Hey everyone. I’ve been a long time Blockstack supporter even though I actually spend most of my life in the Ethereum community. Well… I had the chance to blend the two in a talk I gave at NFT.NYC in Times Square a couple weeks ago. Would love to hear the community’s thoughts on the subject: “From True Ownership to Mass Exodus: Introducing Concepts of Decentralized Intellectual Property (or #DeIP)”
The critical use case that helped me recognize the massive potential of Blockstack came from the Signature Event in Berlin last year when Ryan presented the idea of a “personal Google.” The idea being: if you owned all your own data, then you could query your private information and the public web at the same time to produce radically useful and self-sovereign results.
So this presentation is largely inspired by this specific use case and my own learnings, which I’ve cultivated over the last year working at Hoard. My working thesis is this: one day there will be a mass exodus into virtual worlds, and intellectual property will be the battleground upon which freedom is fought for. Decentralized Finance (#DeFi) is just the tip of the blockchain iceberg. Decentralized Intellectual Property (#DeIP) is everything below the surface.
Looking forward to chatting more with anyone who’s interested 
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I think Decentralized social Network will be the most powerful weapon. Because everything are coming from ideas. Right now, any giant social network app (Facebook, Twitter, etc) censor idea in some levels.
What if Chinese people can read any western idea? How about North Korea people?
When we have Decentralized power (e.g. voting) - we can talk about Decentralized Intellectual Property. For example, right now Blockstack decide right or wrong for any comment (in this forum, Slack, Github, etc). They can delete your post for sure.
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Absolutely! Centralized platforms only scale to favor corporate or state interests. Decentralized platforms, on the other hand, are intended to scale to favor human interests.
When we have Decentralized power (e.g. voting) - we can talk about Decentralized Intellectual Property.
Interesting. In my mind, decentralized governance has always come secondary to decentralized intellectual property and finance. I believe this is because virtual decisions are dependent upon virtual assets. If you don’t have the DeFi or DeIP assets, then what significance do decentralized decisions have? You could spin up a sufficiently decentralized voting contract on Ethereum in 5 minutes, but unless there’s an environment for the decision to be rooted in, then the votes are meaningless. The assets, therefore, seem to be the environment.
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I think we already had finance but some entities controls it. That’s why we build decentralized finance system which decentralized governance that no entity can change protocol/rules as will. And It gives the DeFi values. If you have a centralized finance system then it’s same as bank.
Let take a look at Blockstack .id names - a centralized assets. At first it has some value $xx - but since Blockstack decided change the rules - they provide free Blockstack id (Which I strongly support it) - the .id names has value = $0.
I meant in decentralized world, you can’t create any value for centralized assets - belong to centralized system (Of course, you can scam people first).
It’s quite confuse so I give you a concrete example.
Digital world: An artist create a digital paint.
Decentralized world: the digital paint transform to a decentralized asset (named DAP). The artist has private key of DAP.
For me, two worlds are different. A digital paint could have no value at all. But the DAP could be a CryptoKitties asset. And some people think CryptoKitties has value because it’s a decentralized system plus …
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The beauty of these systems is owner can negotiate value that is contained in the contract.
Doesn’t need value from a community (crypto kitty). Can be anything.
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Yeah centralized institutions wield a great deal of influence and power over their domain. And they are vulnerable to different attack vectors to manipulate communities by third party actors and internal administrators with special self-interests.
I definitely think digital 2-dimensional artwork is interesting. I also think what will become even more valuable is when a DAP is a virtual experience. Nobody can pirate a virtual experience. It’s like a ticket to an amusement part - you can look at pictures of the park all day, but the real reason someone would give the park money is if they can go in and ride the roller coasters.
The cool thing about decentralizing assets is that virtual experiences can become highly personalized. In that sense, decentralization isn’t just about decentralizing power… it’s also about decentralizing experiences.
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Every digital/virtual thing is a bunch of number
010000100110100101110100011000110110111101101001011011100010000001101001011100110010000001100001001000000110010001100101011000110110010101101110011101000111001001100001011011000110100101111010011001010110010000100000011100110111100101110011011101000110010101101101
You have three way to execute that number,
By your machine
By machine of other people
Both your machine and by machine of people
Rules are needed to encrypt, execute the number. So the real questions are who executes the number, who can change rules, who control machines. For example, Blockstack (or any centralized system) can change rules (supply Stacks, any algorithm, PoW/PoB to PoS, etc)