decentralized internet

The Business Blockchain: Promise, Practice, and Application of the Next Internet Technology
by William Mougayar
Published 25 Apr 2016

Banks as Backends Blockchain Inside Regulations Versus Permissionless Innovation Landscape of Blockchain Companies in Financial Services Blockchain Applications in Financial Services Strategic Questions for Financial Services Key Ideas from Chapter Four Notes 5: Lighthouse Industries & New Intermediaries The New Intermediaries Lighthouse Industries Key Ideas from Chapter Five Notes 6: Implementing Blockchain Technology Internal Strategies for Tackling the Blockchain The Blockchain Czar Organizational Models A Blockchain Functional Architecture Core & Protocol Blockchain Software Development Writing Decentralized Applications 12 Features of a Blockchain Platform Decision-Making Framework Key Ideas from Chapter Six Notes 7: Decentralization as the Way Forward What Happened to the Decentralized Internet? It’s not Easy Being Decentralized What Will Decentralization Look Like The Crypto Economy A New Flow of Value How Technology Permeates Peering Into 2025 Key Ideas from Chapter Seven Notes Epilogue Selected Bibliography Index Additional Resources About the Author EULA FOREWORD THIS DECADE IS AN INTERESTING time for the development of decentralized technologies.

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Maybe the blockchain will lead us to the not-so utopian view of Nobel Prize winner, economist, and philosopher, Friedrich Hayek. He believed that the path to a functioning economy—or society—was decentralization, and asserted that a decentralized economy complements the dispersed nature of information spread throughout society.1 WHAT HAPPENED TO THE DECENTRALIZED INTERNET? Let us remember the intended vision of the Internet. It was very much about openness in decentralization and distribution of services, with minute controls at the centers. At the dawn of the Internet life in 1994, Kevin Kelly wrote in his book, Out of Control, three important comments to remember: The network is the icon of the 21st century.

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The Web that drives economic progress and knowledge, is the one where anyone can create websites to share culture and information. It’s the Web where new businesses bloom, where government transparency is a reality, and where citizens document injustice. Wow. What Kevin Kelly and Web We Want are saying is pure music to the ears of today’s believers that a more decentralized Internet can shepherd us into a better future. If you are content with the Web today, stop and think for a minute whether you are happy with this situation. Web We Want observes: Millions of spam blogs and websites are visited by bots to cash in on ads. Even quality websites are so overloaded with automated ads and trackers that using an ad blocker is the only responsible way to surf the Web.

Lurking: How a Person Became a User
by Joanne McNeil
Published 25 Feb 2020

Yet failure to anticipate the consequences of the internet is not the same as accepting, loving, or yielding to the internet in its current state. None other than Tim Berners-Lee—he of the modest 1991 Usenet announcement about a project that “comes without any warranty whatsoever”—has expressed disappointment about what has become of it. The World Wide Web was built following the ethic of a decentralized internet; concentration of power, which Amazon, Google, and Facebook have shored up, once seemed impossible to him. “Happily, the Web is so huge that there’s no way any one company can dominate it,” Berners-Lee wrote in 1999. Twenty years later, the World Wide Web Foundation, with his approval, would fund research about social hazards online—largely because of companies he predicted would never gain a foothold on it.

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Segmenting and clustering users and history into communities, rather than mass-purpose platforms, would be an integral component to this ideal internet in its cycles of maintenance and renewal. Calls for regulation or even brand-new ventures might be too little, too late, but it doesn’t hurt to dream. A public internet alone won’t save us, a decentralized internet itself won’t protect us; more than that, what users need are noncommercial localized systems of feedback, mutual aid, and accountability—commons guided with respect to user consent and privacy. Users need users, people need people. To borrow a slogan often expressed by health and disability activists, there should be “nothing about us without us.”

