Decentralizing All The Things

Distributed applications are the future, they are immune to censorship, downtimes, and the inherent security of the Blockchain remain untouched and uncontested.

The brilliant Satoshi Nakamoto found a way to implement a system in which currency transactions could be carried out in a secure way, and with all the aforementioned benefits. Others came and took Satoshi’s vision and through tinkering and experimentation made further changes and improvements.

The hardcore Bitcoin community tends to doubters of other currencies or blockchain protocols. Indeed, many saw the classic economic pump and dump scheme as a quick way to get rich, sadly, Ponzi schemes, fraud, and treachery is still something present inside the Bitcoin and other blockchain’s communities.

Bitcoin remains King in Cryptosphere, mostly because of the “network effect”, being the first of its class and with the higher valuation. Inspired by Bitcoin’s Blockchain technology, Vitalik Buterin came up with a solution to the internet’s centralization problem.

Ethereum is a protocol that can perform computation in a secure and distributed way, Ethereum was built, and with it, the term Distributed Applications flourished inside the developer’s community. With Ethereum an application can be executed in a global network of computers, the programs perform calculations without the risk of downtimes, and with a myriad of benefits that technologies like Bitcoin already offers.

Not everything is perfect about Ethereum, Vitalik has talked about several challenges that -if left unresolved- could seriously harm the health of the project, one of them is the scalability problem, as Dapps grows, and new use cases are developed, the network will be under severe pressure, Ethereum will need improvements to allow an efficient use of computer resources, a successful transition from PoW to PoS is another challenge that could alter the status of the project.

Is it really worth it to transition from a cheap centralized internet to a distributed decentralized one? In a recent experiment, Amanda B. Johnson creator of The Daily Decrypt -a Youtube Channel– used a “Smart Contract” -another term/ for Dapps- which was intended to refund the Channel’s sponsor in case that the videos didn’t reach a milestone of 2,000 viewers in seven days.

The Smart Contract did the job, but the fees involved made the costs of the implementation outweigh the benefits.For the time being, Distributed Applications and Smart Contracts aren’t the cheapest or most efficient solutions to general problems, more efforts, implementations, iterations, and trial and errors attempts are needed in order to tip the balance into the Dapp’s backyard.

Hopefully, in the future developing Dapps will be a common thing among programmers, and then Blockchain technologies will see a widespread adoption.

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