IPFS Pinning Summit 2020, 14 May 2020

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From YouTube: Blockchain Domains + IPFS = Decentralized Websites - Bradley Kam

Description

Traditional DNS has two points of failure—domain names require centralized custodians and content is stored on servers controlled by one company, meaning websites can be taken down. Unstoppable Domains builds domain registries on blockchains. These domains are not part of DNS and are stored in users’ Ethereum wallets. The user signs a message with their private key and writes their IPFS hash to the blockchain, giving them the power to put up or take down their website. Domains work in apps like MyEtherWallet, Trust Wallet, and Opera Browser.

Read more about the inaugural IPFS Pinning Summit on the website: https://ipfspinningsummit.com/

For more information on IPFS
- visit the project website: https://ipfs.io
- or follow IPFS on Twitter: https://twitter.com/IPFS

Sign up to get IPFS news, including releases, ecosystem updates, and community announcements in your inbox, each Tuesday: http://eepurl.com/gL2Pi5

For more information on Filecoin
- visit the project website: https://filecoin.io/
- or follow Filecoin on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Filecoin

Get Filecoin community news and announcements in your inbox, monthly: http://eepurl.com/gbfn1n

A

First of all, I'm Brad and one of the co-founders and unstoppable domains. We build domains on block chains, so domain registries, which are smart contracts on block chains, domains are in FCS and talking today about how block chain domains plus IP FS gets you a decentralized website.

A

So we build domain registries. We have two registries crypto and zil. We also have a registrar, like our version of GoDaddy called I, don't stock, all domains comm, and we also have decentralized web tools. So things like we have a demo browser which is a open source Fork of chromium. We have browser extensions. We have a marketplace of ipfs templates, IP, invest deploy tools and libraries for domain resolution.

A

So why do we need to do central as web? Well, the current DNS system is easily censored. It relies on registrar's, which are mandatory custodians of domain names like com domain names, all traditional domain names registries can revoke domains or they can be taken down and hosting services can take, can take content completely offline, not just off of their platform, and so do sometimes web starts. Web sites are an alternative because domains are NF. Ts, no custodian is required.

A

You can store your domain inside of your wallet so domains you store inside of an aetherium wallet watching domain registry is like on several domains and ENS. They can't revoke your domain and the hosting is on the central storage networks like ID BFS, instead of on centralized hosting providers. So that's why blockchain domains plus IP FS equal to centralized websites, so I thought I would just show everybody the product real quick. If that's alright. So this is unstoppable domains. Com you can search for domain.

A

This is basically how you would expect a domain registrar to work. You can check out. You can, of course, pay in crypto I.

A

Just use a coin based commerce widget right now, so these are the these are the defaults. Hopefully we can get filed coin in there too, though, we've got credit card, we've got PayPal and once you've bought a domain, you clean the domain to your wallet and then you can manage and manage means that you add crypto addresses to your domain name so that you can receive money. You can receive Bitcoin litecoin, you perceive any cryptocurrency and a dyke, EFS hashes, so the website. So what you do is you add an address. You click Save.

A

You send a message with your private key. A lot of people use meta, masks that writes that information to the blockchain and then an application can look that back up I'm, just going to show you real quick. Hopefully this is big enough for everybody to see, but if you type in Brad crypto into trust wallet, then you can pay. You can pay me in theory and Bitcoin whatever, so it all works. It also works inside of these wallets right now, plus many many more coming.

A

Ok, so after I have added my crypto addresses. I can then go and add my PFS.

A

So a few different things that you can do here, one is you can just you know, build your website, build your application copy and paste your hash sign a message with your private key write it to the blockchain, but you can also upload files, so this is actually using pinata in the background as a bloater, so shout out to pinata cloud I, and we also have a template marketplace for non-technical users, and so this is kind of like our little centralized Wix here. So you've got little image editor. You can add text whatever this.

A

This is really bare-bones right now, you're. Looking at like basically profile pages, you know look, this is like 1995 Geocities level of the internet type thing, but there's a blog template. It's coming soon. There's ecommerce store templates, there's a need for marketplaces forums, a whole bunch of different stuff, and we've got more than 20,000 users who have registered domain names and they're looking for two pools. So this is open.

A

We're looking for people who want to build like ipfs templating tools and offer them to our users, whether paid or unpaid, depending on what your, what your folks done. So that's that so now, if I want to go view a website, so we have a unstoppable Chrome extension we're also integrating with several Chrome extensions. Actually working on I'd be vest, companion right now, working on several others, but you can just type in and by the way, can everybody hear me and see my screen everything good yep, just fine, okay, great all right.

A

So this is my ether wallet crypto, so you've got a essentially a fully functioning version of my ether wallet, so got hybrid crypto, where you can do an ease dye exchange. These are websites that are live right now.

