Written by: REN
Editor: HS
Typography: Li Xuewei
What is Web3?
If you can't answer, don't worry, you're not alone. The concept has been on the rise for quite some time, whether from the perspective of venture capital, media, or company announcements, but it's still hard for the general public to understand what all this hype is all about.
At its most basic level, Web3 refers to a decentralized online ecosystem based on blockchain. Broadly speaking, Web3 represents the next stage of the Internet, and perhaps the next stage of human society. Of course, this is all based on what you believe.
The term Web3 was coined in 2014 by Ethereum co-founder Gavin Wood, and was originally called Web 3.0.
Since it's Web 3.0, that means web 1.0 and 2.0. The former is a thing of the past and is characterized by the fact that most web activity is associated with a single static web page. The latter is the current era, an era of centralization, because a lot of communication and business activity is concentrated on closed platforms owned by a few tech giants, such as Google, Meta, Amazon, and so on.
From this perspective, Web3 represents a vision to break this monopolistic control---- Web3 platforms and applications built on blockchain technology will not be owned by giants, but by each user, who will gain ownership by helping to develop and maintain these services.
To achieve this ideal, Gavin currently operates the Web3 Foundation, which supports decentralized technology projects, and Parity Technologies, a company focused on building blockchain infrastructure for Web3.
Recently, in an interview, Gavin described what he saw as a Web3 proposer and his vision for the future. The "Academic Headlines" have compiled the key contents into a text, hoping to clarify the thinking of readers in related fields.
Attached: Gavin Wood, a British computer scientist, co-founder of Ethereum, and the main developer of the C++ version of the Ethereum client prototype, completed the writing of the Ethereum Yellow Book and invented the Solidity language specially designed for Ethereum smart contracts, known as Ethereum's "invisible brain". After the Prism Gate incident, Gavin Wood proposed Web 3.0, hoping that at this stage of the Internet, everyone can control their own destiny, such as our digital identity, digital assets and data.
1. Why do you want to have Web3?
Gavin argues that the Web 2.0 model is very similar to the social model that preceded the advent of the Internet, and the reason we're talking about Web3 is because Web 2.0 isn't good enough today.
If you go back 500 years, most people were basically limited to their small villages and townships, interacting and trading only with people they knew. Broadly speaking, they rely on social structures to ensure that their expectations (of the outcome of the transaction) are credible and are likely to actually happen, such as buying apples that won't rot in a short period of time – which also means credibility guarantees.
At the time, this mechanism was quite effective, as moving between towns was difficult, time-consuming, and costly, so many people paid extra attention to their credibility in order to stay in one place.
(Source: moralis.io)
It can be simply considered that Web1 is a read-only network, Web2 is a read-write network, and Web3 promises to provide an intermediary-free read-write network, that is, a decentralized Internet.
But as society has gotten bigger, we've got cities, states, and international organizations, and we've created a number of strong but regulated institutions to ensure a larger-scale credibility issue. In principle, they exist to ensure that our expectations are met. A classic example is if you want to do business in a particular industry, you must first meet certain statutory requirements.
This is not a good solution. One reason is that emerging industries are very difficult to regulate, as governments are often slow to act and take a while to catch up. The other is that regulators are imperfect, especially when they work closely with the industry, and there is often some revolving door relationship between the industry and the regulator.
Another reason is that the capacity of regulators is very limited, and the degree of regulation depends on the resources invested by the government. They may be able to rein in the swaggering criminals, but they cannot maintain a strong influence at all times, and the regulatory systems vary from country to country.
We need to cross that. Unfortunately, Web 2.0 still exists in this very centralized model.
"It's a broken model," Gavin says. "We need to solve this model of regulatory failure at a technical level."
2, less trust, more truth
To explain Web3 in one sentence, Gavin believes that its definition is "less trust, more truth."
In his eyes, "trust" has a special meaning: it is essentially "faith." It is the belief that something will happen and the world will work in a certain way without any real evidence or rational argument as to why this is happening.
In contrast, the "truth" in his eyes means that there are more reasons to believe that expectations will be met.
Further, Gavin believes that "trust" is not a good thing in itself. Trust means that you delegate some power to someone else or an organization that they will be able to use in any way they want. As a result, trust can become blind and no longer true trust.
