Front-end Chinese developer based on Shenzhen city,China. I love this project because it is open source like Nginx,docker,mariadb, etc. More and more devs contribute their time on it( you can find them on forum.blockstack.org and slack).I still remember the first time I used hello world and todo list sites programmed by Larry. At that time, There are no 170 apps like now , and no xordrive.io,bitpatron.co these kinds of websites. Now,devs can find docs and seek support from support easily from forum.blockstack.org. One week ago, I realized how important open-sourced blockstack auth is,because I use vpn in China,gmail blocked my email account without a reasonable reason and forced me find a Phone number to verify it.I use that gmail address for daily works. Suddenly I cannot use it for many websites. I realized ,They(google,github) can block any users as they like. I reduce my use of google drive and gmail now. For general users, use open source software as possible as we can.If even some core developers(Jude,Aran,Ali ) died or did evil things that other devs cannot accept(not offend),other devs can also fork a new project like blockstack, you know that Linux have many versions,Firefox also have many versions in China.
Blockstack Auth pros and cons:
1. You don’t need a phone number to verify your account and worry your phone number leak.
2. You don’t need time to write traditional codes about user registration and finding password. And you don’t need to buy or deploy a mail server like mailgun and sendgrid.
3. No one can block your accounts (blockstack id )like google did it for me,currently.
4. No one can sell your data to others, I don’t how it going for data business in USA , but in China, Alibaba and baidu , every day, they sell data of users to their paid merchants without our permissions.
5.No cost for image storage in Gaiahub now
Cons:
1. No server nodes in Asia, it is really slow to use graphite and xordrive, I mean, most blockstack sites load pages slower than trational websites. It’s time to deploy Asia servers !
2. No 100% decentralized, actually , I wanna say that blockstack websites and apps also based on ip protocols. China government firewall can easily blocked these domains. If some blockstack websites use Twitter,react Facebook js cdn, we have to use vpn to use these sites normally.