StJohn Piano: New thesis: The crypto wallet eats everything else. It eventually turns into your public-key-backed passport (perhaps protected by a main offline key), and browses the internet. The internet is now a bunch of blockchain feeds. Social / finance / info are all messages i.e. blockchain-secured transactions. Your wallet stores its own copy of every message that you care about (perhaps using a rolling window for less important categories of message). You subscribe to various feeds (corporate or personal), which arrive at your wallet, where you can view/sort/search them. A conversation between N chat participants is a tiny blockchain, where your messages are signed by your wallet.
StJohn Piano: ^ This makes more sense to me than the thesis "the browser incorporates the wallet".
Nicholas Piano: Interesting approach
Nicholas Piano: It shifts the "browser" from being a "HTTP browser" to a "blockchain browser"
Nicholas Piano: Point at any proxy for a blockchain and view the results
StJohn Piano: yes
StJohn Piano: ^ I'll publish this chat excerpt, I think. Happy with your name on it, or prefer to be anon ? (It's polite to always ask).
Nicholas Piano: Name is fine
StJohn Piano: Cool.
StJohn Piano: ^ This makes more sense to me than the thesis "the browser incorporates the wallet".
Nicholas Piano: Interesting approach
Nicholas Piano: It shifts the "browser" from being a "HTTP browser" to a "blockchain browser"
Nicholas Piano: Point at any proxy for a blockchain and view the results
StJohn Piano: yes
StJohn Piano: ^ I'll publish this chat excerpt, I think. Happy with your name on it, or prefer to be anon ? (It's polite to always ask).
Nicholas Piano: Name is fine
StJohn Piano: Cool.
Related: Proposal: Decentralised Domain Name System (DDNS)
More:
- To-do lists and job tasks get mixed in here somewhere. Also shopping and reputation. Also shares, trading, and voting.
- This "passport wallet" stores your "ready money".
- Most of your money is in a separate "storage wallet", ideally offline.
- Your wallet handles message encryption, not just signing.
- The internet evolves from siloed apps into a bunch of blockchain datafeeds.
- These blockchains, smaller than Bitcoin, less decentralised, will probably need to produce periodic checkpoints, so that in the event of data corruption, the new checkpoints can be used in recovery procedures.
The driver here is the inescapable need to manage private keys securely and usefully, i.e. create wallet software.
To create a good crypto wallet, you have to solve these problems:
- trusted software development
- secure software distribution (requires solid digital signature code)
- block transmission and reception
- useful display of items from a blockchain datafeed
Once you've done this, you can handle lots of other problems using the same tool. E.g. proving identity, chat, reputation, shopping, etc.
I expect that crypto wallets will be built to a higher standard than other software (because any losses in this domain hurt more than in other domains - see Conversation: Programmer Licences), and that therefore over time it will be generally easier to build new functionality around wallets than around other types of software component (e.g. existing browsers). Hence "the crypto wallet eats everything else".
I don't know if this will actually happen, or whether only certain components of this will happen, but I think it's a plausible future, and that it's worth recording these ideas here as a reference point.