The Best Personal Agent May Be the One That Does Less
Trying Instinct made me rethink personal AI: keep my authority, protect my attention, and quietly look after the things I would otherwise forget.
ARCBlock JOURNAL
Ideas worth exploring
A living library of ideas, products, practical guides, and stories from ArcBlock.
The Data Is Still There. I Have Already Lost It.
Data in your hands may no longer be usable. Data in the cloud may still be yours. A personal history of data sovereignty across floppy disks, MO media, cloud services, private keys, and AI.
Why We Built Aside
We watched great tools change hands or disappear. That is why ArcBlock built Aside: an ARC-powered iPhone app that sends every Share back to a place you own.
DiscussKit, Rebuilt on ARC
DiscussKit has been rebuilt on ARC, and ArcBlock Community has completed its move. This is a new division of responsibility across discussions, identity and user-owned data.
Ideas & Perspectives
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CLARITY Act or Not, Let’s Clarify ABT
Clear law matters, but a product must also explain what its token does, who controls it, what rules apply, and how participants reconcile the record.
Agents Need an Identity. DID May Be the Best Place to Start
An agent cannot exist only as a platform account and an API key. DID can provide a portable, long-lived identity anchor, but authorization, runtime proof, revocation, and audit still have to do their own jobs.
After the AI Security Warning, How Should We Use Our Wallets?
A response to Justin Drake and Vitalik Buterin's cryptography discussion: test transfers, HD wallets, public-key exposure, and why account migration and usability belong in security design.
Products & Updates
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Accepting Payments Is Not Issuing a Stablecoin
Issuing a stablecoin, accepting payment, and operating a digital service are different systems. Most applications need billing and credits, not a currency of their own.
Keep Portfolio References and Draft Ideas in Aside
Save a portfolio reference from Safari, note what you want to borrow, and collect it alongside your own drafts in Aside.
Use Aside to Remember Why You Reached a Decision
Save sources and their conditions in Aside, then add your working decision and open questions so you can pick up the research later.
Build & Tutorials
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After Software: Collaboration, Production, and How Value Gets Shared
Making software no longer requires making a company first. When productive capacity is scattered across people and AI, collaboration, ownership, and value need a new organization.
Web Device: Declare a Website, Then Pick the Right Path
Web Device is one of ARC's core capabilities: declare a .web/ folder anywhere in AFS, and the data and AUP under it get rendered server-side into a website, SEO checks, broken-link detection, and visitor analytics included for free. This piece covers how it differs from UI Device (/dev/ui/web), how to use it, and which situations call for which.
Small World: Every Agent Lives in Its Own Projection
AFS has a design principle we call Small World: every agent, every app, every process sees not the global world, but a small world projected specifically for it. Anything outside that world isn't "access denied". It simply doesn't exist. Here's where the idea comes from, why it's more than a security mechanism, and how to try it yourself.
Stories
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Community Bounty Program Update
Hi everyone, Over the past months, our community bounty programs have helped drive meaningful improvements across our ecosystem. Through the Bug Bount
Flash Talk: The New Browser War Where Your Data is the Battlefield
AI has restarted the browser wars. The prize isn’t tabs or benchmarks—it’s your data. Most “AI browsers” ship a cloud-first model that vacuums everyth
ArcBlock Weekly Product Highlights
Over the last week, the ArcBlock team has rolled out a wave of updates this past week to improve usability, performance, and AI-readiness across mult
Latest
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When the interface changes, the work should remain
AI can generate a fresh interface at any moment. How do people and agents keep working on the same thing? A journey from OpenAI Intelligent UI and UI protocols to X Window and a working AFS-UI experiment.
After the AI Security Warning, How Should We Use Our Wallets?
A response to Justin Drake and Vitalik Buterin's cryptography discussion: test transfers, HD wallets, public-key exposure, and why account migration and usability belong in security design.
OCAP’s Three Generations: From Chain Access to AFS
How an idea inspired by ODBC developed into a GraphQL playground, became part of the Blocklet architecture, and now lives within ARC’s AFS resource model.
Real user sovereignty: freedom to choose, freedom to move
Why Arc separates identity, data and compute: ownership should let you change services while keeping your identity, records and AI memory under your control.
The Best Personal Agent May Be the One That Does Less
Trying Instinct made me rethink personal AI: keep my authority, protect my attention, and quietly look after the things I would otherwise forget.
New keys, old address: where does the next transfer go?
ArcBlock's account migration design connects old and new addresses. Follow incoming transfers, historical signatures, SDK behavior, and the limits of migration as recovery.
Keep Portfolio References and Draft Ideas in Aside
Save a portfolio reference from Safari, note what you want to borrow, and collect it alongside your own drafts in Aside.
Use Aside to Remember Why You Reached a Decision
Save sources and their conditions in Aside, then add your working decision and open questions so you can pick up the research later.
Capture an Unfinished Thought in Aside
Open Quick Capture from Aside's home screen and save an unfinished thought. Find it again later, then capture the next question.
Prepare Your Next Draft in Aside
Save a source in Aside, note its purpose in your draft, and capture your own angle. Keep both in a collection for the piece you want to write.
Consensus Is More Than PoW or PoS
Separate participation weight from agreement, understand fork choice and finality, and see why 51% and two thirds are not comparable security scores.
How can software act while your main key stays offline?
A closer look at ArcBlock's blockchain delegation patents: separate signing keys, enforced permissions, usage limits, revocation, and the boundaries of keeping a main key offline.
One interface, multiple chains: which differences must remain visible?
OCAP and ArcBlock's access-layer patent separate common requests from chain adapters. Follow data preparation, client signing, and the chain-specific facts an application still needs.
How can we build decentralized markets on ArcBlock?
From native Exchange transactions to ARC, ArcSpace and personal agents: a research direction for markets their participants can own.
The Data Is Still There. I Have Already Lost It.
Data in your hands may no longer be usable. Data in the cloud may still be yours. A personal history of data sovereignty across floppy disks, MO media, cloud services, private keys, and AI.
Functional Networks, Not Perpetual Promises
The SEC staff's new crypto FAQ draws a useful distinction between improving a working system and promising to build one. What matters is distinguishing delivered capabilities from work that remains promised.
Build a travel collection in Aside
Start with a route guide and a record of your own. Save content, add a note, and bring the pieces together in a travel collection in Aside.
DiscussKit, Rebuilt on ARC
DiscussKit has been rebuilt on ARC, and ArcBlock Community has completed its move. This is a new division of responsibility across discussions, identity and user-owned data.
Why We Built Aside
We watched great tools change hands or disappear. That is why ArcBlock built Aside: an ARC-powered iPhone app that sends every Share back to a place you own.
Bookmarking is a runtime capability, not a site plugin
Bookmarking and notes should not be rebuilt on every site. Arc ships them as a default-on runtime capability: hidden until you log in, easy to turn off, or bound to buttons the page already has.