The collective consciousness known as open source has always been guided by an ethos with several key components, including fundamental inclusiveness, decentralized governance, and the instinctive disdain for monopolies. Underlining all parts of this ethos is the idea of freedom - that the world will be a much better place if software and information iss free to access, modify, and create.
Far from being the kind of soul draining mumbo jumbo that plagues corporations and bureaucracies, this ethos has been the key reason why open source went from being a niche movement to underpinning much of the internet. The people of the world idolize billionaires and titans of industry, but the open source movement has arguably contributed much more to the benefit of the everyday person everywhere in the world, while flying very much under the radar.
Perhaps more importantly than the vast trove of intellectual capital bestowed to the world by open source, has been the manifestation of a new vision of how decentralized networks can thrive in a world dominated by power based hierarchies. A distributed network of people working across borders and organizational lines, each contributing what they can towards a common goal, has often managed to produce far more that what economically and politically powerful entities have managed to create. Open source is also incredibly resilient and innovative in the face of civil discord. Strife in hierarchies has often led to collapse of projects, organizations, and even civilizations. In the case of open source though, the same deep disagreements are often the hallmark of a healthy ecosystem, and have in fact lead to the blossoming of many diverse approaches towards similar endpoints. We only has to look at the brilliant plethora of server operating systems, programming languages, and web frameworks to see that.
Decentralized currencies, as a movement, also had to overcome a similar set of challenges from a skeptical world accustomed to the faux reassurance given by the omnipresence of powerful hierarchies. That is perhaps not very surprising, since decentralized currencies share many of the same components of the open source ethos. The Cypherpunk Manifesto by Eric Hughes and the Bitcoin Whitepaper by Satoshi Nakamoto were strikingly similar in both tone and spirit, emphasizing freedom to connect, collaborate, and coordinate as fundamental rights. This movement also owns a ton of debt to open source - it is the latter that laid out the social organization principles and technological foundations that made the kind of distributed transparency and collaboration necessary for decentralized currencies to even be possible in the first place. Unfortunately, the industry has strayed far from the founding ethos, with wide swathes of newcomers focusing on hype and asset accumulation rather than creating new socio-economic systems that make the world more open and free.
Handshake seeks to honor the common ethos and original spirit of both movements while harnessing the collective energy of these two communities to give the control and agency over the internet back to the people. The design of the internet is fundamentally decentralized: the servers and websites that make up the internet are all owned by different entities, and they are all able to communicate and share with each other because they agree to. The possibility of any one entity deciding the legitimacy of information makes the entire network fragile, susceptible to authoritarian instincts, and stagnant to true innovation. This is the state of the domain naming system today. In particular, the security and control of the root zone that routes practically all of internet traffic is controlled by just a few entities. Returning control and agency of it to the people is a critical part of keeping the internet open, secure, and free for centuries to come.
Handshake is an open source endeavor that aims to replace the centralized control of the root zone file with a permission-less setup, and with the necessary economic coordination for such a crucial, long-term, collaborative endeavor baked in.
Is this going to be hard? Yes. Is it impossible? Not at all. Though the current, deeply entrenched state of affairs have lead many to conclude that replacing the centralized maintenance of the naming system is a pipe dream, recent advances in decentralized technology and economic coordination have certainly made this dream possible. Our technical design goal for the protocol has been to elegantly integrate the DNS and blockchain technology stacks, while making it as seamless as possible to adopt the protocol without disruption to existing systems.
Yet, the technical aspects are merely the conduit upon which this is manifested. No single entity, least of all us, can move the world towards an open, permission-less, and secure naming system. Instead, it requires the participation of a large portion of those who build the tooling, plumbing, and operating systems the world runs on. That would mean that this endeavor has to be a movement with both the overarching ethos and the right economic incentives. The former to keep focus on the why, and the latter to align the necessary stakeholders. We are under no delusion here - this has to be a social and economic movement for this endeavor to have the impact we want it to have... Not a technology, not a platform, but a social and economic movement.
As mentioned above, this is not an endeavor that can be dominated by any one entity - it has to be a movement that all the necessary stakeholders feel ownership for, where ownership is manifested in both sharing in the economic gains, as well as having agency on how to protect and improve the protocol. After all, you do not protect what you do not own, unless you are a mercenary. This basic reason is also why so many people are apathetic towards the current state of the extremely centralized naming system - it is less that they think it is acceptable, it is just not something they feel they have have any influence or agency in changing.
It is our hope that the as many people in the open source community will accept ownership of the Handshake protocol as possible. We believe that the open source community is the rightful guardian of this protocol for several reasons. Firstly, the internet pioneers and the open source community have been the primary actors in making the internet what it is today. Secondly, it is the only community that is capable of fully understanding the urgency, the technical basis, and drive for the adoption moving forward. Lastly, and probably most importantly, the ethos of the open source community is the most aligned with the fundamental nature of the web - decentralized governance, fundamental inclusiveness, and disdain for monopolies and overt use of power.
Towards this end, Handshake's funding (USD$10.2M) and the vast majority (75%) of our initial token supply will be pledged to the open source community. This pledge is meant to ensure the following:
- From the very onset, Handshake will be working hand in hand with the whole open source community to create the necessary technical and economic basis.
- Any economic benefits will be first and foremost be going towards to the open source community to advance the FOSS cause.
- Handshake as an entity will disappear over time, leaving the open source community with the incentive, whereabouts and agency to dictate the long term direction of this protocol.
It is critical that these funds and ownership be distributed as broadly as possible to non-profits and verified open source developers. These are the folks who have been working largely out of sight, out of mind to make the internet, and by proxy the world, a better place, and we hope to reach as many of them as possible.
We need your help to take ownership of this protocol, spread the word and tell us which non-profits and developers this pledge needs to go to. Most importantly, we are not assuming we are doing everything right. On the contrary, we need you to tell us how we might be tone-deaf, wrong, delusional, or any combination of the above. Debate is fundamental to any healthy open source endeavor, and it will be critical here.
Finally, we would like to reaffirm one basic notion - that if this endeavor does not become a movement, it is pointless. But if it does, and the open source community is aligned towards this goal, we might just co-create a truly open, permissionless, and secure internet.