Where does the term Web3 come from?
According to
The first paragraph sets out very clearly the motivations for a web redesign, below with my emphasis:
As we move into the future, we find increasing need for a zero-trust interaction system. Even pre-Snowden, we had realised that entrusting our information to arbitrary entities on the internet was fraught with danger. However, post-Snowden the argument plainly falls in the hand of those who believe that large organisations and governments routinely attempt to stretch and overstep their authority. Thus we realise that entrusting our information to organisations in general is a fundamentally broken model. The chance of an organisation not meddling with our data is merely the effort required minus their expected gains. Given they tend to have an income model that requires they know as much about people as possible the realist will realise that the potential for convert misuse is difficult to overestimate.
A possible summary of this vision, back in 2014, would be something along the lines of — well, now that we have Bitcoin², we can rethink whether the model of financing the web by selling personal data remains acceptable.
Those were exciting days that brought conversations about the foundations of this possible new world. Two essential texts from this same year are Michael Goldstein’s “
In both
In this utopian world, the term Web3 carries a promise of replacing a need for trust in the powerful few (big techs on Web2) with something more widespread, auditable, censorship-resistant, accessible (in the sense of
But what about NFTs? Isn’t web3 something related to monkey JPEGs?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8f-BQFo7lw
Crypto Curious — South Park
Rereading those old texts today, many years later. One might ask herself what led the idea of a post-Snowden web to become synonymous with image collections, a marketing tool for opportunists, a
it seems worth thinking about how to avoid web3 being web2x2 (web2 but with even less privacy) with some urgency.
Moxie Marlinspike —
If you have two hours and want to know a very skeptical opinion of the NFTs I recommend watching this video: “
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQ_xWvX1n9g
Line Goes Up — The Problem With NFTs
Perhaps it is the natural course of buzzwords that carry great promises, to be co-opted by the marketing rush, and become meaningless.
Is there any wheat in this mountain of tares?
Does a hype as big as this still deserve attention?
If you follow where
I’ve also learned, in my career as a tech journalist, that when so much money, energy and talent flows toward a new thing, it’s generally a good idea to pay attention, regardless of your views on the thing itself.
By comparison, during the
I consider it important to observe, know and even participate with discretion, in the subcultures, memes and technologies that are part of the lives of young people and early-adopters today. For this generation, buying shitcoins, getting hacked, losing money, embarking on bogus ventures, dreaming of Lamborghini, spending their allowance on game items and skins, is part of the path of finding each other, finding peers, living, and growing. In a way, all these bad experiences are also schools.
A young woman who learns
A CEO, CTO, or company director interested in some
Reclaiming the term
To close, I think it is important to claim back this buzzword — to be once again synonymous with some ideas of autonomy, independence, sovereignty, privacy, freedom of expression — and direct our efforts toward a world with less concentrated power, more free software, more home servers, more robust and self-hosted initiatives, in short, a true Post-Snowden Web, after all, as André Staltz says, in his response
I like this tweet:
Appendix: Retrospective of the last eight years
From the origin of the term Web3, in those first years after Satoshi's gift to the world, until today, a lot has happened.
In the Ethereum field, we had ERC-20 tokens ; the wave of ICOs ; the "The DAO" hack ; crypto-kittens ; ERC-721 ; EIP-1155 second layer networks like Polygon, other forks, and alternate networks…
In the field of Bitcoin, with which I particularly have a greater alignment of values, there were the block size wars; the UASF ( BIP148 ), and No 2x movements that ensured important upgrades in the protocol; layer 2 Lightning Network has flourished, and continues to evolve (see recent Taproot entry ); privacy-focused wallets and exchanges; open projects of hardware wallets and homemade full nodes with a focus on usability; space satellite; demystification about home mining; El Salvador; Brazilian communities are talking more …
And, of course, the help that certain political arbitrariness gave to accelerate awareness that the separation of money and state is important.
Footnotes
- Ethereum: an “
altcoin ” that purports to be a “decentralized” computer, or, in the words of Gavin Wood: “a completely generalized global transaction processing system”. - You have to consider the context, Gavin Wood’s text was written at a time when people were looking for a “
Bitcoin 2.0 ”, he himself believed that Ethereum was this evolution and was selling this idea that his competing network was supposedly better. In my summary, I took the liberty of using Bitcoin, as it was the project that actually gave us what was not there before, it was the one that solved the problem of transferring value in cyberspace.
Originally published in Portuguese at Egoismo Duplicado.
Header photo by Wioleta Zakrzewska on Unsplash.
English translation by Marcio Galli and revised by me.