I work with a growing number of amazing cryptocurrency and decentralized application projects.
Last month, I braved the fifteen-hour, two-stop flight to Budapest for a chance to get together with some of the brightest minds in crypto: The PIVX and Fermat teams.
I loved Fermat’s overlap with my Cicada project ideas so much that I’m working to backport as many of those concepts into it as possible. You can check out the talk I gave on the decentralized Internet of the future in Budapest at Fermat Summit.
Together, our three communities are a big and growing family. PIVX came up with this beautiful image of a table as a metaphor for how people work together. It’s family. Just like family, we don’t always agree, but we find a way to work it out and for people with different views to reach common ground.
But here’s the thing:
We know we’re not the only ones out there working on awesome decentralized applications and frictionless cryptos.
There are a number of fantastic projects, all at various stages, focusing on different aspects of the problem from different angles.
There’s Maidsafe, Matrix plus Riot, Tezos, QTUM, Block.One, Golem, Syscoin, Blockstack, Consensys, DAOStack, DigiByte, Coinomi, Jaxx, Exodus, Electrum, IPFS, Synereo, Signal, NEM, Backfeed, Ethereum, Bitcoin, and many, many more.
Ask yourself this:
Why are we all working on this in silos?
What would happen if we all worked together?
That’s why we’re setting up a crypto consortium, DecStack, short for Decentralized Stack, an umbrella organization to unite the best minds in the crypto universe.
If you’re out there working on decentralized apps and crypto, we want you!
We’re not saying leave your project behind. No way. We’re saying maybe you’re missing a marketing person or a UX designer? Come into the fold and find them. Come network, meet people, let your ideas cross-pollinate and get sharper through interaction with others.
How do we do that?
We just set up a free MatterMost server for all of you to come use at no cost.
Think of it as a virtual co-working space for decentralized projects.
Pop over the website and hit the link to get a MatterMost invite on the home page.
Mattermost is an open-source alternative to Slack. Why not Slack? Because we all use Slack but we all hate that they hold our data hostage.
Slack is like the Mafia. You can get in, but you can’t get out. You’ve hit 10,000 messages? Now pay up suckers. Screw that. We can do better as a community.
In the future we’re planning to set up individualized Mattermost servers for each project that wants one that’s free for life. We’re figuring out some funding wrinkles for it now. But we do know this:
You’ll control it. We’ll have no access unless you want us to have some as a regular user.
And you know what? We’re just going to give it away. No strings attached. It’s yours. We’re giving back without expectations.
This is all a work in progress. The server could use some load balancing, the website could stand a polish and we will want to extend MatterMost with some bots and additional features. But right now, it’s ready for us to get rolling. And you know what? We’ll do those things together, as a community.
If you’re working on a decentralized project, pop over to DecStack and get your invite. That’s where you can network and find other like minds for your projects or collaborate with sister projects.
Together we can stack the deck against centralization forever.
So come into the fold. Join us. Socialize. Work together. Share code and ideas. Make your ideas better through feedback. Find new friends. Meet your new family.
Decentralized apps of the world unite!
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A bit about me: I’m an author, engineer and serial entrepreneur. During the last two decades, I’ve covered a broad range of tech from Linux to virtualization and containers.
You can check out my latest novel, an epic Chinese sci-fi civil war saga where China throws off the chains of communism and becomes the world’s first direct democracy, running a highly advanced, artificially intelligent decentralized app platform with no leaders.
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You can get a FREE copy of my first novel, The Scorpion Game, when you join my Readers Group. Readers have called it “the first serious competition to Neuromancer” and “Detective noir meets Johnny Mnemonic.”
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You can also check out the Cicada open source project based on ideas from the book that outlines how to make that tech a reality right now and you can get in on the alpha.
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Lastly, you can join my private Facebook group, the Nanopunk Posthuman Assassins, where we discuss all things tech, sci-fi, fantasy and more.