What Is a Decentralized Private Network? | DPN v/s VPN.

When the Internet emerged, everyone thought that this could be the real freedom to humankind. Meaning you can make your own decisions, you can do whatever you want to do through the Internet.

But as time passes. The Internet has not become the stage for democracy. Instead, governments, ISPs and giant tech companies control all the activities you do on the internet.

To get us out of this censorship jargon, VPNs emerged, ensuring all online activity not been censored by governments and tech giants.

For making censorship-resistant VPNs encrypt your data and use a secure tunnel to transfer traffic to a private server. This way, your government can no longer track your address. Even you’re shielded from hackers and snoopy ISP providers.

However, one big problem with VPNs is centralization. VPN services are owned by private companies, so they decide how to handle your security and keep the log of all your activity to hand over to governments and compromise your security. Some VPNs can be vulnerable, so hackers can easily steal your data.

To tackle the VPN problem, a solution emerged in the form of DPN AKA Decentralized Private Network.

What Is DPN?

A Decentralized Private Network works the same as a VPN, but one big difference is all the activities are decentralized, meaning DPN uses decentralized encrypted tunnels to route web traffic in a distributed manner.

DPN does not depend on a single server; instead, all the user devices act as both server and client; the IP addresses automatically change based on DPA platform routing rules, establishing tunnels to other nodes all over the world.

Here is a small example of how DPNs work.

Mr A lives in India and wants to access US Netflix a DPN automatically barrows MR B’s residential IP address in the US to avoid being geo-blocked. At the same time, Mr C in China will be borrowing Mr A IP address to access YouTube.

As you saw in the above example, DPNs do not depend on central servers, and they encrypt all the activities. Blockchain helps DPN nodes to communicate and make decisions that impact the private network.

DPN v/s VPN.

Benefits of DPN.

Enhanced Security.

All the traffic flow through DPN is protected by encryption even though you may connect the Internet through someone else’s traffic overseas, but you are not compromised. Both you and the node contributed are protected using advanced encryption.

Privacy.

Shielded by encryption and the whole network is decentralized, DPNs do not compromise any data flow through them.

Provide Incentives.

Yes… Using the DPN, you can earn tokens by actively contributing bandwidth to the network.

For example, by contributing your bandwidth to DPN called Deeper Network, you can earn DPR tokens.

Cost-Effective.

Any premium VPN service would cost you around $30 to $100 in a year but using DPN you can save because platform tokens fluctuate.

Even physical DPN devices like Deeper Connect cost you around $500 in one time buy.

Ok, these are all some benefits of DPNs.

Now, look at some drawbacks of DPNs so you can get the complete picture of DPN before using one.

Drawbacks of DPN.

51% Attack.

If any malicious node gets control over the 51% of DPN, then the node can control all the network activities, but no such attacks caused serious damages to the blockchain networks.

Speed.

Because anyone can share their traffic, the quality of connections differs. Some may have faster connections. Others may use highly advanced security measures.

Originally published at https://ccoingossip.com on May 4, 2021.