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After Facebook’s sudden fall in popularity this month, people have begun to talk more seriously about creating decentralized versions of various Web 2.0 mainstays. Matteo Gianpietro Zago, whose company Essentia runs a decentralized developer platform, went so far as to create a large map of “Web 3.0” startups. Here, for example, is how he compares…
Read More Blockchain search engines challenge Google
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The initial wave of Bitcoin interest came from people who wanted to spend it. That, after all, was what Bitcoin was designed for. The title of Satoshi Nakamoto’s 2008 white paper was “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System.” So Satoshi’s goal from day one was for Bitcoin to be a medium of exchange. Fast forward ten…
Read More Bitcoin Cash vs. Litecoin as electronic cash
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Interest in blockchain and cryptocurrency continues to surge, which makes comparisons to the mid-to-late 1990s all the more relevant. That was a period when we were all trying to figure out how to use the Web – or “surf” it, using the lingo of that time. We’re at a similar point with blockchain. I call…
Read More We’re in the Geocities era of blockchain
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Over the weekend I had a rare experience: one my tweets went viral. It was an off-the-cuff and slightly pompous tweet about the role of white papers in the cryptocurrency ecosystem: I’d tweeted that in response to a blockchain bro at South By Southwest, who had opined: “Read the white papers. Everyone and their mom is…
Read More White papers: the good, the bad & the ugly
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Loom Network, a startup from the TechStars incubator, has just launched a new development platform for DApps (distributed apps). When the company reached out to me, it described the platform as “new tech that allows developers to easily build highly scalable blockchain applications, with a focus on games and social — think World of Warcraft…
Read More Developers take note: here’s a new Ethereum DApp platform
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Being an Ethereum killer is a trendy thing in the blockchain world currently. What is an Ethereum killer? It’s a public blockchain that aims to be the primary platform for decentralized apps (DApps). While I’d like to say there’s room for more than one blockchain platform for decentralized apps, the reality is it probably is…
Read More EOS: another purported Ethereum killer yet to go live
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Part of the reason I started Blocksplain this year was to experiment with new ways of earning revenue from blogging. Perhaps cryptocurrencies will finally make micropayments a reality, I thought, or maybe the token business model will enable content creators to get a slice of platform revenues at long last. Indeed there are blockchain experiments…
Read More Brave browser protects users & rewards publishers
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Cardano (ADA) is one of several Ethereum challengers currently occupying the top ten of CoinMarketCap. While all blockchain projects are ambitious, Cardano is especially so. It not only wants to displace Ethereum as the primary blockchain developer platform, it wants to do so via a very long, complicated product roadmap that will be rigorously peer reviewed by…
Read More Cardano is a long way from being an Ethereum competitor
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In part 3 of our ongoing series about blockchain infrastructure trends, we’ll focus on storage. In particular, how one ICO aims to be the blockchain equivalent of Amazon’s giant cloud storage platform, S3. Let’s firstly put this in context. A major part of the appeal of blockchain is that it will enable decentralized apps. The example I…
Read More Filecoin: Amazon S3 for Web 3
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When I first wrote about Status in mid-2017, it had just completed a $100 million ICO. At the time I described it as “a kind of next-generation Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp.” But in reality, there was no way to tell for sure since there was no actual product. Since the ICO, Status has obviously spent…
Read More The status of Status after its $100m ICO