The author | Li Hao
Edited by | Zhao
Tim Berners Lee, the father of the World Wide Web in 2020, expressed disappointment with the current Internet table in an interview with Vanity Fair magazine, saying that "the spirit of the Internet should be decentralized, but in some companies have treated the Internet as a monopoly alliance".
Recently, the Monopoly of the Internet is well known, and when the domestic anti-monopoly penalty of 18.2 billion yuan was imposed on Ali and 3.442 billion yuan on the Meituan, Some people on Weibo constantly shouted out that "the world has been suffering for a long time".
At the same time as the domestic anti-monopoly law was implemented, people also began to closely discuss how to recover the power of the Internet giants so that they could not monopolize the entire Internet.
At a U.S. hearing on Jan. 7, Brian Brook, CEO of Bitfury Group, popularized the concept of Web 3.0 to lawmakers present.
Brian Brook believes that in the Internet 1.0 era, users can only access information, not edit information, so Web 1.0 is characterized by read-only.
In the Web 2.0 era, users can read and write Internet information, such as the WeChat public account we use, Weibo, etc., and everyone can become a creator.
But this also gives rise to a problem, the platform power is too large, users become a vague single data existence that can be arbitrarily manipulated.
Even after former US President Trump made unfavorable remarks against Internet companies on Twitter, Twitter could directly block the accounts of former US presidents on social media.
In the Web 2.0 era, users' online identities on the Internet are more like renting from centralized companies, so accounts are vulnerable to risks such as hacking, operation, censorship, loss, and blocking.
On this basis, Brian Brook gave the definition of Web 3.0: readable, writable, and ownable.
After Brian Brook popularized Web 3.0, some of the members of the lawmakers who attended the hearing shouted in public that Web 3.0 must be guaranteed to happen in the United States.
What is the era of Web 3.0? Why is it so important? Is Web 3.0 a "panacea"?
We try to make people understand these three issues in the form of cases.
Web 3.0 launches a new form of organization
Before we can understand Web 3.0, we need to understand a concept that has been hot in recent years.
Few people realize that the application in the blockchain, Token, may be the greatest institutional innovation in recent years, which goes beyond the shareholding system and may truly transform the Internet from the information age into the value age.
Not long ago, there was a bizarre incident in the financing circle, on Twitter, an organization called Concept DAO tweeted that it would participate in the auction of one of the official editions of the 1787 U.S. Constitution exhibited by Sotheby's, which was extremely precious, there were only 13 copies in the world, and because we lacked funds, we could only take the form of crowdfunding.
After the news was released, a large number of netizens mocked on Twitter, "If you want to bid for the U.S. Constitution, you need to get tickets to Sotheby's, and the admission ticket for this auction is at least $10 million." ”
ConstitutionDAO has no funds but has a brain idea, on Twitter shouted to Twitter netizens that they now want to crowdfund the auction of the "U.S. Constitution", after the auction all donors will be able to vote to determine the "U.S. Constitution" exhibition route, as well as get the specific dividends after the exhibition.
To maintain the authenticity of their own words, Constitution DAO leaders launched a crowdfunding portal on Juicebos and used blockchain technology to "decentralize" their rights.
Netizens will also obtain different amounts of voucher tokens "people" by virtue of the number of donations after donations, which is a unique and immutable token, which represents the proportion of dividends and voting rights after crowdfunding, and is also the only proof of participation in the bidding for the U.S. Constitution.
After the news was sent, in just 72 hours, 17,000 people participated in the donation, raising a total of more than 40 million US dollars, because they all wanted to buy the U.S. Constitution independently, most investors played the role of public relations, marketing, website development and other roles after publicizing and promoting the donation project.
Two days later, as the Conference DAO forwarded a news announcement of Sotheby's auction of a copy of the U.S. Constitution, and announced its participation in the auction and fundraising, a large number of users flocked to the tweet, and members from nearly a hundred DAO made the tweet viral by commenting and retweeting it.
