Early 1980s witnessed the beginning of a new era in
computing owing to the birth of the general purpose personal computers. This PC
technology penetrated homes, small business and schools. At that time most of these computers are
standalone and worked independently.
Slowly these independent computers had to connect to other
independent computers to share data and resources. Computer networks which
already existed at that time allowed these independent computers, sometimes
called as nodes, to connect and share resources. As technology progressed the
demand to connect more and more computers grew tremendously.
Early 1990 marks the transition of these smaller computer
networks into a global system of interconnected computer networks. Thus giving
birth to Internet. The Internet, sometimes called “Net”, is a massive network
of networks that consists private, public, academic, business and government
networks. Internet revolutionized how we exchange data between millions of
computers. With computers spread across the globe forming a global
infrastructure, Internet is the beginning of decentralized computing. No one
owns Internet, and no single person or organization controls the Internet.
With increase in sharing between nodes or computers, a new
communication protocol, BitTorrent, has evolved which enabled distribution of
large data and files over the Internet. BitTorrent is the communication
protocol for peer to peer file sharing (“P2P”) digital media using peer to peer
networking technology. It relies decentralized network to effectively share
resources and reduce burden on the centralized server. The decentralization
technology continued to evolve.
With the advent of cloud, the environment changed
drastically. All of a sudden a centralized computing took the prime seat. More
and more servers were deployed on to the centralized cloud environment to
perform computing, sharing resources etc.
The cloud revolution temporarily pushed the decentralized journey to
back seat.
Bitcoin brought decentralization back to the table. It also
revolutionized decentralized technologies with a decentralized peer to peer
ledger that runs in a trustless public environment with immutable data and
without any trusted central authority. It also introduced distributed consensus
which helps all the nodes to validate the block and build the best block chain.
Bitcoin uses Blockchain as the underlying technology.
Ethereum took this decentralized blockchain further by
providing a platform where we can develop decentralized applications. Ethereum,
sometimes called Blockchain 2.0, provides us a programming model which enables
developers to write smart contracts that encapsulate user obligations in a
decentralized network.
As you see the decentralization evolved from standalone
systems to the current state and it will evolve further to become an efficient system
with millions of transactions and capable of changing the technology we know.
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