Blockchain's Biggest Hurdle: Decentralizing The Internet
For those of you who watch it, I think Silicon Valley beat us to the punch. This season is all about decentralizing the Internet.
Blockchain technology stands to decentralize everything: production, infrastructure, corporations, government, money, community, etc. Right now we are stuck on money. It made the most sense to try to tackle the biggest problem first. Money rules the world so if you decentralize it, and take some power away from our evil overlords, everything else will fall into place. However, don't expect the establishment to give up without a fight.
The people at the top have grown arrogant. Their greed will be their undoing. Instead of trying to outright crush our blockchain revolution they want to corrupt it to their own ends and make as much money as they can off of it. This is where all the "Blockchain not Bitcoin" nonsense comes from. Corporations can create patents for the blockchain, but the best cryptocurrencies are controlled by no one, so that doesn't fit their narrative.
We also see that banning cryptocurrency outright totally backfires. Tell someone they can't have something and they want it more. The central banks of both India and Iran have tried to stop their populations from fleeing to crypto.
What Ban? Iranians Spend $2.5 Billion Buying Cryptocurrencies in Capital Flight
What we see here is the centralized system turning against itself. You can't stop millionaires from spending their money how they see fit. The system is rigged so that the rich can do whatever they want. This begs the question: What are the real threats?
Net neutrality has been under attack for years now. Internet Service Providers want to be able to throttle, ban, and control the Internet to the fullest. Most people are worried that streaming services are going to cost them more, but the real threat is much deeper than entertainment. Obviously, if net neutrality is gone, there is nothing to stop ISPs from banning cryptocurrency. This is why decentralizing the Internet is priority #2 for the blockchain. That and I'm tired of Comcast Xfinity Internet being the only damn option in my area.
Mesh Networks
ISPs might start going on a rampage, abusing all their power with little justification. This will create backlash communities to fight against this centralized power. I remember hearing about mesh networks years ago on a TED talk. People have been wanting to decentralize the Internet for a long time. Now that blockchain tech is starting to become developed, it almost seems certain to happen.
Even if ISPs don't abuse their power (they do) we should still decentralize everything. We no longer have a reason to trust central authority. Smart contracts make middle men, escrow, and other centralized trust organizations obsolete. Why put your trust in a person when you can trust cryptography instead? I'll trust a cold and calculating machine over greed any day.
The Internet is the foundation of the new world. It is the foundation of so many things, including cryptocurrency. When it really comes down to it, decentralized currency will never be secure without a decentralized Internet.
Cryptocurrency is here to stay. Development is constant. It's ushering in the next industrial revolution with decentralization of trust and the ability to kick-start the open source economy.
I almost want the establishment to full on reject the blockchain, because it seems like the more resistance we get the harder the community fights to make it a reality.
With telecom companies just gauging people as it is a true uncontrolled infrastructure would be great, that would require a world such as described in this post - a world without money where people will lay the infrastructure for the benefit of others. A world we will not achieve in generations to come.
Data wise blockstacks is on the route of then making you store your own data and sites merely provide the logic for that data to be used (over simplified since I don't actually know what it does since the desktop version on pc does not provide the full experience and I am not going to boot docker) blockstacks I do think has got the right idea though and maybe combined with ipfs and the others like stellite coin etc lol also steem we can get to some degree of decentralization and maybe data masking so the companies can go get fucked when it comes to deciding what to "block" .
It looks like everything is in place for a revolution that will share control of the internet. The days of state run and corporate run internet are numbered.
They have already come very far, the control is total, in one way or another.