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0:00:00 – Intro
0:01:11 – Nora introduces Steven Ross Talbot
0:03:28 – Steve talks about his history, growing up in the uk, the son of South African Cape Cod mother and an Irish / English father. Grew up an area in the UK called Dover. Was one of only 3 non white kids in his school. Suffered racism, but got good at one thing – stopped being characterized by my color and started being characterized by something he was good at – running!
0:05:46 – went to Leeds to study computer science. Led to a career in computer science
0:07:00 – started a company called Spirit Soft in 1997
0:08:30 – in 2004 joined W3C – invited by Tim Berners Lee to chair something
0:10:03 – had been liaisoning with the π calculus community – became introduced to Greg Meredith
0:11:15 – Greg went to the board and said: “If you do an execution language, you’ll be killed in the crush, but if you do a description language, from which execution may be derived and proved, then you’ll be onto something that’s really useful that can code this. And to do that, these are the things you should look at, and one of them is π calculus.”
0:12:40 – then ended up through various companies at Thoughtworks. I was tired of the old ways of working – Thoughtworks operate kind of like a collective.
0:14:17 – ended up doing two other things – first: joined RChain the coop – RChain Europe – given the task to do digital democracy. Out of that collaboration came the intro to Richard Barbrook
0:17:17 – all ideas are a network – RChain Publishing came from the Covid passport. I gave a video demo and Raphael and Theo knocked on my discord door and said they were working on something called RFM: RChain File Manager – that was the beginning of RDrive and RChain Publishing. Then the 3 signature model for attestation was born. From there, the storing of a photograph was born – storage and attestation.
0:22:40 – Along the way, did a 3 week stint with a different company called Iden3. I needed money. Told Greg I was doing this. Greg said wouldn’t it be better if you worked for RChain. The reason why Iden3 wasn’t for me, was that the architecture of their blockchain was wrong.
0:24:45 – so when Greg cut the contract it was a no brainer, and out of that RPC was born.
0:25:25 – trying out the notion of being a Limited Cooperative Association, a new form of off-chain governance. Patron members get a sense of ownership.
0:27:55 – it’s not just setting up a company, it’s much more than that.
0:29:04 – beginnings of RDrive – Theo and Bill, while David is working on a marketplace
0:31:06 – on our website: we are claiming to be the greenest NFT platform, because we are on the greenest blockchain on the planet.
0:32:54 – Steve Henley question: one aspect is search – one key aspect of Web 2.0 is search.
0:33:54 – all other blockchains have this really crazy addressing system – no search. RChain does that deliberately. Having the notion of a URI on the blockchain itself. Imagine the web without URI’s? You wouldn’t have search!
0:39:00 – Steve H – I like the use case that you mentioned as far as being able to share someone’s RDrive.
0:43:07 – Greg – people are beginning to understand just how much RChain is organized around data. Also what people have not yet understood about RChain is that it is part of a progression. Not just keeping up with what we had from the web, but going beyond that – the OSLF algorithm – once you have theses sophisticated type mechanisms – they become search mechanisms for a wide variety of knowledge bases.
0:47:18 – it wasn’t a secret back at the beginning of the WWW, the aim was a semantic web, but the tools were far short of the goal – with rholang we can work on a real semantic web.
0:49:33 – we should begin to openly speak about how RChain and RDrive provide an alternative to IPFS
0:51:07 – we can approach lots of different chains and say – “we think that you would like an on chain data solution that would sit under your chain”
0:52:58 – SRT – earth day – speaking to the Ecole 42 students – my pet project is the UN refugee passport – left that out as a challenge to them