How Ethereum Could Shard the Web
Considering the state of the 25-year-old web and all the problems inherited from legacy 1970s system designs, we should pause and take inventory of the components that are fundamentally broken and could provide a significant return on our development investment. Intersecting these concerns with security, privacy, and censorship resistance, A full-scale attack on the Internet infrastructure is already underway.. As netizens, we have a shared responsibility to explore, utilize, and implement new technologies that benefit creators, not oppressors.
Encryption technology initially allowed messages to be protected from prying eyes, but it is increasingly being used in more abstract ways, such as the secure movement of digital value through cryptocurrencies. If PGP was the first major iteration of applied cryptocurrencies and Bitcoin was the second, we expect the third major implementation of sophisticated interactions and integration of cryptocurrencies into the decentralized web structure itself to take root and gain popularity.
Explosive growth of web services
Looking back at a brief history of the web, most people would agree that Web 1.0 boils down to CGI scripts that generate template content on a server and deliver it to the client in its final form. Although it was a clear model of monolithic centralization, this basic form of interaction was a significant improvement over the basic post-read format that made up much of the Internet’s content at the time. Imagine having to reload the entire front page of Digg every time you click on something.
Digg, 2006, a prolific example of “Web 2.0” interactions not possible with traditional CGI scripts.
As browser technology advances ajax The call is fired, allowing operations to be performed asynchronously without reloading the entire page. Finally, you can submit an HTML form and upvote without having to reload everything. This move to separate content and presentation with the help of CSS propelled the web forward.
Today we have the following technologies: AngularJS and HumanJS Ask your designer to create a client template with specific data holes to fill in some backend. These frameworks facilitate some programming connections for seamless real-time updates, but they also force developers to work in certain ways. However, this is only a modest step toward Web 2.5.
Amuse Bouche
The real Web 3.0 hasn’t taken off yet, but it could eliminate the concept of separating content and presentation by not requiring servers at all. Let’s take a look at some of the underlying technologies that the Ethereum project aims to provide.
- contract: Decentralized logic
- corps: Distributed storage
- whisper: Distributed Messaging
Interactions including Ethereum contracts, Swarm repositories, and Whisper communications
Technologies like Swarm can act as a basic static hosting infrastructure, eliminating the need to highly distribute and cache specific content. because “decentralized storage” has been discussed frequently, so it is expected that HTTP-like bindings or services will be built on top of this type of Blob storage, making integration with the decentralized Web 3.0 simpler. These efforts may even replace typical content delivery networks (CDN) with a distributed hash table (DHT) points to a file blob, just like how BitTorrent works. Due to the flexibility provided by Ethereum contracts, content access models can be creator-paid, reader-paid, or some hybrid system.
Therefore, we have replaced the need to have caches, reverse proxies, CDNs, load balancers, etc. to serve static content to users. Another way Etheruem can impact this traditional infrastructure is by replacing the business logic application layer with blockchain contracts. Traditionally developed in a variety of web-friendly languages such as Perl, PHP, Python, ASP, C#, and Ruby, Ethereum contracts run on fully inspectable virtual machines that encourage simplicity and reuse. Business analysts and project managers may find this code transparency refreshing, especially since the same code can be written in different languages. snake (a language similar to Python), LLL (Lisp-like language), XML (a nightmare), and even visual block forms!
Ethereum contract code visual editor
How is all this possible? Looking at the latest content 6 JavaScript Bindings for Ethereum Proof of ConceptAll you need to monitor your account balance on the decentralized web is a sprinkle of JavaScript.
<div>You have <span id="ether">?</span>.</div> <script> eth.watch(altered: eth.secretToAddress(eth.key)).changed(function() document.getElementById("ether").innerText = eth.toDecimal(eth.balanceAt(eth.secretToAddress(eth.key))) ); </script>
This is because the Ethereum protocol also serves as a large-scale distributed key store. NoSQL), eventually user accounts, credentials and reputation can be migrated to the blockchain with the help of the Whisper communication protocol. In this way, Ethereum sets the stage for full sharding of traditional infrastructure as we know it. No more complicated high availability infrastructure diagrams. Decentralized DNS is also free in the Ethereum ecosystem.
Assessing this context in the larger diagram of all system infrastructures, it is clear that the current web is not as privacy-secure or censorship-resistant as we would like. Economies of scale have enabled a single entity to provide enormous amounts of processing power and storage space on the Internet at very low prices, often to the point where they can individually control large portions of Internet activity with less oversight. Market share has increased. Than a savvy government. In a post-border era where the Internet knows no boundaries, such jurisdictions have little or no meaning.
As the economics of the Ethereum ecosystem mature, including the development of open contracts for lowest-rate storage, a free market for content hosting may develop. Given the nature and dynamics of peer-to-peer applications, popular content will easily scale with swarm sharing rather than suffering from buckling loads on siled servers. The result is popular content delivered. fasterIt’s not slow.
We’ve spent decades optimizing the protocols upon which the Internet was first founded, but it’s time to recognize the opportunities we’ve lost by continually patching existing systems instead of cherry-picking new, optimized systems. The future will likely see a transition between traditional and distributed technologies, where applications will live in a hybrid world and users will be unaware of the turbulent undercurrents. But it should be so.
This change will give developers the opportunity to build the next generation of decentralized, private, secure, and censorship-resistant platforms that return control to the creators and consumers of suboptimal ideas. Anyone with a dream can freely build this new class of next-generation decentralized web services without having to own a credit card or sign up for an account.
We are not told or expected to do so, but we have an obligation to cherish and improve a very shared resource that some people want to interfere with, manipulate, and control. Just as no one person can fully understand the emerging collective intelligence of the Internet, no single group can be expected to fully understand or maintain perfectly aligned motivations. Rather, we must rely on the Internet to solve its problems.
For this reason, blockchain technologies such as Ethereum will enable simplification and cost reductions not seen since the introduction of Infrastructure-as-a-Service.IaaS). Ethereum extends this idea beyond simple web projects to create fully decentralized autonomous organizations (D.A.O.) realizes the dream of early Internet pioneers who envisioned independent servers that could live entirely within cyberspace, eliminating the need for not only centralized servers but also trusted third parties. new home for the heart.