What is Blockstack?

Blockstack is a full-stack decentralized computing protocol that enables a new generation of applications where developers and users can interact fairly and securely.

The Case for Decentralization

In his famous blog post titled “Why Decentralization Matters”, Chris Dixon says,

Centralized platforms follow a predictable life cycle. When they start out, they do everything they can to recruit users and 3rd-party complements like developers, businesses, and media organizations. They do this to make their services more valuable, as platforms (by definition) are systems with multi-sided network effects. As platforms move up the adoption S-curve, their power over users and 3rd parties steadily grows. When they hit the top of the S-curve, their relationships with network participants change from positive-sum to zero-sum. The easiest way to continue growing lies in extracting data from users and competing with complements over audiences and profits. Historical examples of this are Microsoft vs. Netscape, Google vs. Yelp, Facebook vs. Zynga, and Twitter vs. its 3rd-party clients. Operating systems like iOS and Android have behaved better, although still take a healthy 30% tax, reject apps for seemingly arbitrary reasons, and subsume the functionality of 3rd-party apps at will. For 3rd parties, this transition from cooperation to competition feels like a bait-and-switch. Over time, the best entrepreneurs, developers, and investors have become wary of building on top of centralized platforms. We now have decades of evidence that doing so will end in disappointment. In addition, users give up privacy, control of their data, and become vulnerable to security breaches. These problems with centralized platforms will likely become even more pronounced in the future.

We have seen this happen again and again in the past few years and this is where a platform such as Blockstack kicks in. Now,

Why Blockstack?

The core ideology of Blockstack is no company should have majority of the power on the Internet.

Blockstack aims to be a pioneer in building the Web3 as the world progresses away from centralization enabling developers and users to come together!

But how do we move towards this “Can’t be evil” internet?

Muneeb writes..

Google has a famous motto “Don’t be evil.” But maybe it should be “Can’t be evil.” No company on the internet should have so much power that they get to debate if they should be evil today or not. In a “Can’t be evil” model¹, trusting “good guys” is replaced by cryptographic ownership of digital assets and mathematical proofs of security. This is exactly what Blockstack aims to do. A truly open and free internet is not just a theoretical concept. There are technologies available today that can make it happen.

1. Decentralized domain name systems like BNS (used by Blockstack), Namecoin, ENS (used by Ethereum), and others are already available. They generally use blockchains to build a global DNS-like system in a fully decentralized manner; no single company can censor a website or forcefully take away the ownership of a domain.

2. Decentralized storage systems like Gaia (used by Blockstack), Swarm (used by Ethereum), IPFS, Storj and others distribute data on many peer nodes and remove the reliance on any single company for serving content. Some systems, like Gaia, repurpose existing cloud storage providers and can give comparable performance to existing services.

3. Applied cryptography has been around for decades and forms the basis for many secure, decentralized systems. The technology is seeing a renewed interest and is getting easier to use with friendly interfaces for managing private keys and better-designed software.

4. New browsers with blockchain support like Brave, the Blockstack browser, Mist and others are already available and support blockchains in various ways. Brave enables blockchain-based payments. The Blockstack browser connects to a new decentralized internet.

You can read more about it here:

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