Instead of relying on massive, anonymous replication, the Internet Computer strategically combines known node providers from diverse data centers, geographies, and jurisdictions for robust security with less overhead.
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Crypto's primary advantage is its ability to automate processes that rely on expensive human-based trust (brokers, lawyers) with software and cryptography, which offer mathematical guarantees at a fraction of the cost.
This autonomous governance protocol manages everything from adding node providers to upgrading the core protocol. It operates via proposals and a liquid democracy system, removing the need for a centralized administrative body.
Unlike traditional clouds, the Internet Computer protocol is designed to make applications inherently secure and resilient, eliminating the need for typical cybersecurity measures like firewalls or anti-malware software.
By requiring governance participants to lock tokens for up to eight years, the system ensures they are invested in the network's sustained success. They cannot simply vote for a harmful proposal and sell their tokens before the consequences manifest.
An outage at a single dominant cloud provider like AWS can cripple a third of the internet, including competitors' services. This highlights how infrastructure centralization creates systemic vulnerabilities that ripple across the entire digital economy, demanding a new approach to redundancy and regulation.
Moving core exchange matching engines to the cloud is a critical mistake. Cloud environments lack the determinism of on-premise hardware, meaning the sequence of order execution becomes unpredictable. This randomness is highly disruptive for liquidity providers and will ultimately degrade market quality.
The paradigm shift with crypto is not about trusting a new entity like a developer. Instead, it eliminates the need for interpersonal trust by allowing anyone—especially competing businesses—to verify the system's integrity through open-source code.
The system replicates computing across nodes protected by a mathematical protocol. This ensures applications remain secure and functional even if malicious actors gain control of some underlying hardware.
Infrastructure designed to be unstoppable, like the Internet Computer, presents a fundamental dilemma: it could enable rogue AIs, but it also offers a crucial check against concentrated power from governments or large corporations.
The goal for trustworthy AI isn't simply open-source code, but verifiability. This means having mathematical proof, like attestations from secure enclaves, that the code running on a server exactly matches the public, auditable code, ensuring no hidden manipulation.
