Addressing the audience at Cardano Shelley Virtual Summit 2020 Day-1, Vint Cerf, popularly known as the ‘father of the internet’ shared some interesting viewpoints about the internet. However, the internet pioneer did not seem to be too excited about blockchain.
IOHK chief scientist Prof Aggleos Kiayias and senior research fellow Prof Philip Wadler also joined internet pioneer and Google internet evangelist, Vint Cerf on a very interesting panel about ‘Architecting the Internet: What I Would Have Done Differently’.
Scalability
According to Vint, he should have considered the network scalability. That is because right from the beginning it was clear that the internet would be a global ecosystem. He reflected that he should have asked for a 128 bit IP address base instead of a 32 bit IP address base. With this, he could have avoided the transition of address base in 2011.
Security
Vint emphasized that because of limited equipment and cryptographic protocol, the internet was not very secure. If he had to redesign the internet now, he would focus more on security today.
Mobility
As per Vint, the blocks of any ecosystem must be mobile and if anything needs to be moved, nothing should break.
Does Vint Cerf find blockchain useful?
The community noticed that Vint seemed to be a little behind on Blockchain Technology. He even called himself a “Blockchain Skeptic”. But that does not mean he condemns the revolutionary technology.
According to him, blockchain finds very good use in transparency applications. However, he is yet to see a scalable blockchain that is ready for real-world use cases.
Interestingly, he is a strong proponent of anonymity, self-sovereign identity management, and cryptography. These are all related to blockchain also.
Governance is a wider term
Vint also shared his thoughts about governance. His viewpoint holds value as he played a pivotal role in unifying the governance model of the internet across the globe. According to Vint, governance is a very wide term. Hence, before establishing a model, it is very important to educate the community.
As a co-developer of TCP/IP protocols and architecture of the internet, his insights are important. These will prove quite fruitful for the Cardano community that is trying to build a global truly decentralized ecosystem.
In the opening session of the summit, Charles Hoskinson announced the launch of its self-sovereign identity management system Prism. Apart from this, he made 4 surprising announcements.
