Sovereign vs. Cloud Computing

Why Sovereign Computing is the natural extension of Bitcoin's principles

Last year, the Bitcoin VC Fund Ten31 introduced me to Start9, one of their portfolio companies. Start9 is pioneering a new era of sovereign computing. Start9 sells a standalone hardware device that can run a Bitcoin full node by itself. They sent me a sample device to show in my class, and one of my students, James Rude, made a video for the class that you can watch here.

Enter Sovereign Computing

One of the philosophical innovations of Bitcoin is the greater control of individual property rights. In traditional finance, ownership of assets is outsourced to third parties like banks. The cryptography underneath Bitcoin gives users direct ownership of their assets and money in a way that cannot be confiscated by third parties like governments, corporations, or other people.

This primacy of property rights is a hallmark of Bitcoin's design, and runs through much of its implementation. For example, anyone running a full node has their own copy of the Bitcoin blockchain on their local hard drive. Users need not rely on internet APIs or websites to verify their funds, but can simply search data on their own local disk. This is a substantial change from the current dominant paradigm of cloud computing, where most data has shifted to third-party platforms like AWS or Microsoft Azure.

There is an admittedly small technical barrier to running your own node. You'll need to acquire the hard drive, download the software, download all the blocks, and sync it on a regular basis. It's not a huge amount of effort, but enough to prevent most people from doing it. Start9 solved this problem by giving you a turnkey package, in which you simply plug the unit into your router and connect directly to that unit from your computer. Think of it as a hard drive plus dedicated machine all-in-one, which is constantly synced to the Bitcoin blockchain, not requiring you to run a full node separately on an existing PC.

The convenience of a dedicated machine is attractive. However, I believe the real value of sovereign computing will grow as the Bitcoin ecosystem develops. As the second and third-layer applications come alive on Bitcoin, all of these will benefit from running off of local machines. More importantly, it's a reminder of the principle of property rights, which is existential to the Bitcoin ethos.

Cloud Computing