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Web3 as a vision
It seems to be the marketing point for all blockchain industry projects, but multiple people say their projects will lead to Web3, but few can say what Web3 is.
The first Era Of The Internet
In the first era of the Internet - from the 1980s to the early 2000s - all Internet services were built on open protocols and controlled by communities.
As a result, large Internet companies such as Yahoo, Google, Amazon, Facebook, YouTube, etc. emerged, and the influence of traditional centralized platforms such as "America Online" was dramatically reduced.
The Second Era Of The Internet
In the second era of the Internet - from the mid-2000s to the present - software as well as services built by profit-oriented technology companies (still such as Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon) quickly surpassed the capabilities of open protocols.
And the explosion of smartphones has accelerated this trend-users are migrating from open services to these more complex, centralized mobile apps.
The good news is that billions of people have free access to amazing technology.
The bad news is that centralized platforms control everything, and they will worry about startups and creators taking away their users and profits, thus limiting the later to expand their influence on the Internet.
This makes the Internet less interesting and dynamic.
The Third Era Of The Internet
The response to the above phenomenon is for governments to take the initiative to regulate large Internet companies, just as they once did for traditional communications networks such as telephone, radio and television.
But there is a fundamental difference between the hardware-based communications networks of the past and the software-based Internet.
Once a hardware-based network is built, it is almost impossible to be reconstructed. Software-based networks, on the other hand, can be reconstructed through entrepreneurial innovation and market forces.
The Internet is the ultimate software-based network - a relatively simple core layer with billions of fully programmable computers connected at the edge. Computers connected to the Internet can run any software of the user's choosing for free, and software is the encoding of human thought and can be anything one dreams of, and thus has an almost infinite design space.
The Internet is still in the early stages of development: core Internet services may be almost completely re-architected in the coming decades, and this will be enabled by the blockchain - the Blockchain combines the best features of the first two Internet eras: a community-governed decentralized network that will eventually outperform the most advanced centralized services.
Why decentralize?
Decentralization is a commonly misunderstood concept.
For example, some say that blockchain promotes decentralization to resist government censorship, which is not the main reason for decentralization.
Let's start by looking at the problems with centralized platforms.
Centralized platforms have a predictable lifecycle.
In the beginning, they try to attract users, developers, and various partners to participate, which is to make their platform reach the multilateral network effect as soon as possible.
As the platform steadily grows in influence, their relationship with ecological participants changes from positive sum to zero sum when they reach the top of the S-curve.
At this point the easiest way for platforms to continue to grow is to extract data from users and compete with third-party partners of the ecosystem in terms of users and profits, i.e. to unload.
The serious consequence of this behavior is that visionary entrepreneurs, developers and investors tend to be wary of investing too much in a centralized platform - after all, there is the possibility of being shut down.
In addition, users of centralized platforms give up their privacy to some extent, as well as giving up control of their data, which is very vulnerable to security issues.
The above issues are likely to become more apparent in the future.
Into the blockchain. Blockchain is a network built on top of the Internet.
It uses consensus mechanisms such as blockchains to maintain and update state, and uses cryptocurrencies to incentivize consensus participants (miners/verifiers) and other network participants.
Ether is a general-purpose programming platform that can be used for almost any purpose, while other public chains have specific uses, such as Bitcoin, which is primarily used to store value, and Filecoin, which is used for distributed file storage.
Early Internet protocols were technical specifications created by working groups or nonprofit organizations that relied on the alignment of the Internet community's interests to gain adoption. Blockchain, on the other hand, solves these problems by providing financial incentives in the form of tokens to developers, maintainers, and other network participants.
Blockchains use a variety of mechanisms to ensure that network participants are working in unison toward a common goal - the development of the network and the appreciation of tokens.
But if the email protocol is decentralized, third-party developers can build their businesses on it without fear of Twitter changing the rules of the game and making the business cease to exist.
Blockchain is a powerful way to develop a community-owned network and level the playing field for third-party developers, creators and businesses.
We saw the value of decentralized systems in the first era of the Internet, and hopefully we'll see it again the next time around.
A core insight of blockchain design is the addition of economic incentives, cryptocurrencies are tokens built into a specific blockchain that provide a way to incentivize individuals and groups to participate, maintain and build services.
Internet services can also be conceived with tokens, but blockchains and cryptocurrencies can do something for cloud services.
It will take 20 years for open source software to replace proprietary software, and it could take just as long for open services to replace proprietary services.
But the benefits of such a shift would be enormous - we could trust the software owned and operated by the community rather than the companies, shifting the governing principle of the Internet from "do no evil" to "do no evil".
The Internet's past control over its most important services has gradually shifted from open-source protocols maintained by the nonprofit community to proprietary services run by large tech companies.
But the movement emerging from the world of blockchain and cryptocurrencies is building new Internet services that combine the power of modern centralized services with the community-driven spirit of the original Internet, and we should embrace it.