Why ICP Is Essential

By Jan Camenisch

Compute is the lifeblood of society. There’s hardly anything that we do today that does not involve software in one form or another.

Our current IT stack is complicated, sometimes fragile, and can no longer be reliably protected from cyber attacks. That’s why almost everybody has moved their software onto the cloud, trusting the cloud provider with that task.

The Cloud Control Problem

Now, this is problematic for two reasons. Handing over operations also means handing over the control of one’s software and data to these third parties. Worse, it’s not even working. The cost spent on IT is ever-growing, as is the damage caused by cybercrime. Clearly, a radically different approach is needed.

In fact, we all know a computer that is built very differently from the current IT stack and that does not suffer from these problems. Bitcoin.

Learning from Bitcoin’s Security

Bitcoin has never been hacked, despite the large amount of money at stake. You might think I’m crazy. Bitcoin wastes a ton of energy, it’s very slow, and it’s not even a computer but only a ledger that keeps track of who owns how much bitcoin. How could one possibly run all of the world’s software like that?

The reason that Bitcoin is secure is twofold.

How ICP Creates a Secure World Computer

Bitcoin is a computer (well, maybe more like a pocket calculator) that is created by a mathematical protocol. So, it’s pure math. It cannot be hacked; 2+2 will always be 4. But that’s not enough. You don’t want to trust a single entity running the protocol; it could be hacked, bribed, or be outright malicious. You want to have many parties running that same protocol, assuming the majority is honest. So if all of them, or at least the majority, tell you the same result, you’re good.

At DFINITY, we have taken that principle of building a computer from protocol and all the latest research in cryptography and distributed systems, and spent over a thousand person-years to design and build the Internet Computer Protocol. This protocol has been running in production since May 2021 without ever missing a beat nor ever being hacked. The protocol provides smart contracts with lots of storage, computational power, and communication bandwidth, just like any ordinary computer would.

The User Experience

This is how ICP delivers on the World Computer vision. Therefore, from an end user’s perspective, this feels and looks as if the software ran on AWS or Google Cloud. For instance, a user can just fire up a browser, enter the URL of an ICP smart contract, and bingo, they’re already using an application that runs on the Internet Computer. For the end user, the big difference is not visible. Because ICP is a protocol, the applications built by smart contracts on ICP are unhackable and unstoppable, just like the internet itself.

Benefits for Developers

This means that developers do not have to worry about the security and reliability of their applications and can focus on the application logic. That makes it far cheaper and more efficient to build and maintain applications. In fact, most applications that already run on the Internet Computer are built by very small teams.

Getting Started with ICP

I invite you to further explore ICP. Check out DFINITY’s YouTube channel for videos that explain how it works, fire up your favorite browser and try some of the many great dapps, or start building yourself by cloning some samples with ICP Ninja.

Join us in our journey towards the World Computer.

Learn More

• Discover the Internet Computer at internetcomputer.org.
• Try applications built on ICP in your browser at internetcomputer.org/ecosystem.
• For developers, explore the documents on building on the Internet Computer Protocol at internetcomputer.org/docs.

This article is adapted from a World Computer Tech Talk by Jan Camenisch, CTO at the DFINITY Foundation. You can watch the original video here*.*

Why ICP Is Essential was originally published in The Internet Computer Review on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.