Everyone from a gamer to a CIO of a fortune 500 spends considerable time thinking about the future of computing. There is not a single person working in todays society that doesnt in some shape or form use the cloud. From simply using dropbox or an iPhone to small business’ hosting there webpage all the way through to larger corporations heavily invested in the cloud.

Just like the cloud changed desktop computing forever, The blockchain will be to the cloud what the cloud was to the desktop. But how?

The blockchain

Lets consider Bitcoin as a 1st generation Crypto. It’s very basic, requires a lot of computing power and you can’t do much with it besides P2P transactions. Transactions take a long time in the digital world, But it will forever be number 1 in my opinion because it was here first. I call Bitcoin digital gold, Just like gold in the real world its only use is to store value.

Ethereum is a 2nd generation Crypto, there’s more functionality and a lot of flexibility that you can do that Bitcoin can’t. Ethereum created the possibility of creating smart contracts and software inside/on top of the blockchain, Its opened up the doors for a whole new world.

The next wave of computing is going to be a massive shift away from cloud computing. There are two major problems with cloud computing:

(a) Users don’t own their own data,

(b) Remote servers are security holes.

With a move away from cloud computing, decentralized systems like Ethereum give explicit control of digital assets to end-users and remove the need to trust any third-party servers and infrastructure.

The current issue

Whilst the current cloud providers are enjoying the revenue there is a large cost involved in setting up a Centralised cloud data center. The cost of hardware, providing adequate cooling, support and maintenance all have there costs.

These costs are directly paid by us, the users. I recently done a price comparison againts Dropbox and Google drive up against SIA (more on SIA below) to see the cost of 1TB of storage per month.

Dropbox — $8. Google Drive — $10. SIA — $1.

Whilst there would be a significant profit in Dropbox and Google Drive i dont believe it would be 800–1000% or more in there.

The solution

Centralized would be AWS, GCP, Dropbox, iCloud etc etc.

The Ethereum blockchain allows the creation of software taking advantage of the network to create a decentralized or distributed application. This eliminates the need for a centrilazed data centre to provide the necessary compute needed.

Lets look at an example.

We’ll look at cloud storage, SIA is an easy example to explain and understand. You download the Application Wallet and rent out your additional hard drive space, & in return you receive SIA tokens for your time rented out at the END of the contract. It provides redundant backup of your files so one sole host does not control your data and is encrypted with 256AES.

We can look at RNDR also, Which is headed by Jules Urbach the founder of OTOY & Octane Render. One of the most expensive assets in a DC is GPUs, Especially high end. Think 8x GTX Titan Xp per server and there is above 10K each, Not to mention power and cooling over 3KW per server.

He is planning to utilise the Ethereum blockchain to create a distributed renderer for Octane Render. Utilising the spare GPUs around the world on the RNDR network to process 3D rendering work. For Jules/OTOY to deploy such a cloud would be Millions upon Millions of dollars up front in hardware and excessive running costs not to mention every 12–18 months when NVIDIA release a new GPU that reins supreme yet another investment is needed to upgrade the servers, Yet through the power of the blockchain they will be able to provide 10 times more power and no additional cost to them.

The deep learning space could vastly benefit from something like RNDR, Its unknown if they plan to use the network further than there Octane Render software.

There was a meme that was going around a while ago, It stated how Uber is the biggest transport company with no cars & AirBNB is the biggest hotel company with no real estate. Now i hear “They are the Uber of (Fill in the industry)” ALOT…

Well the Blockchain is the Uber of Computing then… You heard it here first? Maybe

What projects to look out for?

These are some projects to look out for that set to disrupt the cloud computing industry, In no particular order: