TL;DR:
- In 2024 Swarm will be a fully decentralised world database, an unstoppable machine powered by microtransactions.
- The key economic insight is that hosting will be supported by users, enabling open innovation, interoperability and lowering the barriers for colonies.
- Developers will not need a profit model in advance; this will completely change how they work, how they make money, and what the end users will get.
- It will also give engineers much more powerful tools to work with than what centralised solutions offer right now.
- To build a project on Swarm, plan for what features Swarm will provide in three years’ time, not what it offers today.
In the first part of his talk, Elad Verbin took a look at how to build a startup on Swarm. As he admits, building a startup in today’s complex world takes time: there are mistakes and numerous iterations. “Before you’re finished the world has moved on. So you need to look at how the world will look three years from now,” he adds.
This holds true when building a project on Swarm, as well. **The world and Swarm are both constantly changing. _“So you need to look at both and think about how they will look in three years’ time.” _**But this is not an easy task because you can’t know for sure what emergent behaviour a technology, once it reaches critical mass, will spur.
Take smartphones for example. Elad’s thought experiment goes like this. It’s 2007 and the iPhone has just come out. At this time, it is nothing more than a flip phone that can run programs. Now, we need to think about what it will look like in 2010. What the iPhone really means, in Elad’s words, is that there will be a computer in everyone’s pocket that is always connected to the internet, equipped with a GPS, camera and a sensor array.
“You don’t build an alarm clock. You build Instagram, you build Twitter, you build something that takes advantage of all these new things,” Elad reminds us.
Feature-packed future
How about Swarm, then? Well, in 2021 it’s not much beyond a chunk store with some additional features. So, what will it look like in 2024? A whole lot different. It will become a world database, that anyone can access from anywhere, and a generally unstoppable machine powered by microtransactions; fully decentralised, censorship-resistant, with native smart contract integration and an excellent service level agreementbecause the content will be served from your vicinity.
Figure 1. How to build a startup on Swarm
In the case of the smartphone, you may think: “Oh, cool, it has a GPS”. This is not the right response, but what will it mean in three years Elad asks. It’s the same for Swarm. “The right response is what censorship-resistant will mean in 2024. It means that if parts of the internet are cut off, it will still work. It brings all kinds of emergent properties that are hard to predict. Just like GPS gave us Uber. Once you have a billion Swarm nodes that can access the network and serve content in a censorship-resistant way, emergent behaviour appears,” he explains.
How to build for the future?
How to do that, how to build for something that doesn’t exist yet? As the scheme from Elad’s presentation shows, plan for the red dot. “Build something that will make sense once this red dot exists. Whatever you can build in Swarm right now, build it. And what you can’t you can postpone or augment with non-Swarm solutions. If you have an app that will be perfect for Swarm but needs Amazon Web Services (AWS) right now to serve it, use AWS,” he advises.
As examples, he gives Twitter and AirBnB. Both were built with mobile-first in mind, but they both have a website as well.
Figure 2. Development strategy takeaways
Incentives, a small change with big effects
In the second part of the talk, he focuses on what that red dot in the diagram might look like. “In 2021 the internet is broken, but I claim it can be fixed and I’ll explain how Swarm specifically fixes it,” he begins. The initial intention for the internet in the 1990s was to help people collaborate and share information. That failed, since people are now separated into data silos, communicating only within the silo.
Swarm can help fix this because it shifts the paradigm by transferring the costs of hosting onto the users, who pay for using the application. “That’s the key insight from an economic perspective,” believes Elad.
This radically transforms how developers build software and is what makes Elad confident about the future: **_“I personally believe that in 10, 20 years’ time decentralised storage will be pretty much the only thing that exists.” _**Just like people still watch TV, some will still use AWS. The reason for this massive change, he believes, is that developers won’t need to raise large VC funding amounts to pay for hosting.