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David Dayen wrote a compelling argument in The New Republic on why the best place to begin is to “Ban Targeted Advertising” (April 10, 2018). Darius Kazemi, writing for the Dat Foundation’s blog, has explained how internet architecture continues to make decentralization possible (“Three protocols and a future of the decentralized internet,” March 22, 2019). The piece “pandora’s vox: on community in cyberspace,” by Carmen Hermosillo, was included in the anthology High Noon on the Electronic Frontier (ed. Peter Ludlow, MIT Press, 1996). It is also widely available online. Adam Curtis appeared on Jarvis Cocker’s Sunday Service on May 22, 2011, to discuss his documentary program All Watched Over by Machines with Loving Grace, which quotes humdog’s manifesto.

The Great Wave: The Era of Radical Disruption and the Rise of the Outsider
by Michiko Kakutani
Published 20 Feb 2024

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “has evolved into an engine of inequity”: Tim Berners-Lee, “One Small Step for the Web…,” Medium, Sept. 29, 2018, medium.com/​@timberners_lee/​one-small-step-for-the-web-87f92217d085. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Berners-Lee has proposed a new platform: Solid, solidproject.org; Thomas Macaulay, “Web Inventor Tim Berners-Lee: Screw Web3—My Decentralized Internet Doesn’t Need Blockchain,” TNW, June 23, 2022, thenextweb.com/​news/​web-inventor-tim-berners-lee-screw-web3-my-decentralized-internet-doesnt-need-blockchain; Peter Verdegem, “Tim Berners-Lee’s Plan to Save the Internet: Give Us Back Control of Our Data,” Conversation, Feb. 5, 2021, theconversation.com/​tim-berners-lees-plan-to-save-the-internet-give-us-back-control-of-our-data-154130; Greg Noone, “What Is Web 3.0?

Life After Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy
by George Gilder
Published 16 Jul 2018

As the blockchain developer Ivan Liljeqvist comments on his blog Ivan on Tech, “It will be cool if I can program the transactions framework and say I want to be paid in micropayments for every operation as it is executed when the software is used.”5 It could radically change how software is written and sold. Golem sees itself in the long term building key elements of Web 3.0, where content of all kinds can be generated and exchanged without middlemen. If it succeeds, the top-down silos of the oligarchs will give way to a decentralized Internet, perhaps attached to the storage realms of the Interplanetary File System of Juan Benet and his Filecoin. Benet is leading a movement of many storage companies to rent unused disk space on a similar model. Scientists around the world could turn to Golem to compute quantitative financial models, Navier-Stokes fluid-flow equations, climate change atmospheric models, protein-fold geometries, machine-learning weights, and pharmacological sampling statistics.

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Bitcoins are not coins, but metrics or measuring sticks for transactions that are permanently registered in the blockchain. Blockchain: A database, similar to a cadaster of real estate titles, extended to events, covenants, patents, licenses, or other permanent records. All are hashed together mathematically from the origin of the series, each record distributed and publicized on decentralized Internet nodes. Boltzmann’s entropy: Heat (the total energy of all molecules in a system) over temperature (the average energy of the molecules). Ludwig Boltzmann (1844–1906) identified this difference with missing information, or uncertainty about the arrangement of the molecules, thus opening the way for Claude Shannon and information theory.

The Truth Machine: The Blockchain and the Future of Everything
by Paul Vigna and Michael J. Casey
Published 27 Feb 2018

Here is sampling of possible use cases, and it is by no means an exhaustive list: •  Inviolable property registries, which people can use to prove that they own their houses, cars, or other assets; •  Real-time, direct, bank-to-bank settlement of securities exchanges, which could unlock trillions of dollars in an interbank market that currently passes such transactions through dozens of specialized institutions in a process that takes two to seven days; •  Self-sovereign identities, which don’t depend on a government or a company to assert a person’s ID; •  Decentralized computing, which supplants the corporate business of cloud computing and Web hosting with the hard drives and processing power of ordinary users’ computers; •  Decentralized Internet of Things transactions, where devices can securely talk and transact with each other without the friction of an intermediary, making possible big advances in transportation and decentralized energy grids; •  Blockchain-based supply chains, in which suppliers use a common data platform to share information about their business processes to greatly improve accountability, efficiency, and financing with the common purpose of producing a particular good; •  Decentralized media and content, which would empower musicians and artists—and, in theory, anyone who posts information of value to the Net—to take charge of their digital content, knowing they can track and manage the use of this “digital asset.”

