The very first computers showcased in the 70s-80s could not “talk” to each other. They were isolated machines, a universe of their own, and there were few things one could do with them.
That’s where blockchains are. Of course any metaphore is necessarily incomplete, but bitcoin does not even have a “word processor,” bitcoin cash is trying to have a limited one through scripts, while ethereum made a breakthrough of sorts with the blockchain’s version of Microsoft office, smart contracts.
These smart contracts facilitate dapps, but like the early computers such dapps are isolated and in a universe of their own.
They run on ethereum, the world computer, so anyone can access them unlike early computer programs, but the dapps don’t really talk to each other.
Our imagination fails us completely, so we’ll give a terrible example. Cryptokitties can’t own a tokenized home. That’s an absurd statement on the surface, and the reflexive question is why should cats own a home, but what if that cat was a business?
Not of the kind we know today, but a code program which “talks” to these other dapps, perhaps even uses them, tells the blockchain land registry something, for example, and that land registry complies and responds if/then rules are satisfied.
Play, of course, is where we learn best and gaming might illustrate this better. The daapchains project for example says:
“You could have a World of Warcraft-type game, where the world is created by players in a Minecraft-type game. The actions of the players in each world would affect the world of the other game.
Developers could release a new game that uses character data from another game world stored on a DAppChain. That way, new users of the game could immediately jump into a new world with their existing characters and assets (essentially airdropping your old game’s data to the new game).”
That’s, basically, the internet of dapps. The way apps currently work, or websites, or even computer programs, is mainly in isolation.
Google, for example, doesn’t “talk” to Facebook. They might copy data from each other or copy-paste each other’s code or functionality within their own space, but that’s like scanning a print paper.
There isn’t much you can do with this scan. You can look at it, you can share it, but you can’t even highlight a part and copy it, let alone modify a word, or correct a spelling mistake, etc.
That’s because the scan isn’t natively digital, like a word document is. So when you incorporate the functionality of a third party within your website, you can’t really do much with it.
We thus get specialized apps or specialized websites that don’t “talk” to each other. And the reason for that might be because they don’t share the same servers. So the apps don’t know what other apps have or can do.
But with dapps being in a world computer, where all data is shared and replicated, they could “talk” to each other and maybe even modify each other if that’s desirable.
Then we might have a breakthrough of sorts. Like the connection of computers, the connection of apps or computer programs might give rise to a new more powerful capability.
Because then code could run a business, with us humans free to just tell it what to do, and off it goes by itself and does it.
At that point it would be 1995. Now it’s still the 80s in the blockchain space we think. Not quite yet at its true form, still at the infrastructure or at the innovative stage with room for some breakthroughs that we can see or can’t see at this stage.
