How will Swarm affect developers?

Original title: "To build a project on Swarm, plan for what features Swarm will provide in three years" time—a talk by Elad Verbin"

Original source: Ethereum Swarm

Original Compilation: Kxp, Rhythm BlockBeats

Recently, Elad Verbin, chief scientist and co-founder of Lunar Ventures, was a guest at the Swarm Summer School event, and shared his views on Swarm's use cases and future development in reality in his online speech. Swarm officially recorded the content of his speech. Rhythm BlockBeats organized and translated the full text.

The following is the original text

Summary:

· In 2024, Swarm will become a fully decentralized global database and become a super machine for processing micro transactions.  

· From an economic point of view, the key point is that hosting will be done by the user, enabling open innovation, increasing interoperability and reducing digital obstacles to colonization.  

· Developers will no longer need to formulate a profit model in advance, which will completely change the way they work and make money, and ultimately affect end users.  

· Swarm will give engineers more powerful tools to get their jobs done than today's centralized solutions.  

· To build a project on Swarm, plan what Swarm will provide in three years, not what it will provide today.

In the first part of his talk, Elad Verbin talks about building a startup on Swarm. As he said, building a startup in today's complex world is not easy: there are countless mistakes and iterations along the way. “The world is moving forward before you get to that point. So you need to look at the world three years from now,” he added.

The same is true when building projects on Swarm, the world and Swarm are constantly changing. "So you need to think about where both will look in three years' time." But it's not easy, because you never know what contingencies a technology will cause once it grows powerful enough.

Taking smartphones as an example, Elad’s thought experiment goes like this: In 2007, when the iPhone just came out, it was just a clamshell that could run programs cell phone. Now, we need to imagine what it will look like in 2010. In Elad's words, the iPhone was really about putting a computer in everyone's pocket with an always-on Internet connection, complete with GPS, a camera, and an array of sensors.

"You shouldn't be researching how to design an alarm clock, you should be designing things like Instagram and Twitter that take advantage of these new things", reminds Elad .

Feature-rich future

So, what about Swarm? In 2021 it is just a block storage with some functions, but in 2024, what will it look like? I believe it will make a big difference. It will become a global database, a powerful machine capable of processing micro-transactions, accessible to anyone from anywhere, and is completely decentralized, anti-censorship, not only that, it will also integrate native smart contracts and have high-quality Service agreement, because the content can be obtained from near you.

Figure 1 How to Build a Startup on Swarm GPS". That's not the right response, Elad said. The right response should be to think about what the smartphone will look like three years from now, and the same is true for Swarm. “The correct response is what censorship resistance will mean in 2024. It means that even if some part of the Internet is cut off one day, it will work normally, and not only that, but it will bring something completely new. For example, the advent of GPS led to the birth of Uber. He explained: "Once you have a billion Swarm nodes that can access the network and provide content in a censorship-resistant way, new things will appear."

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How to build for the future?

How can we build for what doesn't exist yet? As Elad mentioned in his presentation, we should plan for the future. He advises: "Before the future comes, we should be fully prepared. Whatever you can build in Swarm now, just let it go. If you encounter a problem that you can't solve, postpone it first, or Solve it with a non-Swarm solution. If you find an application that is very suitable for Swarm, but still needs Amazon Web Services (AWS) to provide services, use AWS first.”

He cited the examples of Twitter and Airbnb, both of which built mobile apps first, but also have their own websites.

Figure 2 Enlightenment of Development Strategy

Incentive Measures - Small Changes Bring Big Impact

In the second part of the lecture, he focused on possible developments three years from now. Elad said: "In 2021, the Internet has a lot of problems, but I can solve these problems, and I will explain to you how we use Swarm to solve them." The original intent of the internet in the 1990s to help people collaborate and share information ultimately failed because people are now separated into silos of data and only communicate within silos.

Swarm can help solve this problem, because it changes the past model, shifting the cost of hosting to users, and charging users. "From an economic point of view, that's what matters," Elad said.

This fundamentally changes the way developers create software and is what makes Elad confident about the future: "I personally think that in 10, 20 years In 20 years, there will be only decentralized storage in the world.” Just like people still watch TV, some people still use AWS. The reason for this drastic change, he argues, is that developers won't need to raise large amounts of venture capital funding to pay for hosting.

Life after having Swarm

Then he talks about Think about what a developer's life will look like in 2030 if Swarm develops into the future.

Figure 3. A day in the life of a web3 developer in 2030

All developers will develop different features separately, as Elad said, this is very likely, because they will never need to raise any funds for hosting, it is platform users who pay hosting fees. "If the number of users of Dana's function goes from 100 to 100 million overnight, she doesn't need to pay. Users are responsible for paying the hosting fee, and Dana will get a corresponding amount of money. Elad explained: "She The only money it takes is coffee and an internet connection.”

On the other side of the Swarm are the end users, whose lives are now built on cloud servers that do not interfere with each other. Companies are working hard to protect their data because they are making money off of it.

Figure 4. A day in the life of a web3 user in 2030

A The model that developers do not need to pay hosting fees has changed everything, and the entire digital life will be built on an open ecosystem. End users will get a modular experience, and because the system is interoperable, mobile applications will become as easy as installing a plug-in in the browser. Not only will you be able to pick and choose the look and feel of your software, but you'll also have plenty of competition, and moving data will be a breeze.

Elad pointed out, "At the very least, Swarm has rewritten the cloud computing of the past 20 years, the network fee will be paid by the user, and the open model will make faster iteration a Possibly. You will have the power of Web 2.0 and the freedom of Web 1.0 at the same time, data can be written from anywhere, and can be accessed on every terminal. It will be an open ecosystem that can interact with itself".

However, what are the pain points of this decentralized model? “Dana’s life might look more like the life of a vlogger. Some of them become big shots, but others just work on software outside of their day jobs to enrich their lives.” Elad thinks this is a possible negative outcome for developers under the new model.

Provide engineers with powerful tools

On the engineering side, Elad thinks things will improve a lot because he sees Swarm as a breakthrough infrastructure. "Today, what Swarm can provide you, other centralized platforms can also provide you. But the centralized platform has inherent problems, and Swarm can provide you with more things in 2023-24. These will be more powerful than centralized cloud servers,” he added.

He sees platforms as gigantic covert systems built from code stolen from open source projects. Even if we don't look at them ideologically, it's a given that these systems are slow, hard to load, and lock you into a single provider, Elad said.

But according to him, we currently have a model that provides an effective structure for the Internet of the future - the structure of TCP/IP, or in his words, "a Beautiful layer system". "When I think of Swarm, I think of TCP/IP, which is built precisely, defined first, optimized later, to help people do what they want to do. For TCP/IP, it can be A robust way to send packets of data from one end of the internet to the other. And with Swarm, it lets you retrieve chunks of data in a robust way,” he explained.

Figure 5 Swarm is basic infrastructure

“Swarm is a zero-level More upgrades and optimizations will be made.” The optimized Swarm will become a global database, and its functions will also extend from simple file retrieval to complex queries. He believes that "the database is the foundation on which you build applications."

It will integrate with smart contracts and bring governance, highly flexible accounting and censorship-free applications. Elad concluded, "As an engineer, you still need to work on these four points. And you also need to add your own thinking, and then actively build for it. Swarm will change the whole world, and the future will be a decentralized The Age of Storage".  

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