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A version of the “trusted third party” was added to our complicated system of global value exchange. It was another jury-rigged solution that meant that the banking system, the centralized ledger-keeping solution with which society had solved the double-spend problem for five hundred years, would be awkwardly bolted onto the ostensibly decentralized Internet as its core trust infrastructure. With customers now sufficiently confident they wouldn’t be defrauded, an explosion in online shopping ensued. But the gatekeeping moneymen now added costs and inefficiencies to the system. The result was high per-transaction costs that made it too expensive, for example, to sustain micropayments—extremely low payments, maybe as little as pennies, that otherwise promised to open up a whole new world of online business models.

Culture & Empire: Digital Revolution
by Pieter Hintjens
Published 11 Mar 2013

It will take a lot of work to rebuild the web, no matter what technology we use. One thing the Internet has in large numbers, however, is capable young men with a rebellious streak. The chemistry of change just requires that these Dangerous Young Men focus their attention on the challenge of the decentralized Internet. Once it's seen as a plausible direction, there is no stopping the reaction. Indeed, when the Greedy Old Men try flatly to stop the reaction of change, it just makes it run faster. It's a recurring pattern of conflict between the old men and the young ones. Indeed, an ancient one that is universal in myth and history, and embedded in the fiber of our species.

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I'm not sure, this would be my first experience of fighting a global criminal conspiracy with nothing more than my keyboard. Here's my best guess: Identify, document, and boycott the businesses and business partners of the Para-state. Boycott the products of extraction economies. Develop a low carbon lifestyle. Build a new decentralized Internet that is unbearable expensive to spy on -- see my proposal in the Appendix. Promote the Awakening and obviously, make sure everyone you know has read this book. It's free to download and share, though you can also buy it in paper. Praise the whistle blower and the investigative reporter, for she or he is a true hero.

Talk Is Cheap: Switching to Internet Telephones
by James E. Gaskin
Published 15 Mar 2005

These bits are virtually indistinguishable from bits of web sites, music files, email, and airline ticket confirmation forms. Bits are bits. With a monolithic telephone company network, timing must be tightly controlled so connections between central offices tick the same seconds off together. But the decentralized Internet has a wide variety of timekeepers, and few networks absolutely track connected networks to the subsecond level. Yet Internet Telephony works fine. The data stream packets require little absolute timing, but do require coordinated timing between packets in the data stream. So the Real Time Protocol portions of each data packet help coordinate packet sequencing at the receiving end, keeping words flowing smoothly.

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These bits are virtually indistinguishable from bits of web sites, music files, email, and airline ticket confirmation forms. Bits are bits. With a monolithic telephone company network, timing must be tightly controlled so connections between central offices tick the same seconds off together. But the decentralized Internet has a wide variety of timekeepers, and few networks absolutely track connected networks to the subsecond level. Yet Internet Telephony works fine. The data stream packets require little absolute timing, but do require coordinated timing between packets in the data stream. So the Real Time Protocol portions of each data packet help coordinate packet sequencing at the receiving end, keeping words flowing smoothly.

Revolution in the Age of Social Media: The Egyptian Popular Insurrection and the Internet
by Linda Herrera
Published 14 Apr 2014

As reported in the Washington Post article “Tech Firms Hiring White House Staffers,” the Obama administration “brought Facebook and Twitter to politics.”11 In addition to the State Department’s 2.0 diplomacy initiatives, some of which targeted Tunisian and Egyptian internet activists, the Department of Defense and US intelligence agencies also liaised with tech companies on matters pertaining to national security. Technology companies had become deeply enmeshed in American power. Tunisia’s cyberwars escalated to even greater heights when Anonymous, the decentralized internet group that promotes online freedom, launched Operation Tunisia. During the Tunisian uprising, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange released a series of incriminating cables detailing embezzlement and nepotism by the Ben Ali oligarchy, information that further fueled the revolt. When the government tried to block access to the cables, Operation Tunisia used the Twitter hashtag #OpTunisia to inform Tunisians about backdoor ways to access the WikiLeaks cables and protect themselves online.

