Earning bounties by participating with your own decentralised Blockstack browser!
Earning bounties. I will be writing more about this interesting subject in the future, but this post is fully dedicated to Blockstack! “Now why is that?”, one might ask…
Well there are a few reasons, but the first is about something very important. In my last post I’ve talked about the three rules for crypto-projects. Platforms should be easy accessible (which also means easy to use ; ), they should be anonymous and permissionless, so for everyone to participate… and one should always have the possibility to opt-out. Yes… you should be able to walk away whenever you feel like it… without major damage being done. So let’s see what happens when we apply all of these rules to Blockstack.
Let’s talk about the first rule. Accessibility. Directly when you enter the homepage at the website of Blockstack you can see two buttons. When you click ‘Install’ it is made very easy for you to take part. No additional information is given whatsoever, but they basically give you exactly what you need… namely… easy access to the latest version of the Blockstack Browser! Brilliant. So within a few clicks we’re up and running. You can off course try and click and run the web-application now, but wait, let me guide you through this process for a few seconds…
After our first click we read: “Blockstack is a new internet designed for freedom & security. On Blockstack you’ll find apps that give you control over your data.”. Okay, that sounds pretty good, so I guess it would be valuable to enter our email-address. Which application does not need a connection to a e-mail address today? ;) … and after that we can continue and read… “Blockstack has no 3rd parties: a keychain on your device gives you access!” Okay, that sounds pretty good too. So let’s choose a password to protect our new key-chain. (Maybe we should generate a safe one with our Lastpass plug-in? ; ) But be aware… make sure to write down this 12-words of the keyframe-phrase on paper! Do not store this key-chain digitally, that’s very important! As with all things that come decentralised, it also means being at least a little bit responsible about it. When we have done this we’re already there! We can see the browser interface and we can discover some of the amazing apps on the platform.
Okay, to be honest. Discovering apps is actually not as easy as it sounds. A small point of critique here is that I found it a bit hard to discover what these apps are for. ‘What can I actually do with them?’, was my first thought. When you come back a few times though and you try some stuff you will notice pretty quick for instance that you can also attach your own exclusive name-identity to your new blockstack-ID... very cool!
Whenever you try to use apps on the platform, do be conscience of the fact that (as with all things in blockchain & crypto ; ) these things are all still in development. So no, not everything on this platform will be running as smoothly as it could be, but the beautiful thing is you can learn and discover together with these apps while they are being developed. And when you don’t know certain things there is always a very easy to access forum available!
But… that’s basically how easy it is to begin. It works pretty well, doesn’t it? Off course you can stay on the web-application, but I would recommend you to run your own localhost too. It’s just as easy. A few clicks and you install the application on your computer and basically you go through the same process. Maybe you even want to run your own Blockstack Node? Well, you can do that too, but to be honest I have no experience with that (yet ; ). My guess is though it won’t be much different.
Now. Once you’ve entered you can be part of the new community instantly. It is very interesting that you can earn ‘stacks’ as rewards for your participation. I’ve made about 22,50$ already by contributing to the Blockstack community! Is it about the money for me? Nope, it is not, but it does motivate off course. Yes, I like the fact that I can earn a bounty and yes, I have to pay the rent too… but what is far more significant in this development is that Blockstack actually wants you to earn stacks since this means that these coins are more evenly distributed across the network! And yes… as for the second rule of crypto, you can do this as anonymous and permissionless as you like. An explanation. I will quote a few snippets that I’ve taken from the white-paper, which is a bit to technical for me to read, but again in this perspective… my knowledge is also in development.
“In the Blockstack BNS (Blockchain Name System), names are owned by cryptographic addresses of the underlying blockchain and their associated private keys. A user preorders and then registers a name in a two-phase commit process. The first user to successfully write both a preorder and a register transaction is granted ownership of the name. Anyone can create a namespace or register names in a namespace, as there is no central party to stop someone from doing so.”
So no central authority wil decide for us what to choose! Off course the name should still be available and a fee is taken, but that is mostly done to prevent ‘land grabs’, i.e., “… to stop people from registering a lot of namespaces/names that they don’t intend to actually use.” This off course makes a lot of sense. You can also register more than one ID-name and when you enter a certain application from your browser you can choose which one to use when you login! So as for the part of anonymity and the ‘permissionless access’ that seems pretty much covered to me. That leaves us only one thing.
The third rule is the option to ‘opt-out’. In my perspective, I still have all of the tools available which I had originally. I can choose to enter and it is very easy to use another browser and be part of the internet in the old way. Blockstack does not prevent that at the least, even more since you can enter the platform just in your original browser. Of course, we’ll have to start using the apps on the platform and see what happens, but it looks like it that we will be fully in control of our own data. ”New users/nodes need to establish trust on the network …” so yes, there will certainly be a amount of ‘.. being attached to certain applications.. and having a reputation…’ involved, but we’ll have to try and see how that turns out. All looks pretty good to me now. And there is always the advantage of developers in competition for attention between decentralised apps off course… so there is an incentive to keep it clean too!
As a last argument for this I would like to add the following snippet from the white-paper…“We believe that enabling the ability to migrate from one blockchain to another is important as it allows for the larger system to survive, even when the underlying blockchain is compromised. The architecture allows for multiple underlying blockchains.”
So for the conclusion. Blockstack seems to me a very neat and clean and easy-to-use browser, that allows you to try and use the new decentralised internet in a very cool way. You will find very quickly that you might want to be a participator and contributor to the project. This ‘400 word post’ for instance… (that’s what Blockstack would like to receive from me for 300 new stacks!), is also part of that commitment and involves me probably a bit more in the community too. I’ve written a few words more since I’m pretty enthusiastic about it and wanted to be thorough. A stack is worth about 0,15 dollarcent at the moment. So this post will be good for 45 dollars? * Wow… I hope so…
As you can see in the picture below I’m already doing pretty well with earning a few stacks and contributing, even as a non-developer. Thanks for that Blockstack… keep up the good work and I’ll definitely keep on promoting you and will keep on discovering services that are on offer. I would like to conclude with a link to a great TEDx talk by Muneeb Ali, one of the co-founders of the Blockstack-platform. One to watch definitely…
Welcome to the new internet| Muneeb Ali | TEDxNewYork!!
Now go on and have fun with all these new amazing possibilities, and if you have any comments or critique on what I’ve written, I’m looking forward to it! But as always, do keep it polite please…
PS. Off course this writing still has to be verified, let’s wait and see if I make it through the validation process… ;)
