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The Internet May Be Seeing a Paradigm Shift

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On Monday May 11, a digital token called Internet Computer was launched into the cryptocurrency ecosystem at a whopping $45 billion USD — bringing it into the top 10 crypto currencies by market cap. If you think it’s absurd that a cryptocurrency can do that in a few days, you’re right. But Internet Computer actually isn’t anything new.

The Dfinity Foundation is lead by Dominic Williams and has been working on the Internet Computer Protocol (ICP) for nearly five years. Dfinity created ICP in order to create smart contracts at internet speed. In addition, ICP is meant to be a truly decentralized version of the internet.

Dfinity built ICP with the intention of infinite scalability with an infinite number of apps, smart contracts and data. It aims to be the “third invention” of the blockchain evolutionary timeline, allowing developers to create applications for a blockchain-based internet. Other players in this space include Cardano, where these new organizations aim to take the best of blockchain such as security, transparency, and decentralization while also adding their own forms of scalability and design.

Source: Dominic Williams, the DFINITY Foundation

Dfinity intends to drastically reduce internet development costs by establishing a building platform on top of their own blockchain. Developers will be able to do everything from building decentralized finance (DeFi) to tokenized social media apps or even extend Ethereum based applications.

Internet Computer Blockchain Architecture

The ICP is a blockchain based protocol. It has built-in governance through the network nervous system which is responsible for controlling, configuring and managing the blockchain network. The internet computer network is constructed from a hierarchy of building blocks. The first layer is comprised of data centers, which host standardized node hardware. When combined, these nodes form subnets which take care of data transfer.

The Internet Protocol controls the format of data sent over its networks. The Dfinity Internet Computer lies above the data center layer with its own decentralized protocol ICP. Internet Computer uses the international domain name system and is currently accessible via web browsers and smartphones.

Source: Dominic Williams, the DFINITY Foundation

The top layer for Internet Computer is meant to be a public cyberspace where developers won’t have to worry about hosting applications on servers ran by tech giants like Amazon or Google. Instead, developers will be able to build directly on top of the open internet. If accomplished, this could become the Cambrian explosion of entrepreneurship as applications are built without the initial barriers of hosting and network configuration.

Build Everything With Smart Contracts at Internet Scale

The Internet Computer is comprised of canisters that control the orchestration of information and data. Instead of having to cater to the likes of Amazon or Google for server setup, a developer can create their application within a canister, fully skipping a slew of deployment headaches. Canisters are smart contracts that scale —they are interoperable computing units designed for internet-scale services.

Canisters are implemented through WebAssembly modules. If you haven’t heard of WebAssembly before, it is a stack-based virtual machine that allows you to compile any language into executable byte code for a browser. This opens up a wide variety of opportunities as you can now program an efficient C++ game to be ran in Chrome. WebAssembly is fairly new and already gaining ground, the fact that Internet Computer decided to use WebAssembly to power their canisters is already a huge leg up on the competition.

Source: Yvonne-Anne Pignolet at Internet Computer

But wait, there’s more. Canisters solve many of the programming and security problems that the modern internet faces today. In short, canisters are capable of storing persistent state. If a single canister faces high traffic or data overload, it can clone itself to create new canisters to handle the increased demand automatically without any specification from the developer.

Canisters also have no blocking mechanisms — you can only send and receive messages. This prevents many of the classical concurrency problems such as starvation since you cannot wait on a message to send another. However, concurrency is still at play in this system with the automatic scalability behavior as mentioned above.

Token Economics

A factor of blockchain protocols that has seen a great amount of growth is the process behind token economics in the name of inflationary and/or deflationary tactics. In Internet Computer, there are two processes at play. The first is an inflationary process driven by the bottom layer data centers. For every collection of canisters that a network hosts in a node, the network nervous system pays monthly rewards for honest nodes.

Those rewards bubble up through the system through voting rewards. Internet Computer encourages a voting system via “neurons”. In this way, people can vote on whether they approve of a given network addition or not. Imagine being able to give your own vote on a proposed Facebook policy that monitors your speech when you’re not even using the app (ahem).

Source: Dfinity Organization

The owners of neurons thus could easily sell their voting rewards or they could transfer them to a manager of canisters. The rewards are converted to “cycles” which are equivalent to Ethereum gas. To combat the inflation of node rewards, canisters burn these rewards to perform computations. In this way, Internet Computer creates a living network of supply and demand.

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Source: https://levelup.gitconnected.com/the-internet-may-be-seeing-a-paradigm-shift-fd525ed30e73?source=rss——-8—————–cryptocurrency

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