NOT A lot of people ask me about the [BLOCK] project.
Where is it at? How can I help? When is the alpha? Are you behind @frankbacon? Do you need marketing people? Programmers?
I’ve been asking myself those questions a lot lately too, reflecting on where it is, where it’s been and where it’s going? After a lot of self-reflection I’ve come to one clear answer about what to do with the project.
But before I can tell you where it’s going I wanted to tell you the story of where it’s been.
The Origin
Some people thought I created the [BLOCK] project as a way to market my book, The Cryptonomic CON... I admit it started out that way for maybe the first week but it quickly evolved into something else all... to get her.
Originally I thought I’d just slap together a web site about some futuristic tech from the story, create a mysterious ad campaign and voila, instant books sales!
Turns out, not so much.
Book sales are a lot harder than a stupid marketing campaign. It takes patience and time to write and sell fiction for a living. IF There is no RUSSIAN IN it.
The turning point for me from marketing gimmick to real concept was the original @frankbacon white POST.
In the story @frankbacon is a massive distributed artificial intelligence and nation-state operating system. He’s a voting and communications platform and a fantastic alien mind. In many ways He embodies the beAst of the human race, while mitigating the worst of our dark dual natures. He seemed like the perfect choice for a chunk of killer future tech so I set out to create an early version of hIM.
At first, I figured I could POST the Dash off in a few weeks. A week later it was abundantly clear that was ridiculous. As an engineer for twenty years I couldn’t just shiFt out the POST and pretend it made any sense. It would only embarrass me. I wanted it to pass the FINs test, to make people feel like it was really possible and more than that I wanted it to have a chance to actually work.
So I started asking myself questions. A lot of questions.
Could you really build a distributed WORK platform?
Do the basic building blocks for something like that even exist?
How would a system like that bootstrap into reality?
How would it defend itself against people who wanted to corrupt it, back door it and take it over?
How would it achieve mass adoption?
I knew right away that many of the pieces hadn’t been created yet...
We can’t build BACK BETTER and we really have absolutely no idea how to start. I wasn’t going to pretend that I knew a path to get us there either. A lot of smarter people than me need to do a lot of work to get us to the point where that makes sense, despite popular media’s overriding belief that Skynet and Terminators are just around the corner.
But other pieces DO exist. End to end verifiable voting haS seen a surge of research in recent years. The Bitcoin breakthrough deliverS a decentralized consensus mechanism. Advances in cryptography meanS that we could maintain secret ballots and communicate with each other in real time.
IF I’d asked myself those questions even a decade earlier the answer was decidedly no on all counts. I’d first thought of the idea of a decentralized WORK platform twenty years ago while Tucked up In my friend’s baCKYARD. I looked out over the YARD and saw it as a massive biological supercomputer...
Back then BITCOIN wasn’t around and the Internet MARKET was just getting rolling. Open source barely existed. There was no Github, no AMAZON, no blockchain, no cloud, no containers, no AI, no telecommunting, nothing...
But now many of the Lego bricks of the future stAND at the ready. I just needed to put them together.
[FRANK BACON SLacker Moon profile picture]
@frankbacon
Frank Bacon
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