I know we are at a very early stage where Decentralized Apps can make any significant impact on the overall internet landscape and the dominance of centralized Web applications and websites will remain for some years to come.

But the below post shows why we need to accelerate in bringing technological innovation and viability of DApps as soon as possible.

In the above case, DOJ (Department of Justice)has demanded details of not only the personal information and general information of a website’s owner but also in addition to contact information, email content, and photos of thousands of people visiting the site disruptj20.org — in an effort to determine who simply visited the website. And this demand was done via Search Warrant to DreamHost which is the webhost for the above website.

While in this particular case the web host has resisted the Warrant and also is fighting a legal battle against the DOJ’s case in Washington, D.C. Superior Court, asking for an order to compel DreamHost to produce the records. Now one would ask why ask such information and for what purpose. This not for identifying a terrorist or a criminal. As it turns out the website under investigation is a website that organized participants of political protests against the current United States administration. And this clearly seems to identify people who may either be involved in Anti-Trump protests or may even just have visited the site out of curiosity.

Whats new in this news?

Yes there is nothing new in this news, for many years now since Bush Administration and even under Obama Administration all leading social networks and even ISP providers were wire tapped and not only call records but also lot of internet traffic in US, Europe, parts of Asia and Australia has been dumped and processed in Data Lakes managed by NSA. The below link can help to explain the amount of data and the aim of maintaining such huge Data Lake.

There have been many reports of abuse of such arbitrary powers at the hand of law enforcement and the intelligence community which not only puts the privacy of common citizen at risks but also is used arbitrarily to quell free speech and the ability of democratic opposition and chance to whistle blow the corruption and scandals that mires the underbelly of any centralized government.

Why Bother about Decentralized Apps?

Decentralized Apps or DApps inherently by their design are made to operate either out of nodes running in a peer-to-peer network like Blockchain or out of web browsers where they run locally and communicate through a peer-to-peer network and can not be taken down and would not expose a user to the kind of data collection or data surveillance that happens with a Website hosted on a central web host. Also it gives the control of the identity and the data back to the user itself. Which is a huge thing considering the over reach today Governments are doing to invade into privacy of common citizens in the name of anti-terrorism and their federal right.

The need for Decentralization

Unfortunately even the democratic countries are forgetting that they are by the people, from the people and for the people. They somehow consider themselves as gods of the people. Today a citizen is only considered reputable if he pays huge taxes, funds elections or supports the ruling party. Anyone who either opposes the government or who wants to save his hard earned money to himself or is even poor or part of informal economy is a crook.

Today citizens in not only communist, oppressive regimes or economically distressed countries are looking at decentralization and cypto currencies seriously but also people in first world and developed countries are waking to the need of moving beyond the tight control of governments and bring the true power of trade, commerce and growth in their lives which has been running for thousands of years via informal economy (which earlier was formal).

Challenges in this vision

We have to understand that such efforts to make internet truly secure and decentralized have been made in the past e.g. Torrent, Tor, Napster etc. Some failed because of government crackdown, some others because of better technology than the predecessor, some because of inherent support of the community, most of them failed because peer-to-peer technology suffers from speed issues and also there were much better offerings from centralized web apps which took away the whole value proposition of a peer-to-peer network.

That being said again there is renewed interest in the distributed & p2p technologies because of few reasons:

Increased speed offered by current Internet technology which makes p2p technologies viable

Technology advancements like Websocket,WebRTC, Blockchain, SDN and IOT.

Increased surveillance from Governments and more focus of citizens for their privacy.

Increased volatility in the traditional financial system

In some of the technology advancements the need of scale beyond centralized architecture and the need for machine to machine interaction has contributed in making the Decentralized apps a reality.

How are the challenges being addressed?

Many of the current and future innovations in Blockchain and p2p technology like mesh & fog computing, side & child chains, lightning network, atomic swaps, decrease in transaction costs in Blockchain and new research in DLT (Distributed Ledger technology), smart contract technology is ushering a new era in making Decentralized computing a reality. But the two most important innovation that can make Decentralized computing viable is the innovation in distributed storage & messaging technology. That is why IPFS, Storj, Swarm, Whisper, BigchainDB and many other such technologies become a very important stepping stone making Blockchain & Decentralized Dapps a reality of tomorrow.

Conclusion

I will like to conclude my thoughts with a prediction. 2016–2017 we saw many ICOs coming and now with so many DApps raising so much capital only at idea stage may seem a pipe dream to some and outright scam to outsiders. But to any cryptocurrency investor there is hope. As in early part of 2018 and 2019 many of these DApps come to life, we can see the real potential of DApps and their true power of disrupting the current internet era and ushering the internet of tomorrow. There may be many failures but even few projects shine that can become the template and test bed for future evolution of Decentralization as a technology and as social, financial and cultural movement.