all the others: the web browser. There are many reasons it is different but here is the most fundamental one – you tell it what to connect to! Pretty much every other app connects to a specific set of servers that the app’s creators control. So the browser gives you as enduser a fundamentally higher level of control than most other apps. What makes this possible is the existence of the HTTP protocol. So what we need in order to shift more control back i...

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post on bitcoin as protocol that got a couple of hundred comments from which I learned a lot. This is an important topic and Chris Dixon has done a lot of good thinking and writing on this. He has a new short post on the relationship between Bitcoin and the Byzantine Generals problem. Chris wrote this mostly as a reaction to various New York Times coverage of Bitcoin which so far misses the protocol innovation. While I agree with Chris, here are some (possibly ...