Hi Mina,

Thank you for your interesting article!

I have been reflecting on a decentralized web powered by blockchain as well.

What do you think of this solution:

To build a decentralized Internet on the basis of an interoperability between all decentralized blockchain cloud service projects.

The main problem, from my point of view, is the centralization of hosting. Solving that allows us to work our way “up” to build a decentralized web.

You may know of the Siacoin project? It’s one of the only decentralized cloud service available, powered by a blockchain. If you could transform the Siacoin wallet software (which allows you to rent/buy space and upload/download files) from being a peer-to-peer client for transferring files only, to being a fully fledged browser, then you could create addresses in whatever format you choose to access a specific websites or content. You wouldn’t even need the WWW.XXX.YYY format. People could create or trade these addresses using crypto-currencies.

Then comes the issue of search engines to find content. There, you could develop a third party search engine which has access to the entire hosted content labelled as “public” and pay for that service via various business models. The current advertising based model could evolve with the Brave browser. Or you could simply pay for each search via a crypto-currency.

Then comes the problem of scalability. In order to train the search engine, you still need to retain a lot of data like search keywords and what people click on. For the moment, that data is hosted in a centralized manner. But perhaps it could be hosted on the same decentralized cloud service (siacoin in this case). And using sharding, it would ensure that only transaction data (paying for a service) would remain on the “main” chain and less important data (less crucial in terms of reversibility etc) can be on side chains or even partly centralized (private) blockchains.

From my understanding, even Torrent clients could be turned into browsers if you wanted to! You could “seed” a website by hosting it on your computer directly, and you would need a functionality added in the Torrent client to be able to access your content.

Also, the IPFS (interplanetary file system) could be an interesting solution to interoperability for a search engine to “find” in any public decentralized cloud service the “same” files (valid for a website as well) and use that as a basis for interoperability.

What are your thoughts?

Sincerely,

Marma