Blockstack On How To Take Control From Google, Facebook And Amazon

Ryan Shea and Muneeb Ali met through the computer science department and entrepreneurship club at Princeton and knew they wanted to work together.

When they first began working together, they tried a few projects but became extremely frustrated with their dependence on other businesses such as Google, Facebook and Amazon. They ended up abandoning their other ideas and decided to work on building a decentralized internet.

The cofounders of Blockstack now have $5.45 million in funding from the likes of Union Square Ventures, Digital Currency Group and Naval Ravikant, 5,000 developers building their own apps on Blockstack’s platform, and a $25 million venture capital fund to foster a decentralized internet.

“If you look at the internet, users don’t actually own any of their data,” says Ali in the latest episode of my podcast, Unchained (Google Play, iTunes, iHeartRadio, Stitcher or TuneIn Radio). “Let’s say you want to use a website like Facebook. You would make an account on it, and all the data you’re generating on it is kept with Facebook, and Facebook can use it however they want. Same with Google, and many other companies.”

But it’s questionable whether users really care about owning their own data. After all, despite what Edward Snowden revealed to us all about how little privacy we all really have, many people continue to click “agree,” on the terms and conditions of websites galore.

However, Shea says, “Consumers didn’t really have an actionable path in front of them, where now they could say, okay, now I’m going to make a change to my life to back up my data. We’re very much of the belief that we have to give consumers a real, viable choice. We need to be able to give them a system where they can be in control of their data and still do the things they want to do. So if it comes to switching from Facebook to a shoddy social network with a bad product where you don’t have all your friends, well, yeah, no one’s going to do that.”

Instead, Blockstack believes it has the opportunity to create good experiences while also giving users control of their data, privacy and security.

They started by creating was Ali calls “certain core infrastructure competence that should exist in a decentralized way in the internet itself.” The first example is a universal user name. Ali says no company should have the monopoly over such a login. However, though Google built a business with web crawlers that studied the web graph, Ali says, “Developers like Ryan and me today cannot do that today on top of the social graph that Facebook has, so the social graph needs to be decentralized, and that will lead to a lot more innovation on top of the system.”

After launching Blockstack identities, which now has registered more than 70,000 user names, they’ve focused on tools that developers can use.

“We’re really trying to build all the middleware between users and applications and make it really, really easy for developers to build a social network, a marketplace, to something for healthcare data, to a voting system, etc., etc.,” says Shea.

Interestingly, their version of a decentralized internet still makes use of centralized services. For instance, their storage system, Gaia, enables users to “bring their own” storage, so they can use Dropbox and Google Drive, if they want, or they can use a decentralized service like BitTorrent.

“You can choose which ones you want, you can easily migrate from one to the other and you can use multiple at the same time,” explains Shea. “That means it’s completely under your control, and all these storage places are commoditized.”

Tune in to the episode (web,Google Play, iTunes, iHeartRadio, Stitcher or TuneIn Radio) to find out why they think other blockchain systems are approaching scaling wrong, why, when people think they need a smart contract, they often don’t, and what the Blockstack token will be used for. (And if you're looking for details on the ICO, they're TBD.)

Plus, they reveal whether or not developers will be able to create their own tokens on Blockstack, and why they still think traditional venture capital has an important role to play in a decentralized app ecosystem. And finally, they answer the question of why a developer would choose to build on Blockstack over Ethereum.

These are the show notes for the Unchained podcast, available on Google Play, iTunes, iHeartRadio, Stitcher or TuneIn Radio.
I host the crypto and blockchain podcast, Unchained (Google Play, iHeartRadio, iTunes, Stitcher, TuneIn), and wrote The Millennial Game Plan. Follow me at @laurashin.