The importance of owning your data has gained traction with the recent confirmation of the Facebook data breach by Cambridge Analytica. But without a viable alternative, movements like #DeleteFacebook will continue to fizzle out and lose momentum. In the current landscape, users have no viable alternatives to centralized services like Facebook or Twitter. And while I wonder how many people truly care about what it means to own their data — being more willing to trust their information to the silicon valley behemoths for ease of use — there are a group of people working to give this power back to the people.

One of the most promising ones operating in the space today is the team behind Blockstack, which is led by co-founders Ryan Shea and Muneeb Ali.

I could write about Blockstack raising $52 million dollars in an accredited investor sale from notable participants like Union Square Ventures, the Winklevoss Twins, and Foundation Capital, but this has been reported on already. Instead, I’d like to discuss the things you can actually do on Blockstack right now and in the near-future (although I’ll still have to make mention about the way Blockstack has executed their token sale because it’s a law-abiding, ethical model for all future projects).

Onboarding Process

Upon signing up with Blockstack, you’re given a long string of characters and numbers as your default “id” on the platform; this comes free of charge. But for only a few satoshis, you’re able to purchase your own “id” within an hour or so, if it’s still available.

Setting up a Blockstack ID is a simple process. Users can either keep the assigned one or pay a few satoshis to own a personalized ID.

I like the idea of owning my “id” for many reasons. The main one, though, is I now have a universal login for every Dapp in the Blockstack ecosystem. This reduces the need of having to trust a centralized service like Lastpass to manage all of the passwords I have — or heaven forbid using the same password(s) for the majority of my accounts. Also gone are the days of having to generate one specific password for a website because it’s requirements are more stringent than the rest.

And by not having to trust all of my passwords to a centralized service— which are admittedly pretty useful right now— you can increase ease of use as well as identity security. A centralized service is one data breach away from having all of that password information compromised, and since there is no centralized storage location for the keychains and passwords on Blockstack, you’ve nullified this problem. And while the number of Dapps on Blockstack is limited right now, this single “id” sign-on will become more valuable in the future as the team incentivizes developers to build on their platform with programs like the Blockstack Signature Fund.

“Let’s Talk About Dapps, Baby”

The best Dapp on Blockstack is Graphite. I’ve enjoyed using the encrypted chat app Stealthy (I actually had a great one hour chat with one of its co-founders, Alexander, while providing feedback through the Blockstack community rewards program), but Stealthy doesn’t have enough people using its chat feature to be of everyday use yet. Whereas you can start using Graphite in your everyday life right now. It’s currently a stripped down version of Google Docs, but you have access to a text and spreadsheet creator. I also like their idea of using “Vault” storage to be able to securely access your files from anywhere in the world. And while you trade greater functionality with something more polished like Google Docs, you’re able to truly own and control your own data with Graphite.

A sneak peek at the new UI for Coins, a Dapp built on Blockstack

The best cryptocurrency portfolio Dapp is currently Coins, but until it increases its capacity of tracked cryptocurrencies — right now it supports Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Ethereum, Monero, Ripple, Zcash, Dash, Ethereum Classic and Litecoin — its longterm usefulness will be limited. However, according to the Coins creator on the Blockstack Slack chat, there is a massive update in the offing. This update will include over 300 cryptocurrencies, 120 fiat currencies and automatic syncing with Coinbase. If this update is successful, the Coins Dapp will immediately be of viable use to the majority of cryptocurrency holders. And since presumably many of Blockstack’s early users will also have holdings in wide array of crypto currencies, it’s important that a “killer” coin tracking Dapp is available.

The Token Sale

This doesn’t have anything to do with the actual usage of Blockstack, but I applaud the team for the way it has carried off its token sale. As has been cited numerous times in TwoBitIdiot’s Medium posts, projects like Blockstack, Filecoin and Zeppelin are taking a measured, law-abiding approach to ensure their token sales are done legally by only releasing tokens to non-accredited investors after it has real utility on a live network.

There are also no gimmicks like a 25% early purchase discount; the “stacks” price is the same for accredited and non-accredited investors alike. And this all assumes the Blockstack team even decides to sell their tokens to non-accredited investors, pending that it’s not deemed a security by their legal representation.

This patience to do things the right way makes me think that Ryan Shea and Muneeb Ali would have been the type of children who waited the 15 minutes in the famous Stanford Marshmallow Experiment that measured children’s delayed gratification and then tracked this nascent trait into their future adulthood.

Open Source Code

Blockstack has an extremely active Github page. I’ve seen many projects ICO and you can’t find any of the source code on Github, or if you do locate the page it appears vacant, like a once thriving ghost town in the wild west. And while I understand for proprietary reasons why individuals might want to keep portions of their code out of public view, I can’t understand why you’d want to keep everything out of the public eye. But the Github page for all of Blockstack’s various products are active and frequently updated by both the core development team and ordinary users alike.

It was also recently announced that Blockstack had released developer tools for the iOS and Android mobile platforms. According to the team, “Blockstack mobile software development kits allow you to develop decentralized Blockstack applications native to your favorite mobile platform.” The expansion onto these platforms will only further increase the likelihood of greater user onboarding as our lives become more and more dependent on smartphones.

Final Thoughts

Blockstack is one of the frontrunners in the race to create an alternative to our current understanding of the internet. But the ultimate success of Blockstack is intrinsically linked with the developers it attracts to build their applications on the platform. And while it’s still very early in the game developers, investors, and trendsetting users alike are all trying to identify where the “Internet 3.0” is coming from.

And as human lives become further digitized in the coming years, I believe it will soon be of paramount importance that people actually control their online data, as opposed to trusting it to centralized third parties. The Blockstack developers and core contributors appear to be well on their way to making serious, long-lasting inroads to return this power to the people.