How Autonomi takes the online world beyond resilience

The internet promised resilience through decentralisation, and cloud promised massive scalability and global reach, and to be fair they've delivered - to a point.

But recent events have revealed that the cloud and the web are really built on a whole stack of fragile dependencies.How come when a single AWS data centre region goes down it takes all our favourite shopping sites and AI chatbots with it?

How come when an admin at an anti-DDoS service make a config error our music streaming, news sites and social media disappear?

And that's before you get to the current state of digital feudalism. The web is now dependent on a tiny handful of very large companies, almost all based in one country, and all determined to increase their power, wealth and reach by whatever means necessary. They can turn services on or off at will.

At the same time more and more software is only available as-a-service, making us increasingly dependent on this fragile edifice. And as the big players grow ever larger, any hack means billions of us lose our personal data to scammers and cyber criminals, who use it to carry out more crimes in a self-perpetuating vicious circle.In fragile systems errors compound. That's why a simple DNS misconfiguration can trigger an avalanche that wipes out half the web.

Through consolidation and interdependency, a once-resilient system has become fragile. When the hammer falls, it breaks.

Autonomi is anti-fragile by design

Autonomi grows stronger and more resilient over time and in response to stress - much as muscles improve the more sessions you put in at the gym. Let's look at what this means in practice.

• True decentralisation. Every Autonomi node is the same as every other. You don't need a massive data centre to run nodes - unlike cloud services. Instead Autonomi is powered by millions of independent devices - your laptop, your phone, your neighbour's computer - all contributing to a network that no single entity could ever control or break.

• True ownership. With Autonomi you are the owner, not the product. There's no middleman to mine your data for analytics, sell it on or rent it back to you. You and you alone decide who has access to your information. What's more, Autonomi is open source and managed by a foundation.

• True security. With Autonomi data is broken into quantum-secure encrypted chunks, with those chunks replicated for redundancy and spread all around the world. There's no honeypot for hackers to get their sticky mitts into, and if a node goes offline your encrypted chunks are automatically replicated to another node. Errors remain local rather than propagating.

• True resilience. Massive decentralisation, automated replication, end-to-end encryption, code transparency and an incentive model that encourages an optimum number of node operators eliminate the web of dependencies and concentrations of power that have made online services so breakable.

The web is like glass, hard but brittle. Hit it hard enough and it breaks. Autonomi is like the ocean: try to poke a hole in it and it flows and adapts; it has infinite options.

Of course, even anti-fragile systems have their limits - we're still dependent on devices, electricity and connectivity, for example - but by eliminating single points of failure we're working to ensure that anything that does not kill Autonomi makes it stronger.