The Brave New Internet

With so much hype about Bitcoin, it can be easy to miss the big picture: we're in the midst of a revolution in the underlying technologies that define the internet.

Back when Jeff Bezos was selling books out of his garage, packing them on DIY tables made from doors, most people were sure that buying stuff over the internet was not secure, or at least that it didn't represent a threat to brick and mortar retail. And look where we are.

Money is just the first layer. And given how hard the world at large is finding it to grok what makes cryptocurrency so truly exciting, we should expect that the next layers will really blow our minds. Of course, if you're here reading on Steem, you're probably already having your mind blown by the second layer possibilities built upon the foundation of cryptocoins—this platform is a perfect example. I want to briefly look at a few others which are implementing the second layer applications on top of programmable money.

Kitties all the way down

Ethereum provides a Turing complete virtual machine, which means that it can run any program that you might run on your computer or smartphone, and create a public record that it was executed correctly. In practice, its resources are limited, and you'll need to pay gas to carry out the computations. There's enough power there to trade and breed kitties, or gamble with strangers completely securely and without a "house". All executions are recorded on the blockchain and verified by other nodes. Ethereum has become an ecosystem of newly issued tokens and dapps. It was designed from the ground up to be a platform that other applications run on, which poises it to play a big role in future developments. That said, the slowness and cost of executing on Ethereum mean that its domain will be limited to projects where high security is more important than low latency.

Definitively the future of cloud computing?

Dfinity is a very cool project that's built a working test network for a distributed cloud computer that's like Ethereum except much faster and less "written in stone". Whereas the outcome of your poker game will be written into the Ethereum blockchain for all eternity (potentially), in Dfinity, its possible to go back in time and retroactively change the rules of the game. That is if enough people vote to do so. This will be essential to getting complex programs unstuck when unexpected problems arise. It also plans to act as a marketplace for unutilized cpu cycles and storage space, providing a way for casual users to "mine" at home again on their personal computers. This might be the platform that you host a personal website on someday, whereas high stakes financial agreements would be encoded on Ethereum instead.

If torrents made babies...

Meanwhile IPFS and Filecoin are working to create a similar market for storage space on top of an already successful protocol. They're not the only ones, either. The vision of "Interplanetary File System" is really inspiring too: create the means to get the internet to Mars and beyond. Back on earth, it looks quite promising for bringing at least high latency internet access to more of those who lack it. This is something like Bittorrent, except with the added possibility to be paid out in cryptotokens, not just good karma or reputation, for seeding files. A large distribution of such local nodes could optimize content delivery to avoid long routes and unnecessary duplication.

Whip out my crypto ID card at the virtual poling place

I could go on to mention voting and identification, but the truth is that I don't know much about the projects solving those problems with cryptoassets. In any case, these are all examples of the power decentralized technology has to disrupt systems that we touch every day: banking, cloud computing, cloud storage, social media, video streaming, etc. Those things are all about to get a lot more efficient, creating greater access to digital resources accompanying a radical democratization of the creation and use of money.

Don't blink, it's all happening

What happens next is what I'm really excited for. A platform that pays you if you post popular content is awesome, especially if it has the more or less distributed reward system of Steem, rather than the centralized ad showing system of a platform like YouTube. However, it's a basic improvement on the models we already understand (even if all the hows and whys are tricky to understand), not a revolutionary new application that couldn't be imagined in terms of the old tech.

That's what I'm interested in, and I invite you to join me in attempting to imagine just how much is possible as this thing unfolds. It's not an easy job, but somebody has to do it. I'm getting so caught up at the moment in cool shit I've got to learn about right now, that I sometimes forget to step back and ask: what's my dream blockchain/distributed/decentralized app? And now I'll ask, what's yours?

With all that out of the way, I do actually want to say a thing or two about Bitocoin, but I'll save that for my next post.