On today’s show we are talking about the next great innovations in internet applications. In fact every Monday in the month of January we will be talking about some aspect of these new technologies.
There is a disproportionate amount of venture capital being focused on blockchain technology. This is not only in Silicon Valley, but in Singapore, London, New York, Berlin, China and India.
When we think of blockchain, images of crypto currencies like bitcoin and etherium come to mind. We’re not talking about digital money today. We’re going to look at how this next wave of digital applications are going to differ from the last generation.
Today’s internet based applications are centrally hosted. There is a relationship between the host server and the client device which these days is usually a mobile device or a laptop computer.
Most of the processing is happening in that centralized data Center. Applications like zoom which is in wide use are actually hosted by Amazon web services.
These so-called Web 2.0 services have been concentrated In a handful of companies. We are talking about Google, Facebook, Amazon, Twitter. Microsoft continues to have a strong presence.
The biggest difference between a centralized application and the blockchain is that the blockchain applications have their processing distributed among the clients. The idea behind this so-called Web 3.0 and the 2.0 is the centralized versus distributed processing.
The hope and the promise of these distributed applications is that they don’t require a data Center in order to scale. It means that the adoption of new applications can be democratized.