Diving into the World of Decentralized Apps (Dapps): Exploring the Benefits and Challenges

Hi everyone! Welcome to this weeks post on Bit Education. Every Thursday I’ll be sending out a quick, education-packed newsletter containing:

• Either an article about either blockchain technology or cryptocurrency

• Articles or posts that I think would be useful to your learning

• A though provoking excerpt from a book I’m reading

These are informative posts, meaning there will be certain spots where you might not be familiar with the content. I suggest that you do external reading from the links that I will at the end of each post.

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How to best use this post.

1. Take notes while you read the post. I challenge you to discuss the ideas outside the newsletter with friends and family.

2. Read the extra links provided, and apply the information from those posts to come to your own conclusion.

3. Truly digest the book quote. Reflect on how it can apply to your life.

Post

A Dapp or a decentralised application, is an application built on a decentralised network. Built by combining a smart contract, and a front end user interface, a dapp has backend code running on a decentralised peer-to-peer network. Compared to a conventional app, running on a centralised server.

• Decentralized - dapps operate on the Ethereum network, a peer-to-peer blockchain network

• Deterministic - perform the same function, regardless of the environment

• Turing complete - perform any given function, given the required resources

• Isolated - executed in a virtual environment called an EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine), so if the dapp has a bug it won’t affect the normal state of the network

Benefits:

• Zero-downtime - the network will always serve the clients looking to interact with the contract

• Privacy - no need to provide a real-life identity to interact

• Resistance to censorship - no one can block users from interacting with the contract, deploying their own dapps, or reading the blockchain data

• Complete data integrity - the data is stored on the blockchain therefore it is immutable. Attackers cannot corrupt the data that is made public

• Trust-less computations/verifiable behaviour - smart contracts execute in predictable ways, with no need to trust a central authority.

Negatives

• Maintenance - code and data published to the blockchain is harder to modify, so it is hard for developers to make updates to their applications

• Performance overhead - scaling is hard. To achieve a high level of integrity, transparency, and security, every node on the network runs and stores every transaction, which with PoS takes time.

• Network congestion - Currently the Ethereum network can only process 10-15 transactions per second. If transactions are sent faster than this the network will struggle

• User experience - harder to engineer a user friendly experience because the average user may not have the tools to interact with the blockchain securely

Further Reading

Book Excerpt

“Another does wrong. What is that to me? Let him see to it: he has his own disposition, his own action. I have no what universal nature wishes me to have now, and I do what my own nature wishes me to do now.” - Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

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