Nadim Kobeissi of the Capsule decentralised social media project describes the need for an alternative to the existing big-tech offerings and the reason the Internet Computer was chosen as a hosting layer.

capsule.social

CycleDAO.xyz

The Internet Computer Weekly

The Internet Computer Weekly #1 - Capsule

In this session, Dominic Williams, Founder of DFINITY, creator of the Internet Computer, and all-round good dude explains how the internet computer interoperates with Ethereum.

Subscribe @ cycledao.xyz

The Internet Computer Weekly - Chain Keys and Ethereum Interoperation with Dominic Williams

Harrison Hines is back with an insightful discussion into the future of infrastructure funding and an examination of DAOs as infrastructure builders

Harrison Hines On Infrastructure And IC DAOs Mixdown

Longtime DFINITY Community member, Jordan Last takes us on a journey from his love of technology as a youth to his discovery of the Internet Computer.  We discuss Sudograph, Jordan's open-source implementation of the GraphQL database for the Internet Computer, and some of his other numerous projects. Among them, his new podcast Demergence hosted entirely on the IC.

@lastmjs

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/demergence/id1570746602

Jordan Last & The Sudograph Odyssey

DSCVR is in essence a decentralised Reddit - or news aggregator - hosted on the Internet Computer. Rick Porter, formerly BCG, began building DSCVR in 2020 on a hunch that a decentralised news aggregator might be a significantly impactful app. The project has taken him on a journey through token economics, scaling and future application design on the Internet Computer.

DSCVR the Decentralised Reddit

Between the Internet Identity System and application scaling, there are a large number of subjects that the Internet Computer community is still coming to understand.  Especially in the context of the prior described vision of the IC.
Jordan Last addresses misconceptions and reformulates unanswered questions, bringing clarity to areas of ambiguity.

Misconceptions & Open Questions with Jordan Last

Hazel is back to discuss token standards on the IC. We dive deep on the HZLD token, canister upgradability, NFTs and Micropayments. After this interview was recorded, Hazel launched an NFT experiment, the background of which is described here.

@suddenlyhazel

cycledao.xyz

Token Standards On the Internet Computer

Manu Drijvers drops a knowledge bomb in this session, answering your questions about the inner workings of the IC. 

cycledao.xyz

Knowledge Blast: Inter-Subnet Communication, the DKG, and Chainkey

Bob Bodily, Chief Product Officer of Toniq Labs dives deep on NFTs and Toniq Labs' plans to expand their offerings.

https://toniqlabs.com/

cycledao.xyz

https://entrepot.app/

Toniq Labs NFT Art Deep Dive

The Internet Computer native website builder, ICME, is the brainchild of Houman Shadab & Wyatt Benno, a lawyer/no code enthusiast and startup builder respectively. The website builder is the first step on their path to democratise application building on the IC.

icme.io

cycledao.xyz

The No Code Revolution Comes to the IC with ICME

Community Manager Moritz Fuller explains his decision to build a Liquity front end on the Internet Computer. From here we discuss the challenges of hosting DeFi products on the IC, upgrading canisters, and the mysterious role of boundary nodes.

Waterslide Announcement:
https://blog.waterslide.app/waterslide-the-first-defi-frontend-on-dfinitys-internet-computer/

cycledao.xyz

Decentralised Frontends, Upgrading Canisters, & the Mysteries of Boundary Nodes

From the early days of entrepreneurship to the deep inner workings of the Internet Computer, Matt Grogan discusses his history working with Dominic Williams.  We then deep dive on OpenChat, application design patterns, and the SNS.

OpenChat Deep Dive

Andrew and Evan of The Internet Computer Report join to discuss the state of the community, events in New York, and global opportunities for IC-based products.

cycledao.xyz

Today New York, Tomorrow, the World

The Internet Computer requires a large amount of tooling to support web & enterprise developers.  Austin Fatheree believes that should be developed by the community.  Grants are already active for significant tooling, creating an independent alternative to the DFINITY Developer Grants program.

icdevs.org

cycledao.xyz

ICDevs & the Drive Toward Community Developed Infrastructure

"Web" can be used as a performance descriptor to represent the expectations of contemporary users. Does the IC achieve this? Where does it hit and where does it miss. In this episode, we explore the nuance of this term and gain a deeper grasp of the Internet Computer as a product.

cycledao.xyz

What Does it mean to be "Web Speed" with Manu & Diego

Concordium is a "compliant by design" open proof of stake blockchain that has achieved fame among Rust developers as a friendly place to develop.

Community representative Beni Issembert Joins to discuss the origins and ambitions of the project.

