The first programmer, Martti `Sirius' Malmi, who worked with Satoshi Nakamoto (the pseudonymous founder of Bitcoin), is back - with a big project. He is working with a new team of developers on a new cryptocurrency called AX. The project, which combines Malmi's online reputation system Identifi with the decentralized database system GUN, takes on the long-awaited task of decentralizing the web.
Malmi's background and past
The history of Malmi should arouse the interest of many enthusiasts. Here is a little insight. As an amateur college developer in 2009, Malmi played a crucial role in the early days of Bitcoin. He was the only active developer who worked alongside Satoshi because he earned enough trust from Satoshi to gain admin access to the Bitcoin.org site. Most changes in the second version of Bitcoin are attributed to him.
But a few years later, Malmi, like Satoshi before, decided to leave the project because he thought Bitcoin did not really need him anymore.
In an interview with CoinDesk he said:
"I felt like Bitcoin had gone from zero to one, so to speak, it was already running with a growing community and had many great developers working on it."
Malmis comeback to Bitcoin
Malmi always believed in decentralization. He wanted to prevent the central rule of some large companies in the market. Therefore, in 2014 he started with Identifi, a decentralized system that gives every person on the Internet a censorship-resistant identity. It initially had no cryptocurrency included.
But he increasingly saw the rise and control that companies like Google and Facebook have over the Internet. He said something else was needed to stop it. A crypto token (AX) could give users an incentive. As a result, he can better finance his project.
He continued the interview and said:
"Most of the huge online businesses like Google, Facebook, eBay or Airbnb are basically, centralized directories - searchable lists of content - if we want to stop them, we need a decentralized database."
That's where the GUN comes in, which has also been working since 2014. GUN is a real-time graph database that is open-source, distributed and offline. It is designed to be simple yet powerful for Web applications.
The merger of both projects
As for the above reasons, it would be necessary to introduce decentralization to stop control. You would have to combine the two projects as one. To connect the whole thing, it was decided to found a new company called ERA.
Mark Nadal, CEO of ERA (also CEO of GUN), told Coindesk:
"Martti and I discussed how governments can blacklist their miners' IP addresses, and telecommunications companies like Google, Amazon or others can throttle or redirect our traffic without net neutrality - that's a huge vulnerability that could affect anyone, therefore we build AX. "
The big role of Identifi in ERA
Malmi continued with the interview and said:
"You could let users digitally sign all their posts and use Identifi to retrieve the identity profile (name, avatar, feedback, etc.) that corresponds to the public key.You can use your Identifi Web of trust to send spam, trolls, and other unwanted ones Filtering out content without resorting to centralized censorship is useful for decentralized social media. "
What does it take to make the vision come true?
To be truly decentralized, ERA needs people from all over the world running database systems. This is where the new crypto-token comes into play.
ERA with AX is reminiscent of older blockchain storage projects like Filecoin and Storj. Its purpose is to encourage users on the network to store data. But it's a slightly different approach to follow. You pay the servers to move encrypted data instead of paying to store data. Security and anonymity are also taken care of. Because the data is encrypted, it can not be read by the servers that move it.
Malmi is confident
He believes that ERA will properly integrate cryptocurrency into a decentralized web. Malmi has always been in favor of decentralization, which is why he started with Bitcoin back then.
He went on and said
"Cryptos should be viewed as an incentive to decentralize infrastructure, and I believe decentralization of our society's digital identity and other basic infrastructures are the most important things a developer can work on today."
In fact, he and Nadal make a big deal out of this technology being "more scalable" than other technologies. "The missing piece to a decentralized network was a decentralized database that could handle the CryptoKitties traffic," said Nadal, referring to the blockchain-based Cat app that had so clogged the Ethereum network earlier this year that the Users had problems with other distributed applications on the network.
In order to create this scalable system, ERA uses its cryptocurrency only as decentralized money and will not use blockchain to store people's data. In this way, they argue that they are on a better way to build something that people may actually want to use.