Elastos Founder Rong Chen gave a rousing keynote speech at the Amsterdam 2018 Blockchain Expo, the second leg of Europe’s largest business blockchain event hosted at RAI Amsterdam Convention Centre on June 27-28.
He covered the broader vision of Elastos to create a new web that’s truly organic, without “versions”.
When operating at peak performance, Chen says the internet as we know it will no longer be an information marketplace. It will become a value marketplace.
Without owning your code, you don’t own your data.
“When we talk about the ‘value internet’ versus the ‘information internet’ of the past, we’re saying, ‘Okay, this is a value internet. We can share value peer-to-peer,’” Chen said. “You have to own the code. You have to share code peer-to-peer. So that’s where the operating system, the virtual system, comes in.”
Intellectual property and creative content, from e-books to movies to music, are executed on the web but all are at risk of being ripped off.
“If you just own your own data, and you send it through social networks, people can easily piracy your work. So that means, to prevent people from copying your work, all we can do is – we can scramble your data not only into an encrypted form. We are also scrambling it into binary executables,” Chen said.
“So when you circulate binary executables among the internet, what’s going to happen? You will immediately think there’s going to be a virus. So, to find a virus, you need virtual machines. And more so, you need virtual machines because virtual machines have loaders. When the loader loads your artwork, it checks against the blockchain to see – are you still owning it? Did you sell it to someone else?”
The goal is to eliminate architecture that has a single point of failure.
“You want the apps to run peer-to-peer – actually apps running on different servers on the web. They’re not really running on the blockchain because blockchain, at least the Elastos blockchain, is designed for trust. It’s not designed for running apps.”
“On the smart web, we don’t allow any single packet sent by applications. We can guarantee that it’s very hard to launch middleman attacks, very hard to launch DDos attacks. Even if application developers steal the consumers’ information, if you have no communication channel, you cannot send it out. If you have a spy in your home, there’s no way they can pass the message out. Make it harder. So then we have trust. We can have an environment to conduct peer-to-peer business.”
Elastos is designed for peer-to-peer networks for smart homes, video, audio, messaging and other applications. It will be a smart web browser without HTTP and without allowing anyone using the browser to send any internet packets without the interception of the network operating system.
Chen says they’re planning an alpha version in August of the very kind of revolutionary “new web” portrayed on “Silicon Valley.”