Blockchain - new google
The history of the invention of the Internet is similar to the invention of writing. In addition to the revolutionary value of the invention, as well as any innovative phenomenon, at first it caused chaos. Immortal literary masterpieces were not created immediately, it took a long time before people realized the true value and capabilities of the pen and paper. In the field of Internet technologies, we will see great accomplishments and phenomena, in fact, they are already happening now.
After the information revolution, when the Internet broke out of the narrow space of the educational environment, when in 1993 the National Science Foundation decided to open it for mass use, people used the Internet to publish their manifestos: for example, John Perry Barlow wrote “Declaration of Independent Cyberspace.”
Corporations were already intrigued by the new technology. They understood that it was capable of producing a revolution, and wanted to secure themselves in the future as much as possible. They tried to create alternative networks based on TCP / IP, local area networks, MSN and Compuserve - closed, censored, incubator versions of the Internet, hidden behind a high fence, manual, with age restrictions, with all the makings of a real Internet, but without any dirt. Nothing prohibited - a cartoon version of the real network.
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Two differently directed processes gradually crystallized, one of them reveals a clear desire for centralization and control over the digital field, the other has exactly opposite guidelines: maximum decentralization, equality of participants, the Internet of trust.
As the global Internet community grew and became more influential, governments and large corporations began to use HTTP flaws to monitor users, control their financial flows and block their access to the information field in case of danger to the system. The HTTP protocol united the whole world into the global information space, standardizing the ways of distributing and presenting data, allowing the political and economic elite to dictate the ways of information distribution (music, video, news, games ...), to delete and block unwanted system files. Even if someone on the Internet doesn’t know what HTTP is, everyone is familiar with error 404, which means that the requested page or site is no longer present on the server. If the site is not saved in the Internet Archive, you will not see it again. He is lost forever. “404 errors are gravestones of a dying network. Not leaving a trace from those beauties, wisdom and skills that once bloomed here, ”say the creators of the original Internet.
The reason lies in the fact that centralized servers inevitably die. Domains change owners, companies go bankrupt and retire, computers break ...
The blockchain technology, which permanently stores records of all transactions made in such a way that it is impossible to erase or modify these data afterwards, is in fact an endless chronicle of Internet reality. This seemingly simple functional description hides incredible possibilities. The blockchain forces us to reconsider the traditional ways of making transactions, storing information, moving assets and registering rights.
In his book Commercial Blockchain: The Potential and Practice of Using New Internet Technology, William Mugawar describes the blockchain as “a tsunami-like wave that slowly covers and wraps in the code all the facts of reality encountered on its way. In other words, this is the newest level of Internet development, a new layer of reality, while the web was only the beginning. This new layer is based on trust, so we can call it the Internet of trust. ”
The blockchain will be a catalyst for global change that will affect governments, change their usual ways of life, traditional corporate foundations, social systems and international institutions. Naturally, this wave will face resistance in its path, like any innovation. However, it is not easy to fight it, this movement does not have a leader who can be arrested, accounts that can be blocked, its code cannot be erased.
The blockchain gives freedom to members of a network of trust who for years and even centuries have been under the control of central institutions of power, and allows them to act around traditional power structures and intermediary services. Why pay for notarization of the contract, if the blockchain is capable of doing so?
The analogy with the medieval book guilds in the 16th century, which tightly guarded their monopoly on the right to distribute the printed word, is appropriate here. To do this, they had to collude with the Catholic Church and the rulers of the European powers, who were concerned about the safety of their rights, demanding a license to print. This state of affairs did not last long, soon an unavoidable breakthrough occurred in the field of typography and the printing business became widespread. Today, it is unlikely that anyone will consider it an illegal type of activity.
Similarly, traditional centralized institutions, like medieval guilds, have for years reserved the right to control and regulate the flow of financial and official documentation. However, since the blockchain is able to cope with this function more effectively, their monopolies will soon come to an end.
To perceive the blockchain as a decentralized register is a deceptive way, because it is only one of the dimensions of a new reality. Anyway, what to consider the Internet as a social network or a platform for publications. These are necessary, but insufficient source data. Blockchain is more than just a sum of characteristics.
Blockchain supporters believe that trust should not be taxed by commissions and taxes, and should not be concentrated in the same hands. They believe that trust should be an integral part of peer-to-peer relationships based on impartial mathematics and cryptography, eliminating bureaucracy, institutions of mediation and corruption.
When meeting with the blockchain, politicians shrug their shoulders in confusion, because they do not understand how to regulate something that is leaking through the fingers and is evenly distributed throughout the network. However, the blockchain implies not only an equitable distribution of trust, but also a free exchange of assets and values ​​throughout the network, without any restrictions and intermediaries.
