The Revolution of Internet Computer in 2022

2022 年 4 月 7 日

Leaving behind the initial development period of 90s and towards the first 20 years of the 21st century, it is widely accepted that Internet has been found under the control of a specific cluster of big international internet-related corporations that have the power to manipulate its direction according to their investor’s needs. Starting from cloud web-hosting where we can find Amazon Web Services, or Google Cloud Services and passing into web search where Google Search Engine is dominant to end up to the social media giants of Facebook or Twitter, and the Apps Stores of Apple and Android, all these massive big corporations can easily shutdown and censor any kind of “VOICE” in the Internet if that particular voice is against the interests of their investors.

Image Source: Tech Giants And World Domination

And we have seen several examples so far of their censorship practice, especially during the latest years as the competition for internet dominance has been intensified. Who can forget the big clash between Epic Games owner of Fortnite with Apple over the 30% cut of Apple Store’s on any Fortnite purchase, or the shutdown of the Independent Social Media “Parler” from AWS web-hosting platform after the infiltration on the platform several extremistic elements that resulted on the havoc of the events that took place on January 2021 on Capitol after the election of Joe Biden, or even the ban of social media accounts on Facebook and Twitter “owned” by individuals with specific ideas. I won’t talk about politics but what was made apparent is that this particular cluster of corporations can easily shut down anyvoice on the internet which isn’t considered to comply with their investors’ interests. An interesting article about How Big Tech maintains its dominance has been published on #PrivacyCamp21 by Sarah Chander, a Senior Policy Advisor.

Inspired by Satoshi Nakamoto’s Vision for decentralization and operation independently of any kind of establishment, several “indie” companies have started during the recent Blockchain Revolution to try to question the above mentioned Internet control and dominance from these big corporate organizations by providing their own decentralized version of Internet services. Examples can be found on the Presearch Search Engine and AdShares Decentralised Web Marketing Services. Still these companies are more likely to depend on centralised web-hosting platforms such as AWS or Google Coud computing, providing them an inherent centralised control vulnerability.

The Internet Computer starts exactly at this point providing a user-driven infrastructure that encourages the hosting of new and innovative technologies, independently from the big tech companies that dominate Internet today representing what is called the third major blockchain innovation, alongside with Bitcoin and Ethereum. As it is widely known from a technological perspective, Bitcoin is known as the technology that has managed to solve the Byzantine General Problem for the consensus of decentralised systems through a PoW (Proof of Work) mechanism and Ethereum for the development of the Smart Contracts technology that triggered the current DeFi hype. Still, the Internet Computer is promising to deliver a blockchain-based cloud computing system that will form the cornerstone of the next generation decentralized internet.

The Internet Computer is a product of the DFINITY Foundation, a non-profit scientific research organization based in Zurich, Switzerland, comprised of the world’s top cryptographers, distributed systems scientists and programming language experts, with nearly 100,000 academic citations and 200 patents collectively and it was launched on October 2016. DFINITY’s founder and Chief Executive Scientist is Dominic Williams who provides an overview of the Internet Computer technology on the following video.

On a nutshell and according to CoinMarketCap ICP description, the Internet Computer is a blockchain computer that scales smart contract computation and data, runs them at web speed, processes and stores data efficiently, and provides powerful software frameworks to developers. Therefore, Internet Computer enables the complete reimagination of software, providing a revolutionary new way to build tokenized internet services, pan-industry platforms, decentralized financial systems, and even traditional enterprise systems and websites. Here is a list of the main capabilities of the Internet Computer.

Everything that Amazon Web Services (AWS) is doing in a centralized and sometimes authorative way (although the AWS nodes that are being scattered around the develloped world), Internet Computing is doing it in a decentralized way without any means of control or manipulation of the applications that run on its nodes. Here is the main advantages of Internet Computer against the AWS Cloud Computing bringing an end to its mainstream web-hosting monopoly.

