From the Front Page - The Ether Review
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Understanding Urbit #3 - Technology and Freedom
May 20th, 2020 by
Legendface66 The effect technology has on individual freedom is a recurring theme in lunchtime discussions in the Tlon office. Chief Product Officer, Anthony Arroyo has a background in linguistics and the philosophy of technology. This positions him well to explain the nature of this relationship and how Urbit positions itself between the two. Anthony offered the key insight that today computers have evolved from their nature as tools into mechanical colonizers of our lives. More than just absorbing our a... Read More -
Understanding Urbit #2 - Under the Hood of the Urbit OS
April 17th, 2020 by Legendface66 Engineer Ted Blackman works on the Urbit OS kernel. Like many Tlon employees, Ted initially came to the project as an open source contributor. In this discussion Ted breaks the operating system down into its components and explains its relationship to Urbit ID which we will cover in-depth in episode 4. Ted begins by helping us establish a foundational understanding of what an operating system is and what roles traditional OSs excel in. Then he explores how Urbit functions as a layer above, cr... Read More -
Understanding Urbit #1 - Introducing the Personal Server
April 14th, 2020 by Legendface66 Engineer Ted Blackman works on the Urbit OS kernel. Like many Tlon employees, Ted initially came to the project as an open source contributor. In this discussion Ted breaks the operating system down into its components and explains its relationship to Urbit ID which we will cover in-depth in episode 4. Ted begins by helping us establish a foundational understanding of what an operating system is and what roles traditional OSs excel in. Then he explores how Urbit functions as a layer above,... Read More -
The Third Web #17 - Arthur Brock, Holochain
May 9th, 2019 by Legendface66 Holochain has been a project simminging in the background of the blockchain space for several years now. The promise has been a panaceaic solution to the performance and scalability issues facing decentralised hosting platforms. It’s an oft heard claim, but, as founder Arthur Brock expounds in this interview, by giving up our insistence on global consensus in favor of discoverable and verifiable local state, a world of options is opened to us. This kind of discussion follows from the Secure ... Read More -
The Third Web #16 - Urbit, Your New Server
March 17th, 2019 by Legendface66 The range of third-web platforms in development today is greater than ever. From data-centric blockchain based approaches to agent-centric designs like Secure Scuttlebut, the potential futures of the third web are rapidly expanding. Today we look at another approach with the Urbit platform. Like Secure Scuttlebutt, Urbit is agent centric. It is a deterministic operating system designed to be the filter between a user and the online services they use. I last covered Urbit in 2016 and the ... Read More -
The Third Web #15 - Edgeware & Parity, Infrastructure on Top of Infrastructure
March 3rd, 2019 by Legendface66 Joined by Dillon Chen of Commonwealth Labs What is Edgeware Edgeware being developed by an entity called Commonwealth Labs Built on Parity’s Substrate Grandpa finality tool Onchain governance Scripting built in. Using Web Assembly (Wasm) Building on Substrate People used to build their own web servers, now they use the cloud. People used to build new chains, now they can use Substrate. This enables builders to focus on the area of their expertise. One month after development b... Read More -
The Third Web #14 - Dawn of an Ecosystem: Substrate & Polkadot
January 31st, 2019 by Legendface66 Care of DFINITY I was privileged to attend the Web 3 Summit in Berlin last year. While there I interviewed Aeron Buchanan, the Executive Vice President of the Web 3 Foundation and Gavin Wood, Founder of Ethereum, Parity, and the Web 3 Foundation. These guys are two of the individuals that launched the programmable blockchain revolution and these interviews plot a course from the founding of Ethereum to their vision of the decentralized web and give us a trajectory beyond. A quick production not... Read More -
The Third Web #13 - Consensus Primer with Aparna Krishnan
December 20th, 2018 by Legendface66 Aparna Krishnan is head of education at Blockchain at Berkeley and co-founder of Mechanism Labs, an open source blockchain research lab. Earlier this year, Aparna was awarded a scholarship by the DFINITY Foundation for Mechanism Labs’ research into consensus mechanisms. This episode is essentially a primer for advanced discussion of consensus in decentralized networks. https://mechanismlabs.io/ https://github.com/aparnakr https://twitter.com/aparnalocked https://medium.com/@aparnalocked ... Read More -
The Third Web #12 - The Actor Model
December 12th, 2018 by Legendface66 Thethirdweb.net Subodh Sharma is a professor of computer science at IIT Delhi, one of the most prestigious universities in India. While he’s not teaching, Subodh conducts research into the formal verification of distributed systems, and his work on the automated formal verification of smart contacts has drawn international interest. I called up Subodh because I was looking for someone to explain an approach to writing software called the actor model. The actor model essentially involves... Read More -
The Third Web #11 - Scuttlebutt & Cypherspace
November 20th, 2018 by Legendface66 Dominic Tarr is a hacker who resides on a sailboat, usually found in New Zealand's beautiful Hauraki Gulf. In recent years he has risen to fame as the creator of the Secure Scuttlebutt protocol, Scuttlebutt for short. Scuttlebutt is comprised of a standardized message format and a subjective append only log stored locally by users. The first application has been a multi-client decentralized social media platform that is an absolute joy to use, and I encourage everyone to download my favourit... Read More -
The Third Web #11 - An Emerging India
November 8th, 2018 by Legendface66 Recently I visited India representing the DFINITY Foundation. The trip was supported by upstart venture production and consulting group, Dunya Labs, and advocacy group, InCrypt. Those ten days altered my understanding of the way technology manifests products and the driving role the needs of high growth nations will have in defining the digital landscape of tomorrow. In this episode, I’m joined by co-founder of Dunya Labs, Cathy Guo, and co-founders of InCrypt, Nitin Sharma & Sumukh She... Read More -
The Third Web #10 - Jack du Rose, Colony & Coase
October 27th, 2018 by Legendface66 In 2015 I interviewed Jack du Rose about Colony - his autonomous platform that could track contribution to a common enterprse and reward tokens representing stake in said enterprise. Three years and two private betas on, we hear from Jack about his experience building a system to revolutionize the way we work together.