The Third Web #18 - Concordium

Principal Engineer, John Wiegley joins Diego Pratts in this episode to reduce the practice of staking ICP to common English. 

We discuss ICP economics, burning & staking, the importance of governance on the IC and a whole lot more along the way.

 John Wiegley's community conversation on the subject can be found here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xVNSxFFAYUo

Understanding ICP Staking and Neurons in Simple English w/ John & Diego

By now word of the Andreessen-Horowitz/Union Square Ventures investment in the digital asset hedge fund Polychain Capital was reached far and wide across the cryptoverse. Among other things, this interview with founders Olaf Carlson-Wee and Ryan Zurrer explores the questions that must be asked while establishing a long term crypto portfolio. Much of the discussion is especially pertinent in light of the recent ETH jump and fork concerns with Bitcoin.

The Ether Review #59 — Money Talks, Polychain Capital

David Sønstebø, co-founder of IOTA, discusses this next-generation post-blockchain platform designed to serve as the backbone for the Internet-of-Things (IoT).

IOTA is a groundbreaking new open-source distributed ledger that does not use a blockchain. Its innovative new quantum-proof protocol, known as the Tangle, gives rise to unique new features like zero fees, infinite scalability, fast transactions, secure data transfer and many others.

Because the Tangle uses a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) instead of a blockchain, users automatically act as validators, allowing transaction validation to become an intrinsic property of utilising the network. Each transaction requires the sender to verify two previous transactions, resulting in infinite scalability while avoiding the validation centralization that is common with existing consensus mechanisms.

IOTA is also developing a novel standard for embedding minuscule ASIC chips in all IoT devices. These chips perform nominal proof-of-work hashes in order to prevent spam and Sybil attacks, and because the network is partition-tolerant and only eventually consistent, brute force hashing attacks are prevented.

With a transaction volume limited only by the speed of light, IOTA is a promising new solution to the limitations presented by blockchains.


iota.org
twitter.com/iotatoken
twitter.com/davidsonstebo

consensys.net
consensysmedia.net
etherreview.info
https://itunes.apple.com//podcast/the-ether-review/id899090462?mt=2

IOTA white paper: iota.org/IOTA_Whitepaper.pdf
Directed Acyclic Graph: https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/1*F-rjJqQ1PyF8dOnjOaiLFg.png

Ether Review #69 — IOTA & the Post-Blockchain Era

Ether Review #69 - IOTA & the Post-Blockchain Era

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 and businesses in a one hundred Billion dollar industry.

Using payment channels and a novel ethereum based tech stack, Ameen Soleimani and Janice Griffith aim to liberate the adult industry from exploitation by evil financial intermediaries. Soon there may be a place so spend ether.

This episode contains graphic descriptions of pornographic content so if that makes you feel uncomfortable you’ll want to give this one a miss. Take a moment now to stop this recording.

For more visit thirdweb.net
spankchain.com

The Third Web #4 - SpankChain

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 developers the ability to place their purpose specific components in a wrapper which can be plugged into a global network of AI components. These components can be hired to perform tasks, and may outsource tasks to one another through the use of a reputation system. This allows an optimal configuration of independent components to self assemble. 
What is really exciting about SingularityNet is the sheer demand it places on blockchain systems. Applications like this are creating economic pressure to solve the scalable blockchain problem in a way that is effective not only as a PR tool, but also in practical applications.
thirdweb.net

The Third Web #5 - SingularityNet

"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 infrastructure builds in blockchain today. This episode has been under embargo for almost four months so it's with great pleasure that I finally get to publish.

Dominic Williams, the inventor of many of the technologies employed by DFINITY joins to walk me through the consensus paper. This is a highly technical episode, but as the white paper is now available it will make a valuable companion.

Thirdweb.net

The Third Web #6 - DFINITY Consensus

On this episode of Web 3.0, 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 Cancun for Def Con 3. 

thirdweb.net
https://www.hyperledger.org/

The Third Web #7 - Brian Behlendorf

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 government and educational institutions of the region. [Especially noteworthy after the success of Project Ubin]

Epicenter episode:
https://epicenter.tv/episode/209/

@the3rdweb
the3rdweb.net
contact@the3rdweb.net

The Third Web #8 - Zilliqa & Singapore

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 sandboxing tasks in such a way that complexity is minimized and all behaviors of a software system can be known under all conditions. 

Currently the actor model is applied to the management of telecommunications networks through the Erlang language, and also in secure servers. Understanding the way robust distributed systems are constructed assists in the assessment of platform designs and gives us a view into the future of the ultimate distributed system - the Third Web.

