By Mike Tang and Lester Li

preface

In the wake of the Bitcoin apocalypse (see: Bitcoin White Paper), there has been a flood of new terms in technology in recent years. What these terms mean and how they relate to each other are hard for ordinary people to understand, even for veterans of the industry. Because these concepts are no longer confined to purely technical areas, they are interdisciplinary frontiers.

These concepts include, but are not limited to, the following:

A novice will be overwhelmed by so many concepts. At this point, they tend to go in the direction of a particular term, and that’s perfectly fine. But it’s also important to get a sense of the whole, and the overview material on the Internet today is either a grand utopian narrative or a simple exposition of concepts. The systematic and logical sorting of these concepts is still very lacking.

Due to space constraints, it is not possible to cover all of these concepts in this article. The main goal of this article is to try to find the main context for Web3.0 in this pile of concepts.

Thoughts on Web3.0

Many people have different ideas about Web3.0, and the connotations of these ideas are quite different. Liu Yi: Is Web3.0 a constant word or alarmist? A brief summary of the intellectual history of Web3.0 is as follows:

What is Web3.0? The Internet is currently in the stage of Web2.0. Web3.0 is the design and assumption of the next generation Internet. Fifteen years ago Sir Tim Bernard-Lee, the inventor of the Web, argued that the limits of the Web were that HTML was for people to see, without metadata, and could not be understood by machines. So it’s time to give meaning to data and develop smarter, more automated Internet applications that enable Web3.0, the Semantic Web. But about five years ago, Sir Lee’s vision for the next generation of the Internet changed when he launched the Internet Magna Carta campaign, which called for a broad debate among users and practitioners about the future of the Internet.

Ethereum co-founder and Polkadot founder Dr. Gavin Wood proposed a revolutionary vision for Web3.0 in 2014, and subsequently launched the Web3 foundation. His philosophy is that Web3 is a broad set of movements and protocols for making the Internet more decentralized, verifiable, and secure; Web3 vision is to achieve a serverless, decentralized Internet, that is, users control their own identity, data and fate of the Internet; Web3 will launch a new global digital economy, creating new business models and markets, breaking platform monopolies and driving broad, bottom-up innovation.

The two masters experimented in different directions.

Tim Bernard-Lee personally launched the Solid project, which aims to give users control over the data and content they generate on the Web and the ability to choose how that data is used. At the heart of Solid is a personal data storage system called Solid POD. All the data you generate online is stored in Solid POD, such as your contacts, your photos and comments. Users can choose to store Solid POD on their home computer. Or a choice of an online Solid POD vendor (like Berners-Lee’s Inruption), where you control all your data, you can add or remove it freely, giving others or applications the ability to read or write some Solid POD data without synchronization. Because your data is always with you. The platform needs developer support to really work, and it’s hard to imagine a centralized platform supporting a decentralized platform that has no control over data.

Gavin Wood founded the Polkadot project to create an innovative platform for the various parachain projects used to carry Web3.0 missions by providing shared security guarantees out of the box and an interoperable multi-chain network architecture. Dr. Gavin defines Polkadot as a layer0 project, i.e. The platform of platforms. Based on this platform, it is expected to blossom the endless branch application network without boundaries of the new era, thus gradually eroding and replacing the existing Web2.0 Internet.

Of course, there are many other valuable ideas out there that are being tried in different directions.

How do we effectively sort through the vast array of conflicting ideas on this seemingly plausible frontier?

“And the web

Let’s go back to Internet 1.0 and see if we can find something of value. (The following is an excerpt from a16Z’s article “Web 3.0 and the Future of Trust” by Ali Yahya.)

The early protocols of the Internet were actually quite beautiful, TCP, IP, SMTP and HTTP, we call it Web1.0, and they were designed in the ’70s and’ 80s in the spirit of openness and inclusiveness, they were open standards. It means that anyone, anywhere in the world, can stand on an equal footing and build systems on top of them without asking anyone’s permission. For example, there are hundreds of open source implementations of these protocols. Currently, the protocol code on your phone, whether it’s an iPhone or an Android phone, relies directly on this open-source code.

I don’t know if you feel that the Internet is a great thing for mankind, a miracle. The global Internet is now one big whole, rather than a mass of disjointed independent networks. More than 200 countries around the world, tens of millions of companies — even with conflicting interests — magically gather and operate on these same agreements, and connect with each other on top of them, without exception.

This is unusual in such a perennially divided world, and how do we explain it? It is the result of open source. Because the Internet’s core protocols are open source, no one can unilaterally control the Internet. Their presence and support is bottom-up and largely neutral. It is because of the stability of these underlying protocols that the current Internet ecosystem is built on top of them.

The emergence of these agreements ushered in a golden age of innovation. On top of that, business owners and their investors believe that the rules of the game are neutral and fair. But open source is hard to make money from! So the business model for these startups is to build closed source protocols with property rights on top of these open protocols of the Internet. These protocols are known as Web2.0 protocols.

