Beaker is a new, decentralized web browser. Ah, I hear you say, so it’s a Mozilla for blockchain? A Chrome for crypto? Actually, no. That’s because Beaker doesn’t use blockchain. It uses a peer-to-peer network model, similar to BitTorrent.
You may ask why I am profiling a non-blockchain app on Blocksplain. Well, I started this site partly because I’m fascinated by decentralization on the Web, as a means of taking power back from the Digital Oligarchy (Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google). While blockchain and cryptocurrencies are far and away the most promising tools to achieve a Decentralized Web, there are other methods too. Beaker is a case study of the P2P method.
Besides, I couldn’t pass up the opportunity of writing about a read/write browser! (the last time I did that was 2003).
Beaker was founded in 2016 and despite wanting to be a decentralized app, it quickly ruled out blockchain. Primarily because its founders think the proof-of-work consensus mechanism wastes too much energy. In a recent post, Beaker co-founder Paul Frazee wrote that “blockchains are a huge step forward, but proof-of-work is a total mistake.” He goes on to argue that blockchains do not require proof-of-work to provide value. “They’re separate concepts, and blockchains can work alone,” he says.
The Beaker founders aren’t the only ones who don’t like proof-of-work, of course. Ethereum is planning to phase out proof-of-work, once its own less energy reliant solution “proof-of-stake” is completed and ready for deployment.
Paul Frazee thinks proof-of-stake could work out, but he’s “waiting to see.”
In the meantime Beaker went ahead and developed its p2p browser without any blockchain. So where is the data stored, if not on a decentralized, distributed database? It’s stored locally, on the computers of users, and shared when requested using a p2p network. At least I think that’s basically how it works – Beaker’s white paper has a much more complicated explanation.
Let’s now look at the actual end product, the Beaker web browser. As already noted, it’s a browser built on top of a peer-to-peer (P2P) network. This means you can share files or entire websites with other users, on an encrypted p2p network.
This has some interesting use cases for creating websites. You can create a new p2p website or blog using Dat, “a peer-to-peer protocol for distributing and delivering websites and files.” You can also “fork” an existing p2p website using the same protocol, meaning you can copy an entire p2p website and make a new version that better suits you.
This is very cool, because it gets us back to the read/write browser that Tim Berners-Lee originally envisioned for the Web (and which also inspired the name of my previous blog, ReadWriteWeb). Louis Center had a nice slide about this in a recent presentation about Beaker:
To enable this read/write functionality, Beaker allows you to directly connect to another person’s browser. As Center put it in his presentation, “the clients (a.k.a. the users) become the servers, so they gain the right to self-publish.”
If you’re still confused, check out this short video:
As you can see, Beaker has a neat interface – but it’s not especially intuitive for non-developers. That’s okay, Beaker is an experimental new type of browser and its early adopters will have fun thinking up new ways to use it. At some point you can imagine a WordPress.com-like user interface for creating a website within Beaker.
As well as the fancy read/write functionality, you can also use Beaker for ordinary web browsing. That’s because it was built using Chromium (the open source version of Google Chrome).
Beaker goes to show you don’t necessarily have to use blockchain to build a decentralized app. Although as Chris Dixon wrote in an excellent post entitled Why Decentralization Matters, there are ever-increasing benefits to be had in using “crypto-economic networks” (a.k.a. “cryptonetworks”).
I (kind of) get the technical reasons why Beaker chose the BitTorrent model over the Bitcoin model. But by doing that it’s missing out on the benefits of the token model – for example, enticing new developers and users onto their platform. While a read/write browser has some appeal to me, I worry that not enough other people have an incentive to try Beaker. That’s something the blockchain model could’ve offered Beaker, as the project tries to get itself off the ground.
That said, Beaker’s founders seem open to using blockchain in the future. Perhaps they’ll figure out a way to combine the Bitcoin approach with the BitTorrent one.