The social platform Facebook, as well as Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger and Oculus, were unavailable around the world for several hours on Monday night. The reasons for the incident are believed to be problems in the operation of the domain name system (DNS) and problems with the servers themselves Facebook.
At the moment, the aforementioned platforms are already working, but the incident left a lot of food for thought regarding the centralization of the modern Internet. Here’s what the cryptocurrency community thinks about it.
The scale of Monday night’s events was incredible. In fact, users of the mentioned social platforms around the world could not access their accounts. As a result, the smartphone screen showed the ongoing download and eventually gave an error.
And while this topic does not directly address cryptoassets, it shows the flaws in centralization that the blockchain community opposes. Yet cryptocurrency networks do not depend on a single body and exist thanks to the users of coins. Now it has once again become clear that the future belongs to such an approach.
What will happen to the Internet in the future
The Facebook crash this week was one of the largest in the company’s history. As a result, more than 2.89 billion users were unable to access their accounts and accounts on the social network and related services. Recall that in 2019, the Facebook site «lay down» for 14 hours, and in 2008 the site was unavailable for a whole day.
The site shutdowns have sparked a lively debate in the crypto community, with many proponents of decentralization insisting that the internet needs more robust alternatives to popular platforms. According to analysts, they can be built on the basis of blockchain, eliminating the need for centralized servers to function.
The reason for this is that large blockchains operate with little or no disruption. For example, the Bitcoin network went offline only twice: in August 2010 and in March 2013. The duration of the drawdown was 8 hours 27 minutes and 6 hours 20 minutes, respectively, and the rest of the time the blockchain was online and showed normal performance.
As a result, the so-called «uptime» of BTC or the time spent online of its network is approaching 99.99 percent. The actual figure as of this morning according to the data of the BuyBitcoinWorldwide platform is 99.98677938119 percent.
Percentage of Bitcoin Network Online
Decentralization is considered one of the foundations of the «Internet of the future» – a global network where such collapses can be avoided. Here is a comment by Unstoppable Domains CEO Matthew Gould on the matter, in which the expert shares his vision of the situation. The cue is from Decrypt .
The complete collapse of Facebook and Instagram illustrates the problem of centralization. In a decentralized internet or Web 3.0, users would find it easier to migrate their data and contacts to other services, since they would not depend on Facebook or Facebook login to connect with their friends and family and use their favorite applications.
Evolution of Web 3.0
The following message appeared on the official Twitter account of the digital rights protection group Access Now.
While the problem seems to be DNS related, it should remind everyone why we need a more open, decentralized, and inclusive internet – smooth and secure. All over the world, many people are experiencing the devastating consequences of the shutdown of the World Wide Web firsthand.
Against the background of what is happening, an interesting change has occurred: the market capitalization of Bitcoin has bypassed the corresponding indicator of Facebook due to the fall in the price of shares of companies and is now almost $ 32 billion more than it. As noted by cryptocurrency lover Jameson Lopp, the total operating time of the Bitcoin network is now higher than that of the Facebook website, that is, the cryptocurrency works much more stable than the company’s services.
We believe that the Bitcoin network is not suitable for the operation of such a platform on a global scale due to the characteristics of the network and the low speed of transactions. Most likely, more modern blockchains like Solana and Avalanche are suitable for this role. Ethereum will also be listed after switching to the Proof-of-Stake consensus algorithm. Recall that along with this, the so-called sharding will appear on the network , which will significantly increase the throughput of the blockchain.
However, there can be no doubt: the future of the Internet should indeed become decentralized. Moreover, such changes will clearly occur in the coming years.
The development of Web 3.0 may become a major trend in the crypto industry in the next few years. Therefore, now it makes sense to follow promising projects in this area.
