Name: Blockstack’s Case For A Decentralized Internet
Uploaded: 2018-06-08
Duration: 6 min 46 s
Description: Cofounders Ryan Shea and Muneeb Ali explain the startup’s goals.

[ MUSIC ] Well, let's dive in and talk about block stack. What are you guys working on? We're building a new decentralized internet, and the goal is for people to be in control of their digital lives, and we have a full application platform and developer community, Around making this happen. That means that we give developers with the tools that they need. We provide support and an environment where developers can communicate. We provide some funding as well. Really, this whole thing is to build an entire economy that is decentralized. One really valuable thing that we provide and that we're building out as we release the block stack blockchain, is this thing called App rewards mining. What that means is that, developers who have applications on Blockstack that are used, and tha provide real value, they will get a constant outflow of funding of money from the block chain itself, right? This is part of the mining system And we have a system where these app reviewers can actually indicate what applications are being used and what applications are of high quality and they can actually sustain themselves and be able to have a certain amount of revenue where they can go forward. So, it provides a baseline sort of business model while they Get started and can figure out their long term business model. They would receive tokens, Blockstack tokens. Blockstack tokens, exactly. So what's an example of one of these apps and is this kind of payout mechanism working right now? No, so the payment mechanism is not working right now. That's when the Blockchain goes live. We are really exited about our Open source community and the developers who are building apps right now. I can give you some examples, one of them is called Graphite. It's alternative to Google Docs. So, imagine just like you are used to using Google Docs or Spreadsheets, Google has all your data. In the Graphite example, you download the Graphite app locally and you would plug in your private storage which we help with. And after that, it's very interesting that you are using something exactly like Google Docs but it's local, it's decentralized and your data is backed up in the Cloud under your ownership. Right? So, you control all that data. Another app is called Stealthy, it's a secure messaging app. It's interesting that we had Edward Snowden as one of the keynote speakers at one of our developer events in Berlin. He was actually playing around with this app. And it was very interesting to see that people were like that concerned about privacy are actually trying out these Decent Lines Apps for messaging. And what are some of the benefits of having a decentralized Internet that currently don't exist or maybe what are some of the problems with what we have today? Yeah, I think what would happen with the traditional Internet is that you can think of it as people started designing the courses, and it's not like, you know, aliens gave us the technology. Like, those people are still With us were some of the fine years of the existing internet. And didn't build out everything perfectly, right? And some of those gaping holes that you see, fundamental things that should have been part of the [ UNKNOWN ] infrastructure Those holes were filled by large companies like Google or Facebook. One specific example would be Facebook built out an authentication protocol and then a lot of developers used that authentication protocol so that you don't have to make like new accounts. But the thing is now every single app that is using it, they're actually sending data back to a single company, Facebook. Right. If that was a fundamental internet protocol, then users are basically they are in control of their own username, their own data, and a single company cannot just track them. That's just one example, but there are many things that the traditional internet didn't get right and there are many efforts, including us, who are actually trying to fix those problems. And give developers a new platform that completely just changes the game, right. They can build fully decentralized applications where it's actually easier for them to build these apps than to build them in traditional ways. Now you're actually putting your money where your mouth is. You've recently put out a request for proposals for people to submit ideas for social networks. Decentralize social networks. Decentralize social networks and there's a million dollars up for grabs. Tell us about that initiative and what you're hoping to garner from it. Yeah, so the goal there is to provide resources for developers for start ups to build decentralized apps. And really it's about opening up. Allowing people to be as creative as possible. We expect to see teams that will build decentralized Facebook or decentralized Twitter equivalents. But we also expect to see things that we couldn't have ever imagined. You even think of GitHub is a social network, SoundCloud is a social network. There's so many different things. But there's even new things that haven't been imagined yet. And we want to really empower teams to be able to do that. We've had over 100 teams actually apply so far, and we're really excited about being able to support them in any way we can. And this is just one of the types of applications that we are supporting on top of BlockStack there's many more. We believe that we now have that infrastructure Where you can build these apps that can get millions of users. If you remember, cryptokeys on Atirium became really famous last year. How could we forget? And as it was getting 400, 000, 500, 000 users, and you basically couldn't use Atirium because the underlying platform was not ready for getting that many users. So this is our way of telling developers that you can now give our platform a spin and try building out the next breakthrough on top of Blockstack, and you'll notice that this infrastructure has years of R & D work going into it, and you wouldn't notice some of the problems that you might with other platforms. So these are early days but long, long terms. Do you see, you know, everyone on Facebook today switching to one of these decentralized platforms? Everyone on the internet today is switching to block stack. How does that look in the future? It's hard to say exactly what the future will hold. I would say we and many other projects, we're working to building the decentralized future. And it's very possible that if all of this works out, if all of this The vision of decentralization has realized that decades from now, people will look at storing the data for billions of users in one central location as preposterous. Because at the end of the day this, what we call the new decentralized Internet, will just be the Internet if all works out and What that'll mean is that we will all be in control of our digital lives, and it might look something more like each person has their own private cloud, each person has their own keys on their devices and they control their identity and their data. And they can bring their data with them from one application to another. And it's more about the empowerment of the individual user. [ MUSIC ]

Blockstack’s Case For A Decentralized Internet

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Blockstack Wants to Decentralize the Internet

Cofounders Ryan Shea and Muneeb Ali explain the startup’s goals.