The Scandal of Money
by George Gilder
Published 23 Feb 2016

Bitcoins thus are not coins but metrics or measuring sticks for transactions that are permanently registered in the BLOCKCHAIN. Blockchain: A database, similar to a cadastre of real estate titles, extended to events, covenants, patents, licenses, or other permanent records. All are hashed together mathematically from the origin of the series, with the record distributed and publicized on decentralized Internet nodes. Gold: The monetary element, tested over centuries. Usually thought to be money because it is a useful commodity—pretty, shiny, divisible, portable, scarce, and convertible into jewelry—gold is in fact the monetary element because it is useless. Money is not valuable because it is really jewelry; jewelry is valuable because it is really money.

Ours to Hack and to Own: The Rise of Platform Cooperativism, a New Vision for the Future of Work and a Fairer Internet
by Trebor Scholz and Nathan Schneider
Published 14 Aug 2017

This enables close cooperation between the startups because they know that the value that is thus created cannot be privately extracted. Purpose companies voluntarily share employees and code, creating benefits similar to those found in large corporations while retaining decentralized ownership. The fund invests in platform tech companies that are working on the future of work, insurance, the sharing economy, decentralized internet, and open data. It leaves voting rights with entrepreneurs and its investment strategy is evergreen rather than exit-driven. Rooted Internet, itself a self-owned company partly controlled by its startups, raises money by selling non-voting shares. It promises never to extract more money out of the startup ecosystem than a certain capped dividend.

Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy
by Jonathan Taplin
Published 17 Apr 2017

My generation knew that the road toward a better society would be long, but we hoped our children’s children might live in that land, even if we weren’t able to get there with them. It may take even longer than we imagined to rebuild a sustainable culture. If I were to predict the future, I would hope to see Tim Berners-Lee’s dream of a “re-decentralized” Internet, one that’s much less dependent on surveillance marketing and that allows creative artists to take advantage of the zero-marginal-cost economics of the Web in a series of nonprofit distribution cooperatives. I have no illusion that the existing business structures of cultural marketing will go away, but my hope is that we can build a parallel structure that will benefit all creators.

Internet for the People: The Fight for Our Digital Future
by Ben Tarnoff
Published 13 Jun 2022

If people were given the chance to make their own decisions about how data is made and used, it’s reasonable to expect they might make different decisions than those made by Mark Zuckerberg and friends. For instance, they might choose to ban the sort of sweeping surveillance that is so integral to online advertising. This architecture is also well suited to a more decentralized internet, since users could put their data in a central depot and then authorize use by different services—a cooperative social media server, a worker-owned delivery app—as needed. Innovation from Below These sketches are a good start, but they still bear the stamp of the internet they are trying to escape.

Tribe of Mentors: Short Life Advice From the Best in the World
by Timothy Ferriss
Published 14 Jun 2017

But simply “DAD” on a billboard would be great to remind us all of how important it is to be a dad. “When I’m old, how much would I be willing to pay to travel back in time and relive the moment that I’m experiencing right now?” Muneeb Ali TW: @muneeb muneebali.com MUNEEB ALI is the co-founder of Blockstack, a new decentralized Internet where users control their data, and apps run without remote servers. Muneeb received his PhD in computer science from Princeton University, specializing in distributed systems. He went through Y Combinator—considered the Harvard/SEAL Team Six of startup incubators—and has worked in the systems research group at Princeton and PlanetLab, the world’s first and largest cloud computing test bed.

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I think probably the most important thing for me to remember when I get overwhelmed is to not feel the need to continue on and push through. It doesn’t necessarily benefit whatever it is I’m working on. It’s almost always better to take a break. “Be present.” Ryan Shea TW: @ryaneshea shea.io RYAN SHEA co-created Blockstack, a new decentralized Internet where users control their data, and apps run without remote servers. With his co-founder Muneeb Ali, Blockstack has raised funding from top investors like Union Square Ventures and Naval Ravikant. Ryan majored in ­mechanical and aerospace engineering at Princeton with a minor in computer science.

