The future of the internet is on the blockchain

“Lo”… and behold, the birth of the internet!

The first word ever sent over the internet (or ARPANET, as it was known in its infancy) was “login”, sent from UCLA to Stanford Research Institute. Professor Leonard Kleinrock recalls the historic moment: “At the UCLA end, they typed in the ‘l’ and asked SRI [by phone] if they received it; ‘got the l’ came the voice reply. UCLA typed in the ‘o’, asked if they got it, and received ‘got the o’. UCLA then typed in the ‘g’ and the darned system crashed! Quite a beginning. On the second attempt, it worked fine!”

It was happening on October 29th, 1969, half a century ago, and it marked the first step of one of humanity’s most crowning achievements: the internet. Never in our history have we been so connected, distances so short and human communication so readily available.

However, the anniversaries don’t stop here, as history has a knack for coincidences. 30 years ago, on (March 1989, 20 years after the birth of the internet), Tim Berners-Lee circulated a proposal for “Mesh” (later to be known as the World Wide Web) to his management at CERN.

Back then, in the pioneering years of the internet, the rapid pace of innovation was marked by a spirit of freedom and decentralization. Tim Berners-Lee used to write in his book, Weaving the Web: “From then on, interested people on the Internet provided the feedback, stimulation, ideas, source-code contributions, and moral support… The people of the Internet built the Web, in true grassroots fashion.”

Even looking further back to the works of other founding fathers, we see the same patterns emerging — the internet was designed to be a space of freedom and self-determination:

• People-to-people communication drove the need to write the first email software, a deed done by Ray Tomlinson at BBN in March 1972.
• Between 1973 and 1974, Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf, collectively known as the “fathers of the internet” designed TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol and the Internet Protocol), internet’s most fundamental set of protocols. Their vision contained 2 core principles, both revolving around the concept of decentralization:

1. The internet itself would have an open architecture networking, the technology of choice for any individual network being freely chosen by a provider and made to interwork with the other networks through a meta-level “Internetworking Architecture”.
2. There would be no global control at the operations level.

But perhaps the most well-known and striking manifesto for a decentralized internet came from John Perry Barlow, who in 1996 wrote the “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” — a wild call for self-determination in the age of information, a vision of an Internet free of the Governments’ clutch.

23 years have passed since then. The rebellion against governmental control in the cyberspace is far from won, yet the biggest threats to an independent Internet aren’t the states anymore.

We now live in a world where everybody keeps in touch with their friends on Facebook, with their professional peers on LinkedIn, buys almost anything on Amazon, and Google has such a monopoly on indexing and searching on the Internet, that “to google” is an actual verb in the Oxford English Dictionary.

Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook are not just titans of the IT industry, but as of 2018, the largest global companies with a combined market cap. of $3,475 trillion.

Of course, that in itself is not something bad, but a sign of the success and importance that the Internet and data play in our century.

But thwarting and crushing competition is something bad. Censorship is. Collaborating with secret services to spy on the population without a warrant is. Poaching from the (smaller) competition is. Sharing private information to third-parties that expose tens of millions of users is.

Our entire digital lives are locked inside monopolistic stockholder-serving companies with dubious ethical standards. By being the de facto gatekeepers of our internet, they can control even the most private aspects of our online experience, such as access to ideas, opinions or the values which we are being taught to cherish.

Our data, the digital fingerprint that we leave all the time on the internet, which sometimes contains some of the most private aspects of our lives became a precious commodity on which digital empires rose and now they dominate the cyberspace.

This is the exact opposite of what the founding fathers of the Internet have envisioned.

Even without the ethical conundrum, having the infrastructure of the internet depend on a few gigantic bottlenecks proves to be an unforgivable weakness of the system, as some major outages had a major impact in the past, affecting billions.

What can be done?

One approach is to detach the data the users create from the apps and to try to give full data ownership to the user. But such an attempt would raise additional walls for the developers and would not solve the deeper, underlying problem, namely the control of the storage and compute infrastructure, where big-name providers are suffocating all the smaller data centres.

This is not just an unethical competition-crushing practice. It leads to price hikes of monopolistic IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) and PaaS (Platform as a Service) and also to a vastly inefficient computing power resource allocation, with most major data centres using only half of their resources at any given time.

There is a way to regain the independence of the Internet — a decentralized storage and computing power marketplace, based on cutting-edge blockchain technology.

The revolution started with Satoshi’s vision for a decentralized financial system — Bitcoin. Yet, this is far from the full potential of the blockchain, as an empowering technology. There are, however, major challenges to be surmounted, top of list being:

• PoW (Proof-of-Work) is just not a sustainable solution. Only for Bitcoin, the current energy annual consumption is comparable to the entire electricity consumption of Romania.
• Lack of interchain communication leads to chokepoints in centralized exchanges, prone to cyber attacks or market manipulation.
• Traditional blockchain models have a major scalability problem, in terms of the number of transactions per second they support. So far, Ethereum, the most popular infrastructure for deploying real-world applications, goes up to only 20–30 transactions per second. This is nothing compared to traditional centralized solutions, a common comparison being made with Visa’s 24.000 tx/s.

