The Real Problems of the crypto ecosystem
In the previous article called why do we even need crypto, we talked about how crypto could solve the worlds problems,
but before crypto could do that, the crypto Eco system needs to solve its own problems first.
In this article I'm going to name a few major issues and try to suggest an abstract solution
The first one that comes to mind is the high level of complexity in crypto projects, this is leaving a lot of people out, I talked about this problem in a previous article called simplicity,
It's hard to reason about a complex problem, in order to address complex problems in a simple way you need better building blocks, developers call them layers of abstraction, Think how hard it would be for you to explain what a house is without having a way to talk about its various parts like roof flor windos door but instead explaining it in the low level raw matirials layer like sand wood metal stone,
It would be close to impossible,
this is where crypto is today.
But for good abstractions to form we need a larger ecosystem and with the quantity we would also get a decent amount of quality,
For a few years now the largest developer community is in JavaScript.
You could also check out these Github and Stackoverflow stats links
So for the new global human cooperation that crypto is promising us to succeed we will need a lot more developers to get in the field.
Smart contracts introduce this concept that “code is law”
Well if code is the law then we need a lot of people that can understand the law
same way as literacy is the fundamental requirement from citizens to be able to understand what the government is doing and to be able to vote
“Information is the currency of democracy” (Thomas Jefferson)
I must be fair and say that Ethereum Smart contracts can be written in Solidity which tries to resemble JavaScript or in another flavor called Viper which is trying to be similar to Python, obviously, Ethereum recognizes the issue and is trying to address it,
In reality, smart contract development still has a steep learning curve.
The second issue I want to address is that a big part of crypto is distributed computing architecture and networking, which is not a common ground for a lot of developers today.
Also, these networks run on significantly stronger computers than your everyday laptop, it is said that it would take a normal laptop 10,000 years to compute Bitcoins proof of work that happens every 10 minutes to produce a new block.
To be fair some blockchains try to address it to allow maximum participation from everyday users, with normal computers, using various techniques, but same as before there is still a high barrier to entry and unfair advantages towards Optimised computers participating in the network.
The reason this is important is that the same way that software development barrier to entry to blockchains is high hardware network participation is also high, and this centralizes the computing power in the hands of the few, which can cause censorship and other issues with people abusing their power…
Those very issues that blockchains aim to solve in the first place.
like I said before crypto can decentralize the world, we need to decentralize crypto.
So how do we solve these two complex issues
1. Finding a popular programming language that would include the largest amount of developers in the crypto ecosystem.
2. Finding a distributed computing and networking architecture that is simple enough to allow maximum participation.
There's a known fact that a big part of our accelerated technological advancement in the last hundred years was caused by the ability to build upon existing infrastructure,
For example, the first electrical products were hooking to the lightbulb socket, they didn't use the outlets we use today, We used to use telephone lines to connect to the Internet,
so as you see major innovations in the modern era we're riding on existing infrastructure.
Maybe we can find a way that crypto could ride on existing programming languages existing code runtime environments, existing infrastructure, and networking, maybe something that is already installed in every household (hint hint)
Eureka! the Browser
What if we could run smart contracts in the browser using JavaScript,
In such a way that every person with a computer and an Internet connection could run smart contracts & participate in the network,
and on the software side, almost every web developer in the world could read and write smart contracts, and develop new solutions with his existing toolkit.
I know what you're thinking,
This is an ingenious idea, but It will never work,
In reality what would stop someone with an optimized computer farm or a data center to run a lot of “browsers” and get an unfair advantage over the home user?
And that is exactly what we are going to talk about in the next article…
