This post by Chris de la Iglesia starts off very down on blockchains, but ends up not so down after all:

We are entering a new world with a new focus on giving users control over their data, their identity, and their systems. We are building distributed filesystems, distributed identity, and yes, blockchains. I think oftentimes we end up seeing only the blockchain technology due to the headlines and the financial investment, but distributed systems as a whole are taking off in a big, big way.

Jon Stokes believes blockchain tech has the opportunity to take us from a world where individual corporations build their siloed users tables to a world where the entire Internet shares a single users table.

In place of a decentralized network of user data silos connected by APIs, there’s a single decentralized user data store accessible via an open protocol and a decentralized network of storage nodes. So the identity-hosting blockchain represents decentralization at the datastore implementation layer, and recentralization at the datastore access layer.

What would this produce? Jon envisions this:

Moving identity on-chain, and thereby removing the possibility of users-table-centric network effects, completely up-ends the entire landscape of API-based, access-controlled interoperability that the present Internet is built on. All of the non-technical market and political dynamics around users table size, leverage, and risk suddenly go out the window.

Coil is a web monetization effort where you subscribe for $5 a month and get access to various exclusive content things on participating websites. I think of it like Brave meets Patreon.

Firefox Reality is “mixed reality” (AR/VR) games and experiences from around the web.

The news here is that Mozilla is adopting Coil to experiment with monetization on Firefox Reality. Coil is for-profit, which adds a wrinkle to things. It uses Interledger to move money, which means creators can work in whichever currency they like. Lots of details and explanations in the linked post from Mozilla’s blog.

Jack Dorsey:

Twitter is funding a small independent team of up to five open source architects, engineers, and designers to develop an open and decentralized standard for social media. The goal is for Twitter to ultimately be a client of this standard.

Color me surprised and impressed. My first thought was, “why create something brand new when smart people have been working on open standards for a long time already?” Then I read on:

For social media, we’d like this team to either find an existing decentralized standard they can help move forward, or failing that, create one from scratch. That’s the only direction we at Twitter, Inc. will provide.

Verrry interesting, indeed. What do you think will come of all this?

This is a really interesting usage of blockchain technology to ensure you are really getting what you think you bought. Michael del Castillo writes on Forbes.com:

The fifth-largest oil and gas company in the world, valued at $262 billion, is investing an undisclosed amount in LO3, a New York startup using a modified version of the ethereum blockchain to make it easier for individuals to buy and sell locally produced energy using the existing network of power cables.

While the bitcoin blockchain lets users track the flow of value without the need of banks to audit the system, LO3’s platform, called Exergy, is designed to track the flow of energy as it is added to a shared, local energy network, giving the neighbors who purchase the energy absolute certainty it really came from a windmill, a solar panel or a gerbil running on a treadmill.

This repository is essentially for compiling information about Cypherpunks, the history of the movement, and the people/events of note.

This is quite the compilation, including everything from mailing list archives to notable actors cryptography primers.

Chris Dixon on Medium:

Early internet protocols were technical specifications created by working groups or non-profit organizations that relied on the alignment of interests in the internet community to gain adoption. This method worked well during the very early stages of the internet but since the early 1990s very few new protocols have gained widespread adoption.

Cryptonetworks fix these problems by providing economics incentives to developers, maintainers, and other network participants in the form of tokens. They are also much more technically robust. For example, they are able to keep state and do arbitrary transformations on that state, something past protocols could never do.

What Chris is advocating is the protocols of the past weren’t made for the internet of the future. The next era of the internet is being built with Web 3.

Preethi does a great job of bringing some sanity to the (somewhat justified) hype around Ethereum and friends:

blockchains have several major technical barriers that make them impractical for mainstream use today… it could be many years before trustless systems are ready for mainstream use at scale.

We discussed these issues with Preethi in-depth at the tail end of The Changelog #277.

If you’re new to or learning more about blockchain, this is a great post that breaks down the semantics of what a blockchain smart contract is and is not.

Mike Bursell:

The first thing to know about blockchain smart contracts is that there isn’t a contract, they aren’t smart, nor are they necessarily on a blockchain.

Smart contracts could, I suppose, be smart, but for me, that means complex and able to react to unexpected or unlikely situations. I think that people call them “smart” because they’re embodied in code.