How Decentralization Will Completely Change the Internet as We Know It Today
Everything you know about technology and business is about to change!
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What is Really the Main Issue with the Internet today?
The Internet today is dominated by a small number of massive tech companies. This oligarchy consists of Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Google, Microsoft, Twitter, and some others.
They have absolute power over their data and their operations, and complete control over your data, your privacy, and your online behaviour-tracking and monitoring. In fact, in 2019, 88% of Alphabet’s revenue came from Google Advertising alone.
This arrangement is prone to misuse by the following factors:
1. Hacking: Placing all your valuable personal data on public servers means that they will be accessible to the best or the worst hackers. In fact, security is such a problem that bitcoin, Ethereum, and cryptocurrency exchanges have been successfully hacked several times. The sad truth is that every system no matter how strongly protected will have vulnerabilities. This is a very real threat that the world will have to learn to deal with.
2. Tampering of information: Giving other people so much power over your own personal details could place you at risk by misinformation or entering and collecting false information. Anybody who changes the data collected about you has complete and absolute power over you. They can enter any sort of criminal behaviour like paedophilic pornography, false payments, unreported and untaxed income — the opportunities are too much to count.
3. Centralization: The world’s entire Internet is controlled by a few companies in the USA. This can be risky since there is a realistic chance of a central failure leading to systemic collapse. If the Internet goes down, our modern civilization and the stock markets go down with it. This is far too big a risk to take. Decentralization solves this problem effectively, elegantly, and smoothly.
4. Exploitation: Currently, a small number of ultra-large companies are collecting and marketing our personal data and online profile. Not only is this an abuse of privacy, but it is also exploitation of our assets that the companies should have no justifiable right to do so. We should have the rights on our personal data. That data belongs to us. We can realize this right using decentralization, as you will soon see.
5. Crime: The Internet is the world’s largest and most visible decentralized system. But not many people are aware of the Dark Web component. In reality, it is estimated that normal Internet servers are just 20% of the total Internet sites in the world. The remaining 80% is the Dark Web — an un-trackable, anonymous, unpoliced, rule-less system that deals in cryptocurrency (usually Bitcoin or Monero). These domains can only be entered by accessing a VPN (Virtual Private Network — a system that encrypts all data sent on it). The Dark Web is the super-highway of crime, especially organized crime. It is so dangerous that I strongly advocate you stay away. Even something you see on a computer screen can scar you for life. If you see the Dark Web, click away. Immediately. It is a paradise for child molesters, criminals, renegades, un-trackable payments, and illegal activity, especially drug peddling. Stay away from the Dark Web!
6. Economic Profit is siloed: Right now around 10–11 companies in the USA dominate the world economic market. Over 150 other companies make their living from services theses 10 companies offer. This restricts economic freedom and causes the rich to get richer, the poor to get poorer, and thus economic inequality exacerbation. We can completely turn this around with the Decentralized Web (some call it DWeb). In the decentralized Internet, while regulation and censorship are difficult, we can ensure economic equality among everyone in society (so badly needed in countries like India) and actually create wealth, create income out of nothing more than tokenization and blockchain systems, in our case the Hedera Hashgraph, the Blockchain Version 3.0 (blockchain 1.0 is Bitcoin, blockchain 2.0 is Ethereum and its smart contracts, blockchain 3.0 is the Hedera Hashgraph).
These a just a few of the problems with the current, decentralized logically but centralized physically Internet Information System. This is not a complete list. There are many more problems that can be listed. So, looking at such a flawed system, what can we do?
Decentralize!
What is Decentralization?
Decentralization means that the internet, instead of functioning as a client-server model, moves into a peer-to-peer (P2P) architecture. We use technologies like blockchain to create completely independent nodes that provide the entire set of services in the OSI stack in one of many independent interdependent nodes. Instead of servers providing all the information and functionality, each node is responsible for its own services. Blockchain is one of the most exciting aspects of this DWeb because we can program wealth creation into the DWeb (decentralized World Wide Web — Decentralized Internet) and blockchain is and always has been a distributed system by nature. Hashgraph gives you even greater advantages, which is why some analysts believe the release of the Hedera Hashgraph mainnet and mirrornet to be a tipping point in the evolution of DApps (Application that run on blockchain or hashgraph system protocols).
