Partnered With:

Re-understanding the Internet: What is Web3.0 and what is it not?

Read this article in 30 Minutes

The main context of Web3.0.

Original Title: "Carding the Concept of Web3.0"

Author: Mike Tang, Lester p

Foreword

With the Bitcoin apocalypse (see: "Bitcoin White Paper"), a large number of new terms have emerged in the technology field in recent years. The meaning of these nouns and the relationship between them are not easy for ordinary people to understand, even for veterans who have been in the industry for many years, it is difficult to distinguish them. Because these concepts are no longer limited to the purely technical field, they are the frontier fields of multidisciplinary interdisciplinary.

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

Web3. What exactly is 0? and what isn't it?

A novice will be at a loss when faced with so many concepts. At this time, they often choose the direction represented by a certain term to study, which is completely fine. But it is also very important to grasp the wholeness, and these comprehensive materials, in the current Internet, are either some ethereal and grand utopian narratives, or simple display and explanation of some concepts. There is still a lack of systematic and logical sorting out of these concepts.

Due to space limitations, it is impossible to explain these concepts one by one in this article. The main goal of this article is to try to find out the main context of Web3.0 in this pile of concepts.

Imagination for Web3.0

Many people have various imaginations for Web3.0 , the connotations of these imaginations can be described as varied in thousands of ways. "Liu Yi: Is Web 3.0 an Awakening or an Alarmist? A brief summary of the intellectual history of Web 3.0 in the book is as follows:

What is Web3.0? The Internet is currently in the stage of Web2.0, and Web3.0 is the design and vision of the next-generation Internet. Fifteen years ago, Sir Tim Bernard-Lee, the inventor of the Web, believed that the current limitation of the Internet is that HTML is for people to read, without metadata, and cannot be understood by machines. Therefore, data should be endowed with meaning, and smarter and more automated Internet applications should be developed, so as to realize Web3.0, that is, the Semantic Web (Sblockquoteantic Web). But about 5 years ago, Sir Lee's views on the next-generation Internet changed. He launched the Internet Magna Carta movement, calling on users and practitioners to have a broad discussion on the future of the Internet.

Dr. Gavin Wood, the founder of Ethereum and Polkadot, proposed a revolutionary Web3.0 idea in 2014, and then launched the Web3 Fund meeting. His philosophy is: Web3 is a broad set of movements and protocols launched to make the Internet more decentralized, verifiable, and secure; the vision of Web3 is to realize a serverless, decentralized Internet, that is, users control their own identities, data The Internet of fate; Web3 will launch a new global digital economic system, create new business models and new markets, break platform monopoly, and promote extensive, bottom-up innovation.

The two masters are trying in different directions.

Tim Bernard-Lee personally initiated the Sopd project, which aims to allow users to control the data and content they generate on the Web, and to choose how the data is used. The core of Sopd is Sopd POD, a personal data storage system. All the data you generate online are stored in Sopd POD, such as your contacts, your photos and comments. Users can choose to store Sopd POD on their home computers , or a selected online Sopd POD provider (such as Inrupt founded by Berners-Lee), all your data is in your own hands, you can freely add or delete data, grant permissions to others or applications to read or write parts Sopd POD data, no synchronization is required, because your data is always with you. This platform needs the support of developers to really produce results. It is hard to imagine that a centralized platform will support this decentralized platform that cannot control data.

Gavin Wood founded the Polkadot project to provide out-of-the-box shared security guarantees and an interoperable multi-chain network architecture for Various parachain projects carrying the mission of Web3.0 create an innovative platform. Dr. Gavin defined Polkadot as a layer0 project, that is, the platform of platforms (The platform of platforms). Taking this platform as the root, we look forward to blooming a new era of infinite branches and borderless application networks, which will gradually erode and replace the existing Web2.0 Internet.

Of course, there are more other valuable viewpoints in the industry, and they are trying in different directions.

In the face of these seemingly reasonable cutting-edge complex and even conflicting ideas, how can we effectively sort them out?

Web1.0 and Web2.0

Let us go back to the era of Internet 1.0 See if you can spot something of value. (The following part is translated from the Internet evolution in a16z's article "Web 3.0 and the Future of Trust" by Ap Yahya, which has been abridged and modified)

< img alt="What exactly is Web3.0? and what isn't it?"loading="lazy" src="https://img.chainnews.com/material/images/e5a2476ab9375b65835e53ddf32f76ba.png-article">

The early protocols of the Internet are actually quite wonderful, TCP, IP, SMTP and HTTP, we call it the Web1.0 protocol, they were designed in the 1970s and 1980s, Adhering to the spirit of openness and inclusiveness, they are open standards. This means that anyone, anywhere in the world, can stand on an equal footing and build systems on top of them without anyone's permission. For example, hundreds of open source implementations of these protocols already exist. Currently, the code for those protocols in your phone, whether it's an iPhone or an Android phone, directly depends on these open source codes.

