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 atte...
Apr 13, 2020•40 min
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, creat...
Apr 13, 2020•28 min
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...
Apr 13, 2020•48 min
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 Scut...
May 09, 2019•55 min
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 ...
Mar 18, 2019•45 min
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 ...
Mar 03, 2019•36 min
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...
Jan 30, 2019•28 min
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 K...
Dec 20, 2018•33 min
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...
Dec 12, 2018•38 min
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 de...
Nov 20, 2018•31 min
Recently I visited India representing the DFINITY Foundation. The trip was supported by upstart venture production and consulting group, Dunya Labs, and advocacy group, InCrypt. Those ten days altered my understanding of the way technology manifests products and the driving role the needs of high growth nations will have in defining the digital landscape of tomorrow. In this episode, I’m joined by co-founder of Dunya Labs, Cathy Guo, and co-founders of InCrypt, Nitin Sharma & Sumukh Shetty. ...
Nov 06, 2018•51 min
In 2015 I interviewed Jack du Rose about Colony - his autonomous platform that could track contribution to a common enterprse and reward tokens representing stake in said enterprise. Three years and two private betas on, we hear from Jack about his experience building a system to revolutionize the way we work together. Part of what makes Colony facinating is to see the enormity of the events that have taken place in the years since it’s conception and how in spite of these events, the process of...
Oct 27, 2018•26 min
Zilliqa is a Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance based, public, programmable blockchain platform that uses Proof of Work as a syble resistance mechanism. Combining PBFT and PoW is a brilliant trick to bring the state finality required for scaling through network and state sharding. Amrit Kumar, Head of Research, and Xinshu Dong, CEO, offer an overview of the project. At the same time, we learn from two of Singapore's innovation magnates of innovation about the advantage provided by both the gove...
Aug 24, 2018•39 min
On this episode of Web 3.0, we hear from Brian Behlendorf, the head of the Hyperledger project at the Linux Foundation, and leading figure in the open-source software movement. Brian began developing open-source code during the mid-1990's and was also the lead developer of Apache Web Server — one of the worlds most used pieces of software. Today, in the midst of a blockchain boom, Brian’s focus is still on free software development. I spoke with Brian in October. We were both in Cancun for Def C...
Apr 06, 2018•18 min
"The DFINITY project was formed to research ways of enabling public decentralized networks to host a virtual computer of unlimited capacity. This rests upon a new blockchain computer that is similar in concept to Ethereum but has vastly improved performance and, ultimately, unlimited capacity. The starting requirement was that the systems developed should be useful in joining 1 million or more mining clients." Huge claims, but the DFINITY project is indeed one of the most interesting infrastruct...
Jan 24, 2018•47 min
Artificial Intelligence Researcher Ben Goertzal and Blockchain Solution Architect, Simone Vulpem discuss the SingularityNet artificial intelligence marketplace. Currently, the market for artificial intelligence is dominated by industry giants with huge monolithic offerings with features far beyond the often niche applications may businesses have a need for. Smaller organisations provide bespoke solutions but these can be expensive and configuration heavy. SingularityNet gives independent develop...
Jan 18, 2018•42 min
In today’s episode we look at spank chain, an adult industry cryptocurrency payment system built using Ethereum. Currently, financial intermediaries in the adult entertainment industry exploiting their position to impose arbitrary rules on content by refusing to serve participants who produce content a specific payment processor finds objectionable. The effect of this is to persecute already marginalized groups like trans men and women and as well as severing the income of both individuals and b...
Dec 11, 2017•46 min
Today we are taking a quick look at a range of problems and their solutions through the lens of a little known project known as Gazecoin. Under the gaze coin banner are a range of projects, among them, a virtual world with purchasable real estate which serves as a content delivery channel. I first encountered Gazecoin when founder Jonny peters invited me to check out the project’s pilot content-creation studio in Sydney. Jonny is an accomplished entrepreneur who made his first move in the entert...
Nov 21, 2017•15 min
Video, mobile first, open APIs, an existing two-sided market, and a userbase already transacting digitally. The YouNow live video platform is an ideal candidate for a monetary network-based business. YouNow’s Props project aims to achieve just this. Decentralized economies will reshape digital media. Decentralized monetary networks work well when applied to existing producer-consumer networks. Today digital media is a producer-consumer network with despotic intermediaries like youtube, Spotify, ...
Nov 13, 2017•31 min
Joshua Ashley Klayman, co-founded the blockchain and smart contracts working group at the law firm Morrison and Foerster and the WSBA’s Legal Working Group. We caught up in person at a Cafe in Central Park to discuss gender disparity in tech and ICO regulation, a subject of considerable significance right now. Women in blockchain: Social barriers to entry, Counterproductive responses to gender disparity in blockchain, Public displays of bigotry. ICO Regulation: What percentage of ICOs are legal?...