Metaphorically, blockchains are eternal computers that, once started, will never stop, given their degree of stability. Until now, there has not been a single failure in the work of the Bitcoin blockchain, unlike banking systems and cloud services ...
“Today we are talking about what the blockchain is capable of and what its potential is, tomorrow it will be part of the life associated with the options we’re used to,” Mugavar said. Indeed, the blockchain has already introduced a new layer of communication into our lives, including the concepts: consensus algorithms, distributed registers, digital wallets, blocks of transactions.
Today, we "google" everything that is unknown to us, tomorrow we will "blockchain"
William Mugawar believes that in the near future, the equivalent of today's Google for checking data, searching for files, as well as recording data and transactions will become the blockchain. Digital certificates that fix the rights of the owner and simplify the process of transfer of ownership, protection from counterfeit and double costs. “Blockchain is the missing link in the digital information revolution.”
Many people remember the feeling of delight with which we first tracked the movement of our mailing online when commercial mail services only introduced this function. Today, the land cadastre of Sweden is formed on the basis of the blockchain technology - which means that it will be public, publicly available and cannot be falsified. The previously hidden and inaccessible areas of the information field may soon become accessible and transparent: online banking, tax charges, contract settlements, sale of shares and much more. All these new types of services will be checked with the blockchain register to confirm the accuracy of the data and the absence of modifications in the records.
However, in addition to data storage, legal and financial services, the blockchain makes many other options available. For example, the web service Cryptograffiti.info already exists (its office is located in Tallinn, as well as the cloud mining service office Hashflare), which allows people to encode hidden messages into a bitcoin blockchain using a special online interface. Recently, a new, and possibly revolutionary, functionality has been added to the service - recording JPG pictures on the blockchain. A visitor can enter his message in the text field, pay a small amount of bitcoins, and after 1-10 minutes see his message on cryptograffiti.info, decoded from the blockchain, along with other records of anonymous bitcoiners. As soon as the publication process in the blockchain is completed, no one on the planet will be able to censor, delete or rewrite the message left by users - it is permanently stored in the blocks.
The blockchain is much more complicated than the web, and its distribution may take time. This is a new stage in the development of the Internet; it returns us to what the Internet should have been from the beginning: more decentralized, open, safe and accessible. The history of the blockchain is being written now and we are directly involved in it.
An excerpt from the book The Business Blockchain: Promise, Practice, and Application of the Next Internet Technology translated the cloud mining service HashFlare specifically for Geektimes.
After the information revolution, when the Internet broke out of the narrow space of the educational environment, when in 1993 the National Science Foundation decided to open it for mass use, people used the Internet to publish their manifestos: for example, John Perry Barlow wrote “Declaration of Independent Cyberspace.”
Corporations were already intrigued by the new technology. They understood that it was capable of producing a revolution, and wanted to secure themselves in the future as much as possible. They tried to create alternative networks based on TCP / IP, local area networks, MSN and Compuserve - closed, censored, incubator versions of the Internet, hidden behind a high fence, manual, with age restrictions, with all the makings of a real Internet, but without any dirt. Nothing prohibited - a cartoon version of the real network.
')
Two differently directed processes gradually crystallized, one of them reveals a clear desire for centralization and control over the digital field, the other has exactly opposite guidelines: maximum decentralization, equality of participants, the Internet of trust.
HTTP and Hypercentralization
As the global Internet community grew and became more influential, governments and large corporations began to use HTTP flaws to monitor users, control their financial flows and block their access to the information field in case of danger to the system. The HTTP protocol united the whole world into the global information space, standardizing the ways of distributing and presenting data, allowing the political and economic elite to dictate the ways of information distribution (music, video, news, games ...), to delete and block unwanted system files. Even if someone on the Internet doesn’t know what HTTP is, everyone is familiar with error 404, which means that the requested page or site is no longer present on the server. If the site is not saved in the Internet Archive, you will not see it again. He is lost forever. “404 errors are gravestones of a dying network. Not leaving a trace from those beauties, wisdom and skills that once bloomed here, ”say the creators of the original Internet.
The reason lies in the fact that centralized servers inevitably die. Domains change owners, companies go bankrupt and retire, computers break ...
Blockchain as an alternative
The blockchain technology, which permanently stores records of all transactions made in such a way that it is impossible to erase or modify these data afterwards, is in fact an endless chronicle of Internet reality. This seemingly simple functional description hides incredible possibilities. The blockchain forces us to reconsider the traditional ways of making transactions, storing information, moving assets and registering rights.
