how ethereum could fragment the web
Considering the condition of our 25-year-old web and all the issues inherited from outdated 1970s systems design, we ought to pause and take stock of those elements that are inherently flawed and would yield a significant return on developmental investment. Merging this concern with safety, privacy, and resistance to censorship, it should be painfully evident that a full-scale assault on Internet infrastructure is already in motion. As internet users, we share a responsibility to investigate, utilize, and implement novel technologies that benefit creators, rather than oppressors.
Whereas cryptography initially enabled us to safeguard our communications from intrusive spectators, it is progressively being applied in more abstract manners such as the secure transfer of digital assets via cryptocurrencies. If PGP represented the first significant development of applied cryptography and Bitcoin the second, I predict that the interplay and assimilation of crypto into the very framework of a decentralized web will be the elevated third iteration, taking hold and flourishing in acceptance.
the surge of web services
Reflecting on the brief genealogy of the web, most would concur that Web 1.0 was characterized by CGI scripts producing templated content on a server and delivering it to the client in a completed form. This served as a clear representation of monolithic centralization; however, this fundamental form of interactivity marked a notable enhancement over the rudimentary post-and-read format that constituted much of online content at the time. Picture having to refresh the entire homepage of Digg every time you wanted to select something:
Digg in 2006, a remarkable instance of “Web 2.0” interactivity absent in traditional CGI scripts
As browser technology evolved, experimentation with AJAX calls commenced, enabling us to perform actions asynchronously without the need to reload the entire page. At last, you could upvote without submitting an HTML form and refreshing everything. This shift to decouple content from presentation—advocated by CSS—propelled the web forward.
In contemporary times, we possess technologies such as AngularJS and EmberJS, which prompt the designer to create a client template with specific data placeholders to be filled by a backend. Although these frameworks provide some of the programming mortar for seamless and real-time updates, they also encourage the developer to adhere to a certain methodology. Nevertheless, this is merely a moderate advancement towards Web 2.5.
amuse-bouche
The true Web 3.0 has yet to commence, but it could eradicate the concept of separating content from presentation by eliminating the necessity for servers altogether. Let’s examine some of the foundational technologies that the Ethereum Project aspires to deliver:
- Contracts: decentralized logic
- Swarm: decentralized storage
- Whisper: decentralized messaging
Interaction including Ethereum contracts, Swarm storage, Whisper communications
Technologies such as Swarm could function as the foundational static hosting infrastructure, obviating the necessity to widely distribute and cache particular content. As the “decentralized dropbox” has been frequently discussed, anticipate HTTP-like bindings or services to be constructed atop this kind of blob storage, simplifying integration with the decentralized web 3.0 further. This initiative will also facilitate the replacement of conventional content delivery networks (CDN) with a distributed hash table (DHT) directing to file blobs, akin to how BitTorrent operates. Thanks to the flexibility afforded by ethereum contracts, the scheme of content access could be creator pays, reader pays, or some combination.
Thus, we have just eliminated the need for caches, reverse proxies, CDNs, load balancers, and the like to deliver static content to users. Another way in which Ethereum could influence this traditional infrastructure is by substituting business logic application tiers with on-chain contracts. Traditionally implemented in a variety of web-compatible languages like Perl, PHP, Python, ASP, C#, and Ruby, ethereum contracts execute in a fully-auditable virtual machine that promotes simplicity and reusability. Business analysts and project managers may find this code transparency invigorating, especially since the identical code can be crafted in Serpent (a Python-like language), LLL (a Lisp-like language), XML (a challenge), or even in visual block format!
Ethereum contract code visual editor
How might all this become feasible? Examining the latest ethereum proof-of-concept 6 JavaScript bindings, we observe that a touch of JavaScript is sufficient to track an account balance on the decentralized web:
div>Your --> span id="ether">?/span>./div> script> eth.watch({modified: eth.secretToAddress(eth.key)}).changed(function() { document.getElementById("ether").innerText = eth.toDecimal(eth.balanceAt(eth.secretToAddress(eth.key))) }); /script>
Since the Ethereum protocol additionally operates as an extensive decentralized key repository (a pleasant aspect for supporters of NoSQL), ultimately user accounts, credentials, and reputations can be transitioned onto the blockchain aided by the Whisper communication protocol. This manner enables Ethereum to pave the way for an entire sharding of traditional frameworks as we perceive them. No further intricate high-availability infrastructure diagrams. Within the Ethereum ecosystem, even decentralized DNS comes at no cost.
Analyzing this scenario within a broader schema of any systems infrastructure, it’s evident that our present web isn’t as privacy-protective or censorship-resistant as we wish. Economies of scale have permitted singular organizations to deliver a substantial volume of processing power and storage on the internet at very low costs, thereby enhancing their market dominance to a stage where they profoundly manage vast sectors of online activities, frequently under the oversight of less-than-cognizant governments. In a post-border era where the Internet is limitless, such jurisdiction has minimal or no significance.
As the economics of the Ethereum ecosystem advance to the point where open contracts for minimal-cost storage evolve, a free market for content hosting might materialize. Given the characteristics and dynamics of P2P applications, popular content will naturally scale as the swarm shares, instead of succumbing to the overwhelming load of siloed servers. The net effect is that popular content is delivered quicker, not slower.
We’ve devoted decades refining the protocols that the internet was originally established upon, but it’s now time to acknowledge missed prospects created by perpetually updating the legacy system rather than fostering a new, optimized framework. The future will probably usher in a transitional phase bridging traditional and decentralized technologies, where applications occupy a hybrid domain and users remain unaware of the turbulent undercurrents. But they ought to be.
This transformation will provide developers with the chance to create the next-generation decentralized, private, secure, censorship-resistant platforms returning authority to creators and consumers of the next revolutionary concept. Anyone with a vision is free to construct on this new class of next-generation decentralized web services without needing a credit card or signing up for any accounts.
Even though we aren’t advised to or anticipated to, we possess an obligation to value and enhance the shared resources that certain individuals aim to disrupt, manipulate, and control. Just as no individual fully comprehends the budding internet collective intelligence, we should not expect any singular entity to completely grasp or maintain perfectly aligned intentions. Instead, we should depend on the internet to resolve the dilemmas presented by the internet.
Due to this, blockchain innovations like Ethereum will enable simplification and cost reductions that have not been observed since the advent of infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS). By extending the concept beyond a mere web initiative, Ethereum aspires to illustrate how entirely decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) can exist completely in cyberspace, eliminating not only the necessity for centralized servers but also trusted third-party intermediaries, fulfilling the aspirations of early internet visionaries who imagined an independent new home of the mind.
