The New Internet Protocol: Blockchain

By Othman Darwish

The age of the online world began its journey with the invention of the Internet. The Internet has grown and evolved into its present form because people find immense value in using it. The emergence of Blockchain technology years ago and its current steady progress would revolutionize the Internet as we know it today. This article is arguing how the decentralized nature of Blockchain would radically changing the today's Internet .

Internet starts with a prototype, done back in late of the 1960s by Advanced Research Projects Agency Network or ARPANET, which was funded by the U.S. Department of Defense. ARPANET allows multiple computers to communicates on a single network. The technology continues its growth and developments in the 1970s by Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf, and they developed the Transmission Control Protocol and Internet Protocol-TCP/IP, a communications protocol that standardized the way the data exchanged between multiple networks. The invention of the World Wide Web in 1990, by the computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee, was a crucial step in developing the Internet as we know it today.

As the coming of any newly disruptive shift, such as the Internet, the emergence of large and open commerce marketplaces was the first aspect of the commercialization of such invention. August 11, 1994, NetMarket, an American retail platform, executed the first-ever online transaction. Since then, e-commerce has unfolded to make products more open to discover and purchase through online retailers and marketplaces. Independent freelancers, small businesses, and large enterprises all profited from e-commerce, allows them to sell their goods and services at a scale that was not viable with conventional offline retail. The broader spread of information technology leads to modernize communication processes and becoming a driving force of social evolution, not limited to commerce, but also in education, politics, and many areas of the society.

 It becomes obvious "for many" the vital role of the Internet in societies. Unfortunately, Internet censorship was an easy target achieved by the domain name server - DNS. Domain Name System -DNS is a computer system that is responsible for converting a human-readable, user-friendly format of names like ( www.mycompany.com) to machine numerical equivalent Internet Address IP such as (172.0.10.1). In a nutshell, DNS servers are a simple database that map names to IPs of different machines, devices, and locations. Thus DNS servers are centralized and make it a simple target for censorship and compromisation. On another hand, Internet Service Providers -ISPs that provided the internet service to its clients could be easily controlled and ordered to block, filter, and log their client's requests.

The approach of blockchain technology comes with a newly innovated solution that affords a censorship resistance, security, and resiliency as an alternative for centralized DNS and ISPs. The decentralized nature of Blockchain makes the decentralized domain name a reality. Blockchain-DNS provided a workable solution for Zooko's triangle. The triangle defines the desirable three features that should be provided by names in networking protocols. The features are 1- user-friendly names with low entropy ( easy to remember) 2- secure 3- and decentralized ( censorship resistance). Dot-Bit- *.bit is a new domain offered by Namecoin blockchain was the first effort of creating a successfully decentralized DNS. Registered Dot-Bit domain replicated on thousands of machines all over the world. Thus, a traditional DDoS attack is ineffective. On the other hand, and most important, names now become in total control of the register. No governmental agency or ISPs could forbid it. EmerDNS is another Blockchain-DNS domain name, fired by Emercoin cryptocurrency, and built on the top of EMC blockchain. EmerDNS manage multiple supporting DNS-Zone such as *.coin which designed for digital currency and commerce websites, *.lib - to host words library and liberty knowledge and freedom, and *.bazar concerning marketplaces.

The decentralization of DNS was the first progress toward creating a fully decentralized Internet. The second move is concerned with the applications and services that run on the Internet. Traditionally, applications built with a different flavor of client-server architecture, where the application services run on centralized/distributed servers and accessed by its ultimate users using a thin client such as an internet browser to retrieve information and execute instructions. In the client-server(s) model, the servers that host the applications are controlled and managed by their administrators and owners. Manipulating, controlling, or even shutting down those servers could instantly be achieved. 

The unstoppable, self-executing autonomous application first introduced in Ethereum Blockchain. DApp or what is known as the smart contract, runs inside the Blockchain, and replicated in thousands of machines all over the world, building what knows as world-computer. Unlike a popular client-server application, DApps' new paradigm permits for the first time the integrity of the application code and data. Running smart contracts and updating data state executed in a fully decentralized manner and only authorized if there there is a consensus of the majority of the executing nodes( mining servers ). On another hand, suspending those types of applications is not feasible, if not impossible. 

Smart contracts spread inside Blockchain would be the futuristic replacement of today's distributed application architecture. Interacting with those decentralized applications would achieve by a fully decentralized web browser. IPFS designed to serve this purpose, IPFS acts as decentralized public immutable data storage, stores static files such as HTML, JavaScript, and images, with a cryptographic proof on Blockchain transactions. The network of IPFS formed by thousands of nodes, each node stores only content it is interested in, plus some indexing information for that particular node and other nodes in the network.

The decentralization of DNS, application services and business rules ( smart contracts), and immutable public storage that runs based on Blockchain as protocol would be the significant biller for building the new Internet. The Internet would build on top of many different Blockchain networks; each Blockchain network would select the most convenient approach that fit industry needs and consumer experience. The interoperability and data exchanges between those different networks would accomplish through consensus Blockchain as per network selection. Cosmos, for example, is a decentralized network of independent parallel Blockchains; each Blockchain network relays on BFT consensus algorithms like Tendermint consensus. The concept of Cosmos is to make it straightforward for developers to build Blockchains and break the obstacles between Blockchains by allowing them to negotiate with each other. The end goal is to create an Internet of Blockchains, a network of Blockchains able to communicate with each other in a decentralized way. A network of Blockchains, as offered by Cosmos, would be able to defeat limitations of Blockchain, such as scalability, usability, and sovereignty.  

The Blockchain-based application, built on a decentralized DNS, smart contract, and immutable hypermedia storage, would act as a backbone for next-generation free Internet application. The new online journey begins, get ready!