In addition to the explosive growth of the previous two days, ConstitutionDAO raised about $2 million a day, and by the time Sotheby's auctioned the U.S. Constitution, it had raised $47 million.
However, the highly anticipated Concept DAO did not get its wish this time, and ken Griffin, the richest man from Chicago, narrowly defeated the Concept DAO.
Interestingly, the big reason for ConstitutionDAO's failure is that it was transparent in the fundraising process, the bottom line of the bid was figured out by competitors, and then the Concept DAO applied for a refund to each funder.
After the incident, the New York Times and the BBC made a big report on the Connection DAO organization, but their reporting was not about the win or loss of the US Constitution auction in the Sotheby's display, but on the Organization of The Concept DAO.
The New York Times commented, "In less than a week, blockchain technology has brought together 17,000 people who have never met before to achieve the same goal, which is incredible."
Sotheby's also commented that "it took us half a year to raise money for art to reach 40 million, and the Concept DAO took only a week".
Even the founder of ConnectionDAO tweeted, "Our project to crowdfund the U.S. Constitution failed, but I think it doesn't matter, we've made history, no autonomous organization has been able to raise $47 million in just one week, we used blockchain technology to do the first big fundraising for autonomous organizations, and all of it came from an idea to auction the U.S. Constitution."
Coincidentally, before the Federation DAO autonomous group released crowdfunding, a "decentralized" organization called "Krause House DAO" issued NFTs on Opensea with the goal of raising 1,000 ETH (equivalent to 24 million yuan) to buy an NBA team.
Although 24 million yuan is not yet enough to meet the NBA spherical one-year food expenses and daily expenses, the autonomous organization has raised an amazing speed after the project was launched, raising 400 ETH in just one day, equivalent to nearly 10 million yuan.
What exactly is a DAO? Why did the concept of DAO evolve in blockchain?
In 2008, with the emergence of the first Bitcoin, the concept of blockchain was put into people's eyes, which was the first transaction in human history that did not rely on human labor and relied entirely on the autonomous computing power of machines.
In 2011, ETH appeared in people's vision, he is like an improved version of Bitcoin, ETH runs completely autonomously on code, can be understood as an electronic contract, the treaty information in the contract is determined entirely by code rather than humans, ETH founders also gave it a resounding name - smart contracts.
Dao autonomous organizations are a group of organizations that do not rely on human labor, rely entirely on smart contracts to complete crowdfunding, in crowdfunding people rely on computer code to "decentralize" the leader of the organization, so that the organization's movements rely on voting to decide.
Taking the Connection DAO that auctioned the U.S. Constitution as an example, before the Connection DAO auction, netizens were informed on Twitter that they would put the donation address into an account similar to a "blockchain safe", and if they wanted to move the money, they needed at least 9 leaders to sign their names at the same time.
Secondly, throughout the process of mobile account funding and signing, all data can be viewed in the ETH browser, and internet users around the world can view the network movements of this money in real time as long as they can board the US network, and people can fully trust the code network.
The money is the equivalent of a bank account that the world can see, and his every transaction record is clearly recorded on the blockchain.
Since the Connection DAO did not succeed in the auction, we cannot see how the People (tokens) received by the US Constitution donation perform in the actual vote.
But we can give an example, for example, the parity put in $1 million in donations to the U.S. Constitution, and we calculate that the parity has one-in-47 vote in the U.S. Constitution based on a crowdfunding amount of $47 million.
If the U.S. Constitution went to the "Washington" exhibition or to the "Seattle" exhibition when voting for the exhibition, the parity faction held one-fourth of the voice.
And if the U.S. Constitution is $10 million after the U.S. Constitution is exhibited, parity can also get one-47th of the proceeds.
ConstitutionDAO uses blockchain technology to gain the trust and fundraising of 17,000 people, and only one person needs to complete 80% of the process during the auction. Today, the new concept of DAO still has unimaginable potential.
After Completing this feat, a large number of exchanges launched auction vouchers for the U.S. Constitution to document this historic event and make it the beginning of Web 3.0 , a fully trusted form of autonomous organization.
