I do not know of Solid. But IPFS is a storage layer, so you can use IPFS as part of Blockstack. It is even normally mentioned in the architecture diagrams. Have a look at the picture down on the page here: https://blockstack.org/intro

Where it says "storage layer" it has things like Dropbox and S3, in some versions of the picture it also has IPFS. This is up to the user. As long as you can fetch it, it can be used. Usually that would mean you'd have to use HTTP, but it depends on the browser you're running.

You can also read about 'Gaia' (where it uses storage as Dropbox/S3 as 'dumb harddrives' where it can dump encrypted blobs on) in the whitepaper: https://blockstack.org/whitepaper.pdf

Blockstack project originally ran on namecoin. But it is not a secure blockchain.

Also, it stores much data in the blockchain, so it has scaling problems. Blockstack stores the zone file data in its own Atlas (DHT-inspired) network, and the zone files point to where the actual application-level data is stored.

Blockstack can work on top of any blockchain, so if Bitcoin is not the most secure anymore, it could be moved. Separating into different layers allows scaling and resiliency. And you don't have to run a blockchain, which is good, because that already exists.

You're burning that money. Noone gets it. If it costs 0.025 btc you're trying to register a very short name. Try a longer one, it's a lot cheaper.

I've registered an ID. I did it through onename.com which pays the registration fee for you (as a way to get more people into it, it won't stay that way).

Read the blockstack papers, they're the best info around and makes everything clearer. It is a bit hard to wrap heads around. I've been trying to unsuccessfully explain it many times, there's so many good ideas and so much potential there!

(I'm unaffiliated btw, but have been following the project for a long time)

No. The data record hash is only about your zone file. The zone file is just like DNS. It can point to different things. So say you point 'profile' to 'mywebsite.com/myprofile.json', and then in your profile you can update things about yourself independently. Just make sure to always attach a signature to it, so people can verify that you actually did that.

Here's a profile: https://blockstack.s3.amazonaws.com/muneeb.id

Here's how a simple zone file looks (from https://onename.com/muneeb.json):

  $ORIGIN muneeb.id
  $TTL 3600
  _http._tcp IN URI 10 1 "https://blockstack.s3.amazonaws.com/muneeb.id"

No, you don't need the whole internet.

You can't run application code with just pure HTML. The processing code has to run somewhere. Blockstack runs it using Javascript in your browser, and with bring your own storage.

Only naming (identity) is pegged to Bitcoin, blockstack has a virtual blockchain on top of this which has functionality akin to DNS (and CA). That DNS can point to your storage, so you can have things on Dropbox or Amazon S3 or wherever.

So it scales pretty well, you don't download what you're not interested it. It will work with a lot of infrastructre/services that exist, but you can cut out a lot of middle men.

You could host your application code on your Amazon S3. But when a user runs it, the app can store private data in THEIR chosen storage. And if you have public data, that could be either stored with their chosen storage without encryption (only signature) so it is public, or indeed you could store it in your application storage.

How does this free you from corporate masters then? Is this to prevent governments from seizing your DNS when they can't get access to the hosting?

This is so wrong I don't even know what to say.

Python is a beautiful object oriented language. Very much so.

Java is not different at all, I'd say go for Haskell or similar to get something really truly dif

Python has all of the constituent parts of an OO language, save explicit types, but it is never written in an OO style.

Using classes != OO.

Generally, Python programmers treat objects as structs with associated methods, basically the Go model. Python programmers rarely encapsulate at all. At best, they use a bunch of accessors (which is not itself OO). Implementation details are rarely hidden.

That's because dynamically-typed languages, the interpreter, and the Python culture, lend themselves more to exploratory programming, rather than a UML-design, with objects that relate to real-world entities, that are implemented after careful planning.

If you can show me a Python program where objects are really encapsulated, and aren't chock-full of accessors, I'll stand happily corrected.

Oh, can you point to something here? Some vision document, brainstorming, back-of-napkin spec? Anything?

I would not be surprised to find out that many open source communities would love to switch to a better list software than Mailman. It would need to work well for the main list use case of course - so that switching would cost nothing and people could connect to the waves in their own time.

They started pump.io instead. Which is a much more low-level project than StatusNet. Trying to build a federation-server that other people can make services on top of.

Trying to win a market that way. If only one popular site starts to use it, -- you might be getting some network effect out of it.

I think it was a better level to work on. Let others help with the network.

Yes it should :-) I had to do quite a bit of research to find out who maintains that page and could update it. But found them in the end and that papercut is reported. I'll check it again tomorrow to see if it has been fixed :-)