Uber for Internet

My follow-on from my last post, Uber for Cats, I am jokingly calling “Uber for Internet.” Read the whole thing over on the EI company blog.

I’ll admit, we came out the gate a bit with our heads too deep in the tech and not enough in what our users and developers needed to hear.  Expressing things simply is more art than science – and we’re working on getting into our users’ and developers’ heads, as that’s precisely where we need to be.

We’re also working on getting the messaging right for the general, non-blockchain-using public – no easy task, given how quickly this space moves.

For the latter purpose, you’ll be glad to hear that I’ve consulted some top experts in how the non-blockchain-literate general public looks at distributed computing systems (namely, my parents). The result of these consultations over the Christmas holiday is the following very minimalist interpretation (see picture below) of what Eris does, drawn by my mother, who likens peer-to-peer blockchain logic which creates a hard-to-retroactively-forge, fault-tolerant transaction history to… two computers knitting a sweater.

As it happens, this is a strangely appropriate analogy to describe a merkle tree (particularly in terms of describing what a pain in the ass it would be to fraudulently swap out a transaction and recompute a blockchain from scratch).

To recap:

• Sweater = blockchains. 
• Incumbent cloud/server/application providers = unhappy. 
• Peer network = happy, automated, free, and distributed.  

So yeah. It’s basically Uber for Internet. When in Rome, right?