Blockchain technology has far more potential outside of the realm of cryptocurrencies. It has the ability to create systems of trust based on deterministic logic. This is one reason why cryptocurrencies are so powerful, but that trust doesn’t have to be merely a property of a cryptocurrency. These systems of trust can be used in many other ways.
This might seem like I’m shilling a bunch of projects, and in a way I am. But I can’t talk about this tech without giving examples. Though I hold and like many of these project’s coins, I’m not doing this as a pure endorsement of the individual projects mentioned. I only want to show that there is more to blockchain than the one-trick-pony of digital currency, despite what maxi’s of any coin or token try to claim. These sort of projects deserve our attention as a means of furthering a complete ecosystem of apps and projects that can help to liberate us from big tech and big government.
If only a hand-full of people know they exist, they will never be able to either prove their worth, or if they fail, provide a road map of what not to do in a project. It’s in the interest of both the producers and the consumers to have access to this tech and to decide how, when, why, and where to use it. This is the essence of what these chains promise, and so in that spirit, I want to share ways in which can help to liberate everyone and give true ownership of data and their underlying systems back to the people who develop and use it.
Decentralized Virtual Private Network’s (dVPN’s)
A traditional VPN is operated by large companies. These entities can range from relatively safe to use, to some being data miners. A dVPN is a VPN running on and verified in some way by the blockchain. The dVPN servers are operated by ordinary people who sell their bandwidth on the open market using the dVPN’s protocol. One example that I’m familiar with is Sentinel (DVPN). From their whitepaper:
“Apart from the account management and creation system that happens completely on-chain, the process of querying available servers happens on-chain. As the blockchain which the application is hosted on will be operational 24/7, with no disruption, as the validator community’s infrastructure is globally decentralized (not affected by 1, 2 or 3 data center outages), the up-time and user experience of such an application will far exceed the centralized competitions offerings.”
Instead of just trusting a company or some shady VPN operator to give payment to and route your traffic, it all happens on-chain on open source code. The system of blockchain trust goes even farther with their porotocol. Again, from the whitepaper:
“One of the key goals of the Sentinel ecosystem is to develop and implement the first bandwidth provability protocol, or ‘Proof of Bandwidth’, to allow for trustless sharing of bandwidth.”
They explain that proof-of-work and proof-of-bandwidth are similar problems that can both be solved on-chain. This way you won’t have to take someone’s word for the amount of bandwidth the dVPN node can offer, it’s provable by the user and provider first testing the actual bandwidth, agreeing to what the bandwidth is, and then signing it on-chain. If the node provider says you are getting 3 gigabits/second but your dVPN app only gets 2 gigabits/second, the connection will be terminated and the node will be penalized.
Sentinel is just one blockchain dVPN’s out there. I suspect that these types of platforms will become more prominent as times goes on and the demands of governments for VPN providers to spy on their customers becomes more frequent.
Private Messaging
Blockchain trust systems aren’t the only advantage that this technology can be useful. The encrypted nature of the blockchain itself can be used to send and receive end-to-end encrypted messages. One protocol that is doing this is Conceal Network (CCX). Embedded in their wallet is a private messenger that can send these types of messages for mere pennies worth of CCX. Users also have the choice to have the messages expire after a certain amount of time, or after the recipient reads it. Using this, you can send someone a self-destructing message that nobody can recover after it’s gone.
I wish I knew of more protocols like this but this is the only one I’m aware of. There is at least one privacy coin that lets you sent messages privately in the memo field of the transaction, but that stays on chain FOREVER and should be considered of limited use because of it.
Distributed Data Storage
Cloud data storage has grown into a huge industry since it’s creation. At this time, big companies like Google dominate this space. Unless you live under a rock, having Google in charge of sensitive data might not be the best idea. InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) is one way that blockchain tech can provide access to files on demand from anywhere on Earth. It also provides a way to make sure that the data itself is distributed over a number of nodes, so that if one node that contains your data goes off-line, the data you saved to IPFS can still be accessed. This network is like a giant data center with redundant backups designed into it. To give an example of one of the unique ways I’ve seen people use this, I know of someone who operated a pirate radio and streams music 24/7 through his personal IPFS server. One drawback of IPFS can be lag, so this person solves that by running their own server. Even if they didn’t, or perhaps their server goes down or is censored, the content would still be available.
I’ve only really looked at IPFS for this type of system, but a web search for “blockchain cloud storage” gives more than a few results. This tech has enormous potential to disrupt the big players in cloud storage today by giving people a way to host their own storage node and get paid in crypto to provide data storage to the world in a fair, transparent way.
Cloud Computing
This is similar to cloud storage and shares some functionality with cloud storage. The difference is that instead of just selling hard drive space to the network, you sell computational power to the network as well. This allows you to run dapps (distributed apps) out of someone’s hardware that they aren’t using, or hardware they have set-up for just this purpose. Akash Network (AKT) seeks to make this available to both small-scale consumers who need to rent computational power, but they also provide a means for your own home computer to be used for this type of system. Until now, a powerful home computer was a large investment with little return for the average user beyond gaming and processing speed. Now the use of this powerful hardware can be sold to someone who needs it while you aren’t using it. This can turn your gaming rig into a way to make income, whereas before it was only an expense beyond the entertainment value.
Tools for individuals
These unique uses for blockchain are only the beginning. There are many more ways that NFT’s, those silly monkey pictures and whatnot are used by major retailers to track produce back to the source. More are being discovered every day. The amount of innovation in this space is too large for any one person to discover. Just the chains mentioned above drop the cost of using these technologies to pennies compared to dollars. Just the dVPN I mentioned allows VPN access for a fraction of the cost of traditional VPN’s and guarantees you a wider selection of nodes to connect to. It’s not just a single company, you have thousands of people running these things.
Let me know in the comments what blockchain tools you use.