The Third Web

The Third Web #12 - The Actor Model

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

Aparna Krishnan
Co-founder mechanism labs open source research lab
All work and research is on Github
Telegram: @mechanism_labs
Co-founder of the education team at Blockchain Berkeley
Consensus researcher
Teaches executive education courses

Consensus
Proof of Work
Proof of Stake
Old Field

History
Cynthia Dwork developed stronger adversarial models
Did not have many applications
Blockchain has brought cryptography and consensus into the mainstream eye



Protocols
DFINITY
Tendermint
Bitcoin
Focus has been on proof of stake protocols
Mining may not be sustainable
Long term sustainabilities and lack of externalities is important
Proof of stake offers efficiently
As does proof of elapsed time and proof of space and time

Consensus
Sybil control
Coming to agreement relies on traditional consensus
PoS, PoW refer to the sybil control mechanism
PoS - Putting down capital
Financial penalty for misbehavior
Token holders are participants
PoW - burning energy
One cpu, one vote
No connection between token custody and rewards
P o Elapsed Time 
Proof of Authority placing reputation
A cost of playing ball
Traditional Consensus (PBFT)
No concept of probabilistic finality
All honest nodes come to final agreement
Closed, permissioned
Blockchain
All nodes may with a high degree of probability agree
A probabilistic guarantee

Longest Chain Rule
Longest sequence of blocks is the 
Ethereum
Ghost
Can be attacked by a stealthy entity
Open, permissionless, decentralized
Inefficient
Node churn
Better liveness properties

Early PoS 2013
PeerCoin
NXT
Bitshares
Primitive
State grinding attack vulnerable
Randomness derived from blockhashes

New Generation
DFINITY
Uses threshold relay decentralized randomness
Tendermint
Round robin
Has social layer fallback
Ethereum Casper
Thunderella
Algorand
Hides the block creator until the block has been created

In Tendermint a minority below the assumption cannot break finality
In Bitcoin >10% can change the finality through threatening to censor 

Hard to get both economic and cryptographic security. Not clear that bribing and collusion attacks have been solved. No protocols have shown sophisticated economic models.

Mechanism Labs
Focussing on incentive schemes
What does it mean to have a stable, scalable protocol
Scalability

Proof of Replication
Recent work with Verifiable delay functions
In commit/reveal schemes there is an opportunity to manipulate by giving only one person the ability to reveal the randomness
Verifiable delay functions allow anyone to reveal the randomness
ASIC resistance because not parallelizable

The Third Web #13 - Consensus Primer with Aparna Krishnan

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 project is now nearing public launch. Galen Wolf-Pauly explains.

What is Urbit?
A personal Server
A secure computer that 
you actually own
Stores an event log of everything that has ever happened to it
That’s designed to live on any cloud server
But be controlled by a private key that you actually own
Your Urbit is meant to replace all of the consumer cloud software that you already use

How can it possibly be better than all of the expensive software that has already been created?
The basic thesis is that everything we use today runs on top of a unix of some kind.
The reason we wound up in this centralised world of cloud-based software is that Unix is too complicated.
Because the Unix is complicated, complicated layers between Unix and the application are needed.
The Urbit solution is to rip all of that out and create a single, extremely simple, complex system.
Urbit is a virtual machine, programming language, and operating system in 30,000 lines of code.
For comparison, Wordpress, an application that runs on Unix is 500,000 lines of code
Technical simplicity should turn into user interface simplicity.
Additionally, by hosting your Urbit in the cloud you no longer have a middleman serving you applications, Instead you only need them to host your virtual computer. 

What does an Urbit future look like?
A single platform allows tighter integration of, for example, productivity software like Git & Asana.
As a designer, Galen looks forward to interface standardisation, -having messaging, documenting, code collaboration, task management and other consumer software working seamlessly as one system.
Rather than interfaces built for many people.

Do we need a new back end for a new front end? Hasn’t Wechat done this?
Today we use many services that have unified UIs
Google has both email and documents but do you really trust Google to have total control and visibility into your use of those services?
What if Google goes away?
Being able to run a server myself that I trust will be around a long time and is secure to me makes me feel alot better. [Platform Risk]
Wechat is a really great achievement
Apps are more like modules
But you have given total power to a single company
The decentralised Wechat pitch has gotten tired but Urbit is very much targeting that problem.
The future of cloud computing does look like that but makes no compromises in privacy or durability.

The Third Web #16 - Urbit, Your New Server

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 Scuttlebutt and Urbit episodes. It raises, and offers answers, to questions of data vs agent based ontologies. But most interesting of all, it forces us to reconsider why we wanted to use a blockchain in the first place.



