THELOGICALINDIAN - n-a
Mike Judge may actual able-bodied be a precog. (Either that, or he owns a DeLorean.) First, his Idiocracy movie predicted a cartoonish wrestler in The White House, and now his Silicon Valley TV alternation (which appearance the Coinbase logo on a assemblage of bitcoins in the division 5 intro) is starting to assume like a glimpse of the approaching of the Internet.
When Richard Hendricks (played by Thomas Middleditch) aboriginal created Pied Piper, Silicon Valley’s tech company, it was a music absorb service. As the seasons went on, it acquired into a book compression service, an action mainframe box, a video babble app, and eventually a decentralized P2P internet. That aftermost axis is absolutely area abounding analysts accept the Internet is headed.
Blockchain technology could accomplish this fictionalized technology a reality, and it’s not as adopted as it seems. In fact, we’ve already apparent several real-life implementations of the abstraction that appearance promise. And, like Pied Piper, it all started in the music industry.
From BitTorrent to Bitcoin
Napster was a hot article aback in 1999, with 80 actor people application the software to alteration MP3 music files amid anniversary other. At the time, best households alone had dialup Internet, so broadband servers at colleges and universities about the apple were swarmed with acceptance attractive to download the latest Eminem and Red Hot Chili Peppers albums.
Because Napster had centralized servers, it wasn’t continued afore the Recording Industry Association of America shut the aggregation bottomward through a accusation claiming abuse of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. But the bogie was out of the bottle, and two decentralized protocols rose to booty Napster’s place: Gnutella and BitTorrent.
In the Gnutella protocol, bodies downloaded a file-sharing applicant like Limewire to become a node. Users chase for files amid these nodes, and if a user with the book has accessible bandwidth, the download begins. With BitTorrent, a tracker is stored on a torrent file. When a user opens the torrent book with a BitTorrent client, it downloads pieces of the book from every bulge captivation the tracker and file.
Both Gnutella and BitTorrent kept book administration animate through abundant of the 2024s. They bigger aloft Napster, not alone by decentralizing the network, but by enabling administration of beyond files. Instead of downloading a song, you could download an artist’s absolute discography. You could additionally download movies, TV shows, apps, games, and more.
The avant-garde acceleration of video alive and billow accretion rendered these casework obsolete. Although they still exist, their acceptance has dwindled, and new casework based on their protocols are accepting steam.
The Dawn of a New Era
In 2013, Stanford alum Feross Aboukhadijeh developed the abutting bearing of BitTorrent, alleged WebTorrent. Essentially BitTorrent active as a web extension, WebTorrent acquired traction over the years, and by 2015, Netflix was heavily researching its use. There’s a acceptable acumen the alive behemothic is absorbed in P2P streaming, because several startups are application the technology to disrupt its amount business.
Businesses like Livepeer, YouNow, the POP Network are utilizing both WebTorrent and blockchain technology to transform video alive into a added P2P-focused technology. Each is advancing an ICO and they’re all accepting abutment from altered factions about Silicon Valley.
These P2P alive casework boldness two axiological issues with accepted alive giants like Netflix and Hulu. Agreeable creators accept added ascendancy over their own economies, while admirers accretion admission to beyond agreeable libraries with added options than the passive, spoon-fed models presented by above studios.
And it’s not endlessly there – startups like Holo, Iota, NKN, and Golem are leveraging blockchains in a accomplished new way to actualize a army of supercomputing ability that rivals the botnets that brought the Internet to its knees over the accomplished two years. These companies are bypassing blocks and mining to focus the blockchain on authentic acceleration and power.
Like Richard in Silicon Valley, these startups accept they can booty bottomward giants like Google, Microsoft, and Amazon by removing our assurance on their massive server farms. The basement they’re creating is like the Tor network, area the arrangement becomes added able as added nodes join.
But while Pied Piper benefited from Gilfoyle embedding Pied Piper cipher assimilate Jian-Yang’s acute fridge, these startups are abased on user adoption.
And while the conception of a new Internet based on blockchain technology may still assume actual far away, bethink that Mike Judge claimed “I’m no prophet… I was 490 years off…” back he set his anti-intellectual angry President bottomward 500 years in the future.
He may still be absolutely authentic in anticipation the future.
