Can Blockchain Bring us a New Internet

The growth of blockchain technology over the last decade is often compared to the early days of the Internet. The all-pervading technological feat didn’t happen overnight; it had to contend with its own share of struggles, setbacks and naysayers. Research into the fundamental concepts of the Internet had begun as early as the 1960s, but the TCP/IP protocol stack, the backbone of the modern Internet, was standardized only in 1982. Mass adoption took another decade – it was only in the late 1990s and 2000s that most of the tech giants today, such as Google, Amazon and Facebook, came into being.

Even in these few years of existence, blockchain technology has seen significant growth. It has made its way into applications as varied as identity authentication, cross-border remittance, and supply chain tracking, and created new use cases like decentralized finance (DeFi) and asset tokenization. Now, proponents of blockchain believe that it's ready for the next big leap. And this next leap will usher in a New Internet revolution.  

But we already have an Internet

The Internet was originally meant to be an open and decentralized network, where people could share and publish content without any restrictions. The reality today is, however, starkly different.

The same companies like Google, Amazon and Facebook, which had helped popularize the Internet during its growth, enjoy hegemony over it today. Our browsing data is collected and monetized by these platforms, usually without our permission or even knowledge. The same data is processed to feed us targeted ads and spam mails. The rise of e-commerce has put a premium on consumers’ spending patterns like never before. It can even be put to more sinister uses, as in the Cambridge Analytica-Facebook nexus, where user data was utilized for political advertising to shape public opinion.

Free flow of thought and information over the Internet has also repeatedly come under attack. Internet censorship is being increasingly used by government authorities all over the world today, as an effective tool to conceal information and subdue dissent. Some regions have also seen the complete blocking of Internet traffic in recent times, even when the United Nations has declared the right to Internet access as a basic human right.

Even at a technical or architectural level, flaws have started showing up in Internet-based services. Centralized data storage systems (such as Google Cloud, Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure) do not always follow safe data storage practices, resulting in hacks and theft of sensitive personal data. According to an IBM report, each data breach in 2019 lead to losses to the tune of $3.9million globally, and $8.2million in the US. Billions of users have been affected in the last decade, and the list just keeps on growing.

Tim Berners-Lee, widely credited as the inventor of the World Wide Web, believes that the need of the hour is a radical overhaul of the existing Internet standards, to implement an Internet which is more decentralized, more secure, and less prone to censorship.

How Blockchain can solve this Mess

Decentralization is one of the core principles of blockchain technology. A blockchain network is essentially a peer-to-peer network of nodes, where transactions and transmissions are verified not by any centralized overseeing authority but by the nodes themselves. This rules out the risks and malpractices associated with centralized systems. No geographic restrictions can be imposed on a blockchain network either – all you need is an Internet connection and a simple computing device to access it. Moreover, cross-border payments via blockchain networks are much more hassle-free as compared to traditional fiat gateways.

Research in blockchain has been conducted at a rapid rate. Bitcoin’s network might have its value only as a form of a public ledger where transactions can be stored immutably, but it introduced to the world the merits of blockchain technology. In 2015, Vitalik Buterin introduced Ethereum, a global platform where users could deploy and execute DApps (distributed applications), just like programmers run programs on the Internet. But unlike the Internet, Ethereum was beyond any jurisdiction, and hence free from interference from any government or corporate entity.   

Ethereum can be considered to be the first attempt at building a New Internet. A host of blockchain-based projects have created Ethereum-based DApps, to compete against centralized Internet applications. Projects such as Filecoin and Storj have challenged centralized data storage systems, by implementing a decentralized data storage system using the unused data storage space of users.

On the other hand, Ankr Network and Golem have created distributed cloud computing systems, by utilizing the idle computing resources in users’ edge devices. On the social front, Mycelia has created an Ethereum-based music sharing platform, where listeners can pay the musicians directly, and Steemit has implemented a social media platform, where users can publish content that gets directly written into the Ethereum blockchain.  

A Decentralized Internet

Unfortunately, even though Ethereum has proved to be a roaring success as a DApp platform, its scalability issues make it a less than ideal choice when it comes to supporting a decentralized Internet network connecting billions of users. While Ethereum’s team has been busy improving its speed and performance, other ambitious projects have come to the fore, which are working towards implementing a full-scale decentralized Internet. 2019 saw the public launch of 2 such projects – Blockstack and Tachyon Protocol – which have decided to shun Ethereum for other high-performance blockchain platforms.

Blockstack is creating a decentralized computing and application platform, by re-designing the application layer of the traditional TCP/IP protocol. Blockstack has implemented its own blockchain Stacks, a smart contract language called Clarity, and a decentralized data storage system called Gaia. DApp developers have already started writing and deploying their applications on Blockstack’s platform, as it seeks to replace Ethereum as the numero uno DApp platform.

Tachyon Protocol with their IPX Token is even more radical in its approach, as it is completely restructuring the TCP/IP protocol stack to provide the high security, robustness and performance that the New Internet would require. By implementing a combination of standard distributed technologies and modern encryption techniques, Tachyon is looking to achieve transmission speeds which are 10 times greater than what the current protocols offer. Other innovations, such as simulating the feature state of communication protocols and transmitting data packets through multiple channels, improve data security and restrict firewalls’ ability to detect the traffic.

Tachyon’s application is based on V SYSTEMS’ blockchain platform, which itself was launched in the early part of 2019. Interestingly, Tachyon serves as another example of how centralized entities are realizing the advantages of decentralization and choosing to walk down that path. Decentralized VPN is Tachyon’s first use case, and Tachyon’s team plans to extend its decentralized approach into other emerging sectors like IoT, DeFi and decentralized storage in the near future.

So what does the Future hold

Speaking at the Decentralized Web Summit in San Francisco, Berners-Lee mentioned that in the early days of the Internet, most people thought that proprietary online services like Compuserve, America Online, and Prodigy would go on to dominate the mainstream market in the future. All these companies had a tendency to implement their own rules, curbing the spirit of decentralization that the Internet sought to promote. Not surprisingly, none of them exist now.

The story is similar today. While we cannot imagine our lives without Apple or Google, decentralized alternatives are already available. Centralized systems typically see explosive growth at the beginning, but their progress is limited to the effort of their employees. Decentralized systems, on the other hand, have a sluggish start, but if they can prove to be of some value, then their growth can be exponential, as volunteers all throughout the world contribute to their development. Case in point – Wikipedia.

The blockchain projects and networks today still suffer from limitations related to performance and scalability. Considering the breakneck speed at which blockchain technology is improving, it’s extremely likely that these issues will be solved within the next couple of years. Projects such as Tachyon and Ankr have already shown what decentralization is capable of. It won’t come as a surprise if by the next decade, the decentralized counterpart of the Internet is all that exists.

As Berners-Lee had said, "You can make the walled garden very very sweet, but the jungle outside is always more appealing in the long term."