You own your car, what about the software that runs it?
How about the items you buy on digital platforms? Are you able to take your items beyond the walled garden? And what about user-generated content? Can you always access it or share it? Everything in our world is temporal on some time scale. Platforms are born, and over time, they die. Within this lifecycle, the normal we’ve grown accustomed to is:
When you buy digital items, most of the time you are really purchasing a non-transferable license that can be canceled at any time at the sole discretion of the licensor
When you create content using a given platform’s tools, you may or may not retain ownership of your content, or access to your content
When a platform dies, you will lose access to everything you’ve purchased, and everything you created
We would love for there to be a new normal. What if it is possible to shift trust to math and code instead of trusted platforms? What if when you buy a digital item, you truly own it and can transfer it beyond the walls of any platform? What if when you create content, you can set rules around that content, and retain any rights you choose? What if you no longer have to trust platforms that change their rules or disappear overnight? Someday, we hope Tari will enable this new normal. We imagine something that is:
Censorship resistant - a decentralized blockchain network that is expensive to censor so that anyone can interact within the system without fear of their access getting cut off.
Permissionless - anyone can interact with the network to innovate and create value without jumping through legal and contractual loops beyond those that are specified in the code.
Immutable - once data has been committed, it cannot be reversed.
Open Source - a high certainty system that is community-owned and operated and changes in a regular and predictable way.
The internet has taken off due to public infrastructure, open-source values, and predictability; this created platform certainty and trust without intermediaries, which enables tremendous value to be built and generated by a wide array of constituents. We hope that Tari will be just as useful as the internet is for digital assets.
Please join us this Friday to your thoughts on digital ownership and anything related to Tari. (16:00 UTC, 9:00 PDT, 18:00 SADT).
Ways to get involved:
Are you a developer? Talk to us at #tari-dev on Freenode IRC and make your first contribution from our list of starter issues.
Forward this email to others interested in the intersection of privacy, decentralization, and digital assets.