Walter Isaacson from the Aspen Institute (and author of the Steve Jobs biography) recently wrote a post titled “The internet is broken. Starting from scratch, here’s how I’d fix it.” His core contention is that the Internet at present lacks native support for identity, security and payment. And while that’s correct, it doesn’t necesserily follow that we need to rebuild from scratch. Instead, we can and should use the capabilities of blockchain technology to augment the existing Internet (and in parts supersede it).
There are a number of different initiatives underway to do just that. One of them is led by our portfolio company Blockstack (which was called Onename, when we first invested). The Blockstack team has been building a stack of open protocols on top of the bitcoin blockchain (hence the name) to support decentralized namespaces and applications. Naming is critical to building trust, which Muneeb points out in his recent TEDx talk. And Ryan in a blog post describes how this can then be used to address Isaacson’s original points.
We are excited about the progress that the Blockstack team has made, in no small part thanks to a growing community of contributors. To help grow this effort, we have led a new round of funding. You can read more about it on the Blockstack Blog.