The Big Picture: Crypto for a better internet

Many crypto enthusiasts are too focused on petty details, including cryptocurrency price movements and scams, to focus on the big picture.

The big picture is, I think, that crypto technologies are suitable enablers building blocks for a much better internet: A decentralized internet that can’t be controlled by any self-appointed authorities such as nation states and giant corporations. Since the internet plays a central role in society, a much better internet is an enabler and a building block for a much better society. Simple as that.

Now, “the next step for the web is decentralization — and it’s kind of a big deal,” notes Big Think. “The decentralized web will be as big a game changer as the internet was in the ‘90s.”

“Over the past few years there has been a major increase in the number of decentralized projects working on making the decentralized web a reality in the near future.”

Big Think covers some interesting projects to build the decentralized internet of tomorrow, including TRON, Graphite Docs, and Skycoin. There are notable omissions, including Tim Berners-Lee’s Solid and Inrupt, which are still in an early planning phase and don’t seem to involve crypto-tech at the moment, and promising small projects like ZeroNet, but the Big Think story makes a solid case that “an encrypted, blockchain-operated decentralized web could be the answer” to the problems of today’s internet controlled by Big Government and Big Business (let’s just call them BG and BB).

A decentralized web would work like BitTorrent: All content would be streamed not by central servers — which are controlled by BB and otherwise can be seized by BG— but by the users themselves. It’s worth noting that BitTorrent now belongs to TRON and is focusing on Project Atlas, which will connect the BitTorrent P2P network and the TRON blockchain network. It’s also worth noting that BitTorrent’s creator, Bram Cohen, is building a next-gen cryptocurrency.

Blockchain-based cryptocurrencies are central to the decentralization of the internet, for many reasons. First, a blockchain is a decentralized database controlled by the users, and therefore a blockchain is an ideal storage layer for a decentralized internet. Second, a blockchain can be configured for anonymous access, thus protecting creators and users from BG and BB. Third, a blockchain can carry a cryptocurrency, and therefore a blockchain-based decentralized internet has a built-in payment framework.

It’s very much worth noting that internet pioneers such as Ted Nelson, Marc Andreessen and Tim Berners-Lee thought that the internet should have a built-in payment framework, and Berners-Lee tried to include micropayments in early Web protocols.

In his 2014 book “The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution,” Walter Isaacson reports that: “In the late 1990s Berners-Lee tried to develop a micropayments system for the Web through the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).” The idea was to devise a way to embed in a Web page the information needed to handle a small payment, which would allow different electronic wallet services to be created by banks or entrepreneurs. “It was never implemented, partly because of the changing complexity of banking regulations,” notes Isaacson.

Perhaps the time is now.

Opera, one of the major browser makers, “is finally rolling out its blockchain-oriented browser specifically designed for surfing and interacting with the decentralized web (also known as Web 3.0),” TNW reports.

Opera’s announcement says:

“The Opera browser for Android now features crypto wallet integration and Web 3 support. What this means is that with the newest version of Opera, you will now also gain easy access to Web 3, the exciting internet of tomorrow.

We believe that the web of today will be the interface to the decentralized web of tomorrow (Web 3). With a built-in crypto wallet, our browser has the potential to renew and extend its important role as a tool to access information, make transactions online and manage users’ online identity in a way that gives them more control.”

Picture from Backbone Campaign/Flickr.