Zbay, Fighting FAANG, and the Quest for a P2P Messaging App That "Just Works"

Holmes Wilson Sunday, August 2, 2020: 1600. We live in a time of tech monopolies, again. We escaped Microsoft's 90s desktop monopoly to hurtle into the FAANG monopolies, by walking a path where browsers, OSes, and developer tools might be free softw...

Holmes Wilson

Sunday, August 2, 2020: 1600. We live in a time of tech monopolies, again. We escaped Microsoft's 90s desktop monopoly to hurtle into the FAANG monopolies, by walking a path where browsers, OSes, and developer tools might be free software, but the platforms we used to connect and collaborate were more locked down than ever. But what if free software was not just a window to a locked down world? What if the world "out there" where we speak and collaborate emerged exclusively from free software running on our laptops and phones, connecting in a peer-to-peer network? The p2p "stack" is growing fast in maturity and capability; how far can we take it? Messaging apps seem to be the most popular user-facing software; can we make one of those? This talk will survey approaches to p2p messaging apps and discuss tradeoffs in the context of a specific app: Zbay, which is being built based on Zcash and Tor, and which just launched in beta.