I don’t know if you have felt that the Internet is actually a very great thing for human beings, a miracle. The current global Internet is a large whole, rather than a large number of disjoint independent networks. More than 200 countries in the world, tens of millions of companies - they even have conflicts of interest - have magically gathered and operated on these same protocols, and connected to each other on top of it, without any exceptions.

In such a perennially differentiated world, this is unusual, how do we explain this phenomenon? It is actually the result of open source. Because the core protocols of the Internet are open source, no one can unilaterally control the Internet. Their emergence and support is bottom-up and largely neutral. It is precisely because of the stability of these underlying protocols that today's Internet ecosystem is built on top of them.

What exactly is Web3.0? and what isn't it?

The emergence of these protocols 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. However, open source is hard to make a profit! Therefore, the business model of these startups is to build closed-source protocols with property rights on top of these Internet open protocols. These protocols are the Web2.0 protocols.

What exactly is Web3.0? and what isn't it?

A handful of these startups have turned into the most valuable companies in human history, you sure Heard some of them. And then, also because of these companies, billions of people have access to great new technology, almost for free. This is a phenomenal thing. Until recently, none of these companies got enough of a name for this (for giving billions of people access to great new technology for almost free).

What exactly is Web3.0? and what isn't it?

However, a serious warning also follows that these technology giants of Web2.0 have Become a big intermediary and the gatekeeper of the Internet. Most of the things we do on the Internet today, such as searching the web, connecting with people, and sharing content, are forced to rely on opaque service code with proprietary rights developed by these companies, otherwise we cannot do those things.

Thus, these companies wield tremendous power over their users and third-party developers. With their control over all data, they control: every interaction between users on the platform, every user's ability to seamlessly exit and switch to other platforms, content creators' potential to be discovered and publish content, all capital flows , and all relationships between third-party developers and their users.

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

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

Just imagine, on top of the Web1.0 protocol, a giant like Google was born. And on top of a Web2.0 protocol like Google, can a new similar giant be born? This is something unimaginable (can't imagine how to do it). Google has become the gatekeeper of the Internet, and it will not let you do gatekeeper work on top of it. In other words, Web2.0 is already a leaf of the technology tree and has come to an end.

So we have to go back to the original state to think, not based on the services of these gatekeepers, but based on the open Web1.0: how do we From "Don' be evil" (Google has given up) to "Can't be evil". Never do evil, evolved to be unable to do evil.

Further analysis of the protocol

The open protocol of Web1.0 has changed today's Internet possible. However, 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 data storage protocols, data-based computing protocols, and so on.

The Web 2.0 tech giants have gone one step further by providing closed-source versions of these missing protocols, thus building powerful business models (which is why they emerged essential reasons).

Web2.0 has the following characteristics:

●Platform economy. The platform will eventually become a monopoly
●Privacy for services
The data is owned by the platform. The profits generated by any mining and processing of data belong to the platform.
Some occupations that rely on the platform to survive have no pricing power in the distribution of platform benefits

Simply put, Web2.0 makes the platform the richest and most powerful party, and everyone is working for the platform. This platform model is unlikely to break through from within. For a more detailed analysis, please see: "Liu Yi: Is Web 3.0 a constant statement or an alarmist? ".

Web2.0, the data is completely controlled by the enterprise, there will be the following problems:

● Data is easy to leak. External attacks make data easy to be stolen. In particular, many internal data of enterprises are stored in clear text. Once stolen, all information is equivalent to being completely public
data is easily lost. Accidental loss of enterprise operation and maintenance, or hacker attack loss, or data loss caused by business failure and service shutdown, etc.
Data can be tampered with. Enterprises have the supreme right to their internal databases. In theory, they can modify any data (such as deleting evil records), even if they use so-called pure incremental databases
The data will be reviewed. Reviewing this thing is very controversial. Although it has positive meanings in some aspects, it has a very negative effect on the other hand
Data will be sold in packages. This is actually a gray business model, so I won't go into details
Data islands. The data island phenomenon of competing enterprises in the same industry is particularly serious, and the mutual interaction of data is particularly difficult

There are so many potential problems in data, the core reason is that data is regarded as an enterprise The core assets, data and data usage rules are completely controlled by the enterprise. Ordinary users have absolutely no right to participate in it.

From the perspective of Web3.0, if the data depends on people or institutions, the above phenomenon must occur. And if the data itself relies on open protocols and mathematical algorithms, then it is possible to solve the above problems.

Some experts in the industry have put forward some opinions in recent years, such as:

Chris from A16z Dixon proposes "rebooting the Internet" (See: "Rebooting the Internet")
Gavin Wood says: "Today's Internet is broken by design." (See: "Why We Need Web 3.0")

What we need is an open protocol - just like Web1.0.

Inspiration from Bitcoin

How to do it? Bitcoin has given us some inspiration.

