Circle Update - Mid March 2026
It's cooking.
I’ve built a demo of the CLI interface for the first operations of the Circle Protocol. It basically looks like this.
There’s a lot to say about this, but I’ll keep it brief. I have to relearn Blackmagic DaVinci Resolve to edit the demo video; iMovie doesn’t cut it. What you can see is that I have a bunch of contacts in Limbo (C7) which is the lowest level of trust. These are populated after an import of Apple Contacts and they await me sending them to a new level of trust. In the CLI you pick a name in the Names frame then click or arrow to a Circle level and assign them there.
In the iPhone app, only a random few of those will appear including a mix of the newest and the oldest contacts from your app. Then you simply drag them into a particular circle of trust.
Here there are several actions possible. You can take them and put them into a Group. There are about 43 available now. You can identify a person as a Provider or their business as a Service. You can promote or demote their level of trust by putting them in another Circle.
Brainstorms
Today my buddy and part-time collaborator had a good two hour session getting on the same plane in understanding the value and mechanics of the app. It’s kind of huge. The more we talk about it, the more it becomes clear that we will ideate it for the iPhone and for AWS.
What we talked about, which is inevitable, are the authentication issues with banks and finance companies with KYC requirements. Since he had responsibility for the design and building of the authentication system that now allows your cable providers to validate you for say Paramount Plus and Hulu, he knows what he’s talking about. The intent with Circle is to have a zero knowledge backend that allows for recovery via a paper key. This is rather like 1Password and Bookkmark Sync for Brave Browser. Or was that Signal? Either way, we went pretty deep today talking about failure modes and how we get other service providers to respect our authentication services. The preliminary answer is that we get their APIs and build it first on our side, then decide what each permission will be.
One of the features way down the road will have to do with kids such that you can proxy them authentications and therefore payments to those professionals and services they consume as a kid. For example, your kid can pay his hockey coach because you give that coach a subscription in C4 and then link him to your Venmo. Then you don’t have to push, the coach can pull from the kid’s phone.
So yes managing paid subscriptions is part of this. The point is that the end user has control over everything rather than Google or Facebook. You can make person to person subscriptions for babysitters up to attorneys. We want to make it robust enough to handle PII and medical information. Why? Because your contacts don’t do that now.
This weekend I’m going to an incubator down in Orange County and I will expose this monkey to more people. I will knead it and twist it and cut out parts to work on, either directly coding or meta-coding for spec.
Again, my hope is that I can put social credit in your hands before the government or China does it for you.
Here is a recursive link to my website so you can get there from here and back.
This is great and as you say, with huge potential. The fact that it works with subscriptions is brilliant for my purposes. I am into a pilot project that configures a self hosted server to work like an appliance for content creation. The idea is to allow content creation to get out from under curated platforms' algorithms that mess with visibility in favour of a decentralized peer-to-peer system. Early days for me because domestic pressures, but progress is steady. A small cluster of RPIs running on my home lab and just finishing evaluation of content management systems that do not require programming ability to create rich content. Will be piloting a drag-and-drop CMS that I like this coming week. I am open sourcing this on substack. Wish I could afford to pledge; at 92 on a social security income, need to find ways to generate my own income stream first.