In his book Commercial Blockchain: The Potential and Practice of Using New Internet Technology, William Mugawar describes the blockchain as “a tsunami-like wave that slowly covers and wraps in the code all the facts of reality encountered on its way. In other words, this is the newest level of Internet development, a new layer of reality, while the web was only the beginning. This new layer is based on trust, so we can call it the Internet of trust. ”
The blockchain will be a catalyst for global change that will affect governments, change their usual ways of life, traditional corporate foundations, social systems and international institutions. Naturally, this wave will face resistance in its path, like any innovation. However, it is not easy to fight it, this movement does not have a leader who can be arrested, accounts that can be blocked, its code cannot be erased.
The blockchain gives freedom to members of a network of trust who for years and even centuries have been under the control of central institutions of power, and allows them to act around traditional power structures and intermediary services. Why pay for notarization of the contract, if the blockchain is capable of doing so?
The analogy with the medieval book guilds in the 16th century, which tightly guarded their monopoly on the right to distribute the printed word, is appropriate here. To do this, they had to collude with the Catholic Church and the rulers of the European powers, who were concerned about the safety of their rights, demanding a license to print. This state of affairs did not last long, soon an unavoidable breakthrough occurred in the field of typography and the printing business became widespread. Today, it is unlikely that anyone will consider it an illegal type of activity.
Similarly, traditional centralized institutions, like medieval guilds, have for years reserved the right to control and regulate the flow of financial and official documentation. However, since the blockchain is able to cope with this function more effectively, their monopolies will soon come to an end.
To perceive the blockchain as a decentralized register is a deceptive way, because it is only one of the dimensions of a new reality. Anyway, what to consider the Internet as a social network or a platform for publications. These are necessary, but insufficient source data. Blockchain is more than just a sum of characteristics.
Blockchain supporters believe that trust should not be taxed by commissions and taxes, and should not be concentrated in the same hands. They believe that trust should be an integral part of peer-to-peer relationships based on impartial mathematics and cryptography, eliminating bureaucracy, institutions of mediation and corruption.
When meeting with the blockchain, politicians shrug their shoulders in confusion, because they do not understand how to regulate something that is leaking through the fingers and is evenly distributed throughout the network. However, the blockchain implies not only an equitable distribution of trust, but also a free exchange of assets and values ​​throughout the network, without any restrictions and intermediaries.
Metaphorically, blockchains are eternal computers that, once started, will never stop, given their degree of stability. Until now, there has not been a single failure in the work of the Bitcoin blockchain, unlike banking systems and cloud services ...
“Today we are talking about what the blockchain is capable of and what its potential is, tomorrow it will be part of the life associated with the options we’re used to,” Mugavar said. Indeed, the blockchain has already introduced a new layer of communication into our lives, including the concepts: consensus algorithms, distributed registers, digital wallets, blocks of transactions.
Today, we "google" everything that is unknown to us, tomorrow we will "blockchain"
William Mugawar believes that in the near future, the equivalent of today's Google for checking data, searching for files, as well as recording data and transactions will become the blockchain. Digital certificates that fix the rights of the owner and simplify the process of transfer of ownership, protection from counterfeit and double costs. “Blockchain is the missing link in the digital information revolution.”
Many people remember the feeling of delight with which we first tracked the movement of our mailing online when commercial mail services only introduced this function. Today, the land cadastre of Sweden is formed on the basis of the blockchain technology - which means that it will be public, publicly available and cannot be falsified. The previously hidden and inaccessible areas of the information field may soon become accessible and transparent: online banking, tax charges, contract settlements, sale of shares and much more. All these new types of services will be checked with the blockchain register to confirm the accuracy of the data and the absence of modifications in the records.
However, in addition to data storage, legal and financial services, the blockchain makes many other options available. For example, the web service Cryptograffiti.info already exists (its office is located in Tallinn, as well as the cloud mining service office Hashflare), which allows people to encode hidden messages into a bitcoin blockchain using a special online interface. Recently, a new, and possibly revolutionary, functionality has been added to the service - recording JPG pictures on the blockchain. A visitor can enter his message in the text field, pay a small amount of bitcoins, and after 1-10 minutes see his message on cryptograffiti.info, decoded from the blockchain, along with other records of anonymous bitcoiners. As soon as the publication process in the blockchain is completed, no one on the planet will be able to censor, delete or rewrite the message left by users - it is permanently stored in the blocks.
The blockchain is much more complicated than the web, and its distribution may take time. This is a new stage in the development of the Internet; it returns us to what the Internet should have been from the beginning: more decentralized, open, safe and accessible. The history of the blockchain is being written now and we are directly involved in it.
An excerpt from the book The Business Blockchain: Promise, Practice, and Application of the Next Internet Technology translated the cloud mining service HashFlare specifically for Geektimes.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/395551/
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