A

So we also have a demo browser and the idea behind the demo browser is that this is supposed to inspire browsers to support IP, FS and other decentralized decentralized storage networks. So there's an IP FS note inside of this browser, so when I go to, you can go to my silly little, my silly little ipfs website I can run the note.

A

I can turn on the node and now, when I go to the website, record I am storing and sharing it to the network to so this is like a method for onion scent advised sharing of ipfs files, and the motive would be I like this website, and so you could imagine cases in the future where somebody really wants to put something out and its popular but being censored, and then you could just have a whole bunch of people who care about this news story getting out or whatever, and they can all be, storing and sharing it.

A

All you would need is to add, you know one click, so this is a open source. The UI is terrible. So if anybody wants to fork it commercialize it play with it, do whatever you want, please please do.

A

Yes, so ways to view websites there's the demo browser there's extensions. Opera for Android is live right now, so there's 80 million monthly, unique users who can type in a doctor domain type in a deep domain. They can view websites that are on ipfs, so it works right now, hopefully coming soon IP, best companion and then we've got many many more browser relationships that were working on right now and I would say just that.

A

Just in general and I think that the decentralized web community has turned up the heat and browsers are paying attention in 2020, I, think I see on nodding there. This is not not true, I would say in 2019, because I was trying to talk to them, then as well as much and I think it was definitely not true in 2018, so I think things are actually or actually heating up.

A

So there's a bunch of stuff going on with Mozilla right now, as well with some projects they're looking at so we're just we're seeing a lot of a lot of action coming from a lot of different places. So our stats we've had more than 200,000 domains registered so far, there's more than 4,000 ipfs websites that are launched.

A

Yes, honestly, most of those are people trying to resell their domains right now, but there's about there's about 2,000 that are not that that are people doing other things as well, and all of this has happened essentially the past two months since the website tool started going, live and since the template tool started going live, so people are using and digging in non-technical users are digging in when, when the tools are easy enough, see I'm more than 12,000 unique etherium addresses with domains, and these users are looking for tools to build ipfs websites more easily.

A

So we've got traffic coming to our site. We've got these users that are looking for stuff to play with, so we would love to chat with anybody that thinks that their tool might be interesting to people who are trying to launch websites. Here are some companies that are building stuff with us right now.

A

It's some missing pieces that we have identified, which I'm sure are on top of mind for a lot of folks here.

A

Well, do you centralized database stuff so we're looking very closely at what textile orbit and and gun DB are working on in order to solve some of these problems, and we also have this this paid hosting problem.

A

So one of the themes that we've seen from customers so far or has been people who are formerly relying on YouTube for their business and they have living especially crypto content, has been getting censored on YouTube and so they're looking at the decentralized web, they kind of think it's not quite ready, but they're looking and you know, they'd be doing video video hosting. So you know incentive ization to make sure that that content works and it works fast, is super important.

A

So we're really excited about file coin and we think there's potentially a lot of demand here, especially if we can start getting getting video up, because that's the stuff that's expensive. So if you want to, if you want to consume a lot of fun, I think video customers are a good place to look. So that's one of the reasons why we've been talking to a lot of crypto youtubers.

A

We actually have a need for a template that would allow them to easily launch their videos and maybe charge for them or launch their videos and do like a monthly subscription. So that's an opportunity if anyone's interested so yeah, please PLEASE bill with us. So I mentioned the templates, there's also some dev and deploy tools. You know we're looking at some stuff that the fleek is doing the textile. Doing that a whole bunch of other folks are doing so. There's a lot of there's a lot of cool deploy tools that are coming out right now.

A

We would love to point that stuff. You know the best stuff to our users to our technical users. Who are you know who are looking for that domain resolution and any of your applications, while it's browser, zaps I'd love to talk about that. Also, the browser there's a link to our github. It's open source. Please fork! Please do whatever and if you have an app with users and you might want to sell domains, talk to us as well. Okay, that's um that's it yeah!

A

Let me stop here and open up for questions and say: I haven't really been watching the chat.

B

Awesome. Thank you so much bad.

B

Looks like you're getting a question from Thomas on intent device sharing as it relates to crypto crypto domains, yeah.

A

So the an incentive I sharing was a reference to the feature in the browser where you turn on the IP FS node, and the reason why you do it is because you know maybe the reason why you do it is because you can't you know view the website unless you agree to do that. That could be like one way that, but you could implement it, but the way that we defaulted to in our browser is you go to a website. You just have the option.

A

The button is there and you can just click store and share the website, and the idea is that the reason you would do that is because you care about what the websites saying so that that's all that's all I really meant, but I think there's, there's probably room in the market for both ideas that you know you have. You know you're incentivize, sharing for your uptime and stuff like that, but you could also imagine some sort of viral content or whatever that didn't even need the incentive, because people were just like you know.

