The blockchain is a distributed ledger that runs on top of conventional systems. These elements include storage, communication, and computation.
Storage
Data can be stored directly in a blockchain, and with this fact it achieves decentralization. However, a significant disadvantage of this approach is that a blockchain is not suitable for storing large amounts of data by design.
It can store simple transactions and some arbitrary data, but it is certainly not suitable for storing images or large blobs of data, as is the case with traditional database systems.
A better alternative for storing data is to use distributed hash tables (DHTs). DHTs were used initially in peer-to-peer file sharing software, such as BitTorrent, Napster, Kazaa, and Gnutella.
Two primary requirements here are high availability and link stability, which means that data should be available when required and network links also should always be accessible.
InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) by Juan Benet possesses both of these properties, and its vision is to provide a decentralized World Wide Web by replacing the HTTP protocol.
IPFS uses Kademlia DHT and Merkle Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAGs) to provide storage and searching functionality, respectively.
There are other alternatives for data storage, such as Ethereum Swarm, Storj, BigChainDB and MaidSafe. Ethereum has its own decentralized and distributed ecosystem that uses Swarm for storage and the Whisper protocol for communication. MaidSafe aims to provide a decentralized World Wide Web.
Communication
The Internet (the communication layer in blockchain) is considered to be decentralized. This belief is correct to some extent, as the original vision of the Internet was to develop a decentralized communications system.
Services such as email and online storage are now all based on a paradigm where the service provider is in control, and users trust such providers to grant them access to the service as requested.
Access to the Internet (the communication layer) is based on Internet Service Providers (ISPs) who act as a central hub for Internet users. If the ISP is shut down for any reason, then no communication is possible with this model.
An alternative is to use mesh networks. Even though they are limited in functionality when compared to the Internet, they still provide a decentralized alternative where nodes can talk directly to each other without a central hub such as an ISP.
Free services like Google, Facebook, etc., however, are offered at the cost of exposing valuable personal data, and many users are unaware of this fact.
Blockchain has revived the vision of decentralization across the world, and now concerted efforts are being made to harness this technology and take advantage of the benefits that it can provide.
Computing Power and Decentralization
Decentralization of computing or processing power is achieved by a blockchain technology such as Ethereum, where smart contracts with embedded business logic can run on the blockchain network.
Other blockchain technologies also provide similar processing-layer platforms, where business logic can run over the network in a decentralized manner.
The following diagram shows an overview of a decentralized ecosystem. In the bottom layer, the Internet or mesh networks provide a decentralized communication layer.
In the next layer up, a storage layer uses technologies such as IPFS and BigChainDB to enable decentralization.
Finally, in the next level up, you can see that the blockchain serves as a decentralized processing (computation) layer.
Suryateja Pericherla, at present is a Research Scholar (full-time Ph.D.) in the Dept. of Computer Science & Systems Engineering at Andhra University, Visakhapatnam. Previously worked as an Associate Professor in the Dept. of CSE at Vishnu Institute of Technology, India.
He has 11+ years of teaching experience and is an individual researcher whose research interests are Cloud Computing, Internet of Things, Computer Security, Network Security and Blockchain.
He is a member of professional societies like IEEE, ACM, CSI and ISCA. He published several research papers which are indexed by SCIE, WoS, Scopus, Springer and others.
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