Unchained By The Blockchain
Why The World Is Busy Reinventing The Internet
--
There is no history of mankind, there are only many histories of all kinds of aspects of human life. And one of these is the history of political power. This is elevated into the history of the world — Karl Popper
Historically, July 4th has been celebrated as the US independence day since 1776. This year, though, Malta became the first country to metaphorically signal the importance of a new revolution i.e. a Blockchain revolution. Proponents of Blockchain around the world are busy envisioning a new version of the web called “Web 3.0" that will be based on Decentralization and Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT). A version of the web, they think, will liberate us from Internet monopolies. Liberating the internet from itself so to speak. This article provides a ringside view of the new architects busy shaping the new web and their vision of the future.
Why Do We Need A New Version Of The Web?
The short answer: there are no free lunches. All the services we use (including Facebook and Google) basically monetize our personal data. They also happen to be monopolies in whatever they do barring in a few countries like China.
Tim Berners Lee and Vint Cerf, the original architects of the internet, are busy advocating a move to a decentralized version of the internet. What does that mean? Today, if the Google server goes down, our files stored on the Google cloud drive wont be accessible by us. Now, imagine if the files were stored on multiple servers on the internet. Even if one server goes down, we can still recover our files and call it a day. That’s what decentralization does. It allows us to create a new filing system that is not based on centralized servers i.e. it eliminates the middleman. Your work data can directly talk to your social media data directly without going through a central server (i.e. Facebook).
