Bitcoin & The Rise of Cryptocurrencies

When Bitcoin was released it has not gained much attention at first. Even now I could argue that it is barely known pretty much anywhere. Some people might hear about it, see its logo somewhere, but not give it much thought. If you've had some experience with cryptocurrency before using Bitcoin or seeing it in a store somewhere offline most likely won't shock you, rather put a slight smile on your face if it's the latter.

Bitcoin. Decentralized money, worldwide with no government or people controlling it, meaning the points of failure and corruption are removed from the system. Sounds great and so far it works great. Just Bitcoin alone makes it worth it for people to read more into cryptocurrency and learn more about it. But out of all the possible uses... Bitcoin is just a drop in the ocean.

Personally, I wouldn't call myself an expert. So please excuse me if I miss something or explain something too simply. However I'd imagine it'd help you read it and process the information quicker.

Why cryptocurrency & blockchain?

Besides that, cryptocurrency markets are self-regulating. I will touch more on this further below as I provide different examples of what could work great on blockchain technology. 

A Decentralized Internet

What's my vision for cryptocurrencies? Well, to be fair there's so much potential it's hard to keep up: currency, store of value, decentralized apps, storage, asset & token platforms and many, many, many more! 

The one that excites me the most involves combining those different uses into one to achieve a bigger goal: a decentralized internet.

Domain names

A domain name is basically an alias for an IP address, the hosting. So instead of typing 127.0.0.1 into the address bar, you type steemit.com and it's all nice and easy to remember. Of course this is just an example and actual IP addresses are not always easy to remember, and besides that keeping all those numbers in your head is going to get more and more difficult as you find more and more websites that you like to visit.

Unfortunately the current way domain names are registered and handled makes them prone to censorship. Domain names could be forcefully taken away from people, so there is no true ownership.

Domain names based on a cryptocurrency would be registered anonymously, would have true ownership (nobody can take away your domain name from you) and could have all the features of a regular domain name. In case one wants to sell their domain name, they could use a decentralized marketplace. There is no 3rd party other than one that would secure the network and get paid for it. Any party in cryptocurrencies is usually decentralized and contains people from all over the world, making it hard to force them to go against their will or do anything that would harm the entire network.

A blockchain solution to this already exists, Namecoin. However it's adoption does not seem to be very successful.

File hosting, storage, web hosting

A website needs to be stored somewhere, as well as all the media (images, audio, video). You could use centralized services that have access to your files, are prone to employees with malicious intent, prone to leaks and hacks and others.

A decentralized file storage system based on a blockchain would encrypt your files, slice them up and distribute them to multiple hosts. A few copies would be kept on different computers all over the world. Since only you know the encryption key, nobody else can see what your files are and what's inside them. Besides that, how would you figure out how to put all the small sliced up pieces of files together in the right order, while making sure you don't accidentally put in the wrong part from another file, possibly from another person?

Let's say you're not the type of person that likes privacy. "I don't have anything to hide anyway" you would say. Even in that case, it still has a use. It is cheaper.

Siacoin is not a company that wants to make money from hosting your stuff. It is a self-regulated market of hosts from all over the world. If you want to stay competitive, you need to keep your prices low.

This technology already exists and is successful: Siacoin. Very soon they'll be adding an option to share files, which sounds very exciting. This feature will be able to power the other uses for cryptocurrencies and blockchain that I'll talk about further down.

One thing I'm unsure about is how a website could be hosted on the blockchain. After all the domain name needs to connect to something to somehow find it, but perhaps a blockchain solution for this is simply still not there.

Gaming platforms: Steam, etc.

Steam is such a huge platform for PC gamers I'd say it's a monopoly. It's a great platform, but it's a business, after all.

For gamers:

One thing I don't like about Steam, other than it being almost a monopoly and thus allowing itself to do whatever it wants, is that as per their TOS they can disable your account, making all your games, content that you uploaded (whether it is game saves, screenshots, comments or anything else) inaccessible. On a blockchain powered gaming platform there would be no bans. Your games, save files, content and achievements would be stored on the blockchain. All in-game marketable items (skins, keys, trading cards, etc.) that you own are truly yours with nobody being able to take them away from you by force, be it a ban or a trading restriction. Tradings fees would go down or stop existing as there's no 3rd party that is a business and needs to keep making money.

For game developers:

Steam takes a hefty 30% cut from the sales, plus it requires a $100 fee to publish a game. Again, it's a company that needs to make money so that's understandable. The fees would go down, but the downside is that you would most likely have to pay for bandwidth that your customers consume. Or this cost could be shifted to the consumer to prevent spam. Since we already have file storage solutions like Siacoin we don't need to use the services of a company that is looking to make money.

So now this is getting interesting: A platform that uses a decentralized domain name, hosted on a decentralized web hosting, that also uses decentralized file storage to store other stuff like game files and game saves, that also offers a decentralized games and in-game item market.. If only this existed today.. I'd jump ship from Steam right away!

Video, audio sharing platforms: YouTube, Soundcloud, etc.

This concept is similar to the decentralized gaming platform one. There's not much to add, just use your imagination! ;)

Decentralized computer

This one is the one that I'm not sure about the most, but it needs to be done in one way or another. A decentralized computer. It would be the brains behind all of the other parts of the decentralized internet. It could potentially be made up of hundreds computers spread all over the world. But how is it going to work? That is yet to be seen.

Perhaps Golem can do this? Or an Ethereum smart contract?

You see, for a truly decentralized internet to work you would have to ensure there is no central authority anywhere. And all of the ideas above need to do computational operations.. which means they computer resources. While technologies like Siacoin can host files (and soon share them) allow other websites to host videos and other content in it and share it on the internet, there's still this centralized core part to it.

However if we overcome this problem, the internet will be truly decentralized: Websites will be open source, each update will be seen by the community, the developers will be able to check the code. Implementations will have to stay competitive to prevent another dev team taking over. For example in the case of a decentralized gaming platform like Steam you'd have the source code available for every action, every part of the program and website available to everyone, just like Bitcoin and other cryptocurrency source code is publicly available. Try to manipulate it and people from all over the world will reject it and remove the malicious devs. The bigger the network, the harder it becomes to affect it and/or harm it.

What do you think? Is this science fiction or could we actually achieve a truly decentralized future for the Internet?