Blockchain beyond the hype: A new vision

With the massive dip lately, many of us found ourselves thinking about what people are really investing in when buying cryptocurrencies or tokens. Not from a single investment view, but from a global long-term perspective:

What is the promise that blockchain, or more general, distributed ledger technologies (DLT), hold for the future?

The initial vision

The original vision that spurred the birth of blockchain was the idea of an uncontrolled anonymous cryptocurrency that could be exchanged without central authorities or other intermediaries from person to person. Very much like you can handle cash or gold without banks, but substituting the complicated real-world logistics of handling gold with a simple click; a liberalists wet dream of digital money. And for quite a while it looked like this vision seemed to become true, with bitcoin going rampage like a hooligan on amphetamine — despite its obvious technical limitations (scalability, energy use, etc).

Regulating Cryptocurrencies

Eventually, the illegal anonymous transactions that helped to drive this unforeseen possible disruption of classic banking had reached a point where governments had to step in. Fortunately, the state of development of DLT was already this far that the obvious possibilities that the technology holds were too big of a game changer for a state’s economy to forbid it as a whole. As a result, the thing that almost all governments could agree upon was to regulate access by regulating the exchanges, essentially killing this vision of anonymous digital currencies.

Funding of ICOs

But even if Cryptocurrencies were partially financed by the mob in the first place, the resulting market capitalization brought attention and helped to spur the following ICO craze. Now most of us usually think of all that (the mob, ICOs, the resulting price fluctuations and mood swings, you name it…) as a bad development, but lets zoom out and take a look at the bigger picture: As the prices were rising, many people started to think about the possibilities of distributed ledger technologies and tried to come up with new ideas on how to expand and amplify the system. The funding of these ideas was at some point completely detached from the classic due diligence process for the funding of regular startups. People were making it rain on initial coin offerings (ICOs), rewarding thinking big — without considering feasibility or timelines. And of course many of these ICO funded organizations will eventually fail, but the money they raised will at least help them to get a fair chance to realize their vision. They can employ coders, build prototypes and experiment.

The future

In this way, Blockchains basic idea of uncontrolled (in a positive way!) anonymous financial transactions for everybody maybe almost dead. But it paved the way for something far more revolutionary: The promise of a fully decentralized internet!

If cryptocurrency is like a vaping anti-capitalist teenager, the decentralized internet is like its older, wiser cousin.

@AdamRRowe from tech.co

Today China and other states try to control the internet within their borders to a point where it becomes a government owned internet. At the same time even what we perceive as the “free” internet is actually almost privately centralized and under control from a handful of companies. This centralized fragile construct is often under attack, data is stolen or monetized in unethical ways, servers go down or get hacked. A decentralized internet could solve all these problems and also prevent local Governments from restricting access, censoring data and monitoring citizens. But without a clear direction, the development can go both ways — on the one hand the technology could have an incredibly positive social impact. On the other hand harmful economic incentives could lead to another level of turbocapitalism.

Making the world a better place

It is sometimes not enough to forecast the future development from todays conditions and to build technologies that will probably be needed. For developments with big potential and an unclear path, it is often better to define an ideal and identify the steps to get there. Much like when President Kennedy defined the goal of landing a man on the moon and NASA backcasted all the steps needed to get there — it´s easier to find your way if you know where you want to go. We need to define a bold vision, some kind of a reference architecture of how a free, decentralized internet should look like to avoid bottlenecks where the big players could step in and take over.

Call for Participation

In the following articles and at the Revision Festival in Berlin we want to find answers to the most important questions concerning the decentralized Internet:

• What is the true benefit of a decentralized internet (e.g. owning your own data, reliability, resilience, fair distribution of wealth)?
• What do you think will be the digital components (e.g. decentralized oracles, storage, computing and exchanges, interchains, stablecoins, etc.)?
• What will it take to decentralize the underlying physical infrastructure as well (e.g. decentralized communication via mesh networks, physical interfaces like digital locks, etc.)?
• How can we achieve it (what could be the enabling factors of such a development)?
• What are the challenges we are facing on our way to a fully decentralized internet (adoption, scalability issues like latency, etc.)?
• And probably most important: what does it mean for users and small and big companies and organisations (e.g. how will we use it, how will classic companies fit in a decentralized internet with digital autonomous organisations, if at all)?

You all are cordially invited to help us come up with answers to these questions that will help us to define a reference architecture for the decentralized internet!

Once we reach a point where all of this makes sense, we will invite a graphic artist to visualize this reference architecture into a poster. Everybody who collaborated will receive a free limited edition copy and will be referenced as a co-creator. For the next article in this series, we will focus on what the true benefit(s) of a decentralized internet could be — comments and suggestions are welcome!