FAQ

1. What is the Internet Computer?

What are the value propositions of the Internet Computer?

The Internet Computer is a blockchain computer with concrete benefits that make it the most powerful smart contract platform:

• scales infinitely
• provides a good user experience for consumers of decentralized app ("dapps")
• 100x faster
• 1000x cheaper (and predictable costs)
• can host all of the code of apps
• can update itself on-chain via community votes
• [Coming soon] Host open internet services

Some blockchain platforms have one or two of these features, but none have all of these.

Scales infinitely

Crypto protocols like Bitcoin or Ethereum (by design) do not grow in the number of transactions they can handle by adding more servers (e.g. miners). Bitcoin, for example, will handle the same number of transactions if there are 100 machines in the network or 1 million. Some networks have high transactions per second and there are optimizations that crypto networks do to improve this (e.g. roll-ups), but the Internet Computer has a simple property: its capacity grows by adding more machines to the network. That is it. That is the simple, but very unique, property that makes the Internet Computer "infinitely scalable." It does not mean the Internet Computer can handle infinite transactions at any given moment, but it does mean that to meet the demand for storage or compute, the Internet Computer can accept more machines.

Good user experience

Dapps hosted on some layer 1 blockchains suffer from a few pain points:

• Slow: The dapp is slow to load becaus the underlying crypto network can take seconds or minutes to process
• Insecure: The dapp is not really a dapp but hosted on a centralized cloud provider (e.g. AWS) because the underlying network cannot host the entire dapp. This can lead to insecurity.
• Hard to access: Many networks require users to pay in tokens for using a dapp. Not only does this make dapps not free to use (slowing their growth), it may also force the users to install browser plugins (e.g. Metamask) or wallets to even use the dapp.

Dapps on the Internet Computer do not have these problems. They are:

• Fast: Dapps on the Internet Computer dapps comparably fast to what modern users expect
• Secure: Developers can host the entire dapp on the Internet Computer's tamperproof environment which makes the dapp more secure.
• Easy to access: Dapps on the Internet Computer can pay for their own usage so they can be accessed by anyone without wallets or plugins. Example: https://h5aet-waaaa-aaaab-qaamq-cai.raw.ic0.app/

100x faster

The Internet Computer is very fast. There are two types of calls. "Transactions" is not the right technical term, but it serves in this case to paint a picture.

• Query calls: these calls take 200 milliseconds. They are used for reading data such as "fetch my profile image on the dapp I just logged into".
• Update calls: these calls take 2 seconds. They are used for updating data such as "send ICP tokens to Bob."

Developers can use both in their apps to provide a good user experience.

1000x cheaper

Building on the blockchain can be expensive. To use Ethereum as a concrete example:

- Smart contract call can cost $25 - Hosting 1 Gigabyte of data on-chain costs $1,000,000 per year

Internet Computer ∞ - Smart contract call: < $0.05 - Hosting 1 Gigabyte of data on-chain costs < $5 per year

Hosts all dapp code on-chain

Because of the issues of costs and speed mentioned above, most other blockchain networks do not host the entire dapp on-chain, but maybe a small part of it and host the rest in centralized cloud providers (e.g. Google Cloud, IBM Cloud, Azure, Amazon Web Services, etc...)

Can update itself via community votes

The Internet Computer can update its code by having community proposals that the community can vote on. This gives the power of the direction of the Internet Computer to the token holders.

Host open internet services

Enabling tokenized dapps and services built on the Internet Computer that can be controlled entirely by the community.