John Backus's guest appearances

John Backus

Village Global's Venture Stories

Bitcoin Audible

Tony Sheng

Nik Bhatia

Jimmy Song

Phil Bonello

Dan Held

Saifedean Ammous

Mike Maples

Michael Goldstein

Stephan Kinsella

Nic Carter

Avichal Garg

Lyn Alden

Dhruv Bansal

Vijay Boyapati

Nozomi Hayase

OwlTail

Today we cover another great piece on the topic of what can be learned from the history of P2P protocols and their successes &amp; failures.  Written by John Backus @backus, his article "Minimum Viable Decentralization," lays out a concept that may have been the deciding factor that separated the winners and losers in the file sharing revolution.  Why did BitTorrent succeed even without a discovery mechanism and its lack of privacy, when technology like Freenet, or iMule offered vastly better privacy and security than alternatives?  Listen to find out.Plus, don't miss my commentary on how this concept, plus others from recent reads, could be applied to the Bitcoin/Lightning stack as well as other altcoins and blockchain applications.  There is an entirely new ecosystem at stake, not learning from the failures of the file sharing years could be a recipe for disaster. Don't miss this one.Follow John Backus on Twitter (https://twitter.com/backus) and don't forget to drop applause on his amazing collection of works over on Medium (https://medium.com/@jbackus/minimum-viable-decentralization-d813dcf653fc)Listen to the previous episode by Backus mentioned in the commentary here (https://anchor.fm/thecryptoconomy/episodes/CryptoQuikRead_141---Fat-Protocols-Arent-New-e2ndq4)--- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/bitcoinaudible/message

Today we cover another great piece on the topic of what can be learned from the history of P2P protocols and their successes &amp; failures.  Written by John Backus @backus, his article "Minimum Viable Decentralization," lays out a concept that may have been the deciding factor that separated the winners and losers in the file sharing revolution.  Why did BitTorrent succeed even without a discovery mechanism and its lack of privacy, when technology like Freenet, or iMule offered vastly better privacy and security than alternatives?  Listen to find out. Plus, don't miss my commentary on how this concept, plus others from recent reads, could be applied to the Bitcoin/Lightning stack as well as other altcoins and blockchain applications.  There is an entirely new ecosystem at stake, not learning from the failures of the file sharing years could be a recipe for disaster. Don't miss this one. Follow John Backus on Twitter (<a href="https://twitter.com/backus" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://twitter.com/backus</a>) and don't forget to drop applause on his amazing collection of works over on Medium (<a href="https://medium.com/@jbackus/minimum-viable-decentralization-d813dcf653fc" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://medium.com/@jbackus/minimum-viable-decentralization-d813dcf653fc</a>) Listen to the previous episode by Backus mentioned in the commentary here (<a href="https://anchor.fm/thecryptoconomy/episodes/CryptoQuikRead_141---Fat-Protocols-Arent-New-e2ndq4" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://anchor.fm/thecryptoconomy/episodes/CryptoQuikRead_141---Fat-Protocols-Arent-New-e2ndq4</a>) --- Send in a voice message: <a href="https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/bitcoinaudible/message" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/bitcoinaudible/message</a>

CryptoQuikRead_228 - Minimum Viable Decentralization [John Backus]

On this episode of Venture Stories, Erik is joined by co-host Tony Sheng to interview John Backus (@backus), founder of Bloom and Cognito, two companies working on decentralized lending and identity.Co-host Tony Sheng (@tonysheng) leads product at Decentraland. He also publishes analyses on the business and strategy of crypto at tonysheng.com and is one of Village’s Network Leaders.John recently wrote a popular post about the history of decentralized peer-to-peer file sharing in the late 1990s and early 2000s. He joins Erik and Tony to expand on the post and talk about what that history can teach us about decentralization today.He takes us through the history of file sharing apps from Napster to Kazaa to BitTorrent. He explains why the way BitTorrent is architected “doesn’t make sense” from a technical point of view and why the legal system has had such an impact on the way BitTorrent works.John explains some of the legal challenges to peer-to-peer sharing and how they’ve adjusted. The push to decentralize is often considered a recent phenomenon but he describes a number of projects from many years ago that are actually pretty similar to what people are attempting to build today. He even talks about an early version of a token that was created by a decentralized file sharing service back in the early 2000s.He concludes with why a number of these projects didn’t succeed and what lessons they have for decentralized projects today. He explains that the UX of decentralized services is often very poor, which makes it “an order of magnitude harder to find product-market fit.”Thanks for listening — if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform. Check us out on the web at villageglobal.vc or get in touch with us on Twitter @villageglobal.Venture Stories is brought to you by Village Global, is hosted by co-founder and partner Erik Torenberg and is produced by Brett Bolkowy.

On this episode of Venture Stories, Erik is joined by co-host Tony Sheng to interview John Backus (@backus), founder of Bloom and Cognito, two companies working on decentralized lending and identity. Co-host Tony Sheng (@tonysheng) leads product at Decentraland. He also publishes analyses on the business and strategy of crypto at <a href="http://tonysheng.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">tonysheng.com</a> and is one of Village’s Network Leaders. John recently wrote a popular post about the history of decentralized peer-to-peer file sharing in the late 1990s and early 2000s. He joins Erik and Tony to expand on the post and talk about what that history can teach us about decentralization today. He takes us through the history of file sharing apps from Napster to Kazaa to BitTorrent. He explains why the way BitTorrent is architected “doesn’t make sense” from a technical point of view and why the legal system has had such an impact on the way BitTorrent works. John explains some of the legal challenges to peer-to-peer sharing and how they’ve adjusted. The push to decentralize is often considered a recent phenomenon but he describes a number of projects from many years ago that are actually pretty similar to what people are attempting to build today. He even talks about an early version of a token that was created by a decentralized file sharing service back in the early 2000s. He concludes with why a number of these projects didn’t succeed and what lessons they have for decentralized projects today. He explains that the UX of decentralized services is often very poor, which makes it “an order of magnitude harder to find product-market fit.” Thanks for listening — if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform. Check us out on the web at <a href="http://villageglobal.vc" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">villageglobal.vc</a> or get in touch with us on Twitter @villageglobal. Venture Stories is brought to you by Village Global, is hosted by co-founder and partner Erik Torenberg and is produced by Brett Bolkowy.

Rethinking The Merits of Decentralization with John Backus