Forewarning: This piece is a little different from my more “applied science“ articles. It’s more theoretical in nature and based on past/current experiences and developments. I’m calling these “BOGS“, a more casual series of thoughts coming from yours truly. They’re also way more casual - I don’t care too much about formality in these!
Yeah, You Heard Me Correctly.
Shockingly, blockchain is not the future of web3. A part of it? Yes, most likely - but it’s not the end all be all. I’m sure we can see that at this point.
“But don’t you spend every WAKING moment of your life writing, developing, and fantasizing about blockchain and its endless applications?!“
I do, paid or not - it’s worth it. Escaping and gaining control over the impending Digital Dystopia has always been a dream of mine, and peer-to-peer tech seems to solve quite a few modern-day problems.
The Internet is having a bit of a power struggle at the moment - from social media’s incessantly interesting leadership to the “Web3“ movement to NFT projects switching chains on a dime, it’s obvious that a change of some kind is coming.
Doubling Down On Blockchain’s Pros & Cons
For a while, blockchain was hailed as the savior that will bring us closer to digital liberation. As time went on, however, it became clear that blockchain had its own set of issues when it came to scaling. Most of this was due to a good majority of people abusing it for things it wasn’t meant for.
To be clear, moving forward, blockchain is good for the following:
- Verifying something happened at a specific point in time
- Ensuring that the provenance of something has been preserved (i.e, history of ownership for an NFT)
- Managing and confirming state across a bunch of nodes.
The last point is the most important - blockchains are, at their core, distributed state machines.
Using a combination of cryptography, data structures (i.e, merkle trees), and peer-to-peer networking, they are able to take a piece of information, digest it, and propagate it to the rest of the network.
Up until now, we’ve seen this being majorly useful in the realm of transforming digital finance.
You should not be using a blockchain to “replace the database“, or store/process large amounts of data.
“Why not just use a distributed database instead? Why bother with the complex nature of consensus?“
The amount of times I’ve received this question is mind-boggling - and for good reason. Why should we bother at all with this extra hassle and development headache?
The answer is simple - we don’t use blockchain to store data, we use blockchain to manage data. We’ve spent the last two decades creating more content than we can handle - it’s time to organize and structure it!
It provides robust rules on how to treat information, its sources, and tracks it in a cryptographically verifiable way.
That leaves a big question, though - if we can manage data in this new way, what about actual services? After all, the masses would only use new tech if it provided something which was better - whether that’s more security, uptime, robustness, or digital safety.
Instant Gratification Layers (IGL) To The Rescue
Cutting right to the chase - Instant Gratification Layers provide abstractions in parallel to an existing blockchain network.
For example, let’s say I want a storage layer - I could have a separate service that reconciles to my blockchain as needed, reaches for necessary identity information, or permission graphs for storage access, while still maintaining a speedy, decentralized application.
If you didn’t already know, I am creating a peer-to-peer messaging protocol called Uke. In my development and scaling of Uke, I’m having to solve and think about various issues pertaining to creating something people will actually use.
I wanted to use blockchain for its intended purpose, which is purely storing the state of things.
For Uke’s PoC, I was not doing that - encrypted messages and message propagation was occurring via blockchain, which is NOT optimal for wanting to become a Whatsapp replacement processing millions of messages.
If only I had a way to process data in a decentralized, peer-to-peer way, but also refer to the blockchain as needed instead of all the time!
Enter Tetrax - the first idea (and soon-to-be implementation) of an Instant Gratification layer. Tetrax has a few different jobs, the primary being message propagation via libp2p’s gossipsub protocol.
Essentially, it allows users to talk to each other directly with no middleman, but gain access to the blockchain’s access-based filtering for user permissions and Uke Identity!
In the future, Tetrax might be sharding and storing private keys for the ultimate web3 account storage solution, who knows!
Tetrax runs on the blockchain node as a process (in this case, a messaging service for users)- it just doesn’t participate in consensus for every message, but can still have access to necessary state information for conversations.
I felt the term “Instant Gratification“ was appropriate because it provides an instant service for the user, whilst still maintaining technical fault tolerance by being run on the same instance of a verifiable distributed ledger.
Conclusion
That’s that - scaling blockchain isn’t easy. In fact, the blockchain trilemma of scalability, decentralization, and security is in constant question.
The answer isn’t trying to make blockchain replace the previous web - the answer lies in creating new paradigms that fit a new narrative.
Having Instant Gratification Layers, or IGLs, is one way to do that - providing contextual, highly specialized peer-to-peer networks that are held accountable by something like blockchain.
Looks like I have succeeded in writing a BOG - a semi-coherent string of thoughts that make up a few somewhat valuable ideas!
Until next time, see ya!
Also published here