muneeb

I didn't get into Clarity in my summary above but really into the decidable smart contract language design. The reason I didn't mention Clarity is because most programs on Blockstack are not smart contracts. We think that smart contracts are only a subset of use-cases and should only be used when needed vs. making smart contracts the only way to program decentralized apps.

For any readers that are intrigued by what is Clarity, it's Blockstack's smart contract language that is different in two mains ways:

a) Clarity is a decidable language i.e., it is intentionally Turing-incomplete. This allows for complete static analysis of the entire call graph of smart contracts.

b) Clarity is interpreted. The contract source code itself is published and executed by blockchain nodes i.e., no compiler.

More details on Clarity are here: https://blog.blockstack.org/introducing-clarity-the-language...

There is no cap on the total no. of Stacks. There is a set inflation rate per year (described in the forum post).

Yep, you're right, volatility reduction is certainly one of our goals. Making yearly supply linked to network growth (even if we can only measure a subset of growth metrics) is the basic idea.

I agree with you that the crypto industry in general over-hypes, and everything is a "revolution." The scalable infrastructure and developers tools still require a lot of work and getting "killer apps" is a whole new phase of traction.

With that said, I'm optimistic as all signs seem to point to the fact that security and privacy are going to become more and more critical. Facebook Libra is a great example. Even FB wants to enter this space and rightly so. They have the userbase and are trying to build a decentralized (well federated really) network. Blockstack is open vs. permissioned (Libra). We've done 4+ years of R&D work and are now in the developer traction phase. We want thousands of experiments to happen and organic usage of apps to emerge.

Thanks for the link to the forum post!

We conducted an economic audit and as a result of that study made certain changes to future supply of tokens. Details are in the forum post linked above.

The token economics 2.0 paper is not published yet but the bulk of the details are in that post. We outline the open challenges in the "adaptive mint/burn" mechanism for future token supply there as well. Basically researching optimal values for the "evaluation window" and if we should have a maximum cap on mints i.e., tokens that re-enter supply after being burned/used.

Thank you! It took 10 months so not sure if qualifies as trailblazing. The legal and accounting treatment was new for everyone, so can expect it to take some time.

There is no one year lock on the Reg A. The Reg D offering (which we did earlier in 2017) and which is limited to Accredited Investors has a year and a day lock. We do have a monthly unlock over 2-years but that was our design decision, not a regulation.

Really interesting question about no longer being considered a security. We spent a lot of time on this. There is an entire discussion about decentralization in the offering circular. Our stance is that this is a utility token and due to an abundance of caution we're complying with securities regulations. However, upon further decentralization of the network (and we discuss certain metrics for this) the Stacks token may no longer be considered a security.

Pasting relevant info from the offering circular:

"Blockstack’s long-term strategy is to decentralize development and governance of the Blockstack network such that no single entity, including Blockstack, is in control of the network. At some point when this decentralization process is complete and there is a healthy ecosystem of applications and users on the network, Blockstack PBC expects to develop new business models, which may include the development and commercialization of premium versions of open-source software, enterprise licensing for blockchain technology, and development of new applications for the network. Blockstack may also dissolve Blockstack PBC and distribute the Stacks Tokens in Blockstack PBC’s treasury to Blockstack PBC’s stockholders. We do however intend to continue operating for a minimum of two to three years and likely until one of the following occurs: the Stacks Tokens are no longer deemed to be securities, we are no longer deemed to be the issuer of the tokens, or the Stacks blockchain undergoes a hard fork without Blockstack’s consent that effectively results in Blockstack no longer driving the governance of the network. Blockstack also intends during this time to encourage independent entities to contribute to the development of Blockstack Core, the core open-source software governing the network as well as contribute to the growth of the eco-system."

Typically yes. You'll need to build a lot of the components of a social network.

With Blockstack most of the heavy-lifting is done for you by the underlying platform (identity, auth, storage -- all three decentralized).

We've seen people build functioning chat apps and alternative to Google docs within few months. See stealthy.im and graphitedocs.com

Muneeb Ali, Blockstack co-founder here. I'm a technical consultant to the Silicon Valley show (season 5) along with my co-founder Ryan. So yes there is a link to the show but the project is not based on the show :-)

Blockstack was in the R&D phase until early 2017 (building the core tech & infrastructure), we launched our browser last summer and now have decentralized apps built on the platform that are live. These apps can scale to millions of users today. We're excited about enabling developers to build new apps like decentralized social networks.

I want to cross-link a recent Reddit discussion where people are asking similar questions and there is a good relevant discussion with answers:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/6j6ub1/new_bloc...

