Yet Another Blockchain Based OS - YABBOS

What is YABBOS?

Vaporware.

YABBOS is a thought experiment in what it would mean for an operating system to truly live on the blockchain? In YABBOS, instead of living on your
phone, your laptop, or your old laptop tucked somewhere in the back of
your closet, all of your data lives on your personal blockchain where it
is accessible only to you.

What are some features of YABBOS?

Multifactor authentication is baked into the core of the OSAll of your data is available to you from anywhere

Your devices become “portals” into the blockchain making it easy to share
data between devices or switch from one device to the next without
losing what you were doing

Multifactor Authentication: the heart of YABBOS

Every file in YABBOS is protected with multifactor authentication

The single most important job of YABBOS is making sure that you (and only
you) have access to your data. Users split their identity into “shards”
and each file is encrypted in such a way that a minimum number of shards
is required to access it. Files that don’t require much security might
only need 2 or 3 shards to access, whereas your most private files can
be protected with many more.

A shard represents a piece of your identity. For example, when you unlock
your phone, you generally give it two pieces of your identity: 1)
Physical possession of your phone 2) A biometric access method such as a
fingerprint or face id. No file in YABBOS can be protected with less
than 2 shards.

A possible implementation of shards: Each shard unlocks a private key.
This key can be used to decrypt a point in cryptographic space. A linear
combination of at least numShards points is required to recover the key
for a file.

Discarding shards: Unfortunately, there is no way to cryptographicly deactivate a shard. The YABBOS protocol dictates that the shard-mapping (public key encryption of a cryptographic point) be deleted when a shard is
deactivated. Files can be re-encrypted with new points not dependent on
that key as well. In this way YABBOS provides perfect forward security,
which is the best that can be hoped for.

The YABBOS filesystem

YABBOS files are shared across devices using IPFS

The YABBOS filesystem is based off of IPFS. Each of your devices (as well
as possibly third-party services) acts as a node in an IPFS network and
shares files when requested by one of your devices (portals). As in IPFS
there is a URL-like schema as well that allows a user to have the
appearance of overwriting and deleting files.

Because YABBOS runs concurrently on multiple devices, editing of these files
could result in conflicts. For this reason, file histories are saved and
Operational Transforms are used to resolve conflicts.

Portals: Your view into the blockchain

YDT allows you to access your desktop from any device

Any device can act as a node in your private blockchain. All that is
required is that the device has been authorized with sufficient number
of shards. The YABBOS Desktop Environment (YDT), however, transforms
these devices into a literal viewport into your personal blockchain.

The YDT is a 3d environment whose state is shared across your devices
through your personal YABBOS blockchain. When you open an application
one one of your devices, it is added to the YDT, and your device has a
virtual camera that is pointed at that application.

Because each device is just a camera into a 3d space, this means that you can
do things like: Link two devices together to give the impression of a
screen that is twice as big. Run a video-game on a high performance
device (such as your PC or a 3rd party service) and interact with it on
your mobile phone. Explore all of your files in a 3d environment using
VR or augmented reality.

Think of YDT as a giant 3d desk where you can scatter documents around as much space as you need. Of course you can always customize the
background of your YDT so instead of a desk, it could be a castle or a
beautiful sandy beach.

YABBOS: Sharing is natural!

Sharing with a friend is as easy as changing file-permissions

Just because all of your files in YABBOS live on your own personal
blockchain doesn’t mean they have to stay there. Want to share a
document with a friend so that you both can edit it? Add some of their
shards to the document! Want to publish a webpage? Just remove your
shards and now anyone can view it on IPFS! Want to share something with a community whose members you and a group of friends? Create a Token Curated Registry and add shards for it to your document

Sharing also applies to (you guessed it) YDT. This means that creating shared virtual worlds for you and your friends is as easy as adding permissions to your desktop. What’s more, each item in YDT has its own permissions, so you can control what parts of the world are visible to your friends and what parts remain hidden.

The future of gaming is in the cloud

YDT is a natural platform for the future of gaming

YABBOS provided a natural way for content creators to share content with a large group of people in exchange for payment. Simply set up a
smart-contract that will add a user’s shards to a game when they pay the
access-fee. Moreover, because devices are just portals into a
blockchain, once a game has been shared a 3rd party service can render
the game to your YDT allowing you to play it in full-fidelity on your
wimpy smart-phone.

Blockchains are just a slow database, why use them?

With YABBOS, using the cloud doesn’t mean giving away your privacy

Blockchains are not slow. Bitcoin is slow because it depends on proof-of-work. Ethereum is (slightly less) slow because it needs thousands of people to reach consensus. There’s no reason why private or well-run
application-specific blockchains need be any slower than other kinds of
databases.

What blockchains do offer, however, is trustworthiness. If Microsoft turns of its DRM server, you can lose access to books that you thought you owned. If your private blockchain is running on your own private device (or distributed across millions of devices using a protocol like FileCoin), no one can turn it off and no one can take it away from you.

Moreover, if everyone is using blockchain for everything, then even the
government won’t be able to turn it off (at least not without doing
severe damage to the economy). If reading the news or publishing a
subversive webpage use the exact same protocol that billions of people
are using, then it will be impossible for the government to stop. And
because IPFS is designed to be robust against latency, even turning off
the internet won’t stop the flow of information. Every single person
using YABBOS will be part of a peer-to-peer network using strong
cryptography that spans the globe.

Services like Facebook and Google are able to harvest your data, because you have to share it with them in order to get your daily fill of funny cat
pictures. Once your data is on your personal blockchain, you will have
total and absolute control over who you share it with. YABBOS isn’t just
replacing your OS, it’s rewiring the entire world to enable a freer
more decentralized future.