Today’s web is far too centralized, but so-called “Immortal dApps” could decentralize it.
The centralized web
Indeed, the web today is literally dominated by a few large companies that have almost absolute control over, for example, the content they publish or store, even when it does not belong to them.
For instance, Facebook has exclusive and absolute control over everything users post on it, such as photographs, videos and texts, whereas Alphabet has absolute control over Google Drive, Gmail, and so on.
Theoretically, these companies, voluntarily or involuntarily, have the power to delete everything from one day to the next, with no possibility of independent recovery by users.
In addition, the pages of the various websites are continuously deleted by their owners, servers, or third parties such as hackers or government authorities.
This poses a problem, namely the fact that users have to de facto entrust the security of their data, files and information to third parties, often consisting of individual companies that, like any company, can always go bankrupt and close down.
Indeed, sooner or later any computer code that has ever been produced will disappear, either because it has been deleted by its owner, hacked by someone, or because of problems related to evolution over the very long term.
Immortal dApps
The solution would be to rely on Immortal Decentralized Applications, or dApps.
Imagining a future decentralized Web 3.0, built on edge computing, decentralized data networks and artificial intelligence, it would be dominated by open, permissionless and above all trustless dApps.
One of the pioneers of Web 2.0, Jack Dorsey, who co-founded Twitter, recently said this:
“Blockchain and bitcoin point to a future, and point to a world, where content exists forever, where it’s permanent, where it doesn’t go away, where it exists forever on every single node that’s connected to it”.
Immortal dApps are applications that cannot be hacked or manipulated by any individual, and therefore can never be deleted. Moreover, the content hosted on them virtually cannot be modified.
In such a vision, content uploaded on Web 3.0 can potentially exist forever, safe from large technological monopolies with their specific corporate interests.
It would also grant everyone in the world access to all content, without the possibility of, for instance, a government restricting access.
In a decentralized Web 3.0, the responsibility for maintaining an application online would not fall on publishers or developers, and once online, the dApp can be accessed by anyone.
This would also guarantee de facto freedom to have access to a web that no one could censor, although this would also mean not being able to remove any illegal content, such as child pornography.
In fact, the impossibility of removing content after it has been published may also have negative implications, especially if the author of the publication may remain completely unknown. This may make it impossible to trace the perpetrator of a crime.
Another sore point is the speed of development, which is necessarily much slower in decentralized systems than in centralized ones.
Finally, centralized tools are often designed to be as easy to use as possible, also because they can also generate enormous revenues that constitute a very powerful incentive for development, if they manage to reach the masses. This dynamic is often much less powerful on decentralized systems.
However, the CEO of LiquidApps, Beni Hakak, says:
“Immortal dApps revolutionize application infrastructure in the most radical way, one that eliminates the possibility of a single entity consolidating power over a specific service or app. They empower users to be more than sources of raw data for Internet giants to collect, as their data operations are decentralized as well”.
If nothing else, there is finally an alternative to the centralized Web 2.0 dominated by a few big companies that have accumulated enormous power over the years.
The post Immortal dApps for the decentralized web appeared first on The Cryptonomist.
