The (re-)Birth of the World Computer
The cyber-punk community, and cryptography enthusiasts around the world have been head over feet lately for an innocent looking app that, according to the rumors, might just change the internet and everything you know about it. A small Israeli startup, called Synereo, recently announced the alpha launch of its decentralized Social Network, and raised a great deal of curiosity among the tech savvy and the slightly nerdy.
A decentralized Social-Network does essentially everything that Facebook and Twitter do, except that it doesn’t store or process the information necessary for the performance of the network in a centralized location, hence decentralized. This means that the Synereo network operates entirely without central servers or data centers. Instead, the network compensates users for contributions of storage and computation power when they support the distributed network with their personal computers or mobile devices.
This might sound like a technical peculiarity, but actually is kind of a bombshell to the ears of everyone initiated to the secret workings of the contemporary Internet. The dependence on centralized servers has been the Internet’s dirty little secret for a while now. Although it often looks free, chaotic and, well, cyberpunky - the Internet, and everything on it, is essentially highly centralized and monopolized at the hands of whomever has enough power or capital to supply the storage and computation power to actually keep it up and running (Google, Amazon and the rest of the gang, yes, we’re looking at you).
This state of affairs grants those powerful entities a staggering amount of control. Although created by you, me and the rest of Internet users, the information stored on their servers eventually belongs to them, and can be manipulated, sold bought and leveraged as they see fit. Not to speak of being hacked by, or handed over to the government, or any other syndicate of men in black suits with funny hats.
The idea of distributing the task, assigned to central servers, among the users of the Internet itself, has been around for a while. Who wouldn’t want to shrink the influence of said infamous leviathans to mouth sized chunks? However, for the time being, this concept has encountered many technical hurdles, which until now seemed to high for this mode of operation to become mainstream. This, of course, didn’t keep humanity from trying.
Bitcoin was, and is, one of these attempts. Its underlying technology - The Blockchain (with capital B) - is what enables Bitcoin owners to perform transactions without clearing houses and third parties involved. This technology was later picked up by a 19 year old prodigy named Vitalik Buterin, founding father of the Ethereum project. Vitalik and his associates figured out a way to co-opt the Blockchain’s abilities for much more complicated transactions, effectively transforming it into a decentralized “World Computer”, composed of myriads of personal devices connected to it.
This “World Computer” would allow anyone to deploy applications, websites and even entire organizations, without having to rely on server farms, disclosing their personal information to the lords of mankind. However, it soon became self evident that Blockchain technology isn’t ready yet to deliver on this promise. It proved itself to be too wasteful, slow and above all - not scalable to global proportions. Until now, at least.
Recently Synereo disclosed the underlying technology, enabling its Social Network to function, and it soon became clear that something very interesting is going on. Labeled RChain, or simply Blockchain 2.0, the company announced a Technology Stack, seemingly solving Blockchain’s biggest drawbacks.
Synereo describes RChain as a “concurrent” and “sharded” Blockchain. “Sharded” refers to the subdivision of the Blockchain into composable parts, which interlock to a unified whole, but do not need to be computed all at once (as it is the case with the Bitcoin Blockchain). Concurrent means that this subdivision enables different processes to run in parallel without them interfering with each other. Synereo promises that as a result, RChain is about to solve most of the well known problems of classical Blockchains, troubling the entire industry for years, while enabling Blockchain based systems to be much faster, infinitely scalable and cheaper to maintain.
If all this is as it appears, we could be closer than ever to “fundamentally redesigning the way the internet works”, as Synereo’s company slogan goes. One of the implications would be an Internet that can’t be taken down, censored or hacked by any entity - public or private - and which would redistribute the power and influence that come with storing and processing internet activity, back to the hands of users.
Apparently, it will take a while until the fully matured stack is up and running, but given the prominent figures leading the Synereo development team, it seems worth the while. In the meantime, Synereo has already announced a Grant Project, handing out hundreds of thousands of dollars to developers interested in building decentralized applications for the future Synereo platform.
Time will tell where all this is heading, but for now, the future looks more decentralized than ever.
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