The Bitcoin Guidebook: How to Obtain, Invest, and Spend the World's First Decentralized Cryptocurrency
by Ian Demartino
Published 2 Feb 2016

Mastercoin/Omni was hired by Overstock.com to create a cryptocurrency-powered asset exchange but Overstock eventually decided to continue on with the project without the help of the Mastercoin/Omni developers.8 There are, however, three projects built on the Omni/Mastercoin system that prove its usefulness: Maidsafe, Tether, and Factom. Maidsafe Maidsafe is a decentralized Internet. Rather than storing websites and other files on one server that then serves the entire Internet, files are encrypted, split up and sent to computers around the world. The participants who donate unused portions of their hard drive to the network are awarded Maidsafe coins/tokens. In its current form, Maidsafe is more of a decentralized file storage service, which in itself is disruptive enough to be significant.

The Internet Is Not the Answer
by Andrew Keen
Published 5 Jan 2015

Madrigal, “Camp Grounded, ‘Digital Detox,’ and the Age of Techno-Anxiety,” Atlantic, July 2013. 9 Oliver Burkman, “Conscious Computing: How to Take Control of Our Life Online,” Guardian, May 10, 2013. 10 Jemima Kiss, “An Online Magna Carta: Berners-Lee Calls for Bill of Rights for Web,” Guardian, March 11, 2014. 11 “Bitcloud Developers Plan to Decentralize Internet,” BBC Technology News, January 23, 2014. 12 Suzanne Labarre, “Why We’re Shutting Off Our Comments,” Popular Science, September 24, 2013; Elizabeth Landers, “Huffington Post to Ban Anonymous Comments,” CNN, August 22, 2013. 13 “Data Protection: Angela Merkel Proposes Europe Network,” BBC News, February 15, 2014. 14 Philip Oltermann, “Germany ‘May Revert to Typewriters’ to Counter Hi-Tech Espionage,” Guardian, July 15, 2014. 15 Lanier, Who Owns the Future?

Reinventing the Bazaar: A Natural History of Markets
by John McMillan
Published 1 Jan 2002

Initially devised as a tool for the military and scientists, it was transformed into a surrogate for the postal service, the library, and the shopping mall. Imagine what the internet would be like today if it were centrally controlled. Picture Microsoft or IBM, say—or, for that matter, the U.S. Postal Service—as the internet’s Gosplan-equivalent. Central control would have stunted the internet. Diversity would have been lost. With the decentralized internet we can each choose how we make contact with it. We can use any available program to access the world wide web. We can choose among the many types of systems, in addition to the web, that use the internet as their communication medium (such as email, file transfers, various kinds of live video and video transmissions, telnet, virtual private networks).

Practical Doomsday: A User's Guide to the End of the World
by Michal Zalewski
Published 11 Jan 2022

Next, the Bitcoin protocol established the ownership of coin through the use of cryptography. Only the authorized holder of a given coin would know the secret key needed to transfer the asset, but anyone in the world could verify that a transaction had taken place. And finally, Nakamoto’s currency employed a decentralized, internet-based ledger—known as the blockchain—to record the chain of custody for coins in a tamper-proof way, and to rule out the possibility of the owner of a coin spending it twice. As long as the majority of market participants acted in good faith, the integrity of the blockchain was assured without the need for any central authority to keep track of transactions and accounts.

Don't Be Evil: How Big Tech Betrayed Its Founding Principles--And All of US
by Rana Foroohar
Published 5 Nov 2019

WPP, the world’s largest purchaser of advertising (it shops on behalf of major companies globally), spent $300 million on “behalf of its clients on Amazon search ads last year,” and about 75 percent of that was pulled from budgets that would have been spent on Google-related advertising. No wonder the Googlers are looking nervously over their shoulders to see what Jeff Bezos is doing. All of this shines an uncomfortable light on how the supposedly decentralized Internet economy has spawned a handful of ruthless oligopolies that have begun to use their power to undermine start-up growth, job creation, and labor markets. Over the past two decades, more than 75 percent of U.S. industries have seen an increase in concentration of both wealth and influence. If you compare the numbers with the post–World War II period, when U.S. growth was strongest, the contrast is striking.

