Hi Muneeb!
Thank you for joining us in this AMA.
I would be curious to know the challenges you are running into today when building Blockstack?
How realistic is it for dapps to compete with centralized apps? They sound cool in theory but in reality it seems like it would a tough hill to climb when it comes to growing DAU and revenue to anything significant.
Happy to be here! Broadly speaking, mostly the devs are from the US given that the project started from here and our early efforts to educate developers focused on this region. With that said, we actively host webinars (open to anyone in the world) and have started having events globally. The best way to find Blockstack events is here: https://community.blockstack.org/events
Also, I was recently in Asia and think that itās a really important market.
The Stacks tokens are used as āfuelā to register digital assets (like usernames) and to publish/execute smart contracts. Tokens are needed in the sense of associating a cost to network operations, otherwise, spammers can just register all sorts of junk on the network for free. We also cannot have a single company be the gatekeeper for what can and cannot be registered on the network (canāt operate this in a centralized way).
In that sense, yes, Stacks tokens are absolutely needed.
With that said, we i.e., Blockstack PBC, runs a āfree serviceā to register users currently. See the discussion of āsubdomainsā in the SEC filing (thatās the free service that weāre running).
Other developers of apps may decide to run similar services for their users to offset their initial registration cost. Although I should have a āforward-looking statementā disclaimer here 
Ah, we had to solve a lot of technical challenges at the infrastructure-level and also do new research to enable this. Watch out for the new Blockstack technical paper 2.0 coming out later this week, itāll be available at: https://blockstack.org/papers
That paper is the best way to understand the challenges we had to solve.
In our view, once you get the decentralized computing network & dev stack right, building apps on top actually becomes easier than traditional client-server apps because developers now no longer need to run servers/databases for server-side functionality. And youāre not depending on a single, centralized party like Firebase either.
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No comment RE efforts to acquire Blockstack PBC.
In general, I believe large tech companies like Facebook, Microsoft entering the market is a good thing for the crypto industry.
We partnered with Microsoft RE standards around authentication & identity (see this). And actively participate in the Decentralized Identity Foundation with them: I used to co-chair the Identifiers, Names, Discovery working group and now Blockstack core developer Jude co-chairs it.
Weāre open to working with larger tech companies and help evolve the world towards decentralized computing where users own their data. How this plays out in the market and if companies become hostile or not is something weāll find out with time
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Blockstack provides developer tools to engineers to build apps in a new way.
Apps built on Blockstack, in a decentralized way, can have comparable performance to traditional client-server based apps running on cloud services. And in our view, itās easier for developers to build apps on Blockstack than to worry about managing servers/databases in the traditional way.
The DAU and revenue etc depends on the apps themselves (just like DAU of an app built on AWS would depend on the specific app). Blockstack simply provides an alternative to traditional cloud computing and we believe that it makes life for developers easier, in addition to the security/privacy benefits that it brings to users.
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Itās a lot of work in several dimensions e.g., deep technical research (which is what I used to do for a living), to product and engineering, to regulatory work (like our SEC filing), to educating developers, etc. Blockstack is a rather ambitious project that is trying to replace traditional cloud computing and help evolve the world towards decentralized computing, so just by the definition of our goals, the work is bound to be challenging.
In short: is it challenging? Yes. Is it fun? For me, yes! I personally enjoy taking on challenging things and, more importantly, we have a great team of people whoāre helping drive this forward and are fun to work with
Not commenting on GDPR implications to Blockstack PBC specifically (thatās for our legal team to analyze).
Iād like to make the general comment that Blockstackās storage architecture (where end-users keep their data and centralized companies donāt need to store user data anyway) makes GDPR compliance easier in our view. Data in Gaia (our storage system) is encrypted both in flight and at rest by default and is stored with userās private data lockers.
Weāre open to exploring Proof of Stake or other alternatives as research around these ideas matures. At this time, we donāt feel comfortable in the security properties of non Proof of Work methods for public, open blockchains but that can change in the future.
Also, concerns around energy impact of blockchains are a bit over blown in my view and remind me of similar concerns for data centers a decade ago (which were also over blown in my view). Here is an interesting study about this issue: https://coincenter.org/entry/bitcoin-electricity
Filecoin is taking on a challenging technical problem so itāll take some time to come up with concrete solutions. Disclaimer: Filecoin is one of the few projects that Iām personally an investor in (Filecoin and Tezos are the two token offerings that I participated in lately and currently hold these tokens). I was also in Y Combinator summer 2014 batch with Juan so have that conflict as well. In general, Iām cheering on the sidelines for them to succeed and happy to support them if they need any help.
Some ideas:
- Subscriptions automated using smart contracts for recurring payments can an interesting one.
- Letting users monetize their data directly (and app developer takes a small fee).
- Token based business model that are sustainable in the long run e.g., app token to incentivize content generation etc.
- āEthical advertisingā with clear opt-in from user and maybe even let them get paid for watching ads.
- The good old, pay for my app if you want to download it
- And finally, and probably the most interesting one, is new models that we havenāt really considered yet.
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Was great seeing you too!
We believe in (and practice) open, transparent communication. We use a variety of tools like Slack, Zoom, GitHub, Dropbox Paper, Notion etc. Iāve noticed that limiting the no. of tools actually helps (you can get confused by too many tools and things get lost!).
Doing video calls over audio and encouraging people to keep video on in big meetings makes a difference, I think. Otherwise the āremoteā folks tend to disappear in the background in meetings and it becomes more of a discussion between people whoāre in the room.
Written communication is super imp. Write agenda before meeting, write notes and take away, decisions, action items, after/during the meeting. Thatās just good for meetings but especially needed for remote.
I can go on ā¦
Good to also note that weāre learning and adapting. Their are companies out there that are 100% remote like GitLab they probably have much better insight into what works and what doesnāt than us.
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I think decentralized versions of work collaboration tools can be great! The security benefits of keeping data with the users (vs. third parties) are so imp for such enterprise apps.
See this old post.
Iām not that familiar with it but seems very Ethereum and smart contracts centric. Blockstackās approach is very different from a lot of these other āheavyā blockchains. Iād recommend this presentation RE how the approach is different. Easy dev tools are the next step, they help you interact with the underlying tech.
Donāt put complexity at the server-side but rather keep it at the client-side! That technical decision led to a lot of centralization over the years.
We engage with standard bodies like Decentralized Identity Foundation and W3C etc.
Weāre well-funded (have raised over 50M in capital) and have various programs to support open-source development. See our website for details. Thanks for your support!
Likely a mixture in my view. For the consumer side, our strategy is to let developers run a thousand experiments on top and see which app takes off. Thanks for your support!
Neither! My inspiration came from early use of the internet in the 90s (when it was a lot more decentralized) and from reading a lot of science fiction
There have also been āclean-slate internet re-designā projects in academia that have tried fixing infrastructure issues with the internet. Iāve been following those efforts while in academia.