For today’s topic, I am going to expand upon what I covered in my previous article about smart contracts, and talk about an evolution in software applications. Decentralized Applications (DApps) are an exciting way to leverage a blockchain as the backend of a web application, as opposed to a more traditional setup using a centralized server/cloud hosting provider to handle that portion of it.
For the usual disclosure, I am not a financial advisor, I don’t even work in finance at all. My day job is as a telecommunications software engineer. Treat everything you read here as some educational resources and not financial advise.
What Are Decentralized Applications
To understand what a decentralized application is, we first need to look at how a traditional web application actually runs. In a traditional setup, the application is broken into two parts, the frontend, and the backend.
The frontend would be the actual website that the users would interface with. It would be written in some web application framework like HTML, Java, ASP.NET, or some other common web language. The backend would be where all the heavy lifting code would be that processes the data from the user, connectivity to database or payment systems, and anything else that happens behind the scenes. The front and back ends would talk to each other using some kind of intermediate language for passing data such as JSON.
When we take a look at how a decentralized application would be different than it’s older counterpart, the frontend would be essentially the same, some kind of website written in some kind of standard web development language. Where the difference lies is in the backend.
Instead of the backend living on some server or cloud hosting provider, it would live on a blockchain. All the backend code would reside there, and be hosted by all of the nodes on the blockchain. It would still communicate with the front end using the same form of communications as a centralized application, it is just in the backend where the real differences lie.
Benefits Of Decentralized Applications
One of the first benefits that I’m sure you’ve caught onto is the fact that a decentralized application is not as easy to take down as a centralized one. If you think back to how the centralized application is laid out, there is a weak single point of failure in the backend system.
Since it’s all run in the same place, this makes it vulnerable to various attacks such as government shutdowns for censorship reasons, distributed denial of service attacks because some people are jackwads, and other various forms of attack vectors that bad actors can use to take down a centralized application.
And of course it doesn’t necessarily need to be a bad actor that causes the problem, if your self-hosting your back end, you could have a server or power outage, or if you rely on hosting from the likes of AWS, they could potentially have a problem the brings your application down. It could also be as simple as a software bug being triggered by a user making a simple change on their equipment.
With a decentralized application existing on the blockchain, it makes it very difficult, and I would argue almost impossible, to take one down. It would require all of the nodes of a blockchain to be taken offline and that would be a very hard feat to do on a large, well adopted blockchain.
Another benefit to having the application running on all of the nodes in the blockchain is speed. Having all of the nodes being able to process the applications means that you are not relying on a centralized point to handle all of the processing, and it increases the speed at which the application can handle everything.
Having the code exist on the blockchain also gives the direct benefit of having it easily be audited by the community, and as any open source project, this will help to ensure that defects are found and fixed quickly, and helps to secure the software against attack. This of course assumes the code is well written and audited before it’s deployed, and that any bugs are not going to be too major, or too easy for an attacker to find, because they also will have access to the code, the same as all the people with a more white color of hat on their head.
Types Of Decentralized Applications
There are quite a few different types of decentralized applications out there, and more are being created all of the time. One in particular I’ve even discussed in a previous post, and that would be the decentralized exchange . These are frontend websites that handle their backend on the actual blockchains.
Another good example of a decentralized application would be one I covered in my last post about earning crypto, and that would be the Hive social media and blogging platform. This is a large array of different decentralized applications and platforms that all exist on an underlying blockchain. This allows them to have their fancy rewards system that makes it profitable to just be on the platform and participate, something a centralized old school site like Facebook would never do.
There are plenty of other types of decentralized applications that I plan to write articles on later, things such as Decentralized Finance (DeFi) platforms, To an extent, almost all smart contracts based applications could be considered a decentralized application as well.
Conclusion
I think decentralized applications are a very exciting technology that brings a lot of benefits over the older way that web applications were developed. When you look at what this technology is being used for out in the real world, it really shows that when it’s leveraged properly, it can create some revolutionary things.
And it extends beyond just having a financial system without a central authority. Yes, a lot of what is currently implementing this has been focused on changing the way financial systems work, but sites like Hive actually show that it can be used for a lot more.
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Want some more content right now? Check out some of my previous posts:
Earning Crypto
Merged Mining
Proof of Stake (PoS)
Originally Posted On My Website: https://ninjawingnut.xyz/2021/06/15/decentralized-applications/