Author| Lan Yanxiang Editor-in-charge| Zhang Hongyue
Listing | CSDN (ID: CSDNnews)
Since the second half of 2021, two new concepts have become hot topics of discussion, one is the Metaverse and the other is Web 3 (also known as "Web 3.0"). The Metaverse is a virtual world of full-real experience, which is both mapped from the real world and independent of the real world.
The concept of Web 3 comes from Gavin Wood, the co-founder of Ethereum in 2014. In his opinion, Web 3 is described as a "blockchain-based decentralized ecosystem". Blockchain is the cornerstone of Web 3 technology. By building a decentralized consensus network, blockchain technology enables no network participant to control the data and protocols on the network. Based on Web 3, people can formulate and supervise the rules of the game without a centralized platform, and a group of participants can unite to build a community (DAO); payment and settlement between people do not require financial institutions such as banks Provide "credit", point-to-point payment can be completed directly on Web 3; people's own identity and data do not need to be stored in a centralized platform, people can truly "own" and dispose of their own data; people can create "non-homogeneous "Nationalized Token" (NFT), so that songs and digital pictures created by oneself can also be collected, circulated and auctioned like sculptures and stamps in the past.
Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 Era
Since the invention of WWW by Professor Tim Berners LEE of Oxford University in 1991, the development of the Internet has brought earth-shaking changes to mankind. In the acquisition of information, from the initial portal website to the later search engine to today's personalized recommendation; in people's communication, from the initial email Internet phone to the current WeChat and WhatsApp; in the dissemination of information, From the original electronic media to social media, and now to self-media. The rapid development of the Internet has facilitated our lives and greatly accelerated the process of human knowledge accumulation and progress.
Generally speaking, the period from 1991 to 2004 is considered to be the Web 1.0 era. The main feature of the Web 1.0 era is that people obtain information from the Internet, and information and knowledge are produced and organized by commercial organizations; since 2004, the Internet has entered the Web In the 2.0 era, knowledge and information are more produced by users, and commercial organizations build platforms to organize and distribute information, and thus super-large platform companies such as Facebook, Twitter, Ali, and Tencent were born.
However, people gradually discovered that more than 20 years ago, the Internet was still a decentralized platform, and everyone could publish a website and then link to other websites. Now, when the Internet becomes a global infrastructure, some "BIG TECH" seem to control the Internet, resulting in the abuse of data privacy, killing of big data, induced clicks, information cocoons, group consciousness manipulation, etc. The problem has attracted more and more attention.
Shen Xiangyang, founder and chairman of the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area Digital Economy Research Institute ("IDEA"), proposed at last year's IDEA conference that "we should not only pay attention to the calculation results, but also pay attention to the calculation process." In addition, Professor Tim Berners LEE mentioned in an interview with the British "Guardian" after winning the Turing Award that "the system is failing" and "the Internet should be re-decentralized". In recent years, these issues have also received the attention of mainstream society, such as the EU's GDPR and my country's "Data Security Law", "Personal Information Protection Law" and "Internet Information Service Algorithm Recommendation Management Regulations" "On Strengthening Information Service Algorithms" issued by China last year. "Guiding Opinions on Comprehensive Governance", both regulate the collection and processing of Internet data and the application of algorithms.
Origin of Web 3
Since Satoshi Nakamoto published an epoch-making paper in 2008, "blockchain technology" has officially entered people's field of vision. In 2014, the invention of "Ethereum" made blockchain technology not only used for payment and transactions, but the concept of "smart contract" greatly enriched the application scenarios based on blockchain. Blockchain technology is a "unique technology" that can "make this computer system self-certify innocence within the scope of formalizing all business information." It can be extended to separate it from specific physical computing devices, fundamentally avoiding the computing process from being controlled by a single controller, so that everyone can trust this computing system[¹]”.
From this, people seem to see a feasible way to fight against the monopoly of large platforms, bring the Internet back to "decentralization", and allow value to flow to Internet participants more universally. In the eyes of technological idealists, this is simply the Internet returning to what it was.
The concept of Web 3 is a "decentralized ecosystem". This "decentralization" is not only the "decentralization" of computing, but also the "decentralization" of storage. In Web 3, computing is not done by a single participant in the network, but by the participants of the network. Although each calculation is still performed on the node of a certain participant, the consensus algorithm negotiated in advance makes it necessary to perform calculations in accordance with the calculation rules agreed in advance, otherwise the calculation results will not be accepted by the network. Similarly, in Web 3, data is not stored on a single node, but distributed and stored in the entire network and there may be multiple copies, which makes unauthorized modification and deletion of data very difficult. impossible.
Web 3 applications
Based on Web 3, the industry generally believes that there are the following applications:
Decentralized autonomous organization (DAO): There is no central person (such as the general manager) in the decentralized autonomous organization to manage the organization. The operating rules of all organizations are written in smart contracts, which are automatically run by smart contracts. The decision-making rules of the organization are transparent and visible to all members of the organization, which is very different from the current organizational form. In the current organizational form, organizational decisions are often made by a few people and are not appreciated by all organizational members. Know. Members are free to join and leave a DAO. If a DAO is well designed, it will attract more and more members to participate, and vice versa. The success of a DAO depends on the quality of its protocol design. The operation of the protocol is automatic, transparent and group decision-making, and is not controlled by any participant.
Decentralized Finance (DeFI): In DeFI, user-to-user transactions can be conducted directly without going through a credit intermediary. That is to say, on DeFI, payments and transfers between users do not need to be based on the user having a bank account, which enables DeFI to serve people in areas with underdeveloped financial systems. It is said that there are still 20 100 million people do not have bank accounts. At the same time, point-to-point direct transactions greatly reduce transaction costs.
