Tim Berners-Lee, founder of the World Wide Web: Using blockchain and P2P technology to build a decentralized Internet

The first Decentralized Web Summit was held in San Francisco, USA from June 8 to June 9. The conference brought together developers from all over the world who are committed to achieving an open, secure, censorship-free network and ultimately decentralized control by distributing, processing and hosting data for millions of computers around the world.

The conference was hosted by the Internet Archive, which called on people with ideas and abilities to collaborate to build a more advanced network environment. Brewster Kahle, the founder of the Internet Archive, and Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, both participated in organizing the summit.

The summit marked a new era for the Internet - a new generation of decentralized systems, inspired by peer-to-peer file-sharing networks and distributed ledger technology, blockchain, which brought digital currencies such as Bitcoin.

Kahle said:

Snowden's example shows us that people have inadvertently used the Internet to build the world's largest surveillance network. For example, the Chinese government blocks almost all foreign websites, leaving only a few large service providers to choose from. We can change that situation.

In fact, the Internet was originally created based on a distributed architecture, but today's network is centralized. Billions of Internet users can only connect to the Internet through some centralized servers. And the telecommunications service providers that provide these servers are fixed. Today's network is also vulnerable because it is too centralized. If the network provider crashes for technical or commercial reasons, all the data it is responsible for storing will be lost.

Berners-Lee said:

The network we designed is decentralized. The problem lies in the monopoly of search engines, social networks and other platforms. What we are facing now is not a technical problem but a social problem.

We have been exploring the decentralization of the network for many years, and many projects have emerged, such as Ethereum, Interplanetary File System (IPFS), BitTorrent, BigChainDB, Blockstack, Interledger, Mediachain, etc. The summit also invited developers of the above projects to share their technologies and ideas.

Today's Internet uses relatively old technology, and online payment is one example. If you want to shop online, you must enter your bank card information, which is equivalent to exposing your account information directly to the sun. The new payment system based on distributed ledger technology can ensure that individuals have greater control over their funds and replace online advertising with a micropayment system.

He believed that it was necessary to establish a micropayment system on the Internet. In order to develop a micropayment system, Berners-Lee had already established the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) in the 1990s, but unfortunately this technology has never been realized.

Recently, W3C restarted the project and released a draft, which also mentioned Bitcoin and distributed ledger technology. Digital currency based on distributed ledger is currently the only convenient and fast Internet payment system.