5 Reasons to Build Decentralized Apps

Key Takeaways

Hello world, Shiraj here. Let's talk about five reasons to build decentralized apps. Decentralized apps are apps that are peer-to-peer. No central server whatsoever. The users connect to each other directly. The first reason is that you would own your data. The web has become totally centralized. That means a handful of apps own all of our data, all of our texts and images and videos. Take WhatsApp for example. WhatsApp was acquired by Facebook for $22 billion when it only had 35 engineers. 35 dudes own 500 million users data. Facebook didn't buy the 35 engineers. They bought the 500 million users data that they owned and profited from profit that those 500 million users should have gotten a little share of but didn't. In a decentralized app, you would maintain ownership of your data. People would pay each other for data instead of one group profiting off of all of it. Your data is your most valuable asset in the new data economy. When robots begin to replace all labor-based jobs, which are half of all current jobs, the value that you provide to people that no robot can ever take from you is your data. Your five senses, your unique perception of the world that you output with tweets and pictures and videos. You should be paid for it. With decentralized apps, you could be because you would own it. We could use cryptocurrency to pay people for their data or pay people for hosting our own data. It would create a new economy where everyone is earning money online. everyone every day. Just by being on the internet, by participating you are contributing to the data economy. The second reason is increased data reliability. In a centralized app, all data is stored on a central server. If that central server gets shut down for any reason, that data is lost forever. So, if you uploaded a really precious photo to Dropbox and Dropbox got hacked, which has happened before, that photo is gone. The link to it is broken forever. It's just not sustainable. In a decentralized app, since there is no central point of failure, you can choose to either store your data securely yourself or have your data replicated across many different clients. It moves us towards a permanent web, a web where links never die. Stupid 404s. The third reason is faster data transfer. We're moving into a new era of data transfer. Soon we're going to be sending huge files across the web. I'm talking pabytes. Centralized apps only allow you to retrieve data from one central server, which can take forever to download a stream, especially if it's across the world. In a decentralized app, if you want to load a website, instead of your computer requesting it from a server across the world, it'll find the nearest copy. Maybe that random dude sitting next to you in chemistry has it on his laptop and your computer would retrieve it from there directly. And if multiple people have copies of it, your computer would request it from all of them at the same time. The more peers, the faster the download. Videos would load so much faster. You could download games 10 times faster. It's just better in every way. The fourth reason is that it couldn't be shut down. Centralization means governments can block a website from reaching users in its country for whatever reason. The Chinese government has easily blocked Facebook from its citizens. That's 20% of the global population. And recently, the Egyptian government easily shut off the internet to stop people from protesting. Isn't that crazy? And if a data center goes down or an ISP has an outage, you're out of luck. A decentralized app could never be shut down by anyone. Even if a government shuts down internet access during protests, people can still communicate with each other offline in their local area networks by connecting to each other directly. The fifth reason is it's the wild west of software. We've barely begun to unlock the potential of decentralized technologies like Bit Torrent and Bitcoin. The first people to make successful decentralized apps will be remembered for many years and will provide a huge amount of value to the world. If you'd like to learn more about decentralized apps, check out the links in the description below. And if you'd like to see more technology videos, please subscribe. I'd really appreciate it. As always, thanks for watching.