I’ve checked NuCypher’s homepage and I find a bit strange to have that much emphasis on the blockchain on your homepage and at the same time only 5 occurrences of the word "blockchain" in your 21-pages whitepaper. Am I missing something?
1) The whitepaper describes the nature of our network and how Alice and Bob use it. It does not describe (and isn't meant to describe) node operation except as Alice and Bob need to understand it. We'll have an additional node operation whitepaper that describes the smart contracts in more detail. We - and I know this may sound strange - decided to build our cryptography and network first and foremost rather than race to build "something, anything, as long as it's blockchain."
2) Do you think that the whitepaper insufficiently describes how Alice and Bob use the blockchain? If so, do you have suggestions for how we can do this better? I think our whitepaper is pretty solid, FWIW. If you are Alice or Bob, I think this gives you exactly the understanding of the blockchain application that you need.
Our website is not designed to appeal to VCs per se; we are not raising money right now and, frankly, if we were, we don't need a website to do it. Our team and our repos speak for themselves, IMO.
As I explained in our other comment, our whitepaper mentions the blockchain integration in all the places that matter. I'm surprised to hear that 5 is not enough.
You're right, I was more curt and that came across pretty asshol-ish.
In general, whitepapers mention the blockchain in all the places that matter. Contrast websites and pitch decks mentioning it in all the places it can possibly be mentioned - as it's perceived to increase the odds of getting attention.
It basically looks like a smart contract-powered decentralized escrow service, but the impression I got from their main page is that there isn't a specific end user or market for this yet, although that didn't stop the VCs from funding it.
> smart contract-powered decentralized escrow service
That's actually not quite right. I'm one of the engineers here, but allow me to put my evangelism hat on a bit here. We're building a decentralized key management system similar to AWS KMS or Google Cloud KMS -- except decentralized.
We use proxy re-encryption to do this. You can read about how it works in our Umbral blog post[0].
Several large applications are within the healthcare world. This allows patients to be in control of their own medical data and to share/revoke their data at will with other doctors, hospitals, etc. This lets them retain their own encryption keys without trusting another party.
Its market/end user is specifically anyone who has a need for a KMS. I Would also like to point out that NuCypher can be used as a consumer grade KMS -- something that I am exceptionally excited about.
I honestly think those are the two worst possible examples.
I would never trust my secret management to some random block chain. And for medical records? That is laughable at best with severe HIPPA compliance issues.