But is Web 3.0 really here? Twitter founder Dorsey did an experiment to prove that it is only in the transition stage of WEB 2.0 and Web 3.0, and Web3.0 is still just a concept.
Web 3.0 that can still be blocked
Some time ago, the concept of NFT became popular in the entertainment industry. Before Lin Junjie spent 500,000 yuan in Opensea to buy NFT assets "crypto monkey" to arrange his own MANA land space, and then there was Jay Chou INS platform "crypto bear", the digital collection NFT topic completely detonated.
Opensea is a digital collection NFT trading platform where users can create and trade NFTs, where digital collections can be your selfies, your paintings, or even your QQ avatars.
In just one month of July, Opensea traded $350 million in the veins of the digital collection NFT. After Opensea's announcement, blockchain investment team A16z led a $100 million investment in Opensea, and since then Opensea has also reported that it may be listed on the NASDAQ in the near future.
Opensea is also known as the native application of Web 3.0 in the market, because in addition to using email and telephone number login during the registration process, the blockchain wallet can also directly log in to Opensea.
The reason why using blockchain wallet login is known as Web 3.0 is that all assets registered in the wallet can be stored in the wallet, rather than storing digital assets in the official server. In this way, even if the platform fails, remember the wallet account password can still retrieve your digital assets and NFTs.
But the Moxie founders didn't believe Opensea was a Web 3.0 application.
Moxie created an NFT on Opensea and deliberately programmed the code in the NFT to look different on different platforms. (Depends on website IP)
Originally, after Moxie launched this NFT in Opensea, images of this NFT can be seen in its own wallet and in Opensea.
A week later, however, Opensea officials claimed to be removing Moxie's NFT, claiming that Moxie had violated their terms of service.
Although Opensea claims to have removed Moxie's NFT from its official website, Moxie can still see its own NFT in the wallet, but it is permanently removed from Opensea, and the platform can no longer buy and sell Moxie's NFTs.
It's like when we write an article, Weibo deletes our remarks on the client line, but there are still opinions about our speeches in local records and drafts.
Moxie dug deeper and found that the wallet app he used didn't really show the contents of his account on the Ethereum blockchain. Instead, his wallet application relies on an API to check which NFTs are related to which blockchain account, which is the OpenSea API.
Moxie said, "It feels like a resurgence of Web 2.0." A powerful platform successfully confiscated/deleted data and assets from his account without the user's consent".
However, there is a fundamental difference between what happened to Moxie and what happened when the Web 2.0 platform decided to delete user files or lists.
If Moxie uses a different application that checks the status of his NFT directly on the blockchain, then he can see that the NFT still exists. If Moxie changes platforms, the new platform will also show his changing NFTs, but in Opensea due to the administrator's blocking, Moxie's NFTs are not displayed.
Through Moxie's experiments, we can know that Web 3.0 is still not coming in the experiment, and the current situation is more like the transition period of Web 2.5.
Web3.0 is on the application side, and Web3.0 applications such as blockchain wallets, defi, decentralized exchanges, and smart contracts are booming in the blockchain.
However, in the real world, most people choose to compromise with Web 2.0 due to the convenience of life and the dependence on the path of Internet giants.
If you must say what era the Internet is in today, Web 2.5 may be the best description.
Is Web 3.0 the Internet of Value?
The Internet is perhaps the most important invention of this century. Over the past two decades, it has changed the basic nature of information flow in society: media, politics, journalism, education, social interaction, and so on. However, even as economic activity increasingly shifts from reality to the web, our online identities still lack true ownership and are still viewed haphazardly within the platform.
Blockchain is a special computer that anyone can access and no one can own. In our thinking, Web 3.0 is a new generation of value Internet designed by the Internet based on blockchain technology.
The distance between the Internet and reality is TOKEN (token), token for users is like the configuration of code and computer - they are one kind of person-to-computer programming scheme, the other is the incentive scheme between society and people.
At the beginning of the birth of Bitcoin in 2008, no one thought that the simple solution of linking users through tokens would cause a huge shock on a global scale. Later, the success of Bitcoin and Ethereum proved that it was simple and feasible to give incentives to people through tokens and vouchers.
