Around two years ago a decentralized internet alternative named Zeronet came up on the market. With this underlying cryptography, any Zeronet address is a public key; any visitor can directly send bitcoins to site owners. What’s interesting about this technique is that users who didn’t set up wallet can also send Bitcoins directly.
Birth of a decentralized and a private Internet
Since its inception in the year 2015, one man effort limited the functionality with a chatroom and blogging system board. But, it could use the Tor network for privacy purposes, and there was the ability for anyone to make other types of websites under Zeronet from the very start. This all are done alongside all social sites with dynamically updated contents.
In present day time, there are many popular and useful Zeronet sites names ‘Zites’ are designed to mimic other popular apps and sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and Popcorntime. The value of this whole system is far higher now with additions like a private email client, zite search, a file manager and Zeronet newsfeed which effectively keep track of all your conservations around all zites.
How about using Bitcoin to solve complex problems?
The way Zeronet is hosting these private zites in a complete decentralized manner is not only simple but also effective. Each one of these is treated as Bit Torrent shared file, denoted by its Bitcoin public key. Users visiting the zite can instantly download it from any nearby peer and accordingly start seeing it for other users to visit. Unlike any other Bit Torrent counterparts, these Zeronet files can be updated by any individual visiting the zite. Now they can easily make comments in a different blog post and up vote on other people’s comments.
The result is, however, bit slow net speed through Zeronet browser window which never goes to any other domain on the internet. All these files are served locally from the folder where it was downloaded to. To make sure each and every file came from site owner unbroken and is not revised by anyone else on another peer, Bitcoin was turned to.
The best thing about Zeronet is that it uses the same mathematic calculations as well cryptography to that of Bitcoin network for verifying if the wallet owner started any transaction or not.
Network Usage as well as Growth
A network of all Zites are growing at a steady pace; active users are coming from different countries where Internet censorship is affecting their daily life, like China and Russia. What’s more surprising is that there is significant interest in North America and European countries. However, it is also true that some users are interested in the technology itself, different from others who need Zeronet for decentralization and contribution to freedom of speech.
Government crackdown is not likely to have so much effect on Zeronet, as per claim by the network’s creator. This whole system is fully Tor enabled, and the nature of this network is quiet similar to that of Bitcoin addresses. If someone starts attacking these systems or computers, in such case he or she will only delay the updates. So it is not worth all the effort!
When someone is opening the Zeronet browser that automatically connect through Tor, all users visit the ‘Hello’ page, which is an ideal launch pad to numerous other zites as well as display the feed about all your interactions on the Zeronet.
The number of users who are connected to the system is shown on the page, this in a useful statistics for users. You can easily check the number of users serving Zeronet homepage and the ones using the Tor Network. Isn’t it unique?
Different developers made five zites available from the page for Zeronet, including the private mail system, official Zeronet blog, a simple chatroom, Zerome and a Reddit-like forum.
Most of the zites are Spartan versions of its old net counterparts, with fewer color options and few images to keep the whole file size small. Within the Zeronet you can easily find other user’s content just by going through zite search or lese you can browse through directories as per convenience.
One of the first and popular zite that most people run around is Zeroplay; it is something that uses Web torrent to display Bit Torrent movies all in the browser window, such as controversial Popcorntime app. Music versions and TV shows too exist.
Future Plans as well as new additions
Quite a few interesting plans are coming up. There are amazing expansions lined up which includes speed boosting solutions like archiving solutions for many bigger sites, ability to support large files which will allow direct video as well as audio file sharing between peers, all without Bit Torrent.
Zeronet community crowdfunds Bitmessage integration, and the developers are looking for some similar options to help out the project. Some plans would allow Zeronet sites to send as well as receive messages all using BitMessage protocol at ease.
Darknet Marketplace 2.0
It is now almost possible to build e-commerce zite selling services as well as goods for bitcoin; it can be a big challenge to create the right environment. However, OB or Openbazaar integration will be easily completed once Openbazaar 2.0 comes out with full Tor integration. There won’t be any reason why an OB marketplace can’t be useful to Zeronet zites in the present day time because of its Hidden features. There are many more benefits on offer and in days to come it will serve many users.
Conclusion
With so many things and features coming up it will be interesting to know how users feel about this new progress. Many believe that with so such new changes there will require high anonymity to all users and admins of marketplaces. The reason being every peer will be equal on Zeronet. This also means it will be very hard to find out who the site owner is and who the only visitor is. So what you think about this new move? Let us know!