The idea behind Bitcoin is very interesting. It uses some infrastructures of cryptography such as digital signatures, open protocols of Web1.0 (TCP, UDP, etc.), And a very clever incentive structure to build a collectively owned neutral database, or distributed ledger, for recording Bitcoin transaction/payment data.

The innovation of this database is that its security is established from the bottom up by its users, and this user can be anyone, in any place, to participate in without anyone's permission. In other words, control over the database itself is distributed, with no gatekeepers. The challenge with it, of course, is that many of the participants are dishonest and would like to exploit the system for profit if possible. The genius of Bitcoin lies in its incentive structure, which allows the system to self-police (self-popcing). It does not put the only copy of the database in a "trusted" data center (this data center may be owned by a large company like Google), but each participant on the network holds their own copy.

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

The answer is that each participant in the network (called a miner) monitors the network and votes on the set of transactions they consider valid. The point is that they use their computing power to vote. For example, Apce is a miner. The more computing power she contributes to the network, the more secure she will help the network. As a result, the agreement gives her more voting power and greater rewards.

Importantly, the rewards paid to Apce are freshly mined bitcoins. So Bitcoin has done two things in one go, it exists as a currency, and at the same time it becomes a source of funds to guide its own security.

This idea is called Proof of Work (PoW). The internal logic is that you have to contribute security to this database 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 though they don't trust each other, they trust this database (distributed ledger) that they have been protecting together.

Bitcoin is the simplest encrypted network. It tries to deal with the problem of trustless currency - the legitimacy and endorsement of currency does not depend on human institutions, but on mathematical guarantees.

This is the idea behind Bitcoin, great! Of course, starting from this model, we cannot directly launch the specific form of Web3.0, but it will give us great inspiration. Bitcoin showed us that a reliable permissionless distributed system is capable of stable and durable operation in the real world. People have reason to believe that following this line of thought, a new world is waiting for us. Now the world's brightest minds are actively exploring along this direction (also accompanied by a huge investment boom and bubble).
Features of Web3.0

The industry defines Web3.0 in a variety of ways, and it is hard to agree, and almost all the beautiful ideals for the future are imposed on Web3. Above 0, this is not advisable.

We have summarized the characteristics of Web3.0:

Web3.0 must Be open
Web3.0 must be secure. Because it is open and safe, cryptography technology must be used
Web3.0 must be decentralized or distributed. Open protocol must create decentralization
The platforms and applications of Web3.0 must have native certificates, because decentralization requires the automatic settlement of the distribution of interests of all parties through certificates

Web3.0 will be A huge breakthrough has been made in production relations.

For the service provider:

The code (protocol) of the platform is An open
is not a company that controls the platform alone, but a community that owns the platform
The profits of the platform are no longer opaque, unpredictable, and flow preferentially to major shareholders (major shareholders may pursue higher Huge profits to modify the strategy of the platform). Rather, it is ruled, calculable, and predictably allocated to value creators in all platforms
The business model of the platform can still accommodate the mature business models of Web2.0, such as advertising, membership services, games, etc. The platform may give birth to a new business model
The platform will not be closed due to the bankruptcy of its main company like Web2.0, and the closure of a participating node will not affect the overall operation of the Web3.0 platform

For users:

App experience is still similar or consistent with Web2.0
Users are interested in The content you contribute has ownership, and you can get a certain return based on your content contribution to the platform
For the private data generated when you use platform services, you can clearly know the boundaries and uses of these data, and have certain rights to these data Decision-making power, which can be used to generate certain economic benefits
Confidence in the storage of some private data promised by the platform (because it is guaranteed by cryptography and the code is open source)
Users can own something across platforms Ownership (this ownership is guaranteed by cryptography, not certified by an organization), so that when interacting across platforms, these ownership assets can be authenticated and freely transferred

We sort out the historical relationship between Web1.0, Web2.0, and Web3.0, as follows:

What exactly is Web3.0 ? and what isn't?

Web3.0 is not a direct descendant of Web2.0, but more like a distant cousin. The core idea of Web3.0 comes more from the mixture of the open protocol cluster of Web1.0 and the field of cryptography. The operating business model and user experience of the Web3.0 platform are not much different from those 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 able to completely replace Web2.0 in all fields, but it will definitely be in some fields, especially those with obvious network effects breakthroughs in the field. For example: social media, UGC content platform (blog, question and answer, etc.), original content (such as music, art, books, etc.) distribution platform and other fields.

Conclusion

We use a picture to summarize the core elements of Web3.0:

What exactly is Web3.0? and what isn't?

The picture is 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 the 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 benefit distribution on the basis of motivating people's subjective initiative and value creation. The distribution of benefits is closely related to the form of organization. This is where blockchain can play a role, and these details will be explained in detail in the next article "Why Web3.0 Needs Blockchain".

Web3.0 is not building a castle in the air on a blank land, it is dedicated to solving the deep-seated problems in the development of human society.