[talks] Talk: Building a new decentralized internet with Blockstack- Today 1:30pm

Nicole E. Wagenblast nwagenbl at CS.Princeton.EDU
Wed Apr 26 10:53:34 EDT 2017


Time : 1:30pm to 2:50pm 
Location : Friend 003 

Title : Building a new decentralized internet with Blockstack 
Abstract : The internet was designed more than 30 years ago and is showing signs of age. Recent attacks on internet infrastructure, like DDoS attacks on the Domain Name System (DNS), and cases of fraudulent security certificates issued by certificate authorities (CAs) have exposed the ugly underbelly of the internet along with flaws in the internet's original design. Centralized services and hidden middlemen introduce points of failure and control. In this talk, we present the design and implementation of a new internet architecture that explicitly follows the trust-to-trust design principle and remotes any centralized point of trust from the middle of the network. More specifically, we present the design of (1) a decentralized naming and PKI system, (2) a decentralized storage system that gives comparable performance to traditional cloud storage services and (3) discuss how blockchains can be used to bootstrap trust in these new decentralized systems. Further, we present our lessons from operating one of the largest production deployments of blockchain-based systems, with over 70,000 domains registered, and discuss how our experiences helped evolve our design over time. Our new system, called Blockstack, is released as open-source and has an open-source community of 5000+ members. 
Bio : Muneeb Ali is the co-founder of Blockstack, a new decentralized internet where users own their data and apps run locally without remote servers. Muneeb is an alumnus of Y Combinator and has raised $5.1M from Union Square Ventures, Lux Capital, Naval Navikant, and others for his startup. Muneeb is also a final-year PhD candidate at Princeton University, where he has worked in the Systems and Networks group and at PlanetLab. He helped start a new course at Princeton on “How to be a CTO” and gives guest lectures on cloud computing at Princeton. Muneeb has been awarded a J. William Fulbright Fellowship and has served as the Program Co-Chair of ACM NSDR. He has built a wide range of production systems and published research papers with over 900 citations. 

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