1/ How will computation be affected by crypto?
2/ First, we have to see what is the underlying mechanics behind centralized and decentralized computing.
3/ The history of computers come from the inventor Alan Turing, who formalized a Turing machine, which means that theoretically this machine can calculate anything from a "program" which will execute its instructions from a "stored program"
4/ This was revolutionary because it provided the theoretical foundation that a calculation could be stored somewhere. This now is known in modern times as the CPU, GPU and where it's stored your hard drive.
5/ The problem is that in the early days, computers were simply a very fast calculator. The only applications were only for government or businesses that had to calculate a lot of data quickly.
6/ The users evolved from government (cracking security codes), big businesses using IBM mainframes (census data, accounting, sales, transaction processes), small businesses using DEC mini computers (accounting, resource planning) to consumers using IBM PCs (word processing, CAD)
7/ You could argue that the history of computing is simply democratizing computing so everyone in the world can have it. PCs -> Mobile phones -> Watch -> Internet of Things is simply embedding computing so you can access and control everything from a more malleable medium.
8/ In this process of democratization, moore's law kept on allowing richer and richer interfaces to occur and you had the rise of flash drives, graphic processing units, magnetic hard drives, modems (2G/LTE/Internet) to be able to support the democratization process.
9/ However, this was a parallel process that occurred with the cloud. As data became bigger and bigger, local hard drives couldn't support the exponential rise in data.
10/ With the rise of the internet, you had three trends:
humans using computers to form networks to do things (lyft, facebook, airbnb)
commodity computers networked together to help support this in the backend
software as a service that supported consumer and business use case
humans using computers to form networks to do things (lyft, facebook, airbnb)
commodity computers networked together to help support this in the backend
software as a service that supported consumer and business use case
12/ These computers coordinated together and from batch processes, allowed faster and more real time interactions to occur. Remember how mainframes became smaller and faster and more capable from IBM mainframes to IBM PCs and Windows OSs? The same thing happened with the cloud.
13/ Over time, you had massive networks that controlled parts of the internet. Google is a monarch in search, Facebook is a monarch in social, and Twitter is a monarch in real time news.
14/ Why does this matter to crypto? We are currently in the mainframe days. Where we can only do one application accounting, which is known as proof of work, which is known as Bitcoin. All bitcoin is currently is a slow debit and credit system.
15/ Eth is currently the best implementation of a super computer but if we assume that applications need to be more graphical, more usable, more responsive. You can extrapolate out a number of things that will happen.
16/ The computing pillars of CPU (computation), semi parallel processing (GPUs), parallel processing (concurrency), space (fast and slow storage), and software infrastructure around business and consumer infrastructure will be reinvented. We're currently in phase one.
`17/ It means that all of the infrastructure will be used individually by different coins and composed together. Many things think ASICs are a bug, but I think it's a feature. To compose the most secure, you need the fastest application specific computers securing it.
18/ This however means that as other types of infrastructure come online all aspects of the computer infrastructure will be used: ASICs, FPGAs, CPUs, GPUs, magnetic hard drive, SSDs, optical and non optical networking equipment.
19/ All middleware: hypervisors, virtual machine, programming languages are now in contention and being reinvented in a globalized state. When you have a global decentralized machine, what can you do with that hardware? Existing software systems were not designed for this.
20/ So what where is this going? We should see a cambrian explosion of experimentation around the permutations with software and hardware and as certain paradigms dominate a culling of the ecosystem 4-5 years from now.
21/ What will drive this? Primarily around applications. Currently, the reverse is happening what happened in computing. The misfit consumers, techie professional, and finance professionals are consuming this and driving the use cases.
22/ First killer use case was tokenization with @VitalikButerin and then volatile crypto economies with @CryptoKitties All the killer applications have to be asychronous, semi-batch, and can tolerate a volatile currency.
23/ We are seeing the form of interactive media spread as an application, and the reason why this is happening is from a governance perspective facebook has largely killed social games on facebook.
24/ Most people don't know that @farmville got to about 50% of Facebook's traffic and drove a lot of the international traffic. Why do I mention this? It's because while Facebook used apps to drive its fourth leg of distribution, after the bootstrapping they decided to kill apps.
25/ This is the reason why that most applications don't survive on centralized networks like twitter, facebook is because the corporations see applications as a test bed that they can use for their means and acquire/kill them when it doesn't fit their purposes.
26/ Twitter acquired search, built images/video, and through a build vs buy process killed of the application ecosystem on Twitter. That is perfectly rational in a world where you need to go to maintain your network effect and go public.
27/ Largely, this is like the French kings of old who constantly re-issued their own currencies to fund the wars. Whereas money is a common good for the community and not just for the king's will, cloud computing and applications need to be for the common good.
28/ So now the modern monetary system for all countries are controlled by the central bank head and this is to separate out the function and make sure that it's for society and not for the king. Now, computing have a similar problem, where it's not designed for the people.
29/ From a governance standpoint, the revolution of computing of the blockchain will determine a cloud computing for the people and by the people, so no dictactor centralized computing company can kill off the applications of the people.
30/ This was the promise of bitcoin, which is the decoupling of monetary system from the control of the patrician class (politicians and financiers). As central banks rise interest rates and the financiers overleverage, the people don't have to suffer 30% asset drawdowns anymore.
31/ Yes, this is currently what happens. Interest rates are correlated with recessions even when times are good. When the central bank rises interest rates, liquidity floods and financiers overleverage and then explode during financial crises. This happens regularly every 15 year
32/ So, just like what bitcoin is for the people by the people. We will now, have a computing infrastructure to use applications that would be traditionally killed on centralized cloud networks.
33/ In conclusion, all aspects of hardware and software decentralized computing is being reinvented right now to reflect a global super computer. This is important because for the first time, we have cloud computing for the people by the people, so no monarch can shut it down.
