New era of personal computing
On this blog I’ve talked a lot about blockchain technology recently. And while blockchains certainly are disruptive to how we use and agree on shared information, or run shared applications, they aren’t changing how we do general purpose computing, or personal computing.
What is personal computing?
Storing or reading private documents, storing emails or maintaining private todo-lists, these are examples of personal computing. Truly personal computing should be available to you, on your conditions, on any of your devices.
Today, the only way to do personal computing is to stay on a single device (e.g. your laptop), or put it “in the cloud”, which is basically another person’s computer. And while sharing data in the cloud can be private, the Internet infrastructure, as we know it, isn’t designed to easily let us own our data. Someone else will always control your data, or your applications, for you. This is problematic for many obvious reasons.
Disruption
There’s a couple of very interesting projects that are innovating in this space. Perhaps the most interesting ones are Blockstack and Ceptr. Blockstack, in particular, is a very clean and user-friendly approach to this problem, which I mostly likely will be writing more about in the future.