Web 3.0 — the decentralized internet
The future of the internet is based on blockchain technology, distributed hyper-cloud infrastructures and sharing economy. Hosting providers are living on borrowed time.
That last line is one hell of a prediction and statement, for a guy, who worked in the hosting business since he could walk, don’t you think? But let’s have a look at the actual predictions and facts behind that statement.
With the expansion of blockchain technology, I’m betting that we will soon see a decentralized internet. An internet where you and me holds a part of the internet — and earns money doing so. It is the evolution and technology of cloud hosting, blockchain and sharing economy coming together.
Imagine this: when you are not at your computer, your computer’s resources will be used for hosting (serving websites, files etc.) or storing data. The companies using your “spare capacity” will pay you. Now imagine millions of people doing this. Then you essentially have a distributed cloud infrastructure. A decentralized internet. It’s like the Airbnb of internet hosting.
Will this be the end of traditional hosting providers?
Well — not entirely. Because with all the bandwidth power and equipment they have, they could be a significant part of the new decentralized internet. But they would probably be paid a lot less and get a smaller piece of the cake.
Creating a blockchain-based distributed cloud, would decrease the cost of computational power, storage and bandwidth so drastically, that it would not be profitable to be a big, traditional hosting provider. And they wouldn’t own the customers anymore. They would just be part of the blockchain and “the cloud”. They would be more comparable to the chinese Bitcoin mining farms.
But don’t worry. The old, traditional hosting providers will keep living of people and companies that doesn’t know better and doesn’t really care either.
But why decentralize web and cloud hosting?
For the customers (or the users) there are a lot of benefits with a blockchain-based cloud in comparison to the traditional hosting providers:
- It will be much cheaper.
- You can achieve (in theory) 100% uptime, because it’s extremely unlikely that the whole blockchain will break down at the same time.
- Data is spread among many clouds/devices/machines (call it what you wanna call it), so data loss should be a thing of that past (but keep your backup).
- It would allow websites to never be taken down or removed from the internet, as there is no central power to do so.
- It would be a lot more safe, because everything would — by default — be encrypted and decentralized. No middle man.
And that’s just some of the benefits of decentralizing the internet. So if we can figure out a way to put all the technologies together and make it work, it makes a lot of sense to do so.
The big question: When?
I’m sorry to disappoint you, dear reader. I’m only good at understanding new technologies and figuring out what they can be used for. I’m not an oracle — unfortunately. But I will bring a vague prediction: It’s soon. Investors are throwing money in blockchain-based projects like it was 1999 — and the technology is actually here today:
Decentralized file storage system, Storj, already solved the problem of having decentralized, distributed, end-to-end encrypted storage. It’s basically a blockchain-based Dropbox.
Another alternative is Sia which are claiming they are 10 times cheaper than comparable storage at Amazon AWS — one of the world's biggest cloud hosting providers.
The Ethereum Name Service (ENS) is a blockchain-based name service, that offers both human-readable names for Ethereum adresses like theander.eth, but also supports traditional DNS, that support .com, .net, etc.
Gladius.io is providing a global CDN and DDoS mitigation service, where the DDoS attacks are mitigated to many individual computers/devices, providing their spare capacity of bandwidth. It all works like a sharing economy, as they are paid for the GB bandwidth that are sent through their network.
BigchainDB is creating a blockchain database that is based on MongoDB, a well known database. Solving the challenges with running databases in a highly decentralized hosting environment is a big one.
It’s starting to create a bigger picture, isn’t it? Now (for the hardcore tech-entrepreneurs) combine these blockchain-based technologies with the latest server technologies like container virtualization and distributed systems kernel and you have the secret sauce. And I’ve pretty much made you the recipe for a billion dollar project (I’m accepting Bitcoin donations — thank you!).
The technology is here. The money is ready to be invested, to further develop and improve that technology. Now we just need some first-movers and proof-of-concepts. And actually, that is going to happen very soon. Multiple startup companies and upcoming ICOs will focus on this particular area. But there is still a long way, for sure.
So. Is a completely decentralized internet a moon-shot? Maybe. But as JFK once said: “ We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard”.