Alas, this is not the entire picture. Stemming from the above-mentioned problems, a larger problem emerges — current blockchain infrastructures just aren’t prepared to support application layers that millions of users can use.

This is where Swazm comes into the picture. Our vision from the beginning was to offer decentralized apps a scalable infrastructure solution, one that could serve real-world, mainstream applications.

And we are proud to announce that we are one step closer to that vision.

Our blockchain infrastructure was able to reach up to 500.000 tx/s (corresponding to 3 million operations per second), as you can see in the below live technology demo:

Not only Swazm offers unprecedented scalability, but it also solves the energy consumption conundrum by eliminating PoW as a consensus algorithm and allowing for direct chain-to-chain communication.

A vision for a decentralized internet.

However, any technology is just as useful as it’s applications. Our focus is how to offer real value to our users, to build products, not just a technology.

And such a product is Swazm’s IaaS solution — a distributed storage and computing power global marketplace that can be used to host the decentralized internet of the future.

Much more than just a very fast blockchain, Swazm’s architecture rests on 4 key pillars:

• SWAZM Data Transfer Socket (SDTS) — a robust protocol that aims to offer latency-free data transfer while also offering a bleeding-edge-optimized allocation of hardware resources
• SWAZM Data Storage Layer (SDSL) — a decentralized database and storage layer that is capable of handling large volumes of structured data across clusters of commodity servers; it organizes data and assures ACID transactions for all operations
• SWAZM Compute Layer (SCL) — a layer that allows DApps running on the network to be encapsulated in a SWAZM Container; specifies and controls the configuration, execution environment, and lifecycle of any DApps using it
• SWAZM Vault Permission System (SVPS) — a digital entity that can issue, manage and revoke digital certificates; offers a unique solution for projects that rely on third parties, such as developers and contractors

The ability to host language-agnostic compute containers on the data layer, together with the above-mentioned advantages of SDSL and SDTS allow for developers and the general public alike to be able to deploy any content on SWAZM, opening the doors for a new age in the history of the internet:

• DApp infrastructure solution. The first and (for now at least) the main usage of SWAZM blockchain is to offer a scalable, decentralized infrastructure on which DApps developers can deploy their world-changing solutions.
• Universal hosting solutions for traditional web applications (apps, websites, portals) — The SWAZM network can offer hosting services for any website, no matter the complexity, from a simple Wordpress site to the most complex e-commerce portal.
• Decentralized personal storage space. Just like the traditional cloud system (iCloud, Microsoft OneDrive, Google Drive, Dropbox), the SWAZM network can provide the storage space for all the needs of the user in terms of space. Given the cryptographic nature of the storage, this can also work as a safe box for private documents. The contents could be shared as either public or private documents and the public documents could be indexed by hash and could be browsable, offering, in fact, a peer to peer data streaming service.
• Content delivery networks. The properties of SWAZM infrastructure granted by SDTS (SWAZM Data Transfer Socket) and by SDSL (SWAZM Data Storage Layer) make it a unique solution for CDNs. The ability to deploy the content from the nearest SWAZM nodes will ensure the lowest latency and the highest possible data transfer speed. This can be used for:

1. Video on demand services
2. Online radios
3. Private CDNS, for example for video surveillance
4. Large data streaming solutions, for business or scientific purposes

Just imagine how the internet of the future could look and the advantages it could bring:

• The monopoly of large data centre companies will end as anyone can use the unused resource from his/her PC to help “run the digital world”, on a global, decentralized computing power marketplace, a vision exposed in greater detail in a previous article. This will lead in turn to a drastic decrease in costs for developers, as the vast unused resources of the world will be put to good use.
• Users will finally be the masters of their data. Censorship, privacy breaches and monopolistic abuse of power would be a thing of the past, as the current privacy-centred technologies from the blockchain world, such as ring signatures of zero-knowledge solutions will gain mainstream adoption on the decentralized web.
• Just consider all the “sharing economy” mega-companies that currently centralize the resources and data of the final user — Uber, Airbnb, eBay, Etsy, Tumblr and many more. Now imagine blockchain-based networks that do that offer the same services, just that all the added value gets distributed to the individual contributors.
• Centralized crypto exchanges would give way to a new class of decentralized exchanges, one that can process chain-to-chain transactions with unprecedented levels of security and speed. Such a measure would eliminate the prohibitive market entry barriers and overhyped projects, so that technological advance to be, once again, the main drive of a token’s success, not aggressive marketing.

Our creed is that in order to revert the internet to the original vision of its founding fathers, we need to change the bedrock on which it is built. To strive towards a decentralized infrastructure that relies on blockchain technology. Not only this is the only way we envision to build a free internet, but perhaps this is the only way for blockchain to reach mainstream — by showing its real utility in making the world a better place.

In the end, it is not only the internet that needs blockchain. To scale up and into the mainstream, the blockchain needs a new internet.

And we are prepared to build it.

Join us on our Telegram group: t.me/swazm

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