AT Protocol is 'web three, the good parts' — it uses cryptography for signing (like Git), drops the global ordering constraint of blockchains, and achieves decentralization in the shape of the web itself rather than through a shared ledger.

41:45hear the word decentralized or any of that like you instantly go to crypto. I mean are there lessons from crypto here? Is there any any connection at all? >> Well, I like to think of at Praa is like web three. The good parts uh but the good parts uh you know not not a lot. [laughter] Um I think the like the closer like it's you know it's

42:11crypto in the sense of cryptography. So the lessons are um it's kind of like one failure or like maybe not failure of RSS but if you want to scale a network that is you know like all these like hosts and the data flows to the apps you want to have intermediate nodes like you want to have this kind of retransmitters like relays uh which makes it easy to like as

42:39an app developer like I just want to listen to one websocket that tells me about everything that's relevant to my app so I can just feed it into my database, right? Like I want it to be simple. I don't want to think about crawling or subscribing or whatever. I like I just want to listen to one websocket. So that is, you know, some somebody can run a service like this. So

42:58like Blue Sky runs one, there's a bunch of independent ones. Uh but how do you trust that it's not, you know, it's not lying about the content that's flowing through it? And so the solution is kind of the same as in Git, right? In g you can sign commits. >> So uh the signature travels with the like the the data itself contains enough information that you can verify that it

43:23was actually signed by the person whose like public key you know. So that is how like the some lessons from cryp like cryptography is really that the content like the event stream is signed but in that sense it's closer in lineage to uh maybe git or you know like uh I don't know bit torrent or like some of those other things that are not about blockchain and the only thing that is

43:52because like in I think like people try to build social stuff on blockchain but is super inefficient because there's a bottleneck of like every right is like an append to a single kind of shared queue. >> Yeah. >> But this this is only this only makes sense when you have a when you have requirement that uh well first like everything is append only. So if you put

44:17some bad stuff there like it's going to be there forever. Another problem is that it's um well it's very inefficient and the I think the big insight for for it prior developers was that actually you don't need global ordering on the event log and if you drop the glo global ordering constraint like everything is in a single queue it actually becomes just the web so the shape of it is really like is

44:44decentralized but it's decentralized in the sense that the web is like when I use a browser you don't really think about oh like I'm accessing a decentralized network. You just click on links. >> Yeah. >> So this is kind of similar like in in that shape. >> It's a good way to put it. Does any of this stuff have anything built like it is it good or bad for abuse? Um because