On a challenging Head2Head comparison between the Internet Computer and other similar Smart Contract Technologies such as the Solana, Ethereum, Avalanche and Binance Smart Chain, it is clear that only Solana can seriously challenge the superior smart contracts capabilities of the Internet Computer.

With a MarketCap of $4,107,532,142.67, Internet computer is currently found on the #31st place of the market when Solana after the hype that hit the cryptospace during the previous months it is found on the 7th. Internet computer currently has a Circulating supply of 199,015,444 ICP and a total supply of 476,538,269, without having though any Maximum Supply. In contrast with the majority of crypto tokens and especially Bitcoin that has a maximum supply of 21 million that provides non-inflationary financial characteristics, the Internet Computer and similar Smart Contracts Technology tokens such as Ethereum or Avalanche have NO maximum Supply which it can be considered as logical because there can be no actual limit on the supported transactions and generation of Smart contracts for these kind of tokens. If there was a limit on its supply then probably it should stop operating as new smart contracts wouldn’t have been able to be generated after reaching that max supply limit although Ethereum and Binance Smart Chain have introduced burn mechanisms in order to reduce their circulating supply on the market providing an imaginary non-inflationary character while retaining at the same time higher market prices for their tokens. And apparently using over-valued smart contract tokens to perform smart contract transactions, isn’t always a good practise for the payment of gas fees. I believe that a smart contract token should always be affordable at least under 300 USDT in order to be able to sustain the payment of these gas fees generated for the execution of smart contracts. Otherwise users might end up refraining in executing transactions until their price will go lower. And I am certain, the Ethereum MainNet is currently much more busy with Smart contract transactions since the almost 50% reduction of the Ethereum token value from 4k USDT to 2.4k USDT.

Image Source: $ICP Trading History on Bityard

During the initial launch of $ICP on Bityard and other centralised crypto-exchanges, it received a very huge enthusiasm from the cryptotrading community that resulted on a ATH (All-Time High) of 461,65 USDT on 10th May 2021. However very quickly $ICP started facing huge loses under the 100 USDT support barrier. During the past September 2021 there was an attempt to break the barrier of 100 USDT reaching at around 80 USDT where it faced again severe liquidations. Currently due to the bearish cryptomarket, $ICP trades at around 20 USDT a price that apart from everything else it is a very attractive for investment.

As i have said before, I am NOT a short term crypto-trader that would buy an attractive cheap meme-token only to sell it when it will provide some profit, if any, hoping to achieve the “get rich or die trying” dream in a inflationary fiat currency (please see All I Want For Christmas Is… Financial Freedom by [ Khazrakh]). Cryptotrading isn’t my cup of coffee as it involves a lot of stress and most likely the loss of my trading capital. The majority of my capital and collection of my tokens consists mainly of earnings from my faucets and the rest of my legitimate crypto-activities and I really enjoy it as a hobby at the same way that someone enjoys fishing, ballet, opera, yoga or collecting stamps.

Still, any long-term micro-investing positions that I have made in the past are focused exclusively on the infrastructure, the technology and the innovation that a particular token can provide. As an IT profesisonal, I can see a lot of potential on Internet Computer as a new innovative technology providing a decentralized web cloud computing service that can compete with the monopoly of Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Services and towards 2022 we can probably see more companies who are willing to gain more independence on the Internet by building their internet services and infrasctrure on the Internet Computer decentralized platform without the danger of having their voice shut by the big internet corporations. More importantly, for 2022, the Internet Computer Team plans to bring Smart Contracts integration on Bitcoin which as an idea on its own sounds such a revolutionary innovation.

Finally, from a market perception, I should also notedown that the current price of ICP on its ATL (All Time Low) is very attractive and long-term investors should try to make an investment move as the price of the ICP could easily climb over 100 USDT during 2022. I won’t be happy if the price would climb even higher because being greedy on the profits of a pumped investment isn’t always the best option on the trade market and in life in general. As it was mentioned above, smart contracts tokens such as Ethereum, ICP, Solana etc with no max supply no matter if they include a burning mechanism or not, should try to retain affordable transactions fees for the users of their network by keeping their market price low.