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Understanding Web3 from the perspective of Web2: capacity expansion and Web3 application construction methods

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How does the blockchain support large-scale users? How will Web3 applications be constructed?

Original author: jolestar

BlockBeats Note: This article is a series of opinions published by Jolestar, a Move language contributor, on Twitter. BlockBeats compiled and released the original text Click to view.

First of all, introduce Web3 to friends of Web2, you cannot directly use crypto The narrative needs to start with the difficulties faced by Web2.

For example, for many users, the banning of Weibo/Twitter account has more impact than revoking their company license. And this kind of powerful power will inevitably bring about the intervention and competition of government power, and the application will face the power agencies of different countries and will be divided by different legal systems, so the application has only three options:

1. Shrink the scope of operations to within one country, or split into multiple entities, isolate according to the country, and operate separately (slowly "donate" to the country? ).

2. Waiting for the global powers to compete with each other to form a globally unified set of international laws on Internet regulation and the like.

3. The Internet application ecosystem forms an autonomous system, where developers, operators, and users check and balance each other and redistribute rights and obligations.

Among the three options, option one is tantamount to giving up the Internet and acknowledging that the territory of the country also needs to be mapped to the Internet. The second option is unlikely based on the international situation. In addition, practitioners seem to be unable to do much, so there are only three options left.

Essentially, the third is to pursue the independence and sovereignty of the Internet. The Internet is equivalent to a new continent, and it needs to re-establish its own rules from the bottom up.

I don't quite believe that order can be built from the bottom up through marketization. Of course, this point can be doubted. After all, Web3 is still in the proof-of-concept stage. It is always possible to keep a little possibility, right?

An independent currency and financial system is required. It is also easy to understand that any application, if its business model is attached to the US dollar, is within the power of the US government. And with this wave of DeFi Summer, the prototype of a financial system is basically in place.

So now is it possible to directly access the application directly? In fact, there are still two key problems:

1. Expansion problem, how does the blockchain support large-scale users? The sum of all the current public chains is equivalent to the difference between a small ditch and a big river in front of the transaction volume of Web2 applications.

2. How will Web3 applications be constructed?

The expansion problem is a place where people outside the industry are prone to misunderstand, thinking that the blockchain is slow because these people are not skilled , this problem can be solved with new technology. In fact, this is a choice to achieve decentralization, or a necessary choice for a system without a super administrator. The main goal of the blockchain Layer 1 is to achieve the "bootstrapping" of the software system.

Of course, such a "bootstrapping" system is not purely a technical issue. , Whether it can grow or not depends on the weather and the harmony of people, and requires patience. Here, if the other party is interested in technology, you can continue to talk about how the blockchain works, how to achieve decentralization, how to ensure a game and check and balance mechanism, PoW, PoS, etc., but you can also skip it.

After talking about Layer1 expansion, you can talk about Layer2 expansion ideas. Understanding Layer2 purely from the perspective of expansion requires a relatively high technical background, but the problem it needs to solve has been encountered in the Web2 era. I wrote an article "Looking at the second layer solution of blockchain through the ofo deposit refund event" article, which is more popular, you can read it.

To give a simple example, users charge their own assets from the chain or bank to the Internet application, and the assets are under the control of the application. How can users protect their rights in case of an application error, or loss of assets in a malicious application?

The first thing to face is the problem of proof. The transaction records inside the application must be guaranteed to be accessible to users, right? This is the problem that data availability addresses. There must be a way to generate proofs through technical means, right? This is the problem that Fraud Proof Technology aims to solve.

Then it is how to arbitrate, Web2 can rely on the court, and Web3 needs to rely on a platform that can faithfully execute the arbitration procedure, and Layer1 plays this role.

Then we can talk about how Web3 should be built. This is an open question, but it is obviously not enough to just connect Web2 to the blockchain payment system. This solution only solves half of the problem, and the application still has absolute control over the user's data and assets.

It is a way to directly move the application to the chain as an application chain, but there are still problems of expansion and cost. Another way of thinking is to return to the original p2p network, and the application is a set of protocols on the p2p network. The key to the decline of p2p applications is that there is no payment system and identity system on p2p, and it is impossible to build a positive feedback business cycle, and the blockchain just provides this mechanism.

Here you can continue to talk about DID, SBT, DAO, etc., how to build a program-recognizable identity, reputation, and organizational system in the dark forest of the current blockchain. These are all big topics, but they are not so technical, and there are many points to talk about, so I won’t expand here.

Finally, we can talk about the metaverse again. What exactly the Metaverse is is debated, but let's first analyze what it isn't. First of all, if it is worthy of the words "yuan" and "universe", it should not be a fragmented digital world. Secondly, it cannot be a world with "God", and it must be bootstrapped. Therefore, maybe the blockchain, Web3, and metaverse are just multiple aspects of the same elephant, and we are just trying to figure out the elephant for the blind.