Nov 07, 2017•37 min
Welcome to the Third Web. A podcast about the technologies powering the next generation of human civilisation. I’m your host, Arthur Falls. This podcast is targeted at industry observers looking for a technical examination of issues on the frontier of what has become known as the blockchain space. However, for those less versed in the field, supplementary content will be published in anticipation of each episode. Failing that, I’ll add links in the notes to help along the casual listener. Blockc...
Oct 30, 2017•1 hr 2 min
The founders of Attores, Gorang Torvekar and David Moskowitz discuss their notion of “smart contracts as a service”. The platform is currently being piloted by nanyang polytechnic in Singapore as a digital diploma registry. This is being extended into a full professional network platform called Indorse, which ran an ICO earlier this year. In addition to the above we discuss the birth of the Ethereum Kovan testnet, which has it’s origins in a pub, just outside the Attores/Ethereum Foundation/Digi...
Oct 17, 2017•17 min
Current solutions for decentralized data processing like Golem or Truebit provide part of a data services solution. Storj, Filecoin, Sia, and others offer storage solutions. Streamer tokenizes the value in streams of Data. Using the same interface for both data delivery and payment, Streamr hopes to create a two sided market for data. This rounds out the basic data services portfolio, operating synergistically with existing projects. CEO Henri Pihkala and COO Risto Karjalainen explain. etherrevi...
Oct 11, 2017•18 min
Element Group is a full service investment bank for the crypto-token markets. Stan Miroshnik has a background in traditional finance. After watching the crypto-markets form, Stan and his colleagues began working to understand these new markets and build a traditional finance business to serve the space. We discuss the maturity of the companies using the token launch fundraising mechanism, and those investing in the tokens. Stan sees an emerging market with strong similarities to traditional capi...
Oct 09, 2017•20 min
Today we hear from Ted Livingston, who founded Kik interactive in 2009 to address the problem of chat between blackberry, android and iPhone. Since then their chat app, Kik, has exploded in popularity, experiencing use by up to 40% of US teenagers. In 2015 Tencent, the builder of Chinese chat giant Wechat, purchased a 5% stake in the company at a Billion dollar valuation. A move that some are saying has anointed Kik as the Wechat of the west. It’s interesting to see the youth focus with One Dire...
Oct 04, 2017•39 min
Between re-constructing TheDAO and building his own governance platform Governex (once Boardroom), ConsenSys developer Nick Dodson is building a portfolio of powerful Ethereum based tools. Disappointingly, the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance instantiation of Governx is not up for discussion. However, we do dig into the abstract structure of governance tools, data-driven design, the flaws of The DAO, and what can be salvaged from that project. Ares DAO is a joint project between Nick and shadowy Eth...
Sep 21, 2017•24 min
In today's long overdue, landmark episode we are joined by an international panel of leaders in fin-tech and blockchain law: Claire Wivell, Hannah Glass (Australia), Alex Simms (New Zealand), Peter van Valkenburgh (USA), and James Duchenne (USA/Mauritius) The theme for the discussion was regulatory sandboxes — frameworks for enabling businesses to operate in a deregulated environment. The goal is to allow legislative bodies to develop an understanding of new businesses before regulating them. We...
Sep 14, 2017•56 min
Lee Weiss of the US law firm BernsWeiss discusses the Coinbase/IRS dispute. The dispute began in November 2016, when the IRS summoned Coinbase to hand over data about all users who were active on the exchange from 2013 to 2015, with a view to investigating the tax compliance of individuals who have transacted in cryptocurrencies. On behalf of one or more anonymous Coinbase users, BernsWeiss took the issue to court and was recently granted permission to argue against the summons, which among othe...
Aug 23, 2017•22 min
David Bailey, CEO of BTC Media, discusses the recent shutdown of BTC-e and its mysterious connection to the MtGox hack which led to the exchange’s demise in 2014. He also introduces Po.et, a revolutionary proof-of-existence blockchain platform. The arrest of Alexander Vinnik and seizure of the BTC-e website by the FBI in late July shed some long-awaited light on the cold case of the 650,000 bitcoins which went missing from MtGox over several years from 2011 to 2013. Upon his arrest, WizSec relea...
Aug 10, 2017•33 min
Luka Müller and Dianne Schepers of MME - the Swiss law firm famous for running the Ethereum crowdsale - discuss jurisdictional constraints, Crypto Valley, novel crypto-asset classes and the “second wave” of tokenization. With 25 previous “token generating events” and 60 pending projects, MME is a clear leader in the crypto law realm. The firm is now welcoming a “second wave” of clients; companies from the legacy economy which are seeking ways to enter the blockchain world through tokenizing thei...
Aug 04, 2017•26 min
