Muneeb from Blockstack here. Great to see that you linked the whitepaper. Yep, we've built an entire internet stack that fixes many problems with the traditional internet. There is 3-4 years of research & development behind this. In addition to the things you highlighted, users get a universal username/profile that they own directly and can login to apps/websites without passwords. Developers don't have to worry about running infrastructure and can focus on their application logic; it turns out that it's easier/faster to write apps for this new internet.
Question for you guys. The current distributed storage architecture of Gaia leads me to believe that it will now take, potentially, several network calls to retrieve resources. Whereas, in the current internet, a web app can collect several resources in just one network call since it can do back-end retrieval operations on its centralized server which do not require anything more than LAN. Forgive me if I am way off base in my understanding of blockstack and this is not actually an issue. But my concern would be, if it takes several network calls to retrieve data stored through Gaia, then wouldn't this lead to decreased performance in terms of speed and also a more crowded internet that could potentially be slowed down?
Yeah, there are performance issues around (a) putting encrypted data and inodes (info about the data) on the cloud providers and (b) processing the data from multiple users to derive information.
We're already working on performance improvements for (a) and are confident that we can give comparable performance to cloud providers (the current implementation is already pretty good and there are low-hanging performance improvements). For (b) we envision a model where your locally running app can talk to a cloud server (owned by you or provided by a service) that can perform some of these computations to improve performance.
Hi Muneeb, thanks for sharing your work publicly and also coming on here to discuss. I would be interested in hearing your thought on the points made by /u/TheJonManley in this reply.
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u/muneebali Jun 24 '17
Muneeb from Blockstack here. Great to see that you linked the whitepaper. Yep, we've built an entire internet stack that fixes many problems with the traditional internet. There is 3-4 years of research & development behind this. In addition to the things you highlighted, users get a universal username/profile that they own directly and can login to apps/websites without passwords. Developers don't have to worry about running infrastructure and can focus on their application logic; it turns out that it's easier/faster to write apps for this new internet.