Twitter, Internet Computer, And Hosting Everything On-chain as Smart Contracts
In recent years, Twitter has become a global digital stream of human consciousness plagued by censorship from centralized entities and spam bots.
There are many reasons I can list to point out what is wrong with Twitter right now.
Sometimes it’s the never-ending tags by the verified scam profiles. Other times it’s the shadowy censorship and secret algorithms, as pointed out by the Tesla CEO and Centibillionaire Elon Musk.
Why Twitter should consider hosting on ICP
To host such a service on a single chain, the blockchain must
Scale infinitely without bounds.
Serve front-end and back-end from the chain, i.e. hosting everything on-chain as smart contracts.
Be Gas-free for end users, and enable cheap static hosting costs for devs.
Be a soverign network that does not depend on-cloud or any central intermediaries.
Be governed by the community through Governance DAO.
Tokenization and smart contracts are the future of the Internet and the next era of applications and services. A smart contract allows for automation and removes the need for centralized parties that have monopolized, and are centralizing the Internet.
ICP Smart Contracts are by default mutable untill they are made immutable, by setting the controller address of the canister to a black hole address.
Converting Twitter into an Open Internet Service?
Another way of decentralizing Twitter would be to convert it into an Open Internet Service (OIS) by moving it on-chain and tokenizing. OIS is an open-sourced service or an application on the internet, managed by its sovereign native governance DAO, which can upgrade, modify, and govern the protocol whenever it deems necessary.
A ‘dapp’ on the Internet Computer Protocol is a distributed application until it is decentralized by making it immutable or turning it into an Open Internet Service
On-chain reputation can be carried anywhere on-chain - Read, Write and Own on-chain.
Smart contracts provide a trustless system for information exchange on the blockchain, thereby removing the need for any third parties.
Metaverse will rely on Network Effects, and the ones enabling maximum interoperability will create the most extensive network effects.
IMO simple interactive software like Twitter can be easily run on-chain.
Tokenization, again, opens up infinite possibilities and features that do not harm the platform to monetize, sustain, and generate revenue for the users of that platform.
‘Gives them skin in the game’ - @cdixon
Not only smart contacts can be made immutable and open-sourced, the users will no longer be required to give up their data for advertising and surveillance.
The only way a blockchain would fail/get hacked/attacked would be when most of the network and the participants become malicious, which is the same for all other public blockchains.
Appropriate staking mechanisms and tokenomics will drive the participants and stakeholders to make decisions that benefit the long-term growth of the platform.
Users will have complete control over their data and can decide how to monetize it.
Users become the governers of the platform with tokens. On-chain DAO can upgrade the application at any time. So rewards/bounties for creating better features can generate a micro-economy on its own, starting a positive feedback loop to increase the value of the Network.
A self-governed autonomous platform that evolves with time
Infinite possibilities with permissionless innovation are possible through smart contracts when their limitations are removed.
With Internet Computer’s asynchronous state updates and 2-second finality, developers can deploy full-scale applications on-chain that serve the user’s web browsers directly without the involvement of Cloud services. This makes the services more resistant to censorship.
Around 60% of the Ethereum nodes are hosted on the Cloud. If Infura (AWS) goes down, most of the users will not be able to to access Ethereum with Metamask. This makes it vulnerable to censorship, adding salt to the injury, with its inability to scale/serve the web. ICP applications serve the web directly with HTTP requests.
Users can purchase governance tokens of the platform and vote on the proposals to upgrade the network, pay for a fancy feature or buy NFTs. Distributed platforms are less vulnerable to censorship, as no single entity has the majority of the influence over the platform.
Your keys your crypto your platform. But liquid Democracy =/= Democracy, proof of human fixes this
Users don't have to pay gas fees all the time to interact with a smart contract on the Internet Protocol. Instead of low gas, why not zero gas to users and static computation cost for smart contracts paid by devs/platform, like hosting on the cloud. Mint, transact and burn tokens to create a social economy on-chain.
It only costs 5$ to store one GB of smart contract data on the Internet Computer Protocol, in contrast to Ethereum - Tens of Millions of dollars, and for Solana the rent is around $800,000/GB
Metaverse is the Open Internet built on the Blockchain
There are many decentralized Social Media applications building entirely on-chain at the time of writing and have already airdropped thousands of NFTs to its users without making them pay any gas at all.
Practically, it’s zero-gas fees for every smart contract interaction by the users.
Internet Computer Protocol enables us to realize the vision of Metaverse by allowing developers to create infinitely scalable autonomous software on the blockchain, by providing an entirely new Turing complete blockchain-powered IT Stack. Currently, ICP is the only general-purpose public blockchain that can host the entire social media platform on-chain.
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