Ty Everett: Building a better internet

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Ty Everett has big ambitions. His Project Babbage is named after the 19th Century British mathematician and inventor Charles Babbage, often called the ‘father of the computer.’

The Project Babbage website invites us—in big, bold type at the top of the front page—to “Help revolutionize what it means to use computers. Help preserve what it means to be humans.”

So how’s that going to work? The answer lies with the BSV-based Metanet which Ty describes as “a new version of the internet,” adding that “it’s a version that I think people are going to really like when they get to understand it.”

Project Babbage will provide an interface between users and the apps and services they use, an interface which stores each person’s identity and online history—the personal details and data currently stored so profitably by tech giants like Facebook and Google. 

“When we allow people to move between apps and services while retaining ownership over the things that they’ve done over the people they’ve connected with, over the ideas that they’ve shared, we can enable a better way for value to be conveyed and conducted and assessed,” says Ty. 

Speaking on this week’s CoinGeek Conversations, Ty describes how his Babbage Desktop will act as “a single identity layer.” Instead of having to provide the same information to each service provider, you’ll be able to deploy it from what’s stored on the Babbage software, to anyone you give permission to access it: 

“You have one account, one password, one set of keys, so to speak, that control the different ways that apps can interact with you, using Bitcoin.”

Project Babbage will allow BSV startups to leverage users’ collected details from its desktop centre, but in time it will also, Ty believes, attract existing businesses to make themselves Babbage-compatible: 

“If existing apps are smart, if you are a data silo, if you have a bunch of users and a bunch of data, eventually it will make sense for you to voluntarily break down those walls and start moving all of that data that you have on chain by using Bitcoin transactions to build up a collection of the things that existing users have done.”

From its earliest days, one of the promises of Bitcoin (‘digital cash’, as the white paper describes it) was to add a monetary layer to the internet—a feature whose absence was so often said to create time-wasting processes and unnecessary costs. 

Project Babbage plans to rectify that, making use of Bitcoin SV’s micropayment capabilities: 

“One of the biggest things I think that we can achieve with Bitcoin and micropayments is the reduction of economic friction,” says Ty, “because when you don’t have to go through a whole bunch of hassle in order to set up agreements and arrangements and have them be affected by all of these legacy processes that create a lot of overhead and a lot of cost, [then] creators can create content and earn money from it without needing to sign up through all of these different things and depend on revenue that comes from one data broker such as such as YouTube or Facebook.”

Ty says his big vision does not depend on building a huge team. Much of the work will be done by him personally: “I’ve written a lot of code. I’ve built a lot of these components already.”

Will Everett be the new Babbage? Watch this space. 

Hear the whole of Ty Everett’s interview in this week’s CoinGeek Conversations podcast or catch up with other recent episodes: 

You can also watch the podcast video on YouTube.

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