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John Backus Profile picture
John Backus
@backus
Shameless, dissonant, and obsessive. Founder and CTO @getcognito (acquired by @Plaid)
May 20, 2021 • 13 tweets • 7 min read
Announcing: Flow, by @getcognito: A beautiful drop-in ID verification product with:

🌎 high quality global data coverage
🕵️‍♀️ powerful anti-fraud tools
🪄 simple, no-code customization

We have worked SO hard on this.

Thread showing off some of the coolest features 👇 First, context: Flow is an identity verification product. It handles:

• Verifying typed in data (name, birthday, SSN) & photos of physical IDs
• Checking gov watchlists
• Fraud detection

@getcognito is widely used in fintech and crypto. We've probably processed your data 😇
Apr 21, 2021 • 13 tweets • 4 min read
Update: I moved to Miami 🙃 A bunch of people have asked why, so...

Thread on how I switched from loving SF to moving 👇
Jun 29, 2020 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
2010: Digg users fled to Reddit over redesigns @alexisohanian called "VC meddling," betraying principle of "giving power to the people"

Today, Reddit banned 2k subreddits! "Major expansion" of rules.

Does this give power to the people? Is this meddling?

theverge.com/2020/6/29/2130… Famous @pmarca quote comes to mind:

> The problem with network effects is they unwind just as fast. And so they’re great while they last, but when they reverse, they reverse viciously.

Not sure if today is the day, but I have to imagine the Great Unwinding is coming for Reddit!
Nov 26, 2018 • 6 tweets • 3 min read
Discussed my favorite internet history w/ @eriktorenberg + @tonysheng. Themes:

• How does decentralization evolve?
• "Minimum viable decentralization" and UX
• Tokenization + monetizing decentralization

Full episode: overcast.fm/+LDKfi3AII

Thread w/ timestamped sections 👇 How do we understand the waves of decentralization for p2p? Starting w/ centralized mp3 sharing in '97, why did get BitTorrent + The Pirate Bay in '06?

Each wave's tech + go-to-market behavior was shaped by historical legal action!

Link to section: overcast.fm/+LDKfi3AII/4:05
Nov 10, 2018 • 7 tweets • 3 min read
Early FB users demanded privacy but _actually_ wanted an information asymmetry over their friends. Each user wants both…

🔐 Control over how they specifically are perceived. "Who can see what?"
🕵️ Power to internet stalk their friends way more than they'd ever admit Facebook's user need doublethink (privacy, but also voyeurism) translates into a similar product subtext: feel private, but actually minimize user-on-user privacy while providing plausible deniability. Quell outrage with opt-in privacy tools, but default everyone into no privacy
Oct 29, 2018 • 7 tweets • 4 min read
Failed early internet businesses seem awfully familiar.

> I basically think all the ideas of the 90s that everybody had about how this stuff was going to work, I think they were all right, they were all correct. I think they were just early — @pmarca

Thread 👇 2004 attempt to build Tinder. Short phone calls instead of texting on a mobile app.
Oct 17, 2018 • 10 tweets • 4 min read
BitTorrent is a well-tuned game-theoretic system during download and a tragedy of the commons after. Private trackers turn the commons into a poorly tuned centrally planed economy (big improvement).

Let's reframe private trackers in economic terms and tune the system!

Thread 👇 Private torrent trackers enforce upload/download ratio requirements. This is actually an "upload credit" centralized currency in disguise!

For example, a 0.25 minimum ratio requirement can be reframed as a credit system:

Credits = (4 * upload) - download
Sep 12, 2018 • 24 tweets • 10 min read
Interested in decentralization today? Learn what worked in the 2000s for p2p file sharing:

⚖️ Decentralization is a legal tactic used alongside activism
⌛ Decentralizing the wrong things is a waste of time
☠️ Decentralizing everything is suicide by bad UX

Thread! 👇 Decentralization should shadow the law it is trying to avoid. Chronology of popular p2p file sharing apps:

1999: Napster
2002: Kazaa
2005: BitTorrent

Each app degraded its UX and altered its protocol for better legal protection.
Sep 4, 2018 • 14 tweets • 4 min read
Stare at each icon below for a sec. Imagine it's your phone. How does each make you feel?

That feeling says so much about the product. Notification behavior is one of the most important aspects of mobile UX to get right to in the long run.