Arthur Brock from Denver Colorado
Interested in alternative currencies in 2001
Self organising companies are just a form of currency hacking
Discovered what a huge leverage point for change currency is
Change the business incentives and all business will reshape towards those incentives
The Future of Money, Bernard Leotard
2003 alternative currency became main gig
Metacurrency project 2004
Met Harris Brown
Currencies as more than money - symbol systems that we use to coordinate at scale
Out of metacurrency project came Ceptr 2006
Interact/transact with anyone else without intermediary
Required a reinvention of most of the communications stack. Modeling on nature - biomimicry
Prototyped for rewrite of computation, communication, commerce
Took piece of Ceptr and built Holochain, completed in Go in 2017
Bitcoin neither blindsided nor felt like a culmination of work
Seemed like a ham handed design
Questionably successful
Has captured a large following
Has not achieved what Arthur Brock wants to achieve
Not to dismiss blockchain - if nothing else it has prepared public consciousness and awareness for dealing with these problems.
Blockchain has altered the discourse
Pulled discourse in a crazy direction
Recreates unhealthy patterns turbocharged
Definitely need new money but need to do it in a manor that does not amplify volatility and wealth concentration
Recreating old problems won't get us somewhere new
Core issue is validation, not consensus
Everyone must use the same validation scheme to participate in consensus [validation is more fundamental than consensus]
Push for global state is a lazy way of modeling problems
In reality there is no global state or time. Only relative state and time.
Holochain uses an Agent Centric approach rather than a Data Centric approach.
Each agent has their own chain for an application, only tracking the agents activity.
Genesis block of each chain includes a hash of the source code of the application.


Holochain.org
Holo.host
Artbrock.com
Ceptr.org
Metacurrency.org

#webscale
#patriciatree

The Third Web #17 - Arthur Brock, Holochain

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, creating a unique environment for applications to run within.

A major question raised by the first half of this discussion, and which many Urbit enthusiasts will already have in the back of their minds is how can such a minimalist, universal operating system take advantage of the task specific performance benefits some CPUs offer? The answer lies in a unique Urbit innovation called Jets. In understanding Jets we can grasp the inherent performance limitations of an operating system like Urbit, and understand how those limitations can be overcome.

Ted has a talent for making the complex understandable, so while this is a very advanced episode, even a non-technical person will find this discussion educational and entertaining.

urbit.org/install/

urbit.live

urbit's podcast

Understanding Urbit #2 - Under the Hood of the Urbit OS

The recurrent theme of calm computing is explored more deeply in this discussion with Logan Allen whose focus is infrastructure and product at Tlon.

Logan sees the attention economy, with all it’s popups and news feed clickbait as a result of the way startups are organised and funded. In between rebukes of VC capital and the growth business model, Logan describes a software landscape where the user is king, extending the views of Christian and Anthony.

The only way Logan believes this can be achieved is to create a computing platform with different product design incentives.

Part of this picture is a unified tech stack that applications share rather than the bespoke, but very similar, internal tooling built individually by major tech companies like uber, facebook, airbnb and others. 

For Logan, Urbit addresses this by standardizing a large part of the system stack. As an abstract I/O interface it separates the software and hardware layers in a way that allows applications to be developed for an environment that is consistent across hardware.

This makes Urbit a much more efficient way of developing software from a corporate perspective by reducing dev-ops and the size of the layer that security concerns can happen in.

One of Logan’s most powerful revelations is that today, system software, linux for example, is deeply complex and growing ever more so and the number of people who understand the way it works is shrinking proportionally to the task of maintaining that software. Designing a new platform that evolves toward stability may be the only way to ensure a secure computing landscape in the future.

urbit.org/install/

Urbit.live

Understanding Urbit

Understanding Urbit #6 - Built to Last

Tlon COO Erik Newton and Community Manager Kenny Rowe join this session to provide some additional background to Tlon and the Urbit Community. 

Erik Newton begins by explaining the relationship between the Tlon corporation and the Urbit project. We also discuss the reason behind the valuation of the address space, business opportunities, and plans for the launch of Urbit OS 1.

Then Kenny describes the cultural reach of the Urbit aesthetic and how he found himself pulled into the project from his prior employer, Maker. In particular the notion of the Kelvin versioning system evolving toward stability as opposed to complexity, and the power of unique terminology to avoid false cognates.

Kenny elaborates on the community on-boarding strategy of Urbit and its suitability for the collaboration needs of DAOs and front end requirements of smart contracts.

urbit.org/install/

Urbit.live

Arthur Falls

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