At the beginning of the year, I set a goal for myself to research new things in the crypto world on a regular basis. So far I have plunged into Solana, into Betury and into Deso. This journey is interesting but it is also intensive and time intensive because it takes a lot of work to understand how these things work and figure out whether it's worth to dedicate more time to it or not. Today, I would like to present you my latest discovery wich is ICP or the Internet Computer Protocol.
What so special about the internet Computer Protocol?
This is the first question that I have to tried to answer for myself and the more I learned, the more I was surprised about the scale of this project. The Internet Computer is claimed to be the only protocol that is 100% on the blockchain. But there are many other blockchains that claim that. What is different?
When you use a blockchain like Etherum or BSC of course you transact on the blockchain but you don't do it directly. You need to access the blockchain through a user interface, a website that is hosted on a server somewhere, most of the server space is owned by the big companies like amazon, microsoft or google. Then you need metamask which is a google chrome extension among others. You also need the necessary software that goes in between and makes the bridges. Only the real transactions will be on the blockchain.
This entails several risks from hackers but also in terms of censorship or because of vested interests. Most of the blockchains rely on centralized infrastructure to work.
source: https://deck.internetcomputer.org/
What is different about ICP?
The internet computer is based on a network of nodes that are spread all over the world. On these nodes smart contracts, also called canisters are hosted. These canisters are totally autonomous and are http compatible. Meaning that it's possible to host your website or your app directly on the blockchain. So you can store and access everything directly on and from the blockchain. A Dao governance takes all the decisions regarding the infrastructure.
source: https://deck.internetcomputer.org/
What makes ICP interesting?
According to the calculations of the people behind ICP, hosting webspace on ICP is like 7 times cheaper than on amazon. It's much safer and totally scalable. ICP can be a real alternative for companies and web projects. Storage on ICP will cost you about 5$ per GB per year only!
Over 200 dapps in existence
There is a lot of development in place on ICP. More than 200 dapps have been created already and many centralised services have been replaced.
source: https://deck.internetcomputer.org/
No gaz fees
On ICP it's not the users who pay for the network but the apps. Each app has to burn ICP tokens to run their app. The usage of the network is basically free. Some apps function differently with their own tokens but using ICP is free of charge.
Everything can be built on the blockchain
ICP comes with it's own programming language which is called Motoko but you can also program canisters using other languages like Solidity, Python or React. There are plenty of tutorials and documentations to build on ICP. There seem to be no limits to what can be built on ICP.
I will dive a bit deeper into ICP in the coming days, I will look at user experience and also tokenomics and share the things that I find out.
With @ph1102, I'm running the @liotes project.
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