System Error: Where Big Tech Went Wrong and How We Can Reboot
by Rob Reich , Mehran Sahami and Jeremy M. Weinstein
Published 6 Sep 2021

In 1996, the top five companies by market capitalization were General Electric, Royal Dutch Shell, Coca-Cola, Nippon Telegraph and Telephone, and ExxonMobil; in 2020, the top five were Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, Alphabet, and Facebook. The utopian notions of technology as a great equalizer have given way to dystopian stories of data breaches, surveillance capitalism, biased algorithms, and rampant misinformation. So how did we end up here? It’s a far cry from the free and decentralized internet that the early pioneers imagined. To understand the forces at play, we need to examine the evolution of the personal computing industry from its roots in the counterculture of the 1960s to its current role as the powerhouse of the global economy. These days, the high-tech ecosystem is fueled by capital—the availability of money for investment in new companies—which creates nearly endless opportunities for building new businesses that disrupt the old economic order.

The Wires of War: Technology and the Global Struggle for Power
by Jacob Helberg
Published 11 Oct 2021

And if some reporters and pundits in our raucous information environment don’t always see the substantive and procedural differences between a democratic Internet and an authoritarian Internet, just ask the people in Taiwan, Xinjiang, and Hong Kong—they know exactly what the difference is. In the end, the two ideologically opposed Internet models are systemically at odds because their underlying political philosophies rest on contrary conceptions of political legitimacy. The Arab Spring showed us that a decentralized Internet is inherently democratizing; democracy itself is predicated on the belief that laws that are arbitrary or imposed by the will of a single person of authority are illegitimate. Conversely, a centrally controlled Internet governed by laws imposed by a single figure of authority is inherently undemocratic.

Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin Is Changing Money, Business, and the World
by Don Tapscott and Alex Tapscott
Published 9 May 2016

Is a blockchain alternative to Facebook or Twitter really achievable or will the incumbents respond by addressing user concerns about data ownership and privacy? Doesn’t matter. Consumers win either way. Will Visa wither or will it change its business model to embrace the power of blockchain? How will Apple respond to an artist-centered music industry? What will tin-pot dictators think about a decentralized Internet that they can’t turn off or control? Can the blockchain make technology accessible to the world’s two billion unbanked people? The failure rate of start-ups is high, and so we expect a good number of our case studies to fall by the wayside, not because blockchain technology is a bad idea, but because—for each one of our examples—there are many competing start-ups.

The Age of Cryptocurrency: How Bitcoin and Digital Money Are Challenging the Global Economic Order
by Paul Vigna and Michael J. Casey
Published 27 Jan 2015

This meeting had been organized by Paige Peterson, a twenty-six-year-old, blond-hair-and-dreadlocked libertarian/anarchist who’d started working at MaidSafe a month prior. She’d arranged for the company’s founder, a Scottish engineer named David Irvine, to “meet” the San Francisco group through a video chat. For a few hours, he answered whatever questions the group had. MaidSafe is trying to build a decentralized Internet network, and this meeting was part of the outreach effort. Meetups, which function almost like the church socials of the bitcoin religion and are now held in cities all over the world, offer a chance for all these decentralized, anonymous players to get together and break bread, as it were (or, perhaps we should say, bits).

The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World
by Lawrence Lessig
Published 14 Jul 2001

Much more significant than in the story I told about liberty, the emphasis here is on the interaction between changes in law and changes in code that together will undermine innovation. Or at least innovation of a certain kind. The story I want to tell is not about the death of innovation generally; it is about the relocation of innovation from the diverse, decentralized Internet back to the institutions that policed innovation before. The story is about the bureaucratization and capture of the innovation process—relocating it back to where it was—as a response to the structures originally enabled by the Internet itself. Put differently, this is a story about changes in code, both East Coast (by lawmakers in Washington) and West Coast (by software writers in Silicon Valley) code, which will restore some of the power of the old against some of the threat of the new.