Unstoppable 101
You may have seen the term “Unstoppable” be used more and more in the blockchain space, but what does it really mean? Well in simple terms in this context it refers to technology that cannot be shutdown.
A great example is the ethereum network. Because it is a peer to peer public network where anyone can participate as a node operator, which means there are thousands of nodes running globally that in reality cannot all be turned off by force.
Even if world governments and regulators got together and made ethereum node operating illegal, there would still be an underbelly of node operators that kept the network alive, that makes it unstoppable.
What about a 51% attack? Well in this case the other 49% can keep running the original network. Kind of like what happened with Ethereum Classic after the DAO hack resulting in the hard fork of ethereum back in 2016.
So in theory smart contract technologies built on top of decentralized public networks are unstoppable. Well not exactly. There is still the issue of ownership of the smart contracts and control of the private keys. Furthermore, the hosting of the frontend and domain name. Let’s dive into this further.
So in order to make the smart contract itself unstoppable the ownership must be renounced, so nobody can make any changes to it. But this is not always practical given the smart contract may need configuration changes and/or upgrades. So the alternative is for the contract to be owned and administered by a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (aka DAO). A DAO is also a smart contract in itself, but any changes made to or by it must be voted upon by the DAO participants or tokenholders of governance tokens. Therefore only the users of the smart contract, which may in fact be a DeFi protocol, have the ability to stop it, but not any outside parties, hence close enough to unstoppable.
For users to efficiently interact with a smart contract they will require a web front end (aka web dapp). This needs to be hosted somewhere. Users with advanced technical skills could host this locally, however this is generally not practical and certainly not accessible to the masses. The other option is hosting with third parties such as AWS and Digital Ocean. However, the issue is you are still at the mercy of a corporation that must abide by the rules and regulations of the jurisdiction in which it operates. Hence government regulators are able to have technologies that are hosted with these third parties easily shut down if they should choose to.
The solution is decentralized hosting using such technologies as Dfinity’s Internet Computer (aka ICP) or StackOS. They are both networks in which their node operators provide computation capacity in order to undertake functions such as hosting.
The next step in the unstoppable minefield is the domain name itself. You may have seen certain domains have been seized by the FBI through legal proceedings undertaken with ICANN. This could also be done to domains which are associated to DeFi protocols, if a influential enough financial regulator (eg. US SEC) decided to take action.
The solution to this predicament is decentralized domains, sometimes known as unstoppable domains. One such solution is ENS (ethereum name service) which will allow you to register a domain name with a .eth domain extension. The payment for this domain is in ethereum and ownership can be with any ethereum address including that of a DAO. But the catch is this domain is not available for viewing on most browsers, with the exception of Brave and Opera. However, there are browser extensions available for most other browsers to ensure compatibility.
But note, browser extensions do have the ability to be stopped by the software vendor of the browser itself, so not an ideal solution.
Now you can see the Unstoppable stack coming together:
Network
Protocol
Hosting
Domain
Even taking all these measures a government could still block its citizens from accessing an online technology by restricting it on its national firewall or directly via ISPs operating in the country. The solution being using a browser such as Brave with a virtual private network (VPN) plugin.
Completely unstoppable yet? Not yet but close. An extreme measure would be for governments to order smart phone app stores (eg. Google and Apple) to ban Brave Browser. However, there will always be an APK file available for download for Android phones, but for iPhone there is probably no hope for now.
Okay then, so we can’t be stopped. But why does it matter so much?
It matters because we should be allowed to have financial liberties and not be forced to operate within a global financial system that has failed us over and over again. That is the underlying reason why Bitcoin was invented and now so widely adopted. We hope you enjoyed reading this article.
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About WallStreetNinja
WallStreetNinja Suite (WSNS) is a decentralized financial solution that provides users simplified access to the DeFi ecosystem chain of their choice from a single screen. WSNS is taking the DeFi sector to the next level through decentralized computing and blockchain relays via The Internet Computer and Pocket Network.
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