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 are used to resolve conflicts. Operational Transforms 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 and add shards for it to your document Token Curated Registry 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 , 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. turns of its DRM server 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.