Identity and data sovereignty: In Web 3, user identities and data information are stored on the entire decentralized network, rather than on a specific server or a specific participant. This enables users to truly have data sovereignty and be able to process their own data independently.
Creator economy: In Web 3, due to the emergence of "non-homogeneous tokens" (NFT), creators' works in the digital world can have unique warrants and cannot be copied. NFT can be either a mapping of items in the real world in the digital world, or a digital work itself. After the creator's work has NFT, it can be bought, sold, circulated, and rented in the same way as in the real world. At the same time, the absence of a centralized platform also enables creators to obtain more returns.
Different perspectives
For Web 3, a new concept that became popular at the end of last year, people always have different opinions. Among them, Jakc Dorsey, the co-founder of Twitter, criticized that "users do not actually own Web 3 products... In the end, Web 3 will be a centralized entity with different labels."
Twitter co-founder Jakc Dorsey
In addition, Tesla CEO Elon Musk also said that "Web 3 is more like a marketing campaign and cannot become a reality." Some people also say that Web 3 is just "a next-generation network infrastructure in people's minds, which can solve people's various dissatisfaction with the current Internet at one time, even though it is itself contradictory." Others believe that Web 3 is "a large-scale marketing campaign to channel people's dissatisfaction with the cryptocurrency field into a challenge to the hegemony of traditional technology companies." In short, supporters believe that the "decentralized" architecture of Web 3 natively supports an autonomous distributed network, allowing "power" to return to users more "inclusively"; opponents believe that only relying on Web 3 and This cannot be achieved.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk
challenges
It is true that Web 3, as a new thing, is now more popular in the Internet technology circle and venture capital circle, and there is still a long way to go before it can be implemented on a large scale. The author believes that the large-scale implementation of Web 3 must overcome at least the following three challenges:
Technical challenges: From the current point of view, the technology stack of Web 3 cannot be separated from the blockchain technology as the cornerstone of the "decentralized" architecture. To serve as the basic form of the next-generation Internet, Web 3 requires a high-throughput and low-latency blockchain network to satisfy various applications on it, especially in financial and data transaction scenarios, where the network throughput and delay will be It greatly affects the application experience and applicable scenarios. At present, the throughput of Ethereum is more than ten TPS, which is still far from the large-scale application required in real life. In recent years, some work has achieved breakthroughs in this area. For example, Dr. Wang Jiaping of IDEA AI Security Pratt & Whitney System Research Center's "Moqun" blockchain has improved the throughput of the blockchain through the "sharding" design. several orders of magnitude. However, there are still many challenges to be overcome from technological breakthroughs to ecological construction.
Governance challenges: The goal of Web 3 is to build a "decentralized" ecosystem, that is, no centralized participant can "control" the data and protocols on the network. Here, we should note that the ability of the blockchain lies in "to the extent that all business information can be formalized, this computer system can prove its innocence." However, in real life, we have a large amount of information that cannot be formalized or even expressed. And because of the form of "decentralization", the traditional centralized referee mechanism based on judicial and arbitration agencies cannot be realized on Web 3, but depends on the unity of group consciousness, which makes Web 3 The mechanism may introduce greater friction and loss of efficiency.
Regulatory challenges: No matter how rosy a vision Web 3 paints, services on Web 3 and even itself are still under the supervision of governments. How to combine Web 3 with government regulation, and the technical, legal and administrative circles to jointly discuss a set of effective regulatory policies will be a necessary guarantee for the sustainable development of Web 3.
Before summarizing, the author also wants to review the origin of Web 3. As mentioned at the beginning of this article, Web 3 was first proposed by Gavin Wood, the co-founder of Ethereum, in 2014, and it suddenly attracted everyone's attention at the end of 2021. People hope that Web 3 can fight against the monopoly and inappropriate behavior of large technology companies after mastering a large amount of data and resources, and at the same time be able to "disintermediate" and return more value to small and medium participants on the Internet. "Opposing monopoly" and "protecting the interests of small and medium-sized enterprises" are actually people's consistent goals, because only in this way can society be more creative. At present, people achieve such a goal through policies, laws, and regulations, and in the future, Web 3 is considered to be a new technological form that is likely to achieve this goal.
summary
As an emerging concept, Web 3 is still in the early stage of development. It depicts a better Internet world in the minds of idealists. In the world of Web 3, no centralized organization can monopolize and control the Internet, small and medium Internet participants can get more returns, and the services provided by the Internet can benefit more people in the world. However, in the process of implementing Web 3, there will be many challenges in technology, governance and supervision. While Internet technology is promoting the continuous development of human society, the form of the Internet itself is also deeply affected by human society. The interaction and mutual promotion of the two continue to move forward. In any case, making "society fairer, more inclusive, and improving the well-being of the entire society" has always been the goal of technological development, and it is also the vision of Web 3 and the original intention of all of us.
Reference link:
[1] What is so great about the blockchain——Wang Jiaping https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/47990621
【Introduction to the author】
Lan Yanxiang Chief Scientist of IDEA AISS
Lan Yanxiang is currently the chief scientist of IDEA AI Security Inclusive System Research Center ("IDEA AISS"), and also the leader of the SPU (Secure Processing Unit) trusted computing solution - Nereus project. Before joining IDEA, he served as the chief technology officer of Beijing Youxin Technology Co., Ltd., responsible for the construction of a "high-throughput and low-latency" online consumer finance real-time risk control, customer acquisition and asset management platform. Lan Yanxiang received a Ph.D. from Tsinghua University, focusing on data-driven real-time material modeling, rendering, editing and reconstruction. Several research results have been published in top international journals such as ACM SIGGRAPH/ToG.
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