Blockstack core developer, Ryan Shea, presented at the Javascript NYC meetup at iHeartRadio theatre. Great event overall! Video coming soon!
We had a condensed Q&A, but one here is a snippet (which I paraphrased):
Q: When you talked about features, I thought about firebase (auth and dashboard is nice). How does blockstack differ from firebase?
A: Firebase gets acquired, it’s going away, now it’s under googles control. Parse is another good example. These platforms go away.
It doesn’t give you the ability to have a layer on top of Parse and Firebase as the same time.
Every user doesn’t have encryption, signing, access to money.
Firebase doesn’t give you the ability switch data streams. Imagine having to switch emails clients without an export tool.
You’re decoupling the application from the protocol.