Like many other developers around the world, I’ve been focusing my work on decentralized technologies for the past few years. Next to artificial intelligence, it’s probably the hottest topic in tech right now. Thousands of people all over the world are working on dozens of different technologies to decentralize the internet because as amazing as the internet is, it has gotten ever more centralized over time and with that came many problems.

Since decentralization has become such a big topic and there are so many different technologies now that even tech minded people don’t know of or understand, I wanted to give an overview here of the current status of the efforts to decentralize the internet and also explain what decentralization even is and why we need it.

You can stream or download an audio recording of this article here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/10VXtgD5qcQUEnokNcC2dsc0BdVzAJF8Q/view?usp=sharing

Since this is such a vast topic, I’ll split this article up into three or more parts. The second part where I show off modern decentralized networks in action will have video clips since it’s easier to show than to tell, other than that it will be in both text and podcast form like this part is.

I could write a whole book or likely multiple books about this topic, especially if I were to go into the technical details. In this series of articles however I’m going to explain just the very basics of decentralization, using real world examples, so that hopefully anyone can understand what I’m talking about with no prior knowledge, so keep that in mind. Reading this doesn’t make you an expert, you need to spend a lot of time to become an expert in this field, and this article might oversimplify some things in trying to be understandable by as many people as possible. It’s at best a starting point to get you interested to learn more.

So, what is decentralization of the internet and why is it desirable?

Centralization means the authority and the responsibility is in the hands of a single entity. That could be a person or an institution or a company. Let's take YouTube as an example since everyone is familiar with that. YouTube is a website owned and hosted by Google. Their warehouses full of computers serve up this website, so every computer in the world that wants to watch a video on there has to connect to Google's computers. If Google has technical difficulties, YouTube goes offline. It's a single point of failure. If Google messes up, everyone who uses YouTube suffers the consequences, people who want to watch videos on YouTube and people who upload videos to YouTube and maybe even depend on doing that for a living.

Since Google is the only entity hosting YouTube, it also means they have full control over the user uploaded content. They decide which videos you are allowed to upload there, they can remove videos or demonetize videos at their whim, without prior notification, without any repercussions. They own YouTube, so they are allowed to do that.

That is great for YouTube. It's terrible for you, as the content creator and by extension even you as the consumer wanting to watch videos. The adpocalypse, the demonetization and alleged censorship of YouTubers is probably something everyone has heard of by now. Just imagine uploading videos every day for years, thousands of hours of work, getting so much interest in your content that you start making it your job and then suddenly, without prior notice, your income goes down to zero. Your income that you might be dependent on if you're just making enough to live from paycheck to paycheck. All the work you and other people have done have made YouTube big, but they don't care about you, you're not their customer, advertisers are, so they throw you under the bus.

Now some people would say, make a competitor to YouTube. Do it better! And people have done that. And they failed. It seems like the bandwidth needed to serve up high quality video costs so much that advertising revenue just can't pay for it. But even if it did work out, you would still have YouTube, under a different name, owned by someone else, and they too when they've become big might do things that are absolutely not in your best interest.

The problem isn't YouTube, the problem is the way YouTube and websites in general work. The problem is centralization, giving a single entity all the power and not having any power yourself. So the solution is decentralization.

In a decentralized system, you own your data and you control it, you don't give up complete authority to a big tech company. You can upload whatever you want, and in some decentralized systems, get paid for it for example based on the popularity of your content, without any human intervention. It's all built into the network so there is no censorship, no one who decides who can make money and who can't, which speech is desirable and which is not. In a decentralized system, to create a competitor to YouTube, you don't need a warehouse full of computers. Instead the people who consume your content can help you share your videos.

You know this idea from file sharing, from Bittorrent for example. But decentralization can do even better than that. Imagining you are a YouTuber, you can make a video. Some developers create YouTube like sites. And then you can list your video on all of those sites, to get the exposure for your videos that you usually get from a site like YouTube, through search and recommendations for example. And you don't need to upload the files to each of these sites. No, you store the files once and all of these sites just link to them. There is no need to upload something in a decentralized network, other people just get the file from you when they need it, you only make it available, and other people then also help you share the files.

You might think, but YouTube needs a warehouse full of computers to work, so how can this work if people like me just use our own computers to share the videos? Easy. YouTube has millions of users. Who have millions of computers. If these millions of computers divide the work up between them, they don't just have as much storage and bandwidth available as YouTube does, they have magnitudes of order more. We're talking about a network of millions of computers here, all working together. The biggest tech company in the world can't compete with that. Decentralization can compete with everything you could wish to throw at it and completely blow the competition out of the water.

The more users your site on a centralized system has, the slower it becomes, so the more resources you need to aquire to serve your site to your users. Bigger harddrives, faster computers. More harddrives, more computers. In a decentralized system, the more users that use your website, the more people help share it, so you always get more resources when you need them, automatically and for free.

I hope this gave you a good overview of why centralization is bad and a bit of an idea what decentralization, at its core, is. If you still have no idea what decentralization is all about, don’t worry, the next part of this series of articles where I’ll cover multiple different decentralized networks and some of the websites that have been built on top of them will make it very clear what decentralization is, what problems it can potentially solve in the future and what problems it can already solve today.