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.[1]
How fast is the Internet Computer?
The most helpful way to way to answer this question is by choosing a vantage point.
From the point of view of an app user (what kind of dapps are possible)
From the point of view of a user of a dapp, the IC is "fast" enough that app consumers would have no idea that it runs with a blockchain under the hood (or Azure or IBM or AWS). It would be comparable to centralized compute providers. This means that while it would be extremely tricky to "build an Airbnb web app on (traditional) smart contracts" because of the slow user experience, developers can create "Airbnb web app on the Internet Computer".
That is how apps like OpenChat (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PjMIY2w480I), LinkedUp, Distrikt can provide a good user experience.
From the point of view of a dapp developer (latency of calls)
There will be two relevant factors:
a. How fast can an app READ data from a backend on the IC - Apps can make query calls to canisters (which hold state) so it can read data in less than a second (targeting under 200 milliseconds, and regularly hit under 250 milliseconds).
b. How fast can an app WRITE data to a backend on the IC - Apps can make UPDATE calls. These go through consensus so they take more time. Target is 2 seconds currently (with constant work to decrease that further). Compared to BTC or ETH, this is orders of magnitude faster. Compared to centralized compute, this MAY seem slow at first, but actually, if you take into account the amount of replication across servers in most stacks, it is par for the course.
Yes, currently, canisters are single-threaded... but as Dom has mentioned at events, we are working on that too.
From the POV of blockchain measurements (Blocks per second & Transactions per second)
The IC is "unbounded" which means that, unlike most other protocols, it can add throughput by adding more machines. To double the calls per second... we would just add more subnets. This is a key point in what we mean by the IC being "unbounded." At the time of this writing, it is processing 25 blocks per second: https://dashboard.internetcomputer.org/
In a recent test of the IC's throughput capacity the network clocked 300,000 (TPS) transactions per second. For comparison, Visa's payment is capable of processing 24,000 to 56,000 payment transactions per second.