What is Headjack
Headjack is a blockchain that links sovereign identities to content at web-scale. Key points:
- Creation is fundamentally different from transfers and exchange of value - the design space around trust & data availability for media and identity is different from finance.
Following the UNIX philosophy - in Headjack identity is simply an identifier (unique number) and anything orthogonal (KYC, profiles, privacy, finance) can be layered on top of it.
It solves single sign-on and allows for user experience similar to Web2 through hierarchical authorization management - keypairs are not required by default and even those with keys bound to their accounts may choose to not explicitly sign every interaction.
Consensus is reached on the absolute bare minimum - the history of authorizations, names, keys & off-chain content anchors (merkle roots) - the simplest mental model for developers.
Headjack can support billions of accounts and link unlimited amounts of off-chain activity to them. The entire web can be rebuilt on top of it - a claim that is easily provable.
Content addressing is with persistent & human-readable URIs (instead of hashes) - the link between identity and data is cryptographically provable even if keys & names have changed.
It doesn't deal with off-chain data storage and retrievability - those are separate problems and Headjack simply lets entities point to ways for others to retrieve addressable content.
The talk "Decentralized identity & content addressing at web-scale" at code::dive 2022 is a good high-level overview of the project and covers the most important aspects:
Book structure
- What is Headjack - How the protocol technically works and how things like applications, services, DMs, social graphs, preferences, etc. could be implemented - the building blocks necessary to recreate anything from Web2 and beyond.
Why Headjack - What's broken with the web and a blueprint for what is possible - services, business models, infrastructure, algorithms, markets, metaverse, etc.
Implementation of Headjack - A detailed specification of the implementation.
What is Headjack
📄️ Design - guiding principles
These are the guiding principles when aiming for mass adoption of Headjack:
📄️ Identity & authorization
There are 3 types of roles in Headjack (although a single entity may play all 3):
🗃️ Addressing
3 items
📄️ Data storage & retrievability
In this chapter we will see the different aspects of handling unlimited amounts of off-chain data:
📄️ Throughput & scalability
Everyone claims to be scalable, but here we'll prove that Headjack can handle billions of accounts and anchor unlimited amounts of off-chain content tied to identity with simple napkin math.
📄️ Headjack vs the competition
This chapter focuses on the disadvantages of some of the more high-profile competing solutions in the space. Most of the issues are solved in Headjack due to its guiding principles & design goals. This page doesn't list any of their positives as it would be too long (so not exhaustive by any means) but many of them have served as an inspiration for Headjack in one way or another.
Named after the data port at the back of the head of synthetically-grown humans in the Matrix.
