The Third Web

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

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

Harrison Hines of Fleek discusses the challenges faced by the current generation of decentralised applications. Namely, the lack of decentralised frontend hosting. Enter the decentralised web, also known as Web 3. Fleek is a provider of decentralised web tooling. visit at Fleek.co or follow on Twitter: @FleekHQ Subsctribe to the Newsletter at cycleDAO.zyx

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

This episode of the Internet Computer Weekly features hybrid decentralised exchange Tacen, which enables users to settle trades atomically, matching trades using a centralised service but storing the orderbook and settlement information in user run oracles living on the Internet Computer. This approach is interesting in its use of an orderbook instead of the automated market maker design used by Uniswap and its derivatives. This is made possible by the inexpensive storage and compute the Internet Computer provides. I’ll let the team fill you in . . . Find out more at tacen.com and follow the project on twitter @tacen_app

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

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

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 environmen

Christian Langalis is the resident bitcoin ambassador to the Urbit team. His motto is sound money requires sound computing and this well describes his role is to develop Bitcoin infrastructure for the Urbit ecosystem. Christian’s interest in Urbit derives from a desire for a sound foundation on which Bitcoin can operate. He makes the argument that for all its potential, bitcoin cannot offer the benefits of sound money (sound being a term that requires specific definition in this case) without a sound computing platform on which to operate. Unix sysadmins have access to this today, but that leaves the future unevenly distributed. More than just a piece of Bitcoin infrastructure, Christian sees Urbit as a response to the shift toward unowned software and data caused the popularity of Software as a Service and content streaming platforms. He also sees the platform as an opportunity for individuals to access the full power of server computing, instead having to rent individual functionalities from subscription

As Ted indicated in episode 2, The Urbit ID public key infrastructure and the Urbit network are core to the way individual Urbits communicate and maintain self-sovereignty. In this episode we hear from three members of the Tlon team, each explaining the part of the system they are most familiar with. OS lead Ted returns to introduce the subject. Tlon engineer, Logan, Explains the use experience of Urbit ID, The reason for some of the design choices, and the topography of the Urbit Network. Philip is a resident cryptographer at Tlon focussed on Public Key Infrastructure. He rounds this episode out by explaining what a PKI is, the differences between PKIs, and the way the Urbit ID PKI is implemented. urbit.org/install/ Urbit.live

The effect technology has on individual freedom is a recurring theme in lunchtime discussions in the Tlon office. Chief Product Officer, Anthony Arroyo has a background in linguistics and the philosophy of technology. This positions him well to explain the nature of this relationship and how Urbit positions itself between the two. Anthony offered the key insight that today computers have evolved from their nature as tools into mechanical colonizers of our lives. More than just absorbing our attention, the online services advertising greater human connection are in reality limiting the way we relate to one another to a centrally defined mode of interaction. This extends to the way we consume news, poisoning the well of information and leading to a toxic mass social environment. He offers Urbit as a solution that allows the user to determine their mode of interaction, and the scale of their social graph, rather than a graph that is global by default. Anthony also introduces three characteristics of a virtual

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 lim

Few software projects today share either the contemporary relevance or fringe mystique of the Urbit Operating and Identity System. As a highly secure personal server, Urbit aims to deliver on many of the ideas pioneered by the Cypherpunks, and, after nearly 20 years in development the platform has begun a phased launch. Urbit gives us persistent digital identity, a new benchmark for secure computing, and maybe even an open source response to more modern social computing platforms like WeChat and Kakaotalk. In February of this year, Tlon, the main company developing Urbit, invited me to their San Francisco office to interview the team for a podcast series. During the three weeks I was there we recorded many hours of discussion. This series is a collage of excerpts from those discussions. The episodes aim to introduce the philosophy of Urbit, establish the problems it is designed to address, explain the way the platform works, and relate it to the world through the lens of Bitcoin, Software as a Service, and

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 M

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 u

What is Edgeware Edgeware being developed by an entity called Commonwealth Labs Built on Parity’s Substrate Grandpa finality tool On-chain governance Scripting built in. Using Web Assembly (Wasm) Building on Substrate People used to build their own web servers, now they use the cloud. People used to build new chains, now they can use Substrate. This enables builders to focus on the area of their expertise. One month after development began a test net was operational Three months the project was live. EOS was too centralised Ethereum was not flexible enough WebAssembly Being able to use Rust or C++ is great Still being experimented with The Polkadot and Substrate ecosystem Friendly and helpful community 20 projects underway 100 planned for the end of the year Platform still stabilizing People are building now planning to switch to the security of the Polkadot chain. Securing the edgeware chain Delegated PoS aiming to move to Nominated PoS as Sybil resistance mechanism Grandpa for finality Round Robin leade

Care of DFINITY I was privileged to attend the Web 3 Summit in Berlin last year. While there I interviewed Aeron Buchanan, the Executive Vice President of the Web 3 Foundation and Gavin Wood, Founder of Ethereum, Parity, and the Web 3 Foundation. These guys are two of the individuals that launched the programmable blockchain revolution and these interviews plot a course from the founding of Ethereum to their vision of the decentralized web and give us a trajectory beyond. A quick production note. These interviews were filmed in the style of the other filmed interviews on The Third Web, unfortunately the footage was lost to a dead macbook leaving only the audio. As I usually cut myself out of the filmed interviews my contribution is less geared for production. Visit https://web3.foundation/ , https://www.parity.io/ for more information Aeron Buchanan Executive vice president of Web 3 Foundation Masters in Computer science with a focus on engineering at Oxford Worked in film Then completed a PHD in computer

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

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.

Dominic Tarr is a hacker who resides on a sailboat, usually found in New Zealand's beautiful Hauraki Gulf. In recent years he has risen to fame as the creator of the Secure Scuttlebutt protocol, Scuttlebutt for short. Scuttlebutt is comprised of a standardized message format and a subjective append only log stored locally by users. The first application has been a multi-client decentralized social media platform that is an absolute joy to use, and I encourage everyone to download my favourite desktop client, Patchwork, or Manyverse for Android. As an autonomous software system, like Bitcoin, Scuttlebutt rewards the provisioning of resources to support the network, only rather than a point system and money myth, Scuttlebutt offers something far more valuable, conversation. This mostly covers the origin of the protocol but I will definitely conduct more interviews with Dom and others close to the project, which is today one of the most impressive, and well used decentralized applications in existence. Visit