Muneeb Ali is on a quest to restore your fundamental digital rights

I was instantly inspired by the leader in Muneeb: when I discovered him, I felt the urge to gather a few takeaways that I found from a discussion of him with Ari Paul. Have a look:

We believe in the freedom to exit that shifts the control to the users

At first I want to point out our philosophy there: we really believe in the freedom to exit, and I think that this is a very important digital right. This applies to crypto currencies where I have the freedom to exit coinbase whenever I want because the bitcoins are going to travel on a decentralized network and they can go to another exchange and coinbase is always going to operate with that model in mind that they can lose their customers to other exchanges. This is very different from being able to exit Facebook or other centralized parties. In many ways the work we are doing is enabling freedom to exit for these apps so you can exit Facebook as easily as you can withdraw your bitcoins from a wallet or an exchange. So I think that shifts the control to the users and then it is the user’s decision if they want to trust a 3rd party

Muneeb Ali May 23rd, 2019

We both agreed that we want the simple based infrastructure layer

We both agreed that we want the simple based infrastructure layer. The danger there is that it is fragile, you’re exposed to a single systemic risk.

The financial system doesn’t worry about this that much because there is the fall back to legal. If hackers change an account balance in a chase account and give themselves 10 billion dollars they know they’re not going to get away with it, it is just going to get reversed. When they try to get away with it, it’s a timing issue. the bank of Indonesia had 200 million dollars stolen and they did it during a long holiday weekend: they disabled the printers inside so the people would be distracted, they literally disabled the printer that prints out the giant wires and that allowed 24 hours for the thieves to move the money around and get away with it.

With cryptos I’ve heard the same thing suggested, “miners can’t hurt bitcoin at all because users can just blacklist them. ” Andreas Antonopopoulos would throw that out as almost a given: he would be like “anyone who says governments can censor bitcoin or miners or consortium or 99% of hashpower are idiots because we would just block them.”

Users of bitcoin as a whole would on a dynamic ongoing way black list a rotating set of IP addresses? I don’t think so…

Ari Paul May 23rd, 2019

So much to learn from this podcast:

https://omny.fm/shows/stacks/ari-paul-and-muneeb-ali-on-scalability-custody-and