A

This is great or maybe more realistically. This is offensive or something else like that we may I. Guess we don't really know what the what the what's going to be the viral moment for yeah for decentralized storage, stuff um and yes, I'll share the deck I'm, not sure where to do that, but I'll I'll do that. Second,.

B

In the chat or tweeted at us or whatever, okay.

A

B

Question from Juan are there things you need help with from pinning services in terms of storage, backup opportunities to help drive product success for you, yeah.

A

So pinning services- yes well, I think that for us, probably the biggest thing is going to be like trustless subscriptions for hosting stuff. You know so somebody wanting to reliably buy like one year above time, so all the stuff to make that happen. You know in you know this is essentially like filing plus subscriptions stuff. So that's like a really big area. I know: we've chatted with the textile folks and it sounds like they're working on some parts of that. That's not something that we've been working on directly, so we're definitely looking for help there.

A

So that's really that's a really big area. I would say the other really big area is the templates, so I know this is not necessarily the place that everyone's mind goes. First, how do I get non-technical users to launch websites?

A

I would say that one of the things that one of the impressions I get when I talk to a lot of tooling companies is that their customer theoretical customer many of their theoretical customers are other tooling companies who are also equally competent and therefore don't require, quite so many tooling companies.

A

Yet because, right now the pool of developers is much more than thine, but, like everyone knows, what's going on, and so I think the the Forgotten opportunity here a little bit is these non-technical users, who can crank out four thousand websites in six weeks and with just you know very, very simple. Like our templates, you terrible like we're gonna. We hope that they're all try they're all most of them are in the trash in a few months or at least modified to be.

A

You know it's definitely not anywhere near as good as what you would get going through a GoDaddy experience or something like that and there's all kinds of cool stuff that you could do here like so we've got. You know, there's like the marketplaces stuff like someone, what kind of like the origin team has been working on. So that's you know. A category blog with like a paywall is super obvious, we're working on versions of that, but we would embrace other people. You know launching those as well and again you can what happens on our site?

A

Is you buy a domain? And then you go what's next? I know I'm supposed to do something with ipfs. What's next and there's a large number of domains being being bought to some extent by people. Thinking that you know this is going to be. You know a future.

A

You know important registry, but there's a lot of people who are saying like I was around for the 1990s 2000s phase, I'm, trying to figure out what parking tools look like here: I'm trying to figure out how to I'm trying to figure out how to be first and I would launch 100 if I had the right type of things you know so we're seeing a lot of that stuff.

A

It's a long answer, but I think the templates are the place where you would get the most kind of immediate, immediate jolt from the dev tools, maybe less so.

B

Here, yeah I definitely I tried the experience of like forestry to flake, to decentralize name, and it works surprisingly. Well. So you just grabbed one of like the Hugo default templates off of forestry. I. Think there's a number of those like static site templates. It would be really cool to just like, like literally glue those things together where you can like one click like it, spins it up, it puts it in your github repo.

B

It connects it to fleek so that it put up on IP FS, and then it updates your your domain name like those little bits of like glue tooling that make it super seamless for everyone to get started. I think we're pretty amazing and would love to feel like you guys, are already headed straight in that direction, with like templates built into the domain name registry and and all those things there. So maybe forestry is the next partner there yeah.

A

We definitely definitely need to look closer in forestry and I. Think that just to jump on that because I think you're you're totally right, that's the goal. It requires a lot more stuff to be connected in together, and so we're really focused on that right now.

A

So we'd love to probably work with everybody honestly in some way and I also think that there's like a motivation, whatever there's, maybe to challenge the decentralized web community dphi already has this and it's awesome like the interconnectedness across all the gaps with the web 3 experiences being consistent across all these apps is amazing, and it's way further ahead than where the decentralized web is right now in terms of UX.

A

So I kind of see that, as like a I did a little bit of inspiration that, like it doesn't it does it's starting to work and I think we should be more like that all of our stuff should very easily stick together and be able to go in these like packages across all of these apps and that should that should be the vision. So it's basically like we just need to like pack up dozens of different tools all together and then make it really easy for everyone to access it. So yeah.

B

Modularity and composability I love it that was super cool I only was recently digging into all of the all the dphi tools that have put their front end up on ipfs, a lot of which are using unstoppable domains, which is super cool, and so it was really cool to dive deeper into that space. It's like oh wow. This is super critical for truly having a decentralized application with a smart contract. Back-End yeah.

A

One that just came up I think it was actually earlier today they fund, they got it up, which was Vulcan feedstock crypto I should have put it in the thing, which is a chain link feed, and so it, if you think about, if you think about a long term, relying on some sort of decentralized oracle system, you're, then also we're gonna need to make sure that there's no reliance on this web infrastructure that can just be taken down otherwise you're still gonna wind up with your data feed turned off at some point.

