Chapter 1 - Decentralized web, distributed ledgers, and build-up to blockchain

Abstract

When Tim Berners Lee founded the W3C in the early 1990s, he himself probably would not have imagined the shape of the behemoth that he had created. It was a paradigm shift from the days of ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network) setup in 1969 which was intended for peer-to-peer communication. Tim Berners Lee while answering young people on the official w3.org website made it look really simple—“I just had to take the hypertext idea and connect it to the TCP and DNS ideas and—ta-da!—the World Wide Web” [1]. This was the beginning of the World Wide Web as we see it today. From humble beginnings, the Internet has become a necessity in everyday life rather than an experimental venture. However, the shape that this giant has taken leaves a lot to be desired from the perspective of those propagating “Freedom of the Internet,” “Net Neutrality,” and “Freedom of Expression.” The biggest reason cited is that typically people do not own their data today. It is stored, analyzed, and used by big conglomerates like Google and Facebook. Every time a user interacts on the net, copies of his/her data are created and travel across the web, and the more such copies, the more one loses control of his/her data. This is not just an inefficient manner of execution but also a privacy concern. Almost three decades into the development and the internet is still hinged on the client-server architecture. Let’s walk through this journey quickly.