quicklink | Umbrel - Become Bitcoin
if you are into crypto currency and bitcoin then you’ve probably already come across the all in one installer for running your own node on a raspberry 4. you literally download the sd card image, set a bunch of things up for storage of the blockchain on SSD and then it go away and spend forever download the darn thing — if ya smart you’ll build in one of those setups with the battery backup and utilise someone else’s internet while you download that, i highly recommend a gigabit local co-working spot for instance :)
anyway back to the point of this post, you can build up a solid infrastructure of nodes by spending the time making something easy to install and super pretty — that’s what umbrella did. you can already set yourself up with something like BTCpay on a standalone raspberry pi system and many others exist with a neat ASCII style frontend to the bitcoin core, even tumblers setups that mix your bitcoin up in the hope to remove traces of where they come from.
But umbrella is different in one major way and it’s sadly missing from the crypto currency scene — attention to detail for the user, the many, instead of the few. There is a certain amount of elitism when people want to gatekeep without knowing they are gatekeeping because they don’t want things to change, or they found it, founded it, were first, have legacy there, don’t want to change the vibe of ‘the way it used to be’
We see the same thing in effect with the ‘gentrification’ of spaces and places. There is a certain irony not lost on me of a place that’s low foot fall, shabby chic, low rent, only the cool underground know about it that eventually get’s taken over my skyscrapers and people with no culture, moving in to gorge on it. Eventually, everything just looks the same, the life force is extracted leaving the shell with it.
Trump did this with the projects in new york city, had a loan from father for a million dollars, bought all the buildings up cheap, gentrified it, rented or sold those places out for a massive profit, with a side order of dodgy deals and no doubt lots of loans on tick from the banks who were in on the racket as well — eventually, you see the rise and fall of places that become ‘trendy’ and they lose their spirit and community because people want it to FEEL the way it did when they discovered it first before the masses arrived.
in the lands of the digital however, while we have the time lock of something evolving rapidly, ebbing and flowing, changing and adapting to current market conditions, trying to maintain relevancy to a drive by audience, depth of all bases is important — what do i mean by that? i guess also saying all boats must rise makes more sense too.
In depends what our ‘hook’ is for the tool, service, utility that we use right, i mean how has adobe managed to corner the market, get people on the hook for subscriptions for many pieces of software that they believe are the best in the market, often to the point of being incredibly aggressive to maintain that market leader position!
What umbrella does for bitcoin is that it makes it feel accessible, i mean, paying a small amount for a computer that can run a copy of the code, the ability to add wallets, a super clean ui/ux that anyone can understand, they made it simple to access, but in turn strengthen what it means to share value in the digital age — every node that is added to the network makes bitcoin more secure, more relevant, but also puts the user in control of their own digital finances — everyone can become a bank now.
I’d love to see blurt have it’s own raspberry pi 4 setup and installer, i’d be glad to do a video walkthrough of all the stages of it. I’m certainly going to do one for the raspberry pi 4 setup from start to finish, from building the pi, setting things up, configuring things, downloading things — i think that’s real value to show people they can do it too.
I know a few people are already thinking this way, multiple frontends, easy to build out the frontend of your dreams but storage on the blockchain, i see steem/hive/blurt as the textual storage and the json meta information layer and i see sia and other places as the storage for actually hosting our video files, dtube too.
Imagine for a moment a dtube self installer, your own version of dtube installed on your own raspberry pi 4 — with the website frontend, connecting to the backend, but also running a node in the background, strengthening our network — imagine then sponsoring ten or more people a week to run these, gradually building up our numbers, that’s real strength in the network then.
Just think big for a moment, a stunning installer, gorgeous layout and control panel dashboard design, 500 nodes for dtube, 500 nodes for blurt, maybe even the ability to add on side projects from an installer menu, maybe plugin services like oneloved uploader and a mechanism for subscription management to these services.
I realise everyone has their own vision for the way something should work but i feel if we just don’t try and evolve into some kind of organised decentralised workforce then we are doomed to go the same way as javascript frameworks — hundreds of them, so much choice, so much spinning wheels, not much innovation or creativity.
i feel the only reason that DeFi is attractive to many and has stolen so much attention marketshare is because they subscribe to the ‘shock and awe’ of the new wave of smart contract writing, it’s like watching web 2.0 API mashing up all over again. taking the best bits of this, adding something, a sprinkle of buzz, quick in and out, birth and death in a day or less — ideas are eaten like breakfast and shat out by sundown.
But that’s not sustainable in the long term is it? i think it’s smart to constantly address what it is that’s missing and be that thing for the many, not the few. build solid foundations, but also be always considering the expiry date.
Cheers for Reading,
Humble x
