Blockchain for Decentralization of Internet: Prospects, Trends, and Challenges

TL;DR

This paper reviews how blockchain can enable a decentralized Internet by analyzing consensus algorithms and future Internet technologies, highlighting prospects, trends, and challenges for secure, robust decentralization.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive literature review of blockchain-based methods for Internet decentralization, focusing on consensus algorithms and integration with future Internet technologies.

Findings

PoP, Paxos, and PoAH are suitable consensus algorithms for decentralized Internet.

Combining blockchain with future Internet technologies can address blockchain's limitations.

The paper identifies key challenges and prospects for blockchain-enabled Internet decentralization.

Abstract

Blockchain has made an impact on today's technology by revolutionizing the financial industry in its utilization on cryptocurrency and the features it provided on decentralization. With the current trend of pursuing the decentralized Internet, many methods have been proposed to achieve decentralization considering different aspects of the current Internet model ranging from infrastructure and protocols to services and applications. This paper focuses on using Blockchain to provide a robust and secure decentralized computing system. The paper conducts a literature review on Blockchain-based methods capable for the decentralization of the future Internet. To achieve that decentralization, two research aspects of Blockchain have been investigated that are highly relevant in realizing the decentralized Internet. The first aspect is the consensus algorithms, which are vital components for decentralization of Blockchain. We have identified three consensus algorithms being PoP, Paxos, and PoAH to be more adequate for reaching consensus in Blockchain-enabled Internet architecture. The second aspect that we investigated is the impact of future Internet technologies on Blockchain, where their combinations with Blockchain would help to make it overcome its established flaws and be more optimized and applicable for Internet decentralization.