The Evolution of Decentralization in Computing

duane.dos (52)in #technology • 7 years ago

If you look back to the start of computing, you will observe that there is a progression of centralization to decentralization in computing systems. Like computing power, infrastructure, protocols and code. It is finally time for decentralized databases.

Large centralized computer systems like the mainframe are almost completely centralized, they house all the computer power, data storage, code and memory. With the rise of PCs and private networks this computational capacity was not handled by client server relationships. This type of infrastructure gave rise to relational databases.

Eventually cloud computing and the Internet allowed relational databases to fit into distributed architectures, which is really just duplication of the data across multiple servers. This made data access a lot faster. This type of architecture is decentralized but only on the hardware level, this intern has given rise to application level centralization like Google, Twitter, Facebook, etc.

Now that we are seeing the decentralization of applications as a direct result of the decentralization of databases, companies like Google, Twitter and Facebook will not be able to make large profits from our data that we submit to them. These decentralized apps give explicit control and or ownership of the data or digital asset to the contributor. This allows the contributor to be able to monetize and profit from his or her digital assets.