Good Protocols and Decentralized Tools

The internet can be weaponized.

That’s according to Sir Tim Berners-lee, one of the progenitors of the internet in a featured Guardian article. If you have ever tried to create a website, or share large amounts of information without a 3rd-party data service, you quickly realize that the internet in it’s current form is pretty broken. It’s the kind of Wild West where one day you have a thriving internet-based cupcake business and the next day you’re hosting the bandwidth for international spammers that have taken over your server and wholly diverted your web traffic. Fixing the hacks left behind may take hours or days depending on your skill and the extent of damage.

Professional assistance may cost thousands of dollars and you still may never recover. In conservative estimates, businesses and their customers are reported to loose over $400 billion per year. Cyber crimes such as data-theft are serious business opportunities for . The only solution today is to either dawn your snorkel gear and learn how to secure your data, or pay the exorbitant costs of having a professional IT staff.

So is anything being done to help make data services more reliable and secure? Enter a handful of visionary teams such as protocol.ai (Protocol Labs), ethereum.org (Ethereum Foundation), plan.tools (PLAN Systems), and an emerging class of humanistic developers that are reimagining the protocols and platforms that can power more robust and resilient community architectures.

Check out the linked video by Juan Benet, founder of Protocol Labs and a techie-folk hero of distributed protocol technologies. While it’s certainly dense in terminology, it gets really exciting once you are able digest the concepts and imagine the possibilities. With new tools comes the ability to organize information, maintain relationships, and have the ability to communicate and transact at increasingly lower costs, and with fewer barriers to entry.