Why Blockchain Needs New Infrastructure

BLOG: Where do you place your bets? On individual Blockchain applications or on the infrastructure to build and run them?

Kurt Pfluger — 14 March 2018

You may have noticed the news is aglow with “Blockchain” and the number of companies entering this space are from far afield, but why hasn’t anyone addressed the elephant in the room? While Blockchain promises to streamline and disrupt many industries such as government, banking, financial services, insurance and supply chain, it will not become mainstream until blockchain applications are cheaper, faster and better than the existing central authority, cloud technologies we use today.

Ethereum, the Blockchain whose smart contracts enable transactions after there is consensus amongst all the nodes on the network has seen its share of growing pains. The network is slow, not scalable and its main use case today is ICO’s. Reference the Crypto Kitties game that nearly brought down the network or at least brought it to a crawl (https://www.coindesk.com/cat-fight-ethereum-users-clash-cryptokitties-congestion/). In order for Blockchain to become a widely adopted technology it needs to be easily accessible by everyone without limitation. The networks need to be free from a single point of failure, central authority, be secure and provide censorship resistance.

Blockchain does represent some very tantalizing benefits which is a sort of Libertarian dream. Transparency of information in a digital public ledger sounds great but many of the big name monopolies like Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure and IBM are in the Blockchain market now, so how do we arrive at a utopia minus these guys?

There are interesting concepts to get around these giant incumbents who gladly host your data and apps and take your money for doing so. Startups like Filecoin and Storj promises to use spare storage capacity of devices around the world to solve the storage issue. Companies like Ripple, NEM and NEO have created their own Blockchains for a variety of use cases but without a healthy number of applications running on those blockchains adoption will be slow.

One Company has set upon ambitious plans to create a decentralized network the likes of which could unseat AWS, Azure, and other cloud service players.

Crowd Machine’s Crowd Computer is just as it sounds, a computer network run with super nodes and individual devices from around the world such as cell phones, computers and servers. Crowd Machine will incentivize individuals by paying them for the spare processor capacity on their devices. Crowd Machine combines its Crowd Computer with the Crowd App Studio, a no code environment where anyone can develop and deploy applications up to 45x faster, a metric that came from one of their Fortune 500 customers in healthcare. These applications are exploded into many pieces as you never run a whole application simultaneously. These applications’ pieces are then sent to the nodes and ordered to run on the individual devices as a user needs them.

It sounds crazy but if your cell phone could run application pieces and you get paid, it sounds like a good deal. As the number of users and volunteered devices grow, the network could achieve economic superiority over the current centralized cloud model. Karl Marx would be proud. CEO Craig Sproule says,”Crowd Machine is Blockchain Agnostic”, meaning you can develop any application on its decentralized platform and write to any Blockchain. The Company believes Blockchain does not exist in the absence of applications and has tied its application development environment along with the decentralized network to disrupt two industries, namely software development and cloud computing.

There is no doubt Blockchain will evolve and like the dot com boom and bust there will be winners and losers. The question is, where do you place your bets? On individual Blockchain applications or on the infrastructure to build and run them? Only time will tell.