An In-Depth Explanation of DApps.
“Decentralized applications” (also known as DApps) are hot topics in the current blockchain industry. Today, Ludos will introduce DApps from different perspectives to understand the development of DApps.
The difference between “Centralization” and “Decentralization”
The birth of the Internet originated from the US Department of Defense research project ARPANET. Its design comes from the idea — if there was only one centralized military command center and the center was destroyed by Soviet nuclear weapons, the national military command would be in a state of paralysis. It is necessary to design a distributed, shared data network system. So the Internet’s decentralized thinking is rooted in the design philosophy. Many of the early Internet protocols, including TCP/IP, were designed based on decentralized thinking.
Then gradually developed a character terminal, as the name suggests is the function of only input and output characters, followed by the emergence of a time-sharing operating system, that is, multiple users share resources in the host. Because the character terminal, time-sharing operating system, etc. can not do anything after leaving the host, the software is completely running on the centralized computer, which makes us enter the centralization period. It was not until the advent of the personal computer (PC) era that we ushered in the first truly decentralized applications. Yes, the various PC “stand-alone” software we used to be familiar with is a decentralized application in some sense.
When browsers became popular, people began to realize that browsers are a common client that understands and is more generally standard “language” (HTML), which makes applications more central and easier to develop, deploy, and maintain. So a more centralized approach to “browser/server architecture (B/S architecture)” has become popular again. In the near future, the “Web 2.0” movement that emerged in 2005 is the closest to the decentralization of the desktop Internet era. The blog is decentralized publishing and media, using a simple, open protocol like RSS. At that period, social networks with personal nodes were outstanding. FOAF, Microformat, OpenID, OAuth, etc. were the development standards that emerged in that era. So the “protocol” is the key to decentralized applications. The most important protocol in the Internet era is the TCP/IP protocol family and the more application protocols built on it. These open protocols enable developers around the world to build today, the Internet.
Unfortunately, at that time and later industry giants Google and Facebook strategically put out the “Web 2.0” decentralization movement but pushed the centralization of the Internet to the extreme. Of course, we must admit that Google and Facebook have contributed a lot of open source products, and many of them have become a weapon that can be used in the blockchain era. For example, Level DB used by Bitcoin is Google’s work, and RockDB, which is used by Ethereum and ArcBlock, is a work of Facebook. The fate of technology is sometimes the process of iterative iterations.
If centralization and decentralization are relative. Taking Bitcoin as an example, from the perspective of its network topology, the nodes of Bitcoin are very numerous and scattered. The mining mechanism of PoW leads to the attack of Bitcoin, which requires more than 51% of the total network, and the collapse of a few nodes. Closing and being attacked will not affect the security and proper operation of the entire Bitcoin network — which means that the Bitcoin network is decentralized. From the perspective of Bitcoin as an application, it is designed as point-to-point electronic cash. The bitcoin’s wallet address is generated by the user and does not need to be issued and approved by anyone. Without the private key, no one or organization can capture the user’s bits. At the same time, the transfer of Bitcoin does not require the involvement of any third party. No other person or organization can prohibit or tamper with the transaction; the transaction record of Bitcoin is permanently stored in the blockchain of Bitcoin, and no one can tamper with, delete or hide it. These are enough to show that Bitcoin is a truly decentralized application.
Another intriguing fact is that the public recognizes the decentralization of the Bitcoin network due to its highly decentralized as an application. In the end, everyone recognizes the Bitcoin network service and there is only one Bitcoin in the world. From this perspective, Bitcoin is highly centralized. This is very interesting. When a system is decentralized, from another perspective it may be that the decentralization of a single performance makes it more centralized. Therefore, the division and definition of any centralization and decentralization are not absolute, but relative, even evolving and intricate.
The current game theory of “centralization” and “decentralization”
Now that Internet centralization seems to have reached its limit, what are the reasons for pushing the centralization to the extreme?
