By Sumukh Shetty
Aug 22, 2017. Originally published here.
Is there a problem with the current infrastructure ?
Yes, there is a fundamental problem in most of the infrastructure which is built over decentralised networks, the biggest one being the storage of users private keys on centralised servers run by these said exchanges. These servers are generally a part of the old backbone the internet used to run on, which has multiple attack vectors that a hacker can exploit. These sites attract the best of the hacker community, because the bounties are massive. A hacker can have a multi million dollar pay day by attacking such sites which makes it a great bug bounty exercise for hackers.
These sites are also vulnerable to governments as we saw with what happened with BTC-E. The founders were involved in money laundering, but the users end up suffering massive losses when the FBI comes and seizes the servers, which store their private keys. As secure as they may be, if the servers are gone, the funds are gone.
When Satoshi Nakamoto shared his vision for a decentralised future with the Bitcoin whitepaper, his goal was to create a technology that would allow for the creation of a truly decentralized currency that isn’t controlled by any one stakeholder. He has succeeded in this vision. The problem arises in taking this vision further to decentralize different services, services that can be more complex than just sending funds from A to B.
The vision with ethereum was to build a backbone for a truly decentralised internet. This meant that users wouldn’t have to use email and password to actually authenticate their identities, that users wouldn’t have to centralise trust on a company to execute core transactions.
How did ethereum achieve this ?
There are multiple layers that when put together, allow developers to build truly decentralized applications. Getting into each would be an article by itself, so I’ll speak about decentralized browsers in this one.
A decentralized browser is like any other browser with a few special properties. Each browser has a unique identity in the form of a public wallet address, which can store funds. This wallet can interact with dApps by connecting the user to the blockchain. So instead of using a centralized backend database, we can use an immutable database for core transactions.
How is it different from the old stack ?
The old stack gave you no option in terms of handling private keys, in this stack we do not need to handle private keys at all to authenticate users and transactions.
This means user funds on a dApp can never be vulnerable to hackers unless the smart contract is badly written. We believe this is the future for building websites and mobile applications on the blockchain to ensure the best of security for users.
We built EZether on this stack to ensure that user funds can never be stolen. This makes us one of the few crypto services out there, that can say with confidence that user funds are always safe in their own local devices.
We can further secure our application by moving our non core data onto a decentralised file storage system like IPFS.