Muneeb from Blockstack here. Yep, many people like Bob Kahn, Vint Cerf, David Clark, Tim Berners-Lee and others helped build the various components of what we today know as the internet.

I'd highly recommend looking at our peer-reviewed research papers at http://blockstack.org/papers. We've been obsessed with performance and scalability and 3-4 years of research, engineering, and hard work went into this.

We already have enough money and are grateful for having investors like Union Square Ventures, Naval Ravikant, Y Combinator, SV Angel, Lux Capital, and others who share our vision. Building a truly decentralized internet will take years/decades and we're looking forward to growing our open-source community that can take on this grand challenge.