The Internet Computer — the future that Vitalik Buterin is talking about.

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Coinmonks

7 min readMar 21, 2022

Vitalik Buterin, the founder of Ethereum is on the cover of March 2022 TIME magazine, that’s great for the entire Crypto & Web3 community as it’s an indication of the importance & acceptance of the space in the mainstream world. However the title of the article is The Man Behind Ethereum Is Worried About Crypto’s Future is puzzling— why would the man who created the whole smart contract revolution be concerned about it? Related to this is criticism of Web3 by Moxie, a cryptographer & the founder of the Signal App. He very poignantly breaks up the way Web3 is working currently & the issues he sees with it. Vitalik gave a well thought out response to this where he concludes :

“I think the properly authenticated decentralized blockchain world is coming, and is much closer to being here than many people think. I see no technical reason why the future needs to look like the status quo today.” — Vitalik Buterin

The intention of this article is to highlight some important points made by them & suggest that we don’t need to wait for the future, it’s already available with the launch of The Internet Computer in 2021. The purpose is definitely not to misquote or challenge what these two technology stalwarts believe in, it’s to present the technologically advanced alternative that is a properly authenticated & 100% decentralised blockchain. It’s about time that the world discovers it & uses it’s power to solve issues that decentralised technology truly can.

1. The argument that Web3 is not fully ‘distributed’ & decentralised”

“There is nothing particularly “distributed” about the apps themselves: they’re just normal react websites. The “distributedness” refers to where the state and the logic/permissions for updating the state lives: on the blockchain instead of in a “centralised” database.” argues Moxie. In response, Vitalik agrees that Ethereum and other chains are probably not 100% there yet, but he claims that it’s costs & time which are the barriers which should get solved as we move on. He also says “Decentralised options that users reject today (eg. running a full node) really are quite difficult today, so it’s understandable that users are sticking to the more centralised options that at least they can easily use.”

The Internet Computer has built an infinite public technology platform which inherently doesn’t face these issues. It’s the only protocol where the entire stack is on blockchain and therefore distributed & decentralised. So with IC, a developer does not not need the cloud, servers, webservers & databases to run a webservice or a DApp. This means that blockchain DApps, systems and services can be created without incorporating websites running on corporate cloud hosting services like AWS into their architecture. This provides true end-to-end Web 3.0 decentralisation, censorship resistance, and superior security.

2. The issue of Complicated & not seamless Infrastructure

The infrastructure of the current DApps are quite complicated. There are servers, wallets & API’s talking to the blockchain at different levels to facilitate transactions using smart contracts. Moxie says “ Almost all dApps use either Infura or Alchemy in order to interact with the blockchain. In fact, even when you connect a wallet like MetaMask to a dApp, and the dApp interacts with the blockchain via your wallet, MetaMask is just making calls to Infura! These client APIs are not using anything to verify blockchain state or the authenticity of responses. The results aren’t even signed….So like for my dApp, MetaMask accomplishes this by making API calls to three companies that have consolidated in this space.”

Vitalik says that “There’s teams already working” on implementing things like API endpointing the code & connecting directly to a p2p networks, and active research is on on other issues with the protocol, however there are no timelines given for these developments.

The Internet Computer Canister Smart Contracts

The Internet Computer has already found a unique solution to simplify the infrastructure that doesn’t need any API’s and external servers. The Internet Computer hosts powerful smart contracts called canisters. Canisters are tamperproof, autonomous, hosted on-chain, and can be run concurrently and interact with each other. Canisters allow users to directly interact with web experiences without any third party intermediary. All features of smart contracts are in one place, using one identity making it seamless & secure.

3. The speed of changes and the need for hard forks.

Moxie points out — “the web3 protocols are slow to evolve”, because of which “Iterating quickly on centralized platforms is already outpacing the distributed protocols and consolidating control into platforms.” Vitalik’s view on this subject is “… new projects are slow to ramp up, and the centralized workarounds have had years of head start. One thing that makes the ramp up even slower is the chain of dependencies: in order to have light clients, we need to have a light client friendly chain, which is a deep change to the protocol, and so the only realistic opportunity to implement it is the switch to PoS…”

The NNS based Governance System of the ICP

The Internet Computer on the contrary already runs under the control of a permissionless algorithmic governance system called the “Network Nervous System” (or NNS) that is resident within its protocols. The NNS processes proposals anyone can submit, either rejecting them, or adopting and executing them automatically. Voting is performed by “neurons” that earn “voting rewards”, which can be created by staking the ICP utility token within the NNS.Through the NNS, the Internet Computer self-directs and evolves in real-time without hard forks.

4. The problem of choking networks and rising gas fees.

To illustrate this issue, Moxie talks about the use case of NFT’s where he says “The transaction fees puts an artificial floor on all bids, since otherwise you’d lose money by accepting a bid for less than the gas fees.” and these fees are quite high right now due to the congestion on the network. Buterin points out an associated issue -“With fees being the way they are today it really gets to the point where the financial derivatives and the gambley stuff start pricing out some of the cool stuff.” There are protocols like Solana and Cardano trying to resolve this issue, however they are facing other challenges. Ethereum would probably resolve this with the ‘merge’ to Proof of Stake, but we need to wait for the rollout to happen.

Contrary to the current Gas Fee models, The Internet Computer incorporates a “reverse gas” model, in which smart contracts pay for their own computation, and must be pre-charged with cycles to run in much the same way an electric car must be pre-charged with electricity to drive. This ensures that end-users of DApps, systems and services can interact with them over the web without needing tokens to pay for the computations that they initiate. In effect, as a user, one doesn’t need to pay any gas fee, the cost is borne by the service provider, which itself is as low as ~5$ GB/Year.

Then there are other conversations on topics like wallets, usernames & passwords and identity which are issues resolved by the Internet Identity (II) used by the ICP.

Internet Identity (II) is a blockchain authentication framework supported by the Internet Computer. Users can now use security features on their devices like phones & laptops like Face Id to signup and authenticate to DApps running on the Internet Computer. This removes the need for usernames & passwords & provides a high level of convenience, while also benefiting from a high level of security and without the need to directly manage or handle cryptographic key material themselves.

The arguments against decentralisation like the “lack of immediate practical or pressing importance to the majority of people” or “the fact that benefits of decentralisation are landing up in a few greedy hands” are premature and it’s the overall ecosystem that needs to evolve to make it’s real power self evident. Buterin captures it quite well — “One silver lining of the situation in the last three weeks is that it has reminded a lot of people in the crypto space that ultimately the goal of crypto is not to play games with million-dollar pictures of monkeys, it’s to do things that accomplish meaningful effects in the real world”.

While the entire Web3 world is waiting for the Ethereum merge to happen to solve some of the problems mentioned above, it’s important that their attention moves to The Internet Computer which is way ahead on these issues and use the power of the decentralised smart contracts to show the sceptics the way true trustless, transparent protocols can run without intermediaries.

For more details on the ICP, here is a quick rundown of the vision & workings of the Internet Computer by Dominic Williams, Founder — Dfinity Foundation

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