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The 3 Platforms That Will Decentralize The Web

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Bitcoin is going mainstream, and the decentralized platform has tremendous potential to change the way people make payments and transfer money.

Now industry leaders are looking at the technology used to create other decentralized services like peer-to-peer file sharing, made popular by Napster and BitTorrent, as a way to deliver content.

Decentralization protects data while providing a more reliable network. The decentralized web spreads information around, keeping it secured in encrypted packets that can’t be accessed by any one party. And, like Bitcoin, it provides a neutral system for managing data that keeps it out of the hands of any one party. The end result is a far more robust system that can’t be broken by either criminals or governments.

Here are a few platforms leading the web decentralization movement:

Synereo

As a new platform for decentralized social networking, Synereo is a powerful system for the peer-to-peer movement of social media information. This allows different users on the network to interact directly with each other, without the need for either party to be connected to each other or to a central server. All of the user data is distributed across the community of Synereo users, where it is safely encrypted -- inaccessible to anyone (even the creators of the platform).

Synereo also has a built-in currency that will create what the organization calls the economy of attention. The currency -- called AMP -- rewards users for their attention to content and can be used to amplify content posted to the network. Users on the network set the value of attention to ensure attention is rewarded appropriately.

“Social platforms are used by 80 to 90 percent of people in the western world,” said Dor Konforty, CEO and Co-Founder of Synereo. “In some parts, people are barely aware of the ‘Internet’ outside of Facebook. Synereo’s technology offers a completely new way to create an Internet. It changes how information flows, how and where data is stored, and where logic operations are conducted.”

Ethereum

Managed by the non-profit Ethereum Foundation, Ethereum is a distributed application platform fueled by an operating software called Ether. The platform serves as a home in which tools can be built to help users and developers make back-end systems more effective in their facilities.

Instead of focusing solely on social networking, the minds behind Ethereum are looking to tackle a host of problems from everything ranging from domain name registries to voting.

The foundation also plans to build what it calls Web 3.0, with a decentralized system handling many of the common web activities we see today.

FireChat

Using decentralization to produce an Internet connectivity solution, FireChat pervades the real world just as much as the tech space. The app was developed by Open Garden which produced another Internet connectivity solution of the same name.

Using the platform, users share their Internet connection with other users of the platform. The platform looks for the best connection and automatically shifts users from one connection to another so users will always have reliable access. Ultimately, this means that Internet access can be quickly distributed to multiple users, lowering dependence on single points of access.

The app gained popularity during street protests in Hong Kong and other places, since users can chat using the app without the fear of its servers being shut down or interrupted by the authorities.

While this space is still in its infancy, the potential power and benefit of decentralized systems is obvious. It takes control out of the hands of a few decision makers and distributes across a broad spectrum of users around the world.

What platform would you like to see decentralized? Let me know in the comments.