Muneeb Ali – Co-founder of Blockstack
Today I’m going to tell you about how I fell in love with the internet. And how I realize that the internet is fundamentally broken in certain ways. But we can fix it.
I still remember that I was a kid growing up in Pakistan. It was in 90s. And there was this one night where we had this big result in the morning, and my mom told us that if you and your brother both get all As, I will buy you a computer. And we were so stressed that we couldn’t even sleep that night. At some point my mom realized that and she was like you know what even if you get one B you will still get a computer.
Next day we woke up, our results turned out to be great, and we went there, we got that machine. I remember that I was the most excited not when I got the computer but when I went online for the first time. For those of you in the audience who are under 25, think of this as the old Chrome. This was the browser. This was the first browser of the internet: Netscape, that actually introduced the internet to millions of people including me. I was the only kid on the block who had access to this magical thing and who had access to all this information and that’s where I fell in love with internet.
I ended up dedicating my entire life to this. I kind of like bomb the hood open and started studying the engine inside that how does this actually work. I ended up doing a PhD in Computer Science, focusing on the internet. So today what I’m going to do is, I’m going to bomb the hood open and show you how the internet works a little bit.
For most of you, the internet is like a black box.
You have no idea how this really works. You just open up Chrome and you go to facebook.com. That’s pretty much it. What most people don’t realize is that when they are going to things like facebook.com, there are so many middle hidden men and companies that you are trusting and they are there. They include companies who made your browser software, your internet service provider, the servers where you are asking “hey, where’s facebook.com?” “where is CNN.com?” and these companies that issue security certificates. Remember these green block signs that make you feel really secure? that “hey, I’m on the secure internet”? It’s mostly just this one company that says “Hey, trust me. You are talking to the right facebook!” And people just blindly trust that company.
Things don’t go well all the time. For example, recently in Turkey the company that was supposed to issue the security certificates for Google was actually issuing the wrong certificates. So an entire country is thinking that they are talking to Gmail or they are talking to the correct Google, but they actually weren’t. So this is the first big problem with the internet that we blindly trust these companies and these third parties that we don’t even know exist.
So once you do connect to the right website, the right Facebook that you wanted to talk to, what has happened all the years is that now there are these big companies in the middle. You are just a screen. Your laptop is just a screen and you are talking to these big companies that have all your data. They have so much power and control over you. The internet is Google and Facebook. And, if you want to talk to your friend, your friend connects to Facebook, you connect to Facebook and then you talk to each other.
So the second big problem with the internet, is that you don’t own your own data. These big companies own all of your data. But we want an internet that is open. We want it to be transparent. We want an internet that is fair. For that, I’m proposing two requirements. One, there can be no middle man. Two, users have to own their data.
Google has this famous tag line. “Don’t be evil.” But maybe it should be “Can’t be evil.” A company shouldn’t have that much power to begin with where they are making this decision that should I be evil or not. So today I’m going to tell you about this new revolutionary technology called the blockchain. I’ve been doing research in computer systems for almost 15 years now.
The blockchain is the most sophisticated, complex, yet elegant and beautiful technology that I’ve ever come across. The main thing that it does is that it gives the power back to the people. So it started off as an application for payments that if you just want to send money to your friend, there are all these banks and payment processors and third parties in the middle that you have to go through.
So the first application of the blockchain technology was called Bitcoin. You might have heard about it in the newspapers. What Bitcoin said was we can replace all these banks with a open network, a network that is made secure by mathematics and cryptography. And in this open network, people can own digital money directly and they can just send transactions directly to whoever they want to send them to.
So how do you use this network? There is this thing called a private key. Think of it as a really really long, and really really strong password. With the private key, it’s like you have a key to a locker that has cash in it or the key of your house where you keep all of your belongings. This private key is so secure that if someone wants to randomly guess it or crack it, they would need more energy than is present in this entire solar system. This is mathematics and cryptography keeping you secure.
So Bitcoin focused on the payments use case and what we realize is that just like there are banks where you keep your money, Facebook is like a data bank you keep all your data there. So you can actually take the same technology and apply it to internet in general.
If you go back and you see how the internet started, it was roughly 1990 when the main technology for the World Wide Web came about. And then in 1994, Netscape, the browser that made me fall in love with the internet came out. And in 2009, the main technology for the blockchain came out. And now, our company has made the first major browser for this blockchain-backed internet.
And just like in 1994, there were so many companies and people making businesses on the internet, the same thing is happening again. There are these developers. We have thousands of developers and community members who are coming together and building applications on this new internet. This is what the browser looks like and the really cool thing about this browser is that you are actually not on the traditional internet. You are on a parallel universe where it’s more secure. And just like on the normal internet, you download something like Chrome, which is your window to how to use this thing, you download the Blockstack browser and that is your window to using this blockchain-backed new internet.
And just like you go to CNN.com or Facebook.com you can go to something like Werner.id and see the profile of Werner Vogels who is the CTO of Amazon. He registered this profile using that private key directly. He didn’t have to go through any company at all. And this profile is so secure that to change a single character in his profile, you will have to take down the entire blockchain network, which would cost you hundreds of millions of dollars and even if you do it, the entire world would notice that someone just took down the entire network.
So on this new internet, I can go and register muneeb.id and you can go and get your user name. Then what happens is because now this user name is yours. You own it. You can actually use it anywhere you go on all the websites on all the applications. So passwords basically just disappear. You don’t need passwords anymore. You are using your own username wherever you are going.
In the real world, we had a concept of property rights. You can buy land. You can build a house there. You can keep all of your belongings inside. But we never had that concept online. We were always renting from these big companies. What’s happening with the new internet is that it has a concept of ownership. You can now go and own your own username. You can have your own storage space online. where you can go and keep all of your data. Once that happens, and I want to talk to a friend, I want to send a message, that communication is between two individuals and there is no company in the middle. Not our company. Not any other company. It is pure mathematics and cryptography.
So the old internet made us blindly trust these middle men and didn’t give us ownership of our data. The new internet fixes that. And what this does, is that this is a dynamic change in the power dynamics between large companies and people. The new internet takes away power from these large companies and takes it to where it always belongs: with the people. On this new internet, the power belongs to all of you. Thank you.
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