"Just because something doesn't do what you plan it to do, doesn't mean it's useless." -Thomas Edison
The Internet is changing again.
Over the past decade, Internet-based services have trended toward centralization. Today, a handful of companies control the platforms we use to search for information, store our personal data, manage our online identities, and communicate publicly and privately.
Meanwhile, a seemingly unrelated set of technologies is being developed on the fringes of the tech industry, from encrypted messaging to digital currencies. In this loose community, "web 3" has become an umbrella term for a vision of a new and better internet.
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▼Neon city, fantasy technology scene
Yet we often struggle to articulate what it all means. How is "web 3" different from previous internet eras? What is "decentralization" and why is it important? How are these new technologies actually used? We spend years building the infrastructure to make blockchains more scalable - but who is going to actually use that infrastructure, for what purpose, and why should anyone care?
This article explains the vision of web 3 in clear, simple terms. In the meantime, discuss the core animation philosophy behind the many projects that make up web 3, and cite three key trends.
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01. Web 3 Reform
The internet has gone through major generational shifts before. These extend the performance, functionality and scale of the Internet. We moved from text-only websites to streaming video; we moved from static web pages to full-featured applications served remotely through a browser; we moved from list services to the global social networks that drive modern politics and culture.
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▼teamLab Borderless Tokyo
Web 3 is a different shift than previous generations. At its core, Web 3 has nothing to do with speed, performance, or convenience. In fact, many web 3 applications are slower and less convenient than existing offerings, at least today.
Instead, web 3 is about power. It's about who has control over the technologies and applications we use every day. It's about breaking down the dynamic that has shaped the web for the past decade: the trade-off between convenience and control.
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▼In web 3.0, immersive Van Gogh Museum
Web 3 rejects the premise. We can enjoy the benefits of the internet without handing over most of the power to a few companies. The above dynamic is not an iron law of the universe, it is simply a product of the technology available at the time and the choices we made along the way.
"Web 3" is a movement to build different technologies and make better choices. Rather than trying to replace the web, it's changing its underlying structure while preserving what we love—a reformation, not a revolution.
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▼"Ella Super" technology, human beings will find a way to prolong life
Web 3 does not only include "Cryptocurrency", blockchain and other cryptoeconomic design products. It encompasses any technology that helps revolutionize the centralized internet and puts users back in control of their digital lives. However, we believe these technologies are the most important contributors to the web 3 movement today, so this article will focus on them.
In this article, three trends are identified and how they are likely to develop over time is discussed:
First, money will become a native feature of the Internet.
Second, "decentralized" applications will provide users with new capabilities.
Third, users will have more control over their digital identities and data.
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02. Trend 1: Money
In web 3, money is a native feature of the internet.
In the past, the internet was just a gateway to the offline traditional financial system. But "Cryptocurrency" is digital in nature - sending a transaction doesn't need to interact with some offline system, it just needs to send a message over the Internet. We will soon be living in a world where "money" is just something the internet does:
Sending or receiving payments is now something any software can do, and by extension, anyone with an internet connection and a phone.
Digital payments will unlock new business models that were previously impractical. They will radically reduce the cost of certain transactions (such as cross-border remittances), enable new use cases (such as machine payments), and serve a large number of new markets (such as people who previously did not have access to the traditional financial system).
An ecosystem of basic financial primitives — lending, derivatives, exchanges — provides the foundation for more complex financial applications that anyone can use.
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▼Future city in the rain
"Cryptocurrency" is possible because Satoshi Nakamoto invented a way to support currency and payment networks without handing over control to any centralized company.
Bitcoin is decentralized because it is "controlled" by various actors, from large mining companies, to individual node operators, to core protocol developers. They all exert influence in different ways and to varying degrees, but no individual actor has exclusive power over the network.
"Decentralization" has become the core concept of web 3. However, it is often used more as a catchphrase than a precise technical description. Decentralization can refer to a large number of possibilities. If a platform is controlled by 20 entities, is it "decentralized"? 100? 10000? What kind of decentralization are we even thinking about?
Decentralization is not a binary state - it is along a spectrum of possibilities. Saying a system should be "decentralized" is a bit like telling an engineer that a bridge should be "big". Undoubtedly, but not very useful information on its own - we also need to know the river you want to cross and the load you need to take.
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▼Imagine the world in 2121. What shape does the world take?