3, break the monopoly, is it possible?
Among the set of visions that Web3 portrays, an important goal is to break down monopolies, especially those of platform-based companies such as Google and Meta.
Gavin argues that while this sounds difficult to achieve and he doesn't know if it will actually happen, he firmly believes that it is a logical improvement and should be unavoidable, otherwise it represents "the decline of human society."
He cites cryptographic algorithms as an example, which can help people implement encrypted conversations and complete the transmission of information that only participants know. One application that makes a name for itself is WhatsApp, which claims to provide end-to-end encryption that even the company that owns it can't decipher.
This looks nice, but the question is what if WhatsApp includes a key in its service that can decrypt all conversations? WhatsApp says that such a key does not exist, so how do you know it does not exist?
You have no choice because you can't see the code, you can't see the key structure, you can't see how the service works, so you can only believe its words. This is also known as "blind belief." Of course, it may be telling the truth, but that is because of the fear that if it does not do so, its credibility will be greatly damaged.
However, as we can see in prism doors, sometimes companies don't get the chance to tell the truth. Intelligence or security agencies can install tools in their back office and then, for various reasons, keep the company from meddling in those tools.
Under the architecture of Web3, blockchain can solve this trust problem very well. Openness and transparency are key, and we can analyze a company's infrastructure architecture and operating patterns to determine whether it's a Web 2.0 company in disguise, such as whether it's really a peer-to-peer architecture or still relies on a data center.
4. What is decentralization?
Decentralization is another focus of Web3, which is also the core of the spirit of the Internet, but at the moment it only stays at the level of technology and protocols. On a practical level, people's Internet activities rely almost entirely on tech companies.
In Gavin's view, decentralization means that "everyone can be as easy as anyone else in the world to be a provider or co-provider of a service."
But that sounds hard to implement. It's hard to imagine that anyone other than a small group of highly skilled programmers would actually be involved in providing any Internet service, and that might eventually evolve into a kind of centralization.
Gavin explains that "having the rights and freedoms to do it" and "fundamentally impossible to achieve" are two completely different concepts. If a person relies on his own efforts to provide a service using freely available resources, then he can be called a co-provider of the service, and the service will be free.
"It doesn't necessarily mean that everyone has to learn to code as a Web3 programmer," he adds. "I'm not going to try to convince you that everyone in the world can do that." But the point is, the more people who can do this, the lower the threshold, the better."
5. What does the world of Web3 look like?
Gavin thinks that the original Web3 application may be primarily a small iteration of the Web 2.0 application, but then Web3 will bring with it a financially obligatory or economically more powerful application — providing economic services between individuals in a peer-to-peer manner — something that Web 2.0 can't easily solve.
The cryptocurrencies we see now are only a small part of that, transfers are only a small part, and the economic services that Web3 brings can cover things that are very scarce, expensive, and difficult.
As a popular example, if there is a dating app that limits you to sending only one flower per day to the person you like, no matter how much you pay, you can't violate this, then this flower has a scarce attribute. If it's a Web 2.0 company that's running, it's definitely going to do it in terms of a commercial profit, as long as you pay and send as much money as you want.
So doesn't Web3 companies need to be profitable? How can we expect them to break the mold?
In Gavin's view, blockchain-based Web3 companies are fundamentally different from Web 2.0 companies. In the Web 2.0 era, the technology represented by programming makes users more powerful, makes them do more things, become richer, and can provide services to more people faster and better.
Blockchains won't do that. It is fundamentally different. It is actually a social structure, a new set of rules whose only function is that no one has arbitrary power within the system. As a user, you can be fairly certain about this, especially if you're a programmer, then you're better able to read the code and know it's doing the right thing.
On the other hand, you can also make reasonable inferences based on the number of users, because there are so many people using a service or joining a network with the support of some expectation. If this expectation is not met, they will leave.
Gavin stressed that Web3 is not intended to replace today's tech giants, even though the over-concentration of technology "threatens the services and expectations we have."
"What's more, Web3 is actually more of a larger social movement, moving from arbitrary power to a more rational model of freedom." It's the only way I can see to protect the free world, the life we've enjoyed for the last 70 years, and the only way we can keep it running for the next 70 years."
Source: Academic Headlines