This marks the beginning of an exciting time and for to understand that we need to see what decentralization can do for us. This is a completely different Internet. There will be only a superficial resemblance to the Internet we know today. Core services, functionalities, and capabilities will be radically transformed. To help you really understand the possibilities, I quote from an excellent article in Medium by Mr. Doug Petkanics:
From the article The Benefits of Decentralization available at:
https://medium.com/@petkanics/the-benefits-of-decentralization-88a0b5d0fd39
1. Users don’t have to put trust in a central authority. We trust companies and governments with our information and money all the time, and it is completely ok to make these decisions on a case by case basis. But we see plenty of examples where this trust lets us down to varying degrees, ranging from the product that you trusted to backup all your photos getting shut down when the startup gets bought or goes out of business, to the social media company selling your data to advertisers who follow you around the internet. In a well designed decentralized network, you should be able to reduce or eliminate the trust that you’re required to put into third parties.
2. There is less likely to be a single point of failure. We see single points of failure all the time in the form of outages of centralized web sites. Gmail goes down and productivity halts as you can’t get your email. Your bank’s web site shuts down for maintenance and you can’t do an online transfer to pay your bills. In decentralized networks, no one node going down can take down the entire network, so no matter how many users come and go, your applications should remain up and running.
3. There is less censorship. It is becoming increasingly common that governments shut down their citizens’ access to social media, as they attempt to censor reports of what is going on internally. It is easy for them to shut down access to Twitter, as all they have to do is stop traffic going to Twitter’s central servers. But it is far more difficult for them to censor traffic on a peer to peer network, in which every single outbound packet being sent could be communicating with another peer on the decentralized network, who can then forward that message along.
4. Decentralized networks are more likely to be open development platforms. This means that anyone can build amazing tools, products, and services on top of decentralized networks. Contrast this with centralized technology which is more often closed off with intentionally limited development opportunities. Open and decentralized doesn’t mean that companies can’t make money. In fact, it means the opposite, as the more great products and tools that are built, the larger the network effects are locking users into the network, and therefore the more opportunities to build great businesses on top. The world wide web itself is a great example of an open network, in which many great businesses such as Amazon, found opportunities to grow enormously due to the network effects of all the great things being built on top of the network.
5. There is potential for network ownership alignment. This is the idea that the people who contribute value to a decentralized network receive ownership or economic stake in the network, that becomes more valuable as the network grows. This is one of the most exciting things that blockchain technology brings to decentralized networks, as it allows economics to be designed into the networks themselves, to create the right incentives for early participants to become powerhouse evangelists and value-contributing users. Contrast this to a centralized network where only the company controlling the network receives value as the network grows, and you can see why it’s exciting for users to participate in a decentralized network.
6. Decentralized networks can be more meritocratic. The best product, service, or content should be more likely to be recognized and rewarded over time when everyone is playing by the same, transparent rules. If traffic, attention, and economics are distributed instead behind a closed, centralized algorithm, it’s possible that the system is less meritocratic.
From https://medium.com/@petkanics/the-benefits-of-decentralization-88a0b5d0fd39
Exciting, World-Changing Opportunities Up for Grabs
This should have you sitting on the edge of your seats. This concept, if it is realized effectively, will mean that Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon (FAMGA) will lose most of their power and give great benefits to the end-user. It means that wealth will become democratic. It means that marketing strategies will change. Hashgraph/blockchain will transform the notion of what a business is. Personally, I expect FAMGA companies to adopt hashgraph technology into their existing services. It will be an exciting vindication of Hedera Hashgraph and the hbar cryptocurrency. Furthermore, entrepreneurs, coders, businessmen and capitalists will have to become proficient in blockchain and hashgraph. Because the most critical innovations will be coupled to an intricate view of the underlying architecture and tech functionality.
Potentially Viral DApps
There is a massive list of opportunities that are available to the tech-savvy entrepreneur. To get a rough idea of this gargantuan list, have a look below:
•Identity Management and Verification
•Record Maintenance
•High-Security Account Management
•Transaction Processing
•Cryptocurrency Creation
•Data Privacy
•Monetization of Personal Data
•Plug-In Consensus System for Other Blockchain Stacks
•Auto Verifiable Transactions
•File Storage
•High Throughput Transaction Processing
•Intellectual Property Management
•Smart Contracts
•Automatic Payment and Process Management System
•Cloud File System Storage with GCP
•Virtual Reality Worlds
•VOIP International Monetisation
•More Relevant and personalized Ads According to Your Personal Preferences
•Game Functionality Support (Micro-transactions)
•Security-proofing against Hacker Breaches
•Copyright Protection
•System Automation
•Artwork Market
•Assets Market
•Gamification of Existing Apps and Systems
•New Gamified Apps rather than Plain Functional Apps Alone
•Publications Market
•Microtransactions Pay-Per-Use Online Systems
•Cryptography Management
•Custom Software Service Design
- Real Estate Marketing System
- …
- …
- …
I can keep going, but I need to keep this article moderately short!. . .