Bitcoin is considered the only possible design of "Cryptocurrency". As a result, "Cryptocurrency" has become synonymous with specific political views about money, such as the merits of a deflationary currency.
It is important to understand that there are many possible designs for digital currencies, which may serve different purposes. Bitcoin enthusiasts believe that the purpose of "Cryptocurrency" is to allow people to choose a monetary policy that enthusiasts like, and its superiority is self-evident.
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03. Trend 2: Decentralized applications and services
The products and services that make up today's Internet are often produced and controlled by individual companies. If you use an Internet-based application, there is a good chance that somewhere there is a legal entity controlling it.
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▼The future will be a mixture of today's lifestyle and high technology
The promise of web 3 is that there may be alternatives. Perhaps we can build products and services that are not controlled by any single company, but still have a usefulness comparable to centralized equivalents. Like Bitcoin, these products will be "decentralized," although the rationale for decentralization and the benefits it provides may vary widely.
For example, imagine what a "decentralized publishing platform" would look like. This would be a social platform, like Twitter or Medium, that would allow users to share content, comment on it and "vote" for what they liked.
Such platforms come with built-in mechanisms to encourage users to contribute. Not only can users "like" posts, but they can also send each other micropayments, or set up recurring payments for content creators they want to support. The best Twitter accounts or Medium authors get paid directly on the platform without having to figure out some secondary way to monetize their massive following.
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▼Artificial intelligence machines and future sci-fi cities
On our decentralized platform, there is no central entity that takes a cut of the funds that users pay each other. The platform can even use inflation funds to create a reward pool that is distributed daily to the top positions.
The core rules governing our decentralized service are defined in an open source protocol, with which users interact using client software of their choice.
In other words, there will be various apps, all made by different developers, but all connected to the same social network. These clients may provide different functionality from each other, but all follow the same shared protocol, similar to how email clients all use the same standards to send and receive email.
Users can use any client they choose, and the client can implement different functions or provide third-party services. Because we're building on a decentralized protocol, client developers don't have to ask permission from any central company, and they can build their product without worrying that their API access might one day be revoked.
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▼A city with a sense of technology
Of course, we will still use products and services created by centralized companies. But these companies may limit the type of control they have over their products, handing more control to users.
This already exists in encrypted messaging apps, such as products like Signal (made by Open Whisper Systems), which never see or hold any customer communications. By designing their applications with end-to-end encryption, they intentionally limit their control over users.
Whereas early internet startups were committed to the ideal of "don't be evil," web 3 companies aim higher, trying to make sure they don't do evil—at least when it comes to specific kinds of evil.
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04. Trend 3: Self-control
In web 3, users will have more control over their identities and data.
Today, most of our online identities belong to other people, such as Gmail addresses or Facebook accounts. Web3 is laying the groundwork for individuals to control their online identities.
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▼Ennis Trepo, different scenarios can be reserved for us in the future, depending on our current behavior
But the same technology could allow people to manage any kind of blockchain-based data, including personal identities. The fact that we call these apps "wallets" is no coincidence - in the future they will not only hold your money, but also your ID.
At the same time, web 3 will enable users to retain control over their data. First, because users can choose to use their own identities rather than those provided by third parties, this limits the opportunities for identity providers like Facebook to obtain user data.
Second, because the advent of decentralized services means that in some cases, when you use social media, rent a house, or rent an apartment, there is no central company that can collect, store, and sell your personal data. In general, the larger reasons we use the internet will be through platforms and systems that do not collect data about us.
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▼Future technology can solve big problems, but for more small "problems"...
These companies collect your data because it is valuable. In web 3, the user gets the value. If you want to sell data about your personal browsing habits, you can do so directly -- but you get paid, not Facebook.
As we experiment with new mechanisms for digital asset ownership, individual users will have new ways to actually own the technology they use every day — an opportunity currently only available to entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and accredited investors.
Web 3 has hair of a different color, but has the same DNA as earlier web paradigms, decentralizing services on an unprecedented scale and centralizing wealth and influence on an unprecedented scale.
Web 3 won't be a utopia, and we shouldn't kid ourselves that it will be. If anything, the past 20 years should have taught us that technology is no panacea and that human problems exist everywhere on the internet.
Politics, power and control didn't disappear with the invention of the web, they just took different forms. The promise of Web 3 is that, at least this time, limits to power and control are a design requirement, not an afterthought.
