What Exactly is Web3? by Juan Benet at Web3 Summit 2018

[Applause] [Music] how's it going are you enjoying today yeah it's an awesome event so I wanted to talk about what is web 3 because I've been hearing a lot of people confused not today but in the past maybe today people have finally in this room gotten it perfectly and now know what web 3 is and so I wrote this talk mostly for myself to kind of articulate how I think about it how I've seen other people talk about it and how I've seen the community as a whole come together around a set of principles and properties and so on and the first thing to note is that web 3 is a part of a much larger face transition that we're going through and so there say a larger movement going on right now in the internet lots of improvements are being deployed but more importantly than that there is a very very significant change happening to our species and that's that we're going from a precomputing civilization to a post computing civilization and most of us don't have a good understanding of what that means we have grown up with the internet we have gotten to know what it's like to live with the ability to talk to everybody else around everybody else that you know at almost instantaneous speeds and we it is very difficult for us to grasp what it must have been like for ancestors say a hundred years ago let alone a thousand years ago so this is a tremendous thing that's happening to our species and the craziest thing about it is that it's quite fast this transition is happening much it's happening both Anna Breck Knicks feed and it also feels kind of slow to us so it's this weird ambivalence between happening quite quickly and happening quite slowly for us year-over-year we don't notice that much of a difference however you know decade over a decade or 50 years over 50 years we see drastic changes so think about think about this phase transition hitting us in periodic waves things like mainframes than personal computers graphical interfaces the internet the web web 2.0 mobile blockchains web 3.0 and more this all of computing has happened in the last give or take 80 years can you imagine what it'll be like 80 years from now can you imagine what it'll be like 40 years from now that should be easier right things are in motion now that are extremely difficult to predict and we are playing a big part of it the choices that we make in the technologies that we build the properties that we give those pieces of technology are going to have drastic implications not just for ourselves but for a lot of people in the future and so that is important and sobering and I should give you a lot of responsibility and you should also think about this in terms of not just affecting a select few people in the world this is increasingly affecting most of the people on the planet we still don't have most of the people in the planet with access to computing but it's getting there we were gonna have billions of people more in the coming years so increasingly everything we humans do involves computing and the Internet in some way software is eating the world old systems are being radically transformed new systems empower us to do things we couldn't before and with each new wave of technology we gain superpowers but these superpowers are defined and constrained by those properties of our technologies by those properties of software systems that we build how they work how reliable they are how correct how fast how open how accessible how safe how they fail who can trolls them how they're governed and so on affect us drastically and not just us but the people in the rest of the world who can't build these things yet because they don't know how to you are part of a lucky few who know how to do fill these things so it's more important for you to be very careful about what you decide to build we need to make sure that these technologies we build are built as well as possible and to maximize all human capabilities but also with careful attention to rights to promoting the long term flourishing of humanity and to making sure we don't accidentally cause some catastrophe on the road that we could have predicted you know we can't predict something well you know maybe we get a pass but but certainly we should be doing careful thinking around what we're building and what lies ahead so with you know that serious beginning you can now relax it's okay this has happened a lot of times before every single wave of competing is this heavy that think about