1) The closed centralized account system
In the past two years, the Internet concept has been popular. Many companies have been inspired to find a large number of users, collect various information of users, and then benefit from advertising or promotion. This also allows many companies to exclusively occupy users, and the idea is to try to lock users into their own platforms as much as possible;
2) Repetitively create “wheels” and use these incompatible “wheels” to form so-called “competition barriers.” This is actually a serious violation of the original spirit of the Internet (Internet) and the Web (World Wide Web), but now this has become the most common means of competition, the result is that we have 10 different messaging apps, 10 different bank apps, 10 different movie apps… and their role is almost the same, only the service providers are different;
3) Grasp the data that should belong to the user for free or extremely cheap, and do not allow users to migrate data or create various obstacles to make the user inconvenient to migrate, occupying the most time, attention, bandwidth, etc. of the user as much as possible to obtain a steady stream of data;
4) Failure to comply with the agreement, not open the agreement, or only partially provide the agreement to create the illusion of “openness.” Use the “open” illusion to acquire users, and use the “not open” implementation to increase the difficulty and cost of user migration, and lock users in their own homes.
The development of DApps and blockchain can justify the four major pain points of Internet-centric monopoly:
1) unified, autonomous, decentralized ID;
2) Reuse “wheels” in large numbers instead of constantly recreating them;
3) The data belongs entirely to the user, and the user has autonomy;
4) Complete and comprehensive open protocols, as far as possible to maintain forward compatibility (does not produce unnecessary forks).
Therefore, the premise of DApps development is firstly independent personal identity, your identity, relationship, data, assets… these are on your own control and not controlled by others; secondly, peer-to-peer digital asset flows (digital currency and others)no middleman, no need for someone else to approve; then you need data to be migrated, your data is yours, and you are allowed to use it. These important foundations are actually unsolvable before the blockchain appears, but breaking them is the key to the next development of computer technology.
Understand the Development of DApps
Why is DApps not currently breaking out? In fact, the detonation of any new things is indispensable to the long and dark eve of the night, many people only see the stage of the explosive growth, often overlooking the slow accumulation process of the potential energy required for the explosion.
Before the iPhone is invented, the concept of smartphones has been around for more than 10 years. The famous investor Peter Till pointed out in the book “From 0 to 1” that a new product must achieve a high-speed growth, which must be more than 10 times better than the existing solution. Therefore, the application must not be decentralized for the sake of decentralization. The key to decentralized application is to find a problem that needs to be solved. This problem is solved by decentralized methods infinite times better than other schemes, or obtained by breaking the rules. “Unfair” competitive advantage.
For example, Bitcoin, as a peer-to-peer cryptocurrency, breaks countless rules and solves many people’s problems, so Bitcoin has an almost unfair competitive advantage compared to traditional digital currency or payment such as Paypal. Although Bitcoin is slow and cumbersome to use, it has still grown rapidly over the past 10 years.
About Ludos Protocol
Ludos Protocol is a purpose-built blockchain infrastructure project for the gaming community. As only the third blockchain project to be backed by Japanese investment giant Softbank, Ludos addresses numerous shortcomings in the existing gaming landscape. Its main chain + multi-sidechain architecture allows games to run entirely on their own blockchain, preventing scalability issues that have plagued previous blockchain-based games. Additionally, the Protocol seeks to create a gamer-friendly ecosystem whereby game developers and gamers can come together to easily crowdfund and build on the platform. The use of non-fungible tokens (NFT’s) within the ecosystem will allow gamers to swap assets in one game for assets in another. Finally, through their partnership with FullPay Japan, Ludos will give gamers the chance to use LUD tokens that are earned in-game to shop and buy at a range of retail stores in Japan and later the world.
Ludos Protocol Links
Telegram Channel: https://t.me/LudosProtocol
Telegram Announcement Channel: https://t.me/LudosAnnouncements
Website: https://www.ludos.one/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/LudosProtocolOfficial/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/LudosProtocol
Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/LudosProtocol/
BitcoinTalk thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5064140