Every single one of these applications can go viral if adopted worldwide through effective marketing. There is no finite list of the number of applications. The potential applications are infinite in number. We can even use hashgraph in environmental protection and energy conservation! The only limit on what you will achieve with this disruptive tech is your imagination. Application developers are available for any of your hashgraph apps given a sound project plan and monetization system. Even just an innovative idea could lead to a world-changing, earth-shaking product! Your mind is an incredible machine. Use it well and there is no limit to where you can go and the places you will reach.
A Decentralized Internet Textual Visualization
Imagine a completely decentralized Internet. To paint a picture of what it might look like, imagine the following scenario:
You put on your Augmented Reality Goggle and access your personal iNetwork property, a site given to you on your birth for free and without overlap (mild changes for duplicate names). It stores the list of your favourite food, your favourite clothes, favourite games, favourite reading, favourite music, etc… as well as the full history of your shopping activities online. Companies who advertise can access it through micropayments to your cryptocurrency account. You have multiple soft wallets and two hard wallets, one in a 24X7X365 secure location, all of them unique to yourself.
The very act of having a shopping history adds to your monetization because every time a company uses your data, it pays you (not Microsoft or Google or Amazon) through your cryptocurrency wallet. Your decentralized Internet Node gives you the full functionality of the Internet available today without middlemen. Everything is automated and implemented with smart contracts. There are software bots that crawl all your application layers to prevent hackers from gaining access to you. Your final payment approval is a biometric unique to you that cannot be copied or stored anywhere else.
To take a loan, use a DApp. To buy a car, use a DApp. Use a robot to drive and maintain the car. To publish a book, use a DApp. To sell property, use a DApp. To buy food and water and provisions, automate the process through smart contracts that run at a fixed time every day or week. The entire world runs a homogenous interface device for using the DApps and the implementation can be heterogenous and specific according to the user’s needs. The market visibility for DApps can be the whole world, since the whole world uses the same interface to access DApps.
This is not a utopian imaginary world but an actual possibility. This can actually happen! And it is in the interest of the big companies to invest in Hedera technology before it becomes an uncatchable phenomenon. The picture of the world above is a natural extension of the technology we have today.
New companies will be formed. New billionaires will arise. Business will boom. The world will be changed forever. Where will you be?
Four (Out of over a Hundred) Leading Disruptive Hedera Hashgraph DApps Worldwide
Hedera has listed seven possibly disruptive Hashgraph DApps on their blog. We close this article with a quick look at four of them that are live right now. These four DApps’ description is taken from the Hedera Hashgraph blog at:
https://medium.com/hashgraph/7-industry-disrupting-dapps-building-on-hedera-24716ff08e84
Industry: Online Marketplace (Cryptocurrency Payments)
Headquarters: Croatia
Website: https://cryptotask.org“We’re proud to present a long term design decision to create a version of our well established platform on Hedera Hashgraph, which we believe offers a superior consensus mechanism that is faster, more fair and secure than existing blockchain systems.”
— Vedran Kajic, CEO
What does Cryptotask do?
Cryptotask is a decentralized task marketplace for freelancers, built to disrupt today’s freelancing systems. Through its token-based task market, Cryptotask hopes to solve the problems facing centralized task marketplaces, such as: exorbitant fees, limits on high-value tasks, and slow dispute resolution. Additionally, users of the platform are rewarded for performing certain actions, such as writing task reviews.Why Hedera Hashgraph?
Cryptotask’s smart contract freelancing platform is currently deployed on the Ethereum mainnet with some high value tasks having already been completed. They’ve decided to move to Hedera Hashgraph because of the opportunity to lower their transaction fees even further, while increasing the speed and security of their platform. Cryptotask views this as a crucial move for creating a successful task market solution on a distributed ledger. Additionally, Hedera Hashgraph offers developers the ability to write and run contracts in Solidity™, unchanged, smoothing the transition even further.
Industry: Media / Entertainment (Micropayments)
Headquarters: Los Angeles, CA
Website: http://artbit.comWhat does Artbit do?
