Continents vs Countries: IBC as a Borderless Transport Layer
The physical world is divided along country lines. Traveling between countries in the physical world requires you to have a passport, potentially get a VISA, learn a new language and hop on a flight between international airports for quicker transit times. There are also other issues with currency conversion, different voltages and mismatched electrical outlets.
There are no countries in the virtual world. The web is borderless. Think of it as one giant continent. Any node can join the internet and open a connection to any another node that also speaks TCP. Anyone can be a middle hop in a TCP connection and there are no gatekeepers or forced routes (minus certain country level firewalls).
The web is borderless because all of its participants agree on standard networking protocols - TCP/IP & UDP. There is no need for specialized translation nodes since every node is speaking the same language. This networking standard is key in making the web interoperable.
It’s kind of ironic that the centralized web is borderless while the decentralized web (web3) is heavily fragmented. Web3 currently consists of an ever growing number of countries. No ecosystem agrees on a standard transport layer. Even within a single ecosystem like Ethereum, you have a proliferation of incompatible transport layers.
This is analogous to every country having its own language (some countries have many dialects). While it’s possible for everyone to learn everyone else’s language, it becomes increasingly difficult as the number of countries, languages and dialects grows. The interoperability protocols of today act as border control in this model. They gate keep entry and access between countries or ecosystems.
This is essentially a vendor lock in problem that comes with using Yet Another Interoperability Protocol ™. Every new interoperability protocol on the market claims to solve interoperability once and for all. But what they’re actually doing is causing more fragmentation.
Having a standard transport layer like IBC removes borders and allows all citizens (chains) of web3 to communicate directly with one another. Say no to creating countries and borders and say yes to an open and permissionless web3!