You may have noticed the blog posts stopped when we shifted gears towards expanding our thesis into a full fledged book. The idea for the book was in part spurred on by the limitations of the blogging format. Blogs are a great way to get one-off ideas out quickly, but are not the best format when trying to organize a body of information into a larger structure.

Also frankly, there wasn't a one-off topic we wanted to write enough to warrant a new blog post until today.

Control of the backend

One of the core tenants of the distributed ledger space is that it is a back end revolution, where most people will not even notice it happening. This immediately runs into the paradox that the entire ecosystem is dead in the water, unless a seamless user interface layer can be placed on top of this new back end architecture.

While buried in research, writing, and editing for the last 9 months, we completely ignored anything to do with publishing or syndicating our content onto a UI layer outside of our own control.

This changed in the last few weeks when we decided to syndicate through an exchange partner via their Medium.com blog. (More info on that coming shortly)

Sliding scale of control

The fun thing when writing about distributed ledgers, is you start to notice the places where someone else is in control of your destiny.

Squarespace

We knew when choosing Squarespace to host our website we were signing up for a terms of service where in theory our content could be censored.

In reality, we are paying customers when we use Squarespace, so we would have to host some pretty awful things to violate their terms of service and be taken down. As we host mostly text content of a very geeky technical nature, this likely will not happen.

The beautiful thing about paying to host your own website is you can in theory code whatever you want. These were the roots the internet grew from in the 1990s. Even today, any person can in theory turn any computer into a web server and run their own website out of their closet.

Services like Squarespace professionalize this by not only hosting the web server for you, but handling web domains, certificates, and most importantly giving users a really simple and slick user interface that makes publishing content seamless.

Medium

Firstly, we are happy with our new relationship where we syndicate our content through Medium. Of course reaching more people is preferable to staying walled off in an echo chamber, even if we give up some control to do so.

While both Squarespace and Medium are centralized intermediaries capable of censoring content, there is one important distinction between the two platforms.

Squarespace pays for its servers and overhead by charging a monthly subscription fee to host websites.

Medium pays for its servers and overhead by getting people to pay for content through subscriptions.

This seems like a subtle difference, but has huge implications.

Namely Squarespace does not care if we paste code with a cryptocurrency tipping function, while Medium does.