Crypto Academy Week 3 Homework Post for @yohan2on

The primary difference between centralized and decentralized network.

#Centralized network

A centralized network also locates all major processing power in this primary server.

Centralized web browsing is a threat to your privacy and online security as it makes it more likely that secondary and third parties can track your browsing habits.

As internet security company Kaspersky inadvertently provided online marketers with a means through which they could track the web browsing habits of users, the incident underscores a need to move to decentralized web browsing.

#Decentralized network

These networks also distribute processing power and workload functions among connected servers.

Paul Frazee, co-founder of the Beaker browser, suggests that our online world has developed purely into a client-server model. Whilst this works quite well, you don’t own your data.

Our information is going into the cloud and is then sitting in a server in plain text. However, Frazee believes that software engineers have an obligation to protect users’ data — something that is not happening with the current model.

It’s still very much early days, but a number of nascent projects are beginning to emerge in this space. Beaker is an experimental peer to peer browser. Whilst you can browse ‘http://’ and ‘https://’ websites like traditional browsers, Beaker also supports ‘dat://’, a peer to peer protocol called Dat.

centralization, I want you to think about some of the systems that you use every day. Whether it’s Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, your bank account, or practically anything else that you use — these are all controlled by a centralized authority.

This means that for a data transaction to be verified, a third-party intermediary must do this on your behalf. Let me explain this further by using the example of Yahoo…

Imagine that you want to send your friend a private email containing some funny pictures from a party. You sign in to your Yahoo account, type up the email, upload the pictures, and then send it to your friend. At this moment in time, think about what information Yahoo has on you.

When you first registered an account with Yahoo, you had to provide your personal information, such as your full name, nationality, and date of birth. After that, every single email that you send is stored internally on the Yahoo centralized servers.

This means that you must trust that Yahoo will keep all of your data private. Furthermore, you also need to trust that they won’t use this data for their benefit, such as selling it on to advertising companies.

Which, as we now know, can often be the case. In 2015, Yahoo experienced one of the biggest hacks of all time. A group of hackers was able to gain access to their centralized servers, allowing them to view private emails within millions of accounts.

The reason they were able to gain access to all of this information was that Yahoo uses centralized servers. If this central point of failure is hacked, then the entire network is at risk.

To clarify, I have identified three main issues with a centralized system.

You have to trust that the centralized organization are going to keep your data safe
They have full control over the system and your data
If the main servers are compromised, data is at risk
These issues are not just related to Yahoo, but almost every single system that you ever use. So, now that you know what centralization is, the next part of my Centralized vs Decentralized guide is going to define decentralization.

What Does Decentralization Mean?

Before I give you some real real-world examples of a decentralization definition, I thought I would explain some of its main features. Firstly, decentralization was first made possible using blockchain technology.

The first-ever blockchain was the Bitcoin client, which was created in 2009. When somebody sends Bitcoin to somebody else, transactions are not verified by a centralized authority.

Instead, anybody can hook up their computer to the Bitcoin system to help verify a movement of funds. Each device that is connected to the system is called a “node”, and in total there are thousands of independent nodes all helping to operate the network.

This means that for the network to be hacked, hackers would need to take control of every single node — this is almost impossible. This also means that the blockchain is the safest and most secure way to send and receive funds.

However, the important thing to remember is that decentralization isn’t just for financial transactions. As I will explain further down, decentralized systems can be used in almost every industry in the world!

The second thing to remember is that people don’t need to identify themselves to interact with a decentralized system. They simply use a private and public key, meaning they can remain anonymous.

Centralized vs Decentralized

Thirdly, a decentralized system that operates on the blockchain is controlled by no single authority, nor is it backed by any centralized government or nation-state. Instead, control is distributed fairly to anyone that wants to use the system. This makes society fairer as it takes control away from powerful corporations. Overall, these benefits would have made it near impossible for the Yahoo servers to be hacked in 2015.

So, now that you know what decentralization is, in the next part of my Centralized vs Decentralized guide I am going to give you some real-world examples of how decentralized systems could make the world a better place.

Thank You

Cc:-
@yohan2on
@steemcurator01
@steemcurator02