'Decentralization Means Freedom': Interview with Alfredo de Candia

In decentralization, we trust, and in our community, we believe!

This interview is part of the #Decentralized-Internet writing contest! For those who are reading about it for the first time, HackerNoon has built a partnership with Free Ton (now rebranded as Everscale) - a decentralized, community-powered blockchain movement for free internet! This is the last month to participate in the contest. You can see all #Decentralized-Internet stories here.

So without further ado, let’s start the interview.

Thank you for joining us! Please tell us about yourself.

Hi, I’m Alfred from Italy, a senior Android developer. I’ve developed several apps (a recent one is about NFTs). I’ve also written books on different themes, from romance books to blockchain-specific books like the one about DeFi or NFTs. I’m a blockchain specialist and CTO of Hoken Tech, an Italian startup leveraging the EOS blockchain to provide different services.

If You want to know me more, check my interview here.

Let's discuss centralized internet first. What is your opinion on the centralized internet? What are its pros/cons?

Let’s start first with some history notes like the purpose of the Internet. It was developed by the United States Department of Defense to better connect several offices and use it as a means to get quick information and facilitate communication.

Soon this “connection“ was extended to Universities letting students and teachers gather more information about different things like paper, contact, and so on, and the latter was widespread to the entire world.

One of the interesting things about the Internet and precisely IPS (Internet Protocol Suite) like TCP/IP is the capability to transmit information no matter what happens, extremely efficient in a war scenario where it isn’t easy to send messages or information to the headquarter or other soldiers or in an emergency or natural disaster. This technology always works.

But everyone doesn’t have equal access to this resource. From cable, cabinet, and so on, to an internet service provider (ISP) that will provide the connection for us, previous payment, a payment that is completely arbitrary, i.e., in Ethiopia, a 60 Mbps ADSL internet monthly bill costs less than $400 and in Ukraine, the same connection cost about $6 per month.

This huge gap leaves millions of people from using this technology for multiple purposes from education to finance, causing one of the best means of payment on the internet is through blockchain.

What does decentralization mean to you?

For me, everything that doesn’t require a center “failure“ point, that it can work every day without specific authorization or authority that tells me what and when doing my stuff if I want to a wire bank transfer on Saturday or Sunday, I don’t care if the bank is closed, I need to process the money transfer as soon I press the button to send money (problem partially solved with digital banking and instant wire bank transfer for SEPA users).

I want to publish my stuff, articles, books, apps without a middleman that can censor me or ban me, directly or indirectly even with some moderator for publishing a controversial article, like the ban I have on r/Bitcoin and also other subreddit of other blockchains.

To me, decentralization means freedom, freedom to do what I want, when I want (in a law frame, of course),

I don’t want to fear to post or saying something bad or different from common and public opinion.

Did You know? I’ve started writing on HackerNoon after my Medium account was closed, and I was banned from writing there.

What is the best thing about decentralized internet?

The astonishing thing about a decentralized internet is the ability to log in with my wallet, any kind of wallet that I prefer, not imposed from someone, linking my profile, and seeing my items linked to my blockchain address/account.

Another cool thing is the versatility of access cause I can log in from my smartphone, PC, or even a simple browser. The “hardware“ problem is not a problem here as we are letting all people have access to it with their choice and without spending too much on hardware.

Moreover, no one can steal my items or censor my things, i.e., I can log in to a writing platform or social network with my blockchain wallet and make posts or comments without problem, and without giving away my information like email or some dubious consensus to some ToS for some company that will resell my data for money for itself.

A cool project, in this case, is Violet Garden, a social media on EOS blockchain where You can log in with Your EOS account and post, comment, and make several things directly on the blockchain.

Are you currently directly or indirectly working on the decentralized internet use case? We would love to know more about it.

One of the things I want to resolve is creating some platform to let book authors decentralize their books, cause in this field, often authors are victims of the publisher that has a big influence even on the royalties for the author.

A platform where anyone can publish his book in an autonomous and independent way is not easy to do, especially for a paperback copy for the expensive cost of self-publishing something like that, but very easy if we take it all on the digital side and with blockchain this is possible.

I made several tests and strategies to link both physical and digital books to an NFT, more a prototype but all working without a problem and a great goal will be to create a dApp (decentralized application) on a blockchain where anyone can upload his manuscript and sell it for crypto, with 100% royalties without asking the permission of anyone.

What are the biggest challenges in the way of the decentralized web?

If we see the modern web, we can see that there is a written part, with articles and so on, a video part with several video portals like YouTube, and a storage part with the rest, and all these things have something in common, space.

Space in the blockchain is a valuable thing, the more space you need, the more you have to pay. Even the famous NFT doesn’t upload his file on blockchain but uses an off-chain system represented by IPFS protocol for saving and limiting cost.

We have to reach a good tradeoff for saving big data on the blockchain at a low price, and of course, a blockchain can do different things other than offering space, even there are some blockchains with big blocks like Bitcoin SV.

Do you have any apprehension or fear related to the decentralization of the internet?

A problem using decentralized internet is pseudo-anonymity. Anyone can post anything on the blockchain, and someone can use it for a bad purpose, making it difficult even to find the culprit.

But some ways and clever solutions are on the way. For example, on EOS blockchain with the Eden EOS project, it is possible to authenticate the user of the account and link a person to an account, and with this, you can know who is behind that post or article. Integration made on Violet Garden, where decentralized social media is used only by real people and real accounts.

How do you see the future of the decentralized internet?

In my view, I want to see a decentralized ID system where my personal data are on blockchain in my account.

Some or all digital certificates are uploaded in my account with a dedicated smart contract, like an ID smart contract; all info is owned by me and shared by me to whoever I want. EOS blockchain has advantages because the RAM resource can store anything, which is more like a digital SSD on the EOS blockchain.

Thank you for your time! Any closing thoughts/advice for the readers?

If you find a closed-door or no one is listening to your ideas, giving up isn’t the answer, instead find alternatives and ways to keep on going and keep sharing your stories, your ideas.

No one can stop your signal!