We have a decentralized storage system, called Gaia, and you publish the files there. This gives you performance and reliability comparable to cloud computing.

Only the domain registrations hit the blockchain and it's a one-time operation (just like buying a domain name for your website or app).

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.

It's an open-source project with 4 years of research and development behind it. The architecture implemented here is actually inspired by David Clark (Chief Protocol Architect of the internet) and his new design principle, called trust-to-trust design, that aims to fix critical security issues with the current design of the internet.

I agree that rebuilding everything is hard and that's why we reuse not only TCP/IP and everything below TCP/IP in the stack, but we also reuse existing infrastructure in a decentralized way.

We've already built this stack and have been running it in production for 3+ years. Please see our peer-reviewed research papers and our whitepaper at http://blockstack.org/papers for more details. Happy to answer any questions!

Muneeb from Blockstack here. We're not reinventing anything at/below TCP/IP. That stack works fairly well and can function in a decentralized way.

We are replacing things above TCP/IP like DNS, Certificate Authorities (CAs), how data is discovered, data silos, and dependence on remote servers for running your apps.

http://blockstack.org/whitepaper.pdf has more details.

Thanks for pointing it out. Bitcoin is referenced in the whitepaper and made it clear in the blog post as well. (Don't want the readers to get confused between the virtualchain blockchain and the Bitcoin blockchain that is used underneath.)

The title of this post should probably be updated to "Blockstack Whitepaper: A New Decentralized Internet (Part I)" to match the blog post title.

I use two browsers, Chrome and Safari.

Reason #1: I have an ad blocker enabled on Chrome and sometimes I copy/paste a URL that won't open with the ad blocker enabled and paste it to Safari (my secondary browser).

Reason #2: To use a site where I have two accounts e.g., personal and public/professional account on Reddit.

Reason #3 (rare use case): To occasionally get through errors e.g., a site has a bug that only shows up on Chrome. I'd try using Safari before giving up.

There is an on-going discussion on r/bitcoin re this post where some Bitcoin Core developers are commenting on the post. Worth checking out: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/4yhhe1/securing_bi...

Blockchains are not there for payment, but for secure bootstrapping of trust without depending on any trusted third parties.

Bitcoin or some other cryptocurrency as a payment method for X is a completely different high-level (optional) feature.

I'd actually put Blockstack in the same category as Ethereum. From a transactional log perspective, it uses the Bitcoin blockchain for consensus on the log and from an application development perspective, you can build apps using Blockstack (gives you naming, auth, and storage).

Very much alive :-)

Checkout: https://github.com/blockstack

for implementation of different software components and protocol documentation!

> Identity does not require consensus, naming does.

It's not just about global consensus on naming, but also global consensus on data associated with that name (which includes proofs/verifications/signed-statements etc). In other words, the system described in that post is not just "DNS for people", it is "DNS + PKI for people".

> Satoshi Nakamoto is the perfect proof that a secure online identity

The Satoshi Nakamoto secure identity you're describing is missing the human-readable part of Zooko's triangle. Not having human-readable names is a major limiting factor for practical adoption.

See this blog post for the appropriate context:

http://blog.onename.com/passcards/

This was submitted to HN earlier in the morning [1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9524702

I won't be surprised if many new discoveries come out of the dataset uBiome is constructing simply because no one has ever collected such a dataset before. And at this scale.

I took a picture of the original dissertation once. They should've scanned it in color:

http://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m654saPHnT1qdr8fn.jpg

That lab had three turing award winners (Leslie Lamport, Chuck Thacker, and Bob Tarjan as visiting researcher). This is how MSFT treats turing award winners now?

+1 to this. YC partners are in a unique position

There is the argument that you can't learn much from failure. You could've failed for 6-7 reasons in reality and can have a theory about the 2-3 reasons for your failure with some overlap between the two.

Successful people however had a series of small wins and small failures and got to experience the difficulties/challenges at each level of success.

+1, the recovery code shouldn't go out in plain text email. Also, I picked a weak password just to quickly make an account and I can't seem to change it, hmmm.

I'm actually more excited about David joining this effort (and entering the cryptocurrency space) than anything else. Stellar, also, looks promising (-:

I'm curious about what inaccuracies are you referring to? Coinbase is not a trading platform (no serious trader would pay 1% fees), Kraken does not accept ACH deposits and so on. Can you be more specific? BTW, I love both Coinbase and Kraken (they serve very different needs and do it well).

Yes, my linode servers got hacked and were part of a DDoS attack so I took them offline. I need to boot up a new server and soon (-: