Hacker News Reader

Comment by arunaugustine | Hacker News Reader

So would this be a startup or a non-profit org? The problem this project is trying to solve is bigger that you or me or any small group of people in an org, not in the technical ability per-say, but along the lines of "absolute power corrupts absolutely". If a single person or entity is the primary creator, what are your thoughts on, how to remain true to the original vision of a truly distributed, participatory network? The linux model perhaps?

View on HN

The gist is a startup that makes money by running services or market protocols on top, and whose work is open source (e.g. IPFS is MIT licensed). I'm a firm believer in open source and want to build a company that can be independent of other companies, that as long as it's able to create value for its users, it can continue to evolve the internet. I should spend some time describing my vision for this because it's really hard to describe the full thing + get right. I should probably write, or maybe record a video?

I don't think a single blogpost or video won't be able to capture it. Audience in general may be pre-disposed to think and reason about it in terms of the existing underlying abstraction layer. (This is an unqualified personal judgement).

This problem and the proposed solution involves new ideas and changes across the boundaries of that layers of abstraction, so it would be hard to digest in a single sitting. Unless of course all this was synthesized in your own head :)

My guess is you would need need a more agile version of the Douglas Engelbart's "Mother Of All Demos", a functional prototype that shows everything works together in synergy to create more than a sum of the parts.

The best case would be if all the components of the puzzle are independently valuable, like Musk's SpaceX model.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com