MegaUpload creator Kim Dotcom is looking to reinvent the future if the Internet with the help of your smartphone, or 100 million smartphones that is. At the ongoing SydStart business startup conference in Sydney, he revealed a teaser into his next online project called MegaNet.
The Internet is getting less and less decentralized
Maybe you fret with the amount of information sought out about you by surveillance bodies like the NSA? Maybe tech companies like Google and Facebook having the personal information on hundreds of millions of users on their servers bothers you? Maybe you feel being online shouldn’t make you an unclaimed victim of identity theft in the future? Kim Dotcom and his proposed MegaNet decentralized Internet looks to cure the growing ills of the current Internet protocol.
.@KimDotcom speaking about privacy and MEGA Net at #sydstart ? pic.twitter.com/zhHHiUsAHl
— Omar ✌ (@omaridau) October 29, 2015
According to Kim Dotcom, the key to a safer, more secure and decentralized Internet will lie within blockchain technology, or a version of Bitcoin’s original concept. He has spent two years working on the program, and basically turning the Internet into a encrypted, decentralized smartphone app. In general terms, here’s how it works:
"If you have 100 million smartphones that have the MegaNet app installed, we'll have more online storage capacity, bandwidth and calculating power than the top 10 largest websites in the world combined," Dotcom claims. "Over the years with these new devices and capacity, especially mobile bandwidth capacity, there will be no limitations. We are going to use very long keys, systems that will not be reverse engineered or cracked by any supercomputer.
He added:
“I hope this will be one of many approaches to try and stop governments from taking control of this beautiful thing that's the Internet.”
Dotcom says it will use a faster version of blockchain technology to exchange data globally. There will be no IP addresses within MegaNet, like the current Internet IpV4 protocol uses for enhanced user security. Yet, it will use the current Internet protocol initially as a “dumb pipe” to get the ball rolling. He and his staff are working on a new type of encryption that will work regardless of how MegaNet is accessed. Bandwidth would come from Wi-Fi use and when the phone is idle, so no charges would come through an IP.
Thank you @sydstart for the opportunity to present MegaNet to your large crowd. A new Internet is coming. https://t.co/o19bEDyHKy
— Kim Dotcom (@KimDotcom) October 29, 2015
Is this anywhere near reality?
It may be closer than you think. Given the fact that he is close enough to completion to do a presentation at SydStart, Dotcom believes his company can be ready for seed investment capital funding in January 2016. From there, the plan is to build a working prototype and engage in crowdfunding for the completion of MegaNet.