Net Neutrality & Its Impact on Bitcoin & Cyptocurrency (Opinion)
This decade has seen lot of progress in the way we do trade and commerce digitally and also has paved the ways for decentralized crypto-economics based on Bitcoin and other Blockchain technologies which helps remove middle men and makes cross border financial transactions without regulatory control possible.
The benefits of Cryptocurrency and Blockchain technology has wider impact than finance, trade and commerce. It brings economic empowerment to the un-banked and to people who have been denied financial empowerment for long.
But the stress and pressure on decentralized technologies like Cyptocurrency is constant. Be it regulatory control or making AML/KYC mandatory even for small businesses to use Cyptocurrency or development of parallel digital currencies and distributed ledger technology to be used in a regulatory environment.
But for me the biggest threat that I see is from removing Net Neutrality
Net Neutrality
In the US, the rules governing Internet access are changing, threatening net neutrality — the principle that lets everyone use the Internet in the same way.
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) lost a battle with Verizon earlier this year — and with it, the right to stop ISPs from throttling others’ traffic an is framing new rules to restore Net Neutrality. But those rules may still allow ISPs and content providers to cut deals to make each others’ traffic faster in payments and transactions.
Impact on Bitcoin & Cyptocurrency
Bitcoin & Cyptocurrency technologies use free internet for the transfer of data packets and transactions in a peer-to-peer manner which helps in settling trades and transactions in a decentralized manner without any central control. For this to happen it is critical that ISP providers and the Internet backbone as a whole treat internet packets and traffic equally. And it is this point where if Bitcoin & Cyptocurrency technologies are throttled or even slowed, it will have grave impact in the future of the growth of the speed and innovation in the P2P technology and make this technology nonviable.
Yes many will argue that use of technologies like VPN or Tor can help sidestep this issue but while we are seeing the wider adoption of Bitcoin and other crypto currencies as a technology, if this is not made more accessible, then without wider adoption the growth in these technologies will be impacted and will hinder innovation.
Without neutral access to the Internet, small businesses, exchanges and startups in cryptocurrency ecosystem would face higher costs or competitive disadvantages in reaching users, and therefore might not even be in a position to take advantage of low cost payment processing.
Options
Already many innovations from the Cryptocurrency community to integrate with censorship resistant networks like Tor or I2P are underway (e.g Byteball). Also projects on integrating VPN technology with decentralized technology (https://mysterium.network/) to make transaction and transfer of data secure are promising.
Even from internet backbone perspective many interesting projects like below are trying to explore possibilities of using alternate backbone so that the Cryptocurrencies survives and spreads to communities and geographies where internet has not.
Conclusion
While some of above technologies are still in concept/development stage or limited to specific use case, the Bitcoin and wider cyrptocurrency community and ecosystem should stand behind the openness of internet as that is the primary backbone that helps fuel the current and future decentralized technological innovation.
