The second generation of the Internet is coming: blockchain distributed Internet

Crazy Review : Blockstack, a startup supported by Union Square Ventures and Y Incubator, is working together to design an Internet driven by the Bitcoin blockchain, which can reduce network friction and make content more easily spread, but it is still in the internal alpha version. Websites on the revised Internet can access the data created by people, but the premise is that they have obtained the authorization of the data owner.

Translation: Nicole

A lot of weird things have been happening to data in the walled gardens of the internet. These walled gardens have been shut down by people who own sites that we need. There's a protest going on on Facebook right now. A Turkish journalist says his account was blocked at the behest of his government. Palestinian journalists are experiencing the same problem. YouTube video creators feel their videos are being unfairly demonetized by mindless bots who proliferate them at will.

From a broader perspective, publishers that worked hard to build Facebook-driven traffic strategies saw their traffic plummet when the social media giants decided to favor user-generated information. These decisions cut into even more organizations, as many of them were completely dependent on the large social network sites. Some of these organizations don't even have independent websites.

It’s now celebrated that 2012 was the year that a news organization was built, and all its content was scattered across social networks without any regularity, but it’s not being embraced as a cultural force. Social network-driven growth is a tempting approach because it reduces the friction of network effects, builds a customer base, and makes it easier for content to go viral. Does it seem like publishers forgot to consider the potential downsides of relying on someone’s IP to distribute content?

Blockchain explorer, still in internal alpha version.

Blockstack, a Union Square Ventures and Y-backed startup that just barely emerged from incognito mode, is already designing an alternative browser that could be described as an alternative internet powered by the bitcoin blockchain.

Muneeb Ali

Speaking to Observer in his office, CTO and co-founder Muneeb Ali said of his investors:

“They are here for the long term and actually think this is the future.”

In other words, even if a different kind of internet hurts past investments, investors still want to be prepared for future trends.

Blockstack's browser is a fork of Chromium and the first Internet application that works just as described by the Economist in the Observer. In this first version, only this new Internet can be accessed. One day, both versions will be available.

Ali gave a speech at TEDxNewYork 2016, describing an internet that cannot be censored. In his speech, he said:

“The new internet takes power away from these big companies and gives it back to where it belongs.”

We have met with Ali and his co-founder Ryan Shea. They believe that users can generate data by using services, but the data will not be stored in these service databases - users can store all their articles, messages, photos and information in their own cloud sites (such as Dropbox). Websites on the redesigned Internet can access the data created by people, but only with the permission of the data owner.

She added:

“Only those people you share your information with can see your information, there is no middleman company in between.”

This information is invisible to most users, but in all of our online electronic signature registrar domain name activities, it goes through an intermediary company. These intermediaries make you believe that you are browsing the website you navigated to. Blockstack will use the blockchain to record the source of the data and who is authorized to view it, but it will not store this data. This is the user's job.

The decentralization path has been taken further than that taken by the founder of crypto-powered social network Steemit, which lets users earn rewards for posting articles using its system, but ultimately their data is stored on the Steem blockchain, which is owned by all Steem currency users.

Naturally, there’s nothing stopping websites from building plaintext copies of user data for Blockstack, but if all information is initially stored in a person’s digital drawer, it could give more rights to the rightful owner. We recently reported on another decentralized web product that makes it easier for creators to track attribution of their work over the Internet, Mediachain.

The Blockstack approach would make it much harder to shut down the internet or block a particular website. Domain name registrations could be done through a blockchain (currently this is the original Bitcoin blockchain) with no private interests involved. There is no single point that tells computers where to find a website. There are many locations, and the more people use them, the more locations there are. If one channel of information is closed, there is another channel to access the information.

On this internet, there’s no logging into websites, because your browser uses a built-in public-private key pair to verify your identity on every website you visit. Online payments don’t require middlemen like PayPal, because you can use the browser’s own digital currency wallet. Ali and Shea say all this work should make it easier to build websites, because developers won’t be responsible for keeping your data or passwords.

Muneeb Ali and Ryan Shea

Shea said:

“You can imagine an app that has 200 lines of code.”

Their first product is Onename, a decentralized identity service. When the system goes live, everyone will have an identity, as will every browser and application, so every part of the system is permissioned.

Shea said:

“Signing up is as easy as logging into the Facebook app.”

We recently reported that Microsoft is convinced that identity verification will be the first real killer app for blockchain. Blockstack is already in the ecosystem of giant software companies, although it is not the first company to want to build better and more secure digital identity verification. In addition, the United Nations has set a goal of achieving global access to official identity information by 2030.

Other companies are working on their own distributed internet products. For example, the team told us we can expect a web like Medium, where browsers are open to the public. After all, who wants a web where you can’t blog?