Not every application needs to be decentralized. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try
Tags: Blockchain

Image credit: Copyright (2017) Adam Jacobs. Prof Jordan Peterson delivering a lecture at the University of Toronto in 2017. Reproduced with permission under the Creative Commons 2.0 License.

The biggest buzzword for blockchain is the ubiquitous term “decentralized.” It’s a term that sells more bitcoin than any other. The prospect of having a totally new world of peer-to-peer application is enticing to a portion of the population suspicious of the unchecked power of a few software oligarchs.

Just what is a decentralized application? To answer that, let’s first look at what a centralized application is. Microsoft Word is a centralized application. All Google apps are centralized. Essentially, any app that pings a central authority for updates is centralized. Almost all mainstream applications fall into this category.

This paradigm puts the user in a tight spot. We depend on many of these apps to run our businesses and our personal lives. Take Gmail, for example. Google is a private company, and can choose to deny its services to users at will. Just ask Jordan Peterson.

Peterson is a famous clinical psychologist whose YouTube videos gained a huge audience across the world. Many of his positions earned him the ire of some of the staff at Google, and in a little-reported incident, Dr. Peterson’s Gmail account, YouTube account, and all other Google applications were locked out. He couldn’t retrieve emails, or see his own videos. His YouTube channel was unavailable to users. That’s a danger when your entire application stack relies on an enormous central authority like Google.

Dr. Peterson was able to get his issue resolved quickly, but only because of the massive public outcry that resulted. A person without fame or fortune would have had zero recourse — legally, Google is a private company who can refuse service to anyone. That’s where centralization leads.

If Peterson’s email and video platforms had been decentralized, with no central authority to control the dissemination of his content or access to his email, he could have slept soundly knowing that he didn’t have to worry about the ire of a few staffers at Google. Security from tyranny is the biggest benefit of decentralization, and that’s why it’s such a hot topic.

In the early days of the internet, the new fad was moving internet apps from the web browser to the mobile browser. “Mobile first” was a common buzzword in the application development world. We will soon see a time when the new buzzword is “decentralization first.”

Decentralized Applications are harder to create, the tools are newer and less proven, and transaction times are slower. But this is to be expected with new technology. There are kinks to be worked out, and those hard problems are being solved.

If an app can be designed to be decentralized, it has many advantages for users. First and foremost, data and personal privacy are much easier to achieve. This allows users to keep control of their information, and prevents corporations from aggregating and profiting from the data themselves. Second, the internet is not very secure. New decentralized protocols such as Ethereum have a much higher standard of security than existing internet protocols.

Data is often stolen from centralized internet data repositories. In fact, you have to go to extreme measures in order to secure data accessible through the internet. New decentralized protocols have security built in from the beginning.

It seems as if we’re in a technological revolution similar in structure to the first stage of the internet revolution — circa 1994. Back then, the internet was slow, hard to access, and fraught with technological challenges. It looks as if the increasing speed of access to the internet from the 2400 BAUD modems of 1994 to the broadband connections of today can be easily analogized with the transaction times of decentralized applications on the blockchain. While decentralized applications may seem like a clunky embryonic niche technology today, we believe that they will be the dominant software in five to ten years, with inestimable benefits both economically and personally for all. It’s an exciting time to be alive.