How Ethereum could break the web
Given the state of our 25 -year -old web and all the problems inherited from the design of Legacy 1970 systems, we must take a break and take an inventory of components which are fundamentally broken and offer substantial return on development investment. Believing this concern about security, privacy and resistance to censorship, it should be painfully obvious that A total attack on Internet infrastructure is already underway. As Internet users, a shared duty is to explore, exploit and implement new technologies that benefit creators, not oppressors.
And although cryptography has first allowed us to secure our messages from prying eyes, it is increasingly used in an abstract way as the secure movement of numerical value via cryptocurrencies. If PGP was the first major iteration of the applied crypto and the bitcoin the second, then I foresee that the interaction and integration of the crypto in the very fabric of a decentralized web will be the third refined implementation, taking root and flowering popularity.
The explosion of web services
Looking back the brief history of the web, most should be that the web 1.0 was embodied by the CGI scripts generating templé content on a server and delivering it to the customer in a final form. It was a clear monolithic centralization model, however, this basic interactivity form was a huge improvement compared to the post-reading basic format which included a large part of the internet content at the time. Imagine having to recharge the whole first Digg page each time you wanted to click on something:
DIGG in 2006, a prolific example of “Web 2.0” interactivity not offered by traditional CGI scripts
As browser technology was progressing, experimenting with Ajax The calls have started, allowing us to carry out actions in an asynchronous manner without having to recharge the entire page. Finally, you can vote without submitting an HTML form and recharging everything. This movement to separate the content from the presentation – helped by CSS – pushed the web forward.
Today we have technologies like Angularjs And Emberjs Who ask the designer to generate a customer model with specific data holes to be filled with a backend. Although these frames facilitate part of the programming glue for seamless and live updates, they also push the developer to work in a specific way. But this is just a moderate step towards the web 2.5.
appetizer
The real web 3.0 has not yet started, but it could erase the concept of separation from the content of the presentation by deleting the need to have servers. Let’s take a look at some of the underlying technologies that the Ethereum project aims to deliver:
- Contracts: decentralized logic
- Swarm: decentralized storage
- Whisper: decentralized messaging
Interaction including Ethereum contracts, swarm storage, whispered communications
Technologies like SWARM could serve as an underlying static accommodation infrastructure, deleting the need to distribute and hide specific content. Because “Decentralized Dropbox“Has been discussed with such a frequency, expect HTTP-type connections or services to be built at the top of this type of Blob storage, making an integration with the even simpler decentralized web. This effort will also allow the replacement of typical content delivery networks (Cash) with a distributed hash table (Dht) Point to blobs, how Bittorrent works. Due to the flexibility offered by Ethereum contracts, the content access model could be the payment creator, the paid reader or a hybrid system.
We have therefore just replaced the need to have caches, inverted proxys, CDNs, load balancers and similar to serve static content for users. Another way in which Etheruem could have an impact on this traditional infrastructure is to replace the levels of application of business logic by contracts on the block. Traditionally developed in a variety of friendly languages such as Perl, PHP, Python, ASP, C # and Ruby, Ethereum take place in a fully inspective virtual machine which encourages simplicity and reuse. Commercial analysts and project managers could find this refreshing transparency code, especially since the same code can be written Snake (a python type language), Lll (a lisp -shaped language), XML (a nightmare) or even in the form of a visual block!
Visual publisher of the Ethereum contract code
How could it all be possible? Take a look at the last Ethereum proof-of-concept 6 JavaScript connectionsWe see that a pinch of JavaScript is all that is necessary to monitor the balance of an account on the decentralized web:
<div>You have <span id="ether">?</span>.</div> <script> eth.watch({altered: eth.secretToAddress(eth.key)}).changed(function() { document.getElementById("ether").innerText = eth.toDecimal(eth.balanceAt(eth.secretToAddress(eth.key))) }); </script>
Because the Ethereum protocol also acts as a distributed key store (a happy note for fans of Nosql), possibly user accounts, identification information and reputation can be migrated on Blockchain using the Whisper communication protocol. In this way, Ethereum opens the way to a total fragment of traditional infrastructures as we know it. No more complex high availability infrastructure diagrams. In Ethereum ecosystem, even the decentralized DNS is free.
Evaluating this context in a greater diagram of any systems infrastructure, it is obvious that our current web is not as secure of confidentiality or censorship as we wish. Savings of scale allowed unique institutions to offer a large amount of power processing and storage on the Internet at very low prices, thus increasing their market share to the point where they individually control large internet activity segments, often under the supervision of less informed governments. In a post-firmish era when the Internet knows no limits, such a jurisdiction has little or no meaning.
As the economy of Ethereum ecosystem matures, so that the contracts open for the lowest storage develop, a free accommodation market could evolve. Given the nature and dynamics of P2P applications, popular content will easily evolve as the sharing of swarms, rather than suffering from the burden of the partitioned servers. The net profit is that popular content is delivered fasterNo slower.
We have spent decades to optimize the protocols on which the Internet was founded for the first time, but it is time to recognize the lost opportunities by continuously correcting the old system instead of keeping a new and optimized. The future will probably bring a transition period between traditional and decentralized technologies, when applications live in a hybrid universe and users do not know the turbulent undercover. But they should be.
This metamorphosis will offer developers the opportunity to build the next generation of decentralized, private, secure and resistant censorship platforms that make control to creators and consumers of the best idea. Anyone with a dream is free to rely on this new class of new generation decentralized web services without having a credit card or registering for accounts.
Although we are not told or did not expect us, we have an imperative to cherish and improve the very shared resources that some want to disturb, manipulate and control. Just as no one fully understands the collective intelligence of the emerging internet, we must not expect a single entity to understand or fully maintain perfectly aligned patterns. Rather, we have to count on the internet to solve internet problems.
For this reason, blockchain technologies like Ethereum will simplify and reduce costs not seen since the introduction of infrastructure as a service (Iaas). Extending the idea beyond a simple web project, Ethereum hopes to demonstrate how fully decentralized autonomous organizations (Suede) can live entirely in cyberspace, canceling not only the need for centralized servers, but also of confidence New House of Spirit.