A

So it's the DAPs that it's the most obvious for I guess you know what, if you ask like who's.

B

The decentralized.

A

Web customer that absolutely needs to meet today I think it's the dabs, probably first because they're also on board to the tooling and then probably next would be like the like. The political distance like the like HK map, live like the that sort of stuff for Hong Kong, and things like that.

B

Any other questions for Brad.

B

Yes, yes, there are more question great write them down.

A

While the anticipation.

C

B

Would you put bounties on templates, I.

A

Yeah yeah, we we have a bounty up, I hope. It's still up. We had a thousand dollar bounty out previously, but yeah. We absolutely do so.

A

Yeah I see one going so yeah, we'll we'll definitely publish some numbers and we'll also I think make them bigger. That's a good idea.

B

Awesome I want.

A

B

Play roblox: okay, sorry.

A

Sorry, I just I just noticed one another one from haunt about about tooling. That would make our lives easier, or maybe I even addressed it partially, but I just realized. There's also this other thing, which is it would be good to have good user flows for, for you know like deploy, stuff and I know, there's a lot I'll. Do that and there's a lot of people that are working on great stuff and part of the problem, then, is then like who do you point to like where you know?

A

How do you just point to something simple that allows a developer to figure it out? So that's a that's a problem and we don't really. Unlike the templates, we don't the UI of that like how do you get into a developers may be a little.

C

Is clear so question on topic, so, given moderation being being a problem, how do you see the moderation question evolving and in the Kryptonite, so you have like I imagine fairly quickly. You people start was once these these domains like really really work that you were saying.

C

Various groups that have reasons to worry about censorship, we're gonna start using all of these things. How does he moderation evolving through these things or is it just kind of like a lot less or do you imagine like the there will be some some way of societies, moderating how names point point to a common yeah.

A

Totally so we have a philosophical view that the base layer should not have any censorship or filtering or anything of any kind, that basically the technology should not decide. What's. Okay and what's not, because ultimately, you'll then need to rely on some person or some group of people or some company or whatever to do that filtering and then it will just be abused. Just like the regular system is so it's basically like the only way to have a secure system is to have tools that take no opinion at the base layer.

A

But then you have the result of both the world we live in will be browsers. So, like browsers, are a point that may need to make decisions about, say, like don't wanna know like I, don't want to not show things that are so just so. People understand, like the record, can be on the blockchain, so I've got my name. I've got my IVFs fashioned on the blockchain. The main name can't be taken away from me. Nobody can update my record other than me, but a browser can simply ignore decide not to read that record.

A

So what the effect will be in the real world is that you could have 99.99% of browsers or other places that you're allowing you to view websites saying this is not okay and then you might need to view some open source or extremists or whatever tool in order to get access, and it could still be illegal just by virtue of access, and it could still be a crime in the place that you live, so that can that'll still wind up being for the things that are ant.

A

Super antisocial, that'll, still wind up being in the dark depths of the internet, just like it is today also not completely stopped, but I think that the benefit that you get in this new paradigm is that you'll have multiple versions of what's okay, to say, a free speech. Right now you have one.

B

A

The regular web- that's essentially whatever is adjudicated by governments and whoever pressuring the registries and the registrar's and and web hosting companies versus a future where you could have like a on chain filtered list of, or you know, block list of bad domains and applications can read that list and they can share and they can decide. Okay. Well, you know I'm going to out so I'm gonna prove I'm.

A

Gonna use this smart contract, which, hopefully is you know, being adjudicated by an ACLU or something like that and I'm gonna say like they're gonna different determine free speech and I'm gonna rely on them and then, if I decide that they're no longer ethical, I can switch to another one or I can provide filters in my browser for my users, where they can accept left-wing version of where free speech line is versus right-wing version versus maybe even no line whatsoever or you choose the line and you could have dozens of different versions of of the internet that we all chaotically move between.

A

If we want to I think it it's not that dissimilar from how the current internet works are how the current behavior of the internet works already. The difference is is that all the power is sitting in the individual users now, and you can't have you know companies allowing movie producers to go and just take people off like right now.

A

You have all kinds of weird ways that people manipulate the current system, so I'm not super worried about it, because I think that it's a better world that way I think that we'll get to I think we'll have like really good adjudicators of free speech, because that'll be a business opportunity like somebody. Actually, we actually need this service provider to come in and be like new blockchain focused, ACLU and analyze and determine where the line for free speech is, and then the Facebook's and the youtubes, and all these other companies don't have to.

A

They can just hit an endpoint and get their. You know answer on where the line for free speeches- and they don't have to be the moral arbiters anymore and that's better world.