DFINITY is committed to building an Internet computer with supercomputing capabilities and secure software, following the "Code as a Service" model.
Developers only need to upload their code, and the corresponding applications and services can be deployed and started to operate, which greatly saves the cost of application development and operation and maintenance, and truly realizes the value exchange of various services within the digital encryption world, thereby accelerating the global digitalization process.
Comparison with traditional Internet applications
As we all know, if you want to launch your own products on the traditional Internet, you need to use major commercial cloud services, cloud tools, various databases and firewalls and other components, related virtualization technologies, software development platforms, etc.
The resulting complexity of the system consisting of software, hardware, and various supplier networks makes it expensive and difficult to adjust the system as demand changes.
Today, 85% of IT costs in the average Fortune 500 company are borne by IT operations, who typically spend more than 90% of their time dealing with system complexities that have nothing to do with the functionality they are trying to deliver, such as configuring infrastructure components. .
The Internet computer that DFINITY is building has redesigned software to address the above challenges. Addressing the above complexities can bring huge benefits by reducing development costs and shortening time to market.
For example, when developers write code that describes data, that data is automatically and securely saved in the memory pages that host their software, eliminating the need for developers to encode and decode data in and out of the database or even think about how data persistence works (this feature Also known as "orthogonal persistence").
As a result, Internet computer developers focus on writing "what" they want to achieve, rather than "how" systems are built and interoperated, and efficiency is greatly improved.
The increase in development speed and decrease in development costs can reduce the price of application services, shorten the product iteration cycle, and improve user experience, thereby helping application developers stand out in the fierce competition.
From the actual demo mini-programs of several test networks recently released by DFINITY, it can be seen that DFINITY provides developers with a seamless development experience. Developers can use Motoko, a language similar to Rust, to quickly complete the development of the application backend, and compile it together with the front-end pages developed using Javascript and Html to generate a set of applications that can be directly deployed on this Internet computer.
Once deployed, users can access and call these applications and services directly through the web on their computers or mobile phones.
Performance bottleneck
We can currently deploy a variety of smart contracts on the Ethereum network to achieve desired functions and applications, but its performance bottleneck has always been a key factor restricting its development.
DFINITY uses more efficient consensus technology. What takes 10 minutes to complete on the Ethereum protocol can be completed in just 1 second using the DFINITY protocol, increasing transaction speed by two orders of magnitude.
In Ethereum's Casper solution, final confirmation can be achieved after about 125 blocks, and the block generation time is about 2~10 s, so the final confirmation time is about 10 minutes.
The final confirmation time of DFINITY is equal to two block intervals plus a little time delay (network traversal or transmission time), so a block confirmation can be completed in a few seconds.
DFINITY's consensus adopts the technical direction of PoS + random numbers. The design of the consensus can be said to be its biggest technical highlight, and the most important component is the random number beacon part of the consensus.
Through this random number beacon, tens of thousands of nodes in the network distributed around the world can randomly select a small number of members to participate in the consensus, thereby reaching an agreement jointly and efficiently.
At the same time, this random number will also be used to determine the final chain, so that the temporarily forked chain can be quickly finalized (the final chain can be determined within two blocks).
In addition, this random number will also provide the underlying stable random number for many DApps in the future.
Among them, DFINITY adopts the threshold signature algorithm based on BLS as its core, and it also has the three characteristics of verifiability, unique certainty, and non-interaction.
Consensus random number technology not only greatly speeds up the final confirmation of blocks on the DFINITY network, providing a guarantee for supporting high TPS applications, but also provides the entire network with nearly unlimited elastically scalable performance and resources.
Since the output of consensus random numbers, block production and notarization are all performed by a fixed number of nodes in the entire network, the addition of new nodes will not affect the speed of operation.
Every time a new node is added, it needs to provide a certain amount of computing and storage performance for the network.
A video conferencing application based on cryptography security (Magnify, Github address: https://github.com/Dfinity-Bjoern/Magnify) can be found on DFINITY’s recent testnet Demo, which can authenticate participants.
The ability of such applications to run smoothly on the DFINITY network also proves its superior performance.
Economic issues
Currently in the digital encryption world, encrypted virtual digital currencies can rarely be used directly to participate in the value exchange process of services or products.
Except for applications such as centralized exchanges, it is almost rare to see applications that can achieve profitability by providing services, let alone services that are integrated with the real economy.
DFINITY Internet computers come with a set of economic mechanisms. Software providers pay for distributed data centers throughout the network based on actual resource consumption. These resources include CPU calculations, data storage, network traffic, etc.
This part of the cost is ultimately paid by the user of the application, that is, the end customer, and does not require the software provider to rent or purchase a server before launching the service.
It can be seen that the software on DFINITY must run completely on the chain, which also means that the software on DFINITY can no longer run on other traditional cloud service platforms.
Combined with the above-mentioned "code-as-a-service" characteristics of DFINITY, the token settlement agreement makes the code directly profitable, and the Internet computer will become a developer's playground, which will encourage a large number of innovations and generate rich and diverse openness. Serve.
Open services can also call and integrate with each other (actually all run on a virtual machine) to combine better services. This win-win game creates a huge "mutual aid network effect" for the network, making it capable Compete with monopolistic Internet giants.
But on the other hand, given that the system will pay remuneration to nodes such as data centers in the form of DFINITY tokens, if the price of such tokens fluctuates to a certain extent in the short term, it will lead to an increase in service fees and a decrease in profits for software providers.
Even if stablecoins are adopted as payment tokens in this economic system, government regulation may become a major obstacle to the entry of software vendors, because the government may not allow anyone to purchase with currencies other than fiat currencies. Goods and assets.
Summarize
Due to its fast block final confirmation speed and high TPS, DFINITY can run various traditional Internet applications, and its "code as a service" model can also significantly reduce the development costs of software suppliers and improve efficiency, making Blockchain value exchange for digital services becomes possible.
However, DFINITY’s future development is closely related to the government’s attitude. Whether it can obtain government support may become a key part of its success.
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