Blocksplain | Crypto & Web3 analysis

July 5, 2018 by Richard MacManus

5 ways crypto is disrupting media

I’m currently following a bunch of cryptocurrency startups hoping to disrupt the media business. I’ve already written about a few of them: Civil, Narrative and Po.et. There are also a number of social media products built on blockchain, such as Steemit (a crypto Reddit) and Peepeth (a crypto Twitter). Finally, there are as-yet unlaunched crypto media projects of various stripes that I’m looking forward to seeing soon: Julien Genestoux’s Unlock and Mike Dudas’ The Block are a couple of examples.

All these companies are trying different things in the media / “content” ecosystem, but here are five aspects I’m particularly tracking right now:

June 13, 2018 by Richard MacManus

Civil wants to be the Jedi Council for journalism

Civil aims to use blockchain and “cryptoeconomics” to provide a sustainable business model for journalism. But its grand plan reminds me a bit too much of the politicking in the Star Wars prequels. Do we need a written constitution, voted on by cryptocurrency holders, to decide what’s ethical in journalism? Does freedom of the press really mean you have to sign a social contract?

To explain, I need to set the context – fairly and ethically of course. Don’t worry, I got permission from the Blocksplain Council of Elders before writing this post.

June 6, 2018 by Richard MacManus

Blockstack’s Dapp Store: today’s version of the Yahoo! directory

Dapps, a.k.a. decentralized apps, have up till now been hard to find on the Web. But the blockchain browser company Blockstack aims to change that with its new directory, Universal Dapp Store. This could be a turning point for dapps, because Blockstack has the heavyweight backing to popularise the use of distributed apps. The company counts Fred Wilson’s Union Square Ventures and self-styled crypto guru Naval Ravikant as investors.

One thing the Universal Dapp Store doesn’t have at the present time is breadth. At time of writing, it lists just 205 dapps. That pales into comparison to Ethereum’s own unofficial directory, State of the Dapps, which bills itself as “The curated list of 1,577 decentralized apps.”

However, there are a couple of key differences between Blockstack’s directory and Ethereum’s. Firstly, Blockstack includes dapps that don’t use Ethereum’s platform (indeed, as I’ll note below, some of the listed dapps don’t even use blockchain). The other key difference is user friendliness. Ethereum’s list is useful if you want to try out the latest developer experiments, but it’s not designed for the casual user. The 205 dapps listed by Blockstack appear to be relatively mature, or at least able to be trialled without a visit to GitHub.

May 9, 2018 by Richard MacManus

Defining Web 3.0 (aka making sense of blockchain)

Love or hate blockchain and cryptocurrencies, you can’t deny they’ve made a big impact on the Web’s evolution over the past several years. I don’t necessarily believe there are “versions” of the Web, but I’m going to appropriate the term Web 3.0 anyway. Mainly because it helps try and identify what’s changed on the Web; especially compared to the Web 2.0 era. Bear with me, and I welcome your feedback.

Web 3.0 is a term that has been bandied about for years now; most notably by Semantic Web proponents in the middle of Web 2.0. The moniker failed to gain traction back then, much like the Semantic Web itself. But lately some blockchain and cryptocurrency people have tried to define Web 3.0 in their context. Most notably, co-creator of Ethereum Gavin Wood, who deployed the term in 2014. His post is overly complicated, in the best traditions of the still young crypto community. But he hit on some key concepts, some of which are just now becoming reality.

As for my own sense of what blockchain and cryptocurrencies bring to the Web, in the process of writing Blocksplain this year I’ve come to realise they’re useful tools that are helping take the Web to the next level. In particular, to address some of the societal problems that Web 2.0 brought us. With that said, Web 3.0 does not equal The Blockchain Web. I’ve also learnt there are some things blockchain isn’t ideal for (more on that below).

Ultimately, if Web 3.0 has any meaning at all, then it’s in trying to define what the latest wave of Web developers and entrepreneurs are building – and why. So let’s firstly identify what’s important in the post-Web 2.0 era.

April 25, 2018 by Richard MacManus 1 comment

3 problems the blockchain industry must fix

I’ve been thinking about some of the problems of blockchain startups and what (if anything) can be done to address them. The fact is, this “Web 3” revolution has been very slow to get going. I had expected it to ramp up faster, but instead the industry is still overly focused on cryptocurrency speculation and promoting new protocols (such as the various Ethereum killers). The speculation won’t stop until there’s a market crash, but it’s the lack of progress on the product side that most concerns me. It’s not protocols we need now, it’s products! Where are the betas of the Web 3 products that consumers will eventually use?

