Rong Chen – Oct 23, 2019

On the current or old internet, when you share a file, you are merely sharing a copy of its original. Yet on the new internet, you will be able to send actual original files. For example, when I send someone one Bitcoin, I no longer have it. This was the breakthrough that Satoshi gave us. But to send someone an original copy of a song or any file of value, we first have to solve not only the provenance and scarcity issues, but we must also solve the piracy and virus issues. We must solve the double-spend problem for all forms of data if we are to enable a truly revolutionary and modern internet and change the world such as Satoshi did.

We can imagine this new internet as a decentralized computer powered by a blockchain, and we are building an operating system, called Elastos, to solve these problems.

Therefore, the Elastos Smartweb is a computer. But when we say this, what does it actually mean? Let us look at each component of the Smartweb in the contexts just discussed.

Hive is the hard drive.

IPFS is the public storage for programs and public data.

OneDrive, Google Drive, and home Network Attached Storage are for millions of personal home directories.

Carrier is the Smartweb computer’s “internal” bus of a motherboard, just like PCI is for PCs.

Mobile phones are “dockers” (CPUs) for foreground apps/DApps.

Supernodes, which will eventually be much more than 108 in number, running in public clouds, are “dockers” for background (Web) services.

DPoS rewards 108 supernodes, but IPFS and Carrier could sponsor many more, including Raspberry Pi grade devices behaving like web service dockers.

DIDs are for user logins and identifying peripheral devices. File paths and URLs are also replaced with Hash based DIDs.

Furthermore, Elastos Carrier is also activating programming tasks and finding web services via Hash based DIDs.

Together, decentralized storage plus decentralized computing will form a decentralized Smartweb computer.

For the first two years, we built components for the Elastos Smartweb computer. For the next two years, we will assemble the components of the Smartweb computer, together.

The first million DID registrations or the million set-top-boxes are not real Smartweb use cases, in the sense that they are merely there to demonstrate that Elastos components are working. That is why we stopped pushing to add more set-top-boxes beyond the one million mark.

Whether it is called a world computer or a Smartweb computer is not important. We should be clear that there is only one of each in the world, underpinned by their public blockchains, respectively. If you are not THE computer, then you are a technology or a component. That is why we built our ETH Sidechain as part of the Elastic Consensus Computing technology, and IPFS as a hard drive component.

We currently have multiple sidechains running, including: DID Sidechain, Token Sidechain, ETH Sidechain and NEO Sidechain. In the future, we will expand on the idea of sidechains being static to being more transient, whereby the sidechains can be created and destroyed on demand. Think of the concept of transient sidechains in regards to how the OS of today is able to dynamically create and destroy tasks on demand. Elastos Consensus Computing will be able to create and destroy sidechains on demand too. The development for this is being planned for next year and we are really excited about the concept.

The challenges are large because most dApp vendors will not support more than two platforms due to resource limitations. Building a Smartweb computer is not easy, attracting developers is even harder, but the ability to alter the course of the internet at a time when the world desperately needs it is why innovators get up in the morning. The key to success is to bring value to consumers, especially the value that cannot be fulfilled by other platforms. Elastos has a unique value.

We define dApps as apps that cannot be manipulated by websites. There is a fundamental difference between the old www web’s approach of managing bad actors versus the Elastos Smartweb’s prevention of bad actors from ever taking advantage of us in the first place. Infrastructural changes are long overdue and the dApp is the future of the internet.

I would like to end with a quote by Steve Jobs, as it embodies the revolutionary spirit of Elastos and what we are actively working towards each day: creating a new paradigm of tools for the world to build with.

“Technology is nothing. What’s important is that you have a faith in people, that they’re basically good and smart, and if you give them tools, they’ll do wonderful things with them.”

My faith is in people, and I look forward to the wonderful things that are coming for the internet.

For more information on each component of the Elastos Smartweb, visit elastos.academy to learn, develop, and start to build the Modern Internet.