Solution
There are many benefits to breaking up monopolies, but a 100% decentralized network faces insurmountable difficulties. Unbearable resource consumption and unbearable performance are two of the biggest problems with a decentralized network.
Unbearable resource consumption: Taking Twitch as an example, if we store all the videos uploaded by users in each node, obviously no node can store such a large number of videos, and the existing blockchain technology cannot solve it. One possible method is to save only 3-4 copies of each video in the decentralized network, and the decentralized network maintains a distributed hash table (DHT) to help users obtain the video. Even by so, the cost is 5-10 times higher than that of a centralized solution, and at the same time, we will sacrifice user experience significantly.
Unbearable performance: In a decentralized network, we cannot assume that all nodes are trustworthy. Every modification on data has to reach consensus states. The existing POW, POS, and even DPOS are far from being comparable to the efficiency of centralization network. For example, suppose there is a decentralized Instagram. On this platform each like, or comment needs to go through consensus algorithm to change the states. In that case, no decentralized solution can support a community of tens of millions of users as of now.
No one can afford the cost: The cost of reaching a consensus state on a decentralized network is too high. So far, almost all successful blockchain projects are built for financial services. That's because users only would like to pay the price of decentralization for business like finance which requires high trust and has high profitability.
It's difficult for decentralized services to compete with traditional centralized services: Decentralized services have the advantages of security and trust. But the question is whether ordinary users care about this subject. They may care more about whether they could find the content they like, if goods and service providers have reasonable prices, and if it has good user experience. Therefore, besides maintaining their own advantages, decentralized services must be close to centralized services in terms of user experience. In the early days, when decentralized services have no advantages in content and experience, it's an excellent strategy to acquire some seed users, specifically some user groups and content creators sensitive to monopoly. It is impossible to decentralize all content on the Internet completely. The most significant benefit the Internet brings to people is the convenience of obtaining information and communicating among people. The most fundamental data is personal accounts and personal social relations.
Communities, social interactions, social media, e-commerce, and local services can all be built on individuals and their social relations. Due to the network effect of social relations, social relations are naturally monopolized on the Internet. Fortunately, personal accounts and their social relations can be completely decentralized. It is plain text and has a small size; its updates are low-frequency and do not require ultra-high-performance services. We propose to build a Social decentralized network based on the existing blockchain technology (PBFT, Tendermint, Algorand, Etherum 2.0). A decentralized account without users' social relations has minimal value. On the other hand, a decentralized account should be able to serve a large number of communities and social services. Users can use the decentralized account as an ID to access the community and gradually builds their social data, but why would they use the community through Dtag? Why should the community support Driipa decentralized network? In the early stage of Driipa, we have to answer these two essential questions first.
There are three ways that the Internet helps people acquire information, Portal, Search, and Social Media, which correspond to the three natural ways people acquire information. Their typical representatives are Yahoo, Google, and Twitter. Portal and Social Media are usually for users to receive new content that they don't know. We believe that in Social Media, the distribution of content, the accuracy (meeting the needs of users), and the efficiency of users' acquisition of new information still have much room for improvement. i) The insufficiency of the discovery mechanism: In Social media, users obtain new content through the behaviors of the users they follow and discover new users they are willing to follow through the network mechanism. The current Driipa's mechanism mainly relies on the recommendation stream of the system, popular users and mechanisms such as follow streams which are not accurate enough for users to acquire content they want. We believe that users' behaviors such as following are a better and more precise networking mechanism; ii) In addition to following people, it is more efficient to follow continuously updated content sources, such as RSS feeds; Forum posts; WeChat public account; daily updated online novels, and so on. We have developed a content community blockchain-based "Driipa" on the following relations, which demonstrates the use of Dtag.
The community will need Dtag to connect with people or engage in our ecosystem, which has the user's private key for signature and authorization;
Driipa would be able to access any web page on the Internet like a browser with every tools you'd ever need to stay sustained online, which will make Driipa more convenient for users to share content;
Many content apps will be able to allow their users to share internal content to Driipa network without hassle, aggregating content from different Apps. Driipa will also be an open-source project.
Driipa Network will acquire new users for Dtag. When the total number of Dtag profiles exceeds 10 million, its accumulated users and social relations will appeal to other communities. When third-party communities support Dtag as a way to log in, it can get free or paid social relation services, for example,
When a user uses Dtag to log in to a community, if a Dtag user he follows is also a user of the community, the community would auto merge a follow to that user;
Users can use their social relations to promote communities. In the PC Internet era, there used to be open-source forum software called Discuz. The founder of a new forum can start one with a simple configuration. Many people want to make a similar App like Discuz on the mobile Internet, helping forum operators launch their own forum apps without development, but it was unsuccessful. In the mobile era, the most significant difficulty is not App development but the channel to acquire users, which is essential for a community. Users' basic personal profile information and social relations can be completely decentralized. If users want to save a large amount of customized data, we can provide them with decentralized storage solution. The customized data will be replicated to 3-4 nodes rather than all nodes. The cost of decentralized storage is much higher than that of a centralized network disk. A single node has no advantage in terms of scale effect. Storing the same content in more than three nodes would cost much more. Therefore, users need to pay for decentralized storage. The reasons are as follows.
Pay the operating expenses of the node;
Prevent users from abusing or attacking the decentralized storage space;
The stored content can generate a link separately, and the user can share it to any community.
To open the shared links, users might need to pay for them depending on the authors' configurations. One of the essential things to run a business on the Internet is acquiring many users. Decentralized services can do so by providing communities and storage solution with competent user experience compared to centralized services. When decentralized services get more than 10 million active users, they will become unstoppable. Any centralized service platform will face the challenge of decentralized services because decentralized services are more likely to be trusted by users. For example, a hotel booking service can collect and aggregate all the registered hotel information for users to search via a particular algorithm. A small portion of users' payments would be paid to Driipa network and the developers. On Driipa's social decentralized network, it is possible to provide decentralized versions of air ticket booking, movie ticket booking, takeaway, e-commerce, and other services, disrupting big centralized platforms' monopoly.
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