Part of what makes Colony facinating is to see the enormity of the events that have taken place in the years since it’s conception and how in spite of these events, the proce...
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The Third Web #5 - Zilliqa & Singapore
September 26th, 2018 by Legendface66 Zilliqa is a Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance based, public, programmable blockchain platform that uses Proof of Work as a syble resistance mechanism. Combining PBFT and PoW is a brilliant trick to bring the state finality required for scaling through network and state sharding. Amrit Kumar, Head of Research, and Xinshu Dong, CEO, offer an overview of the project. At the same time, we learn from two of Singapore's innovation magnates of innovation about the advantage provided by both the ... Read More -
The Third Web #5 - Brian Behlendorf
April 6th, 2018 by Legendface66 On this episode of The Third Web, we hear from Brian Behlendorf, the head of the Hyperledger project at the Linux Foundation, and leading figure in the open-source software movement. Brian began developing open-source code during the mid-1990's and was also the lead developer of Apache Web Server — one of the worlds most used pieces of software. Today, in the midst of a blockchain boom, Brian’s focus is still on free software development. I spoke with Brian in October. We were both in ... Read More -
The Third Web #4 - DFINITY Consensus
January 23rd, 2018 by Legendface66 "The DFINITY project was formed to research ways of enabling public decentralized networks to host a virtual computer of unlimited capacity. This rests upon a new blockchain computer that is similar in concept to Ethereum but has vastly improved performance and, ultimately, unlimited capacity. The starting requirement was that the systems developed should be useful in joining 1 million or more mining clients." Huge claims, but the DFINITY project is indeed one of the most interesting infrastr... Read More -
Third Web #3 - SingularityNet
January 23rd, 2018 by Legendface66 Artificial Intelligence Researcher Ben Goertzal and Blockchain Solution Architect, Simone Vulpem discuss the SingularityNet artificial intelligence marketplace. Currently, the market for artificial intelligence is dominated by industry giants with huge monolithic offerings with features far beyond the often niche applications may businesses have a need for. Smaller organisations provide bespoke solutions but these can be expensive and configuration heavy. SingularityNet gives independent d... Read More -
The Third Web Micro - Economies #2 - SpankChain
December 10th, 2017 by Legendface66 In today’s episode we look at spank chain, an adult industry cryptocurrency payment system built using Ethereum. Currently, financial intermediaries in the adult entertainment industry exploiting their position to impose arbitrary rules on content by refusing to serve participants who produce content a specific payment processor finds objectionable. The effect of this is to persecute already marginalized groups like trans men and women and as well as severing the income of both individuals ... Read More -
The Third Web #2 - Quantifying Gaze
November 20th, 2017 by Legendface66 Today we are taking a quick look at a range of problems and their solutions through the lens of a little known project known as Gazecoin. Under the gaze coin banner are a range of projects, among them, a virtual world with purchasable real estate which serves as a content delivery channel. I first encountered Gazecoin when founder Jonny peters invited me to check out the project’s pilot content-creation studio in Sydney. Jonny is an accomplished entrepreneur who made his first move in ... Read More -
Third Web Micro-Economies #1 - The Props Project by YouNow
November 12th, 2017 by Legendface66 Video, mobile first, open APIs, an existing two sided market, and a 40 million strong userbase already transacting digitally. The YouNow live video platform is an ideal candidate for a monetary network based business. YouNow’s Props project aims to achieve just this. Decentralized economies will reshape digital media. Decentralized monetary networks work well when applied to existing producer-consumer networks. Today digital media is a producer-consumer network with despotic intermediar... Read More -
The Third Web #1 - Re-examining the Legality of ICOs
November 6th, 2017 by Legendface66 Joshua Ashley Klayman, co-founded the blockchain and smart contracts working group at the law firm Morrison and Foerster and leads the WSBA’s Legal Working Group. We caught up in person at a Cafe in Central Park to discuss gender disparity in tech and ICO regulation - a subject of considerable significance right now. Women in blockchain: Social barriers to entry, Counterproductive responses to gender disparity in blockchain, Public displays of bigotry. ICO Regulation: ... Read More
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