Transcription
The history of the Internet Computer really dates back to the mid-1990s when I began working on distributed systems. By the .com Era, I was also working with cryptography and trying to create what would have been one of the world's first cloud services.
In 2013, I got into Bitcoin, and by the end of the year, I decided I wanted to credit virtual currency for the games industry. I circulated a paper in October 2014 repurposing traditional, presenting fault-tolerant consensus math. I got involved with the early Ethereum community, and I'd seen how blockchain could do much more than just cryptocurrency. You could, in fact, use a blockchain to host code and data and computation.
At some point, I'd heard the phrase "World Computer." To me, World Computer meant an extension of the internet that you could use to build almost any system and service using smart contracts. I renamed the project "Infinity," which is a shortening of "decentralized infinity," and began working towards this new goal of creating a World Computer. It finished Foundation was created in October 2016, and then it ran a big public ICO in February 2017. That enabled us rapidly to expand the Infinity R&D team. By the end of that year, we were running the biggest R&D operation in blockchain.
The people we have at Infinity are just the most incredible bunch of hard-working, visionary, talented people that you could ever imagine, and you know, I'm grateful every single day that I come to work.
When the Internet Computer mainnet finally launched, it was it was pretty wild. As an organization, we're primarily staffed by R&D folks, as is the nature of the project. Even now, meanwhile, while all this wildness was going on, we had to contribute to the network to keep it up and running. The Internet Computer has managed to run the last two years without any downtime.
There have been so many improvements that have been added to the Internet Computer in the last two years. There are almost too many to mention. Just recently, something called Chain Key Bitcoin went live. Internet Computer nodes actually talk to Bitcoin nodes. That enables smart contracts on the Internet Computer to directly process Bitcoin on the Bitcoin blockchain now, with no need for bridges.
The next step is to integrate with Ethereum, which will allow smart contracts on the Internet Computer to process any asset on the Ethereum blockchain and call into Ethereum smart contracts. And that, that's a big deal because Internet Computer smart contracts can serve user experiences by processing HTTP, and that's a very unique capability. By integrating the Internet Computer and other networks, we'll be giving that unique capability to Ethereum smart contracts too.
So, one of the very cool things about the Internet Computer is the world's first dapp-active blockchain. And that means that it runs under the control of a decentralized governance system, and you can submit proposals to this governance system that change the structure of the network or run protocol upgrades, and they'll be executed completely automatically. This differs from traditional blockchains, which are upgraded through a process known as hard forking. Through this governance system, the Internet Computer has already been upgraded 145 times in the two years since mainnet has been running.
The Internet Computer is designed to be a World Computer and host things like social networks and enterprise systems on the blockchain itself. And to do that, it has to be unbounded. It has to be able to scale without limit, host any amount of data, any amount of computation, and do so very efficiently. I think one of the big surprises of the Internet Computer is that eventually, not only can blockchain act as a crypto cloud that replaces centralized tech, but that crypto cloud can actually be more efficient than centralized tech in the end. And of course, being green and reducing the emissions of technology worldwide is a key objective.
The Internet Computer has a very fast-growing and vibrant community of developers building. We've seen just about every kind of Web3 service imaginable, and now are increasingly seeing enterprises experimenting with building tamper-proof and unstoppable systems on the Internet Computer that run without the need for a firewall or security team. Two years on from launch, we really are well and truly on the road to realizing this vision of a blockchain singularity where almost everything one day will be built on the blockchain, and the blockchain will play the role of a World Computer. That's the everything stack that will eventually eat centralized technology.