Artbit was created on the premise that fans can harness revolutionary technology to reclaim the power of art. Artbit enables users to offer micropayments to artists performing online, to back their work and show support — revolutionizing the way artists are discovered and compensated.Artbit users can produce live shows and performances through the platform, linking artists’ performance locations to any of Artbit’s virtual stages. Fans from around the world can watch live performances and interact by liking and sharing the performance, all while generating micropayments for both the artist and online crowd.
Why Hedera Hashgraph?
Artbit allows artists to be paid directly through microtransactions of cryptocurrency, but the speed and fees of alternative blockchain or DAG platforms prevent the feasibility of this use case. Hedera Hashgraph offers the speed and efficiency that allow for micropayments on Artbit to be practical.
Industry: Finance (Routing and Settlement
Headquarters: Los Angeles, CA
Website: https://sagewise.io“The Sagewise platform can easily be ported to the Hedera Hashgraph platform because it includes the Solidity™ Virtual Machine. This compatibility makes working with Hedera Hashgraph a true win-win; our developers are able to use the same Solidity™ code they use to build on blockchain to build functionality utilizing Hashgraph.”
— Amy Wan, Co-Founder & CEO
What does Sagewise do?
The company Sagewise is building software to efficiently resolve disputes using blockchains and cryptocurrency; they’re planning on using Hedera Hashgraph to underpin efforts to provide resolution of disputes involving smart contracts. Amy Wan, Co-Founder & CEO of Sagewise, claims “Smart contract losses exceeded half a billion U.S. dollars in value in 2017, so we feel it is integral to address the void in the industry”.Why Hedera Hashgraph?
In order for Sagewise to reach their objectives, the problem of scaling on a decentralized ledger was of utmost importance; this is why they decided to work with Hedera Hashgraph. Hedera Hashgraph does not have the technical limitations of the existing blockchains, and provides distributed finality of consensus. At the same time, Hedera Hashgraph supports Solidity™ smart contracts, which means they can migrate their Solidity™ code directly to Hedera Hashgraph with no code changes.
Industry: Finance (Stable Coin)
Headquarters: New York, NY
Website: https://carbon.money“Carbon aims to facilitate a more inclusive and efficient global economy by introducing a reliable, price-stable cryptocurrency. We are excited by the potential of Hedera hashgraph, a truly innovative distributed ledger platform with unprecedented speed and bank-grade security, to further this mission.”
— Miles Albert, Co-Founder
What does Carbon do?
Carbon is a trustless stable cryptocurrency which closely correlates with the US Dollar. They achieve stability through algorithmically adjusting coin supply based on the demand. Carbon promises to offer users a fast, secure, and stable cryptocurrency that is compatible with smart contracts and used globally.Stable coins as a concept was born due to the volatility of existing cryptocurrencies which have a fixed total supply; stable coins are still a cryptocurrency, but they’re pegged to the value of another more stable asset, such as gold or a stable fiat currency. These coins are global and not tied to a central bank, but still have low volatility; this is what will allow for their practical usage.
Why Hedera Hashgraph?
After Carbon’s investigation of numerous smart contract platforms, they decided that the Hedera Hashgraph distributed public ledger offers the strongest foundation for the Carbon protocol; it allows Carbon USD to achieve unprecedented speed with fractional cost per transaction, all while maintaining bank-grade security.
And all this is just the beginning. There are many, many more Dapps already out on the market. Already, the world today is completely different from what it used to be. New opportunities. New business. New sectors. New industries. My question is: where will you be?
Conclusion
There are well over a hundred DApps running on Hedera Hashgraph available today. This technology is big news. And it is destined to take off like a rocket. If I were a developer, I would be building my own DApp. Languages supported include Java and Go. These are early days. The world is not fully aware of the potential of DApps. So –
Invest. Invest widely, broadly, freely. Buy some cryptocurrency as a long-term saving. Buy shares of these start-ups while they are still at a lifetime low. Teach your kids coding along with mathematics. For those inclined, encourage them to try to code their own DApps and encourage them continually. And do I have to tell you, learn Go or Java, and get started with DApp development! ASAP!
The future will be many things, but never without constant planet-wide disruption and innovation. Millions and billions of USD will be available to those who can take advantage of these times and these conditions.
Ready to be the next Bill Gates?
Read.
Learn.
Code.
Rinse.
Repeat.
And one day –
after enough repetitions –
you just might be.
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