This concern has led me to identify three key challenges with the blockchain startup ecosystem. If we can make progress on each one before the year is out, I think the industry will be in a much better place.

April 17, 2018 by Richard MacManus 1 comment

Peepeth launches a decentralized Twitter

It’s currently a barren landscape for DApps, with CryptoKitties still the most high profile decentralized app to have been built on a blockchain. As Chris McCann from the VC firm Greylock Partners put it, “we are orders of magnitudes away from consumer adoption of DApps.” He went on to say that “no killer app (outside of tokens and trading) have been created.”

All that is true, but there are interesting experiments happening. One of my regular lazy web requests from the blockchain developer community is a DApp version of Twitter. As I’ve pointed out before, Twitter is the quintessential Web 2.0 company – in that at first Twitter welcomed third party developers, then royally screwed them. A decentralized version of Twitter would prevent a centralized company, like Twitter Corp, from treating developers and users with such disdain again.

Enter Peepeth, which went live at the end of last month as a “decentralized microblogging site.” I signed up and became user #833. Here’s what I’ve discovered so far…

April 5, 2018 by Richard MacManus

Zilliqa one-ups Ethereum by implementing sharding

In my post yesterday bemoaning the slow progress of Ethereum’s scaling solution, Pete Abilla tweeted this response at me:

Richard – I dig you, ever since your @RWW days. But bro, how can you miss the only – THE ONLY – blockchain project with a working sharding solution: @zilliqa. DM me and I’ll get you an interview with the Zilliqa team.

— Pete Abilla (@shmula) April 5, 2018

Sharding is a way to divide up a large database – such as a public blockchain – into smaller chunks, a.k.a. “shards.” The reason it’s important is that (provided the technology works) it’ll enable a blockchain project to process thousands of transactions per second; similar to Visa’s centralized databases.

Curious about Pete’s claim, I clicked through to check out Singapore-based Zilliqa.

April 4, 2018 by Richard MacManus

The misty realm of Ethereum scaling solutions

It’s been an ongoing bear market for cryptocurrencies in 2018, including for the top two coins: Bitcoin and Ethereum. The main causes of bear sentiment seem to be worldwide regulation issues and other concerns around legitimisation (for example the blanket ban on crypto ads by Facebook, Google and Twitter). But another factor is the continuing uncertainty over the technical foundation of the main cryptocurrency platforms. In particular: can they scale as development platforms? This issue is especially important for Ethereum, because its grand plan to be a “world computer” relies on its DApp platform successfully scaling. Which, so far, it has conspicuously failed to do.

Even Ethereum’s creator and most influential spokesperson, Vitalik Buterin, has now expressed frustration over Ethereum’s scalability problems. “If you want to build a decentralized Uber and Lyft on top of an unscalable ethereum, you are screwed,” he told attendees of a Seoul conference this week.

March 26, 2018 by Richard MacManus

Blockchain search engines challenge Google

After Facebook’s sudden fall in popularity this month, people have begun to talk more seriously about creating decentralized versions of various Web 2.0 mainstays.

Matteo Gianpietro Zago, whose company Essentia runs a decentralized developer platform, went so far as to create a large map of “Web 3.0” startups. Here, for example, is how he compares the main Web 2.0 search products (by which he means Google and Bing) with some up-and-coming distributed search engines:

March 22, 2018 by Richard MacManus

Bitcoin Cash vs. Litecoin as electronic cash

The initial wave of Bitcoin interest came from people who wanted to spend it. That, after all, was what Bitcoin was designed for. The title of Satoshi Nakamoto’s 2008 white paper was “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System.” So Satoshi’s goal from day one was for Bitcoin to be a medium of exchange.

Fast forward ten years and Bitcoin is now commonly viewed as a “store of value,” rather than a medium of exchange. Bitcoin = digital gold is the mantra of crypto enthusiasts. But while Bitcoin is no longer viewed as electronic cash, two of the top five cryptocurrencies in CoinMarketCap are staking a claim to be exactly that: Bitcoin Cash and Litecoin. The question is, when can we buy a cup of coffee with either one?