It is increasingly perceived that emotions such as issuing tokens for the same dream and forming autonomous organizations, taking advantage of human weaknesses such as "money incentives", "greed of desire", "desire for opportunities", and "fear of loss" will affect the degree of human contribution to the entire project.
As normal people, human beings themselves are genetically set to find more economic returns and make events transparent.
In the first case, for example, ConstitutionDAO used blockchain capabilities to bring together 17,000 people while accomplishing a goal of raising $47 million in just one week.
Even when achieving the goal, users will spontaneously form public relations, marketing, marketing and other autonomous personnel to accelerate the speed of achieving the goal.
In this event, what binds everyone together is the token people used for donations, which is an extremely important part of the blockchain.
The "people" vouchers issued in the ConstitutionDAO donation reduce the entire organization into a decentralized, "distributed community of interests" without a core leader.
Tens of millions of people spontaneously walk together due to dividends, money, and honors, and move towards the same goal, and the ultimate motivation is to make the TOKEN in their hands successful and the value rise.
In addition, the creation of Web 2.0 did not provide a native identity for people, which is why we need to register an account for each website and store our key information in the platform server.
If it is in the early days, the form of account password may be just right, but there are currently billions of netizens in China, user names and passwords are no longer a safe mode in the Internet, and everyone on the Internet needs at least 50 passwords to manage their own software, and the software also forms data islands between each other, resulting in a significant decline in user experience.
Web 3.0 is to solve the problem of identity native, in the second case, although Moxie created a digital collection NFT in Opensea was removed, but as long as Moxie goes to other NFT platforms, it can find the missing NFT and list another platform.
And Moxie does not need to register as a user on other websites, just scan the blockchain wallet to enter the website. In Web 3.0, all identities are interconnected, and other applications can enter without authorization except for the need for wallet authorization.
In traditional enterprise Amazon, the top can decide who can read and write from their database, and who can see which part of it, and they can change this database individually. It turns out that this is also a source of power for Amazon around the world.
Web3.0 is like an independent thinking of the community in the Internet identity, in this thinking blockchain, digital assets, decentralized finance, smart contracts, decentralized organizations and identity interconnection, these blockchain tools have become a new situation for human beings to work together.
However, the scope and connotation of Web 3.0 is much more than that, it includes these applications derived from the blockchain and forms a new way of Internet collaboration.
The characteristics of its Internet platform include reading, writing, and owning information in the blockchain, becoming the monetary layer of the Value Internet, not requiring Internet platform authentication, counterattacking the sale of identity data, and developing new incentive models to make cooperation simple.
But now, Web 3.0 is still in the transition stage, under the united giants of the Web 2.0 era, the third generation of the Internet has not yet emerged.
Write at the end
There is a passage in the movie "Black Swan", "History is jumping forward, and it always jumps on the fault line that we can't imagine without thinking."
What exactly is Web 3.0? Judging from the current development of blockchain, it is difficult to say clearly.
But whenever the course of history is hindered, there is always a whole bunch of concepts that come out and push the process of society forward, and this is the case with the advent of the Internet, and so is the emergence of blockchain.
The emergence of ConstitutionDAO, which seems to be a farce in the Internet world, may have slowly and subtly carved the concept of the same ideal autonomous community into people's hearts.
Moxie's experiment shows that Web 3.0 is still in the development stage, and the entire process of personal identity and wallet can still be erased by the Internet manufacturers.
Web 3.0 is still in its immature stage, but Web 3.0 may become a sharp axe to break the era of Internet centralization.
It's time to build a better internet, which is the end of crypto fund venture capital A16Z's recent Web 3.0 investment summary.
Perhaps it is also the lifelong cry of the Internet era that is about to enter a new generation of value networks.
Resources:
Tiger Sniff "What is the DAO that even the grandmother asks?" 》
Planet Daily's "Opinion Debate on WEB3, Who Moved My JPEG?" 》