A handful of these startups have gone on to become the most valuable companies in human history, and you’ve heard of some of them. And then, because of these companies, billions of people have access to great new technology for almost nothing. This is a phenomenal thing. Until recently, these companies didn’t get enough credit for this (for giving billions of people access to great new technology for almost nothing).

However, there is a serious warning that the tech giants of Web2.0 have become big brokers and gatekeepers of the Internet. Most of the things we do on the Internet today — searching the web, connecting with people, sharing content — are forced to rely on opaque service codes with property rights developed by these companies, or we can’t do those things.

As a result, these companies wield enormous power over their users and third-party developers. With their control over all the data, they control: every interaction between users on the platform, each user’s ability to seamlessly exit and switch to another platform, the potential for content creators to discover and distribute content, all the capital flows, and all the relationships between third-party developers and their users.

They also control the rules of the game. At any time, without warning, and almost entirely in accordance with their terms, these companies can change whatever is allowed to happen on their platforms — often stripping entire third party companies or users of all rights in the process. These companies have grown into giant monsters.

The story of the Internet, then, is that based on neutrality and openness, there is the possibility of value creation. And when too much power is in the hands of a few for-profit human institutions, it stifles innovation into an alarming state.

Think of the Web1.0 protocol that spawned a giant like Google. Can a similar giant emerge from Web2.0 protocols like Google’s? It’s unthinkable, ie impossible to imagine how to do it. Google has become the gatekeeper of the Internet, and it will not let you do the gatekeeper on top of it. In other words, Web2.0 is already a leaf on the tech tree and has reached its end.

So we have to go back to thinking about it, not in terms of these gatekeeper services, but in terms of open Web1.0: how do we go from “Don’t be evil” (Google has given up) to “Can’t be evil”. Never to do evil, evolved to do evil.

Further analysis of the agreement

The open protocols of Web1.0 made today’s Internet possible. But they are not a complete set of Lego bricks for real-world software platform services. There are still many parts of the protocol missing, such as the data storage protocol, data based computing protocol and so on.

The tech giants of Web2.0 went one step further and offered closed-source versions of these missing protocols, building powerful business models that are at the heart of their existence.

Web2.0 has the following characteristics

  • Platform economy. Platforms will inevitably become monopolies
  • Privacy Swap Service
  • The data belongs to the platform side. Profits from any data mining, processing, etc. shall belong to the platform party
  • Some careers that depend on platforms have no pricing power over the distribution of benefits

Simply put, Web2.0 has made platforms the richest and most powerful party in the world, and everyone is working for them. The platform model is unlikely to break through from within. For a more detailed analysis, please refer to Liu Yi: Is Web3.0 a Sobering prophecy or an alarmist one? .

Web2.0, where data is completely controlled by the enterprise, presents the following problems

  • Data is vulnerable to leakage. External attacks make data vulnerable to theft. In particular, many corporate data are stored in plain text, so if stolen, all information is completely open
  • Data is easily lost. The accident loss of enterprise operation and maintenance, or the loss of hacker’s attack, or the loss of data caused by the closure of enterprise service and so on
  • Data can be tampered with. Companies have supreme authority over their internal databases and can, in theory, modify any data (such as deleting bad records), even with so-called pure incremental databases
  • The data will be censored. Censorship is a very controversial thing, and while it’s positive in some ways, it’s very negative in other ways
  • The data will be packaged and sold. This is actually a gray business model, which I won’t repeat
  • Data silos. In the same industry, the phenomenon of data isolation is particularly serious and the interaction of data is particularly difficult

Data has so many potential problems. The core reason is that data is regarded as the core asset of an enterprise, and data and its usage rules are completely controlled by the enterprise. The average user has absolutely no right to participate.

From a Web3.0 perspective, this is what happens when data is dependent on people or organizations. It is possible to solve these problems if the data itself relies on open protocols and mathematical algorithms.

Some of the industry’s gurus have come up with ideas in recent years, such as

  • A16z’s Chris Dixon “Rebooting the Internet” (see: Rebooting the Internet)
  • Gavin Wood: “The Internet today is broken by design. “(See: Why We Need Web 3.0)

What we need is an open protocol — like Web1.0.

The inspiration of Bitcoin

How to do? Bitcoin gives us some inspiration.

The idea behind bitcoin is interesting. It uses some cryptography infrastructure such as digital signatures, Web1.0’s open protocols (TCP, UDP, etc.), and a very clever incentive structure to build a collectively owned, neutral database, or distributed ledger, for recording bitcoin transactions/payments.

What’s new about this database is that its security is built from the bottom up by its users, and that user can be anyone, anywhere, participating without anyone’s permission. In other words, control of the database itself is distributed, with no gatekeepers. The challenge, of course, is that many participants are dishonest and will want to game the system to profit if they can. The genius of Bitcoin is its incentive structure, which allows the system to self-policing. Rather than having a single database in a “trusted” data centre (probably owned by a big company such as Google), each participant on the network keeps his own copy.

This raises a question: how do we ensure that all copies of the database are always consistent, so that no one can insert a fake transaction?