Thread! 👇 Compare how each makes you feel now vs. years ago. For me:

• FB's used to be exciting, now its birthdays, group posts, other BS. They're hyperinflating it to zero
• Unlike FB, Snapchat's usually means a social interaction
• SMS is decent, but automated texts are devaluing it
Jul 16, 2018 • 9 tweets • 3 min read
Decentralization enthusiasts: Why didn't decentralized BitTorrent search takeoff? Many tried: en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?ti…

Not rhetorical, I'd love ideas. I'll share a few theories below 👇 Theory 1: Decentralized search doesn't help improve user experience. In-app search is a liability since courts eventually ruled that Limewire and Kazaa should have added client-side copyright filters. PopcornTime is a torrent specific example of in-app search attracting lawsuits
Jul 5, 2018 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Music industry wasn't just anti-tech

By 2000, they were addicted to inflated revenue: album bundling and illegal price fixing meant you payed $15 for a $10 album to get a $1 song.

Even if $1 songs replaced piracy, revenue would fall by ~90%. More for fixed price streaming. Recording industry couldn't adapt to the internet because >90% of their revenue was artificially inflated.

$15 albums online won't kill Napster. iTunes/Spotify may, but that is almost as bad.

Lesson: Bezos-style thin margins mean your rev model can't be used against you
Jul 3, 2018 • 23 tweets • 5 min read
🏦 Tokens are always presented alongside speculative decentralized tech. How can we understand tokens if we don't get the product?

Let's talk about tokenizing a protocol you know: BitTorrent

Getting tokenization right could create an efficient market for content.

Thread 👇 Do you know why BitTorrent is so fast? The protocol uses game theory in interesting ways to make sure others upload while they download.

In other words, it already uses economics as a tool for optimizing protocol incentives

Jun 29, 2018 • 10 tweets • 3 min read
You can view decentralization and cryptography as generalized tools for obeying the letter of the law but not the spirit.

I think the way they can systematically subvert legal precedent will eventually lead to impossibly tough Supreme Court issues.

Thread 👇 Napster’s death started the decentralization-case law mind game.

Napster’s centralized search made it liable for infringement

What do Kazaa/Limewire do? Package search into a protocol NO ONE owns. Historical case law wasn’t built for this. Nextgen p2p went to the supreme court
Jun 20, 2018 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
🐎 This crypto-fueled decentralized protocol craze is an antitrust trojan horse. Do people calling to break up Big Tech realize Silicon Valley might accidentally trust-bust itself? 💢

Ex: Twitter couldn’t freeze out 3rd party apps like it has if backend was decentralized 🔐 The blockchain ecosystem is also investing insane amounts of cash into finding viable UI for interacting w/ private keys.

This may help privacy advocates find ways to make the equivalent of GPG emails (and much more) easier to use and accessible in key apps like the browser
Jun 6, 2018 • 25 tweets • 9 min read
Blockchain world can learn a lot from p2p file sharing era

😡 Incentive issues (most shared NOTHING, tons of fake files + viruses)
🤝 Lots of attempted market mechanisms (from game theory to tokens) to fix incentives
💰 Monetization lessons
🍴 Forking vs governance

Thread 👇 Tokens are clearly good for balancing incentives. p2p attempts from 15+ years ago:

• Mojo: a liquidatable token to incentivize sharing storage, bandwidth, CPU
• eMule credits for upload/download
• Lots of research on p2p tokens (PPay, PeerMint, PeerMart)
• Kazaa PeerPoints
Apr 8, 2018 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
Reddit is a great tool for bootstrapping new intellectual interests.

• Google to find subreddits. Usually there are several.
• Raid subreddit sidebars and wikis for links, discussions, FAQ
• Take blogs you like and search by domain. Ex: reddit.com/domain/lesswro… The discussion itself on Reddit might not be the best, but the fact that there will almost certainly be an active subreddit for your interest means you can discover what the ingroup discusses, who they follow, and where you can source information within a few hours
Jan 21, 2018 • 22 tweets • 8 min read
If you are using an in-browser Ethereum wallet (e.g. Metamask, Brave, Parity) then any website can detect if you are an Ethereum user. I wouldn't be surprised if some advertisers are already collecting this information. Metamask and Parity inject a global web3 object into the page. For example, the attached screenshots show Metamask and Parity both injecting web3 into the page I'm tweeting from. Parity even exposes the current account address by default.