The Internet. It’s happening again. The open-source, public, blockchain-based distributed computing platform of Ethereum is going to be the NeXT (of) Internet Protocol. Yes, I’ve said it.
Apple’s turnaround was centered around the return of Steve Jobs when the NeXT Computer founded by Steve in 1985 was purchased by Apple in 1997. The NeXT Operating System (OS), as part of the acquisition, quickly evolved into the macOS. This laid the foundation as the standard operating systems of the colorful iMacs, and then the MacBooks. Through several iterations, it became the now infamous Mac OS X, and also ported on to the iOS as the operating system for the iPhones.
The Internet Protocol (IP) is the basis behind web applications. Software developers have been building web applications subconsciously on top of the Internet Protocol. This IP wrapped around TCP (to become TCP/IP), is the foundation of the network layers for all HTTP, and its secure HTTPS counterpart, which helps transmit media content from text, to images to rich streaming videos between web browsers and the service providers delivering those contents.
Blockchain is the building block for the next big thing, much like the beginnings of IP for the Internet today, and on the surface, it’s transacting trillions of dollars per year in commerce around the world. There’s a TCP/IP version of blockchain, called Ethereum, much like what NeXT OS that evolved into Apple’s OS X. There’s going to be an HTTP and HTTPS. As for the applications of TCP/IP, there’s already an Cloud storage solution, similar to Amazon Web Services’ S3, built based on Ethereum called IPFS.
In simple terms, Ethereum has these elements:
- It is a blockchain. Wikipedia defines it as a continuously growing list of records, called blocks, which are linked and secured using cryptography.
- It has attributes of money, having a “means of exchange”, “store of value” , “unit of measure”. This is much like Bitcoin. In Ethereum’s case, Ether is the currency denoted by the ETH symbol. At the time of writing, ETH is worth approximately US$260 each. Ether isn’t necessarily used to hold currency but used to power distributed programs, much like how vehicles are powered by gas.
- It features an ability to run a programmable sets of instructions called smart contracts, compiled into WebAssembly byte-code, and deployed into a distributed ecosystem called Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). The apps deployed are distributed, hence called Distributed Apps (DApps).
I’ve been working around building web applications in my previous life and more recently in scaling out production web applications. Ethereum piqued my interest because the of EVM and DApps development; as fantastic as they are in theory, DApps cannot scale as it is today. If you take away the technical architecture of DApps, they are no different with mobile apps on the App Store or eCommerce web sites.
If Ethereum does not continuously evolve to be a platform that scales, there will be no successful new auction DApps like eBay, no DApps for social network like Facebook, heck not even search engine DApps like Google. Hence it’s critical to raise the awareness that Ethereum needs to scale to a several hundred times beyond what it is at today. Ether will not be worth any where near what it is today (and nor will Bitcoin).
If this has piqued your interest too, I’ve found a really good read on Scaling Ethereum on Medium. Recently, there’s been a keen set of eyes placing resources, attention and talent onto Ethereum. It’ll be interesting to see how Ethereum takes shape at a global scale in the near future.