The answer is that each participant in the network (known as a miner) monitors the network and votes on the set of transactions they deem valid. The point is that they use their computing power to vote. For example, Alice is a miner, and the more computing power she contributes to the network, the more secure she helps it become. As a result, it gave her more voting power and bigger rewards.

Importantly, Alice’s reward is newly mined Bitcoins. So bitcoin does two things at once, both as a currency and as a source of money to guide its own security.

This idea is called proof of work (PoW). The inherent logic is that you have to contribute security to this database in order to get votes and rewards. The result is an elegant incentive structure that encourages participants in the network to check each other out. So even if they don’t trust each other, they trust the database (distributed ledger) they’ve been protecting together.

Bitcoin is the simplest encrypted network. It tries to deal with the problem of trusting money, whose legitimacy and endorsement depend not on human institutions but on mathematical guarantees.

That’s the idea behind Bitcoin, great! Of course, starting from this model can not directly launch the specific form of Web3.0, but it will give us a great inspiration. Bitcoin has shown us that a reliable permissionless distributed system can be stable and durable in the real world. There is reason to believe that along this line of thinking, a new world is waiting for us. Now the world’s brightest minds are actively exploring this direction (along with huge investment booms and bubbles).

The characteristics of Web3.0

The definition of Web3.0 is very different in the industry, and it is not desirable to impose almost all the good ideals for the future on Web3.0.

We have summarized some features of Web3.0:

  • Web3.0 must be open
  • Web3.0 must be secure. Cryptography is necessary because it is open and secure
  • Web3.0 must be decentralized or distributed. Open agreements are bound to lead to decentralization
  • Web3.0 platforms and applications must have native tokens, because decentralization requires automatic settlement of the distribution of benefits by token

Web3.0 will lead to huge breakthroughs in production relationships.

For the provider of the service:

  • The platform’s code (protocol) is open
  • It’s not a company that owns the platform, it’s a community that owns the platform
  • Platform profits, no longer opaque and unpredictable, flow preferentially to major shareholders (who may modify the platform’s strategy in pursuit of higher mega-profits). It is distributed regularly, computationally, and predictably to value creators across all platforms
  • The business model of the platform can still accommodate the mature business model of Web2.0, such as advertising, membership services, games, etc
  • Platforms may spawn new business models
  • The platform will not be shut down due to the failure of the main company like Web2.0. The closure of a participating node does not affect the operation of the whole Web3.0 platform

For users:

  • The experience of using apps is still similar to or consistent with Web2.0
  • Users have ownership of the content they contribute and are rewarded for their contributions to the platform
  • I can clearly know the boundary and use of the private data generated when I use the platform services, and have certain decision-making rights over these data, which can generate certain economic benefits
  • Confidence in the platform’s promise to store some private data (because it is cryptographically guaranteed and the code is open source)
  • Users can have cross-platform ownership of something (the ownership is cryptographically guaranteed, not authorized by an organization), which allows them to authenticate and freely transfer ownership assets when interacting across platforms

We sorted out the historical relationship between Web1.0, Web2.0 and Web3.0 and drew the following figure:

Web3.0 is not a direct descendant of Web2.0, but rather a distant cousin. The core ideas of Web3.0 come more from Web1.0’s mixture of open protocol clusters and cryptography. The operating business model and user experience of Web3.0 platform are not much different from that of Web2.0. Web3.0 is an open protocol cluster, based on Web3.0 will produce more diverse and innovative business models.

Web3.0 may not be a complete replacement for Web2.0 in all areas, but it will certainly lead to breakthroughs in some areas, especially those with obvious network effects. For example: social media, UGC content platforms (blogs, Q&A, etc.), original content distribution platforms (music, art, books, etc.), etc.

conclusion

Let’s summarize the core elements of Web3.0 with a graph:

Image from new opportunities for Web3.0 applications

Web3.0 is a more open, fair and secure network. Its network form is not a simple upgrade of current Web2.0. The core problem it needs to solve is actually the distribution of platform benefits. Web3.0 should try to solve the problem of profit distribution on the basis of stimulating people’s subjective initiative and value creation. The distribution of benefits is closely related to the organizational form. This is where blockchain comes into play, as detailed in the next article why Web3.0 needs blockchain.

Web3.0 is not about building castles in the air on a blank ground, it is about solving deep problems in the development of human society.

reference

  1. Bitcoin white paper bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
  2. Web 3.0 and the Future of Trust a16z.com/2019/11/12/…
  3. Rebooting the Internet medium.com/dfinity/reb…
  4. Why We Need Web 3.0 gavofyork.medium.com/why-we-need…
  5. Liu Yi: Is Web3.0 a constant word or alarmist? Mp.weixin.qq.com/s?src=11&ti… JpcNKnovNPIc2umIuPPHuwzef7mKrD*sUhGCcH89SG2aUT5-9lp4nNxJ86S9HxLUQ&new=1
  6. New opportunities of Web3.0 application mp.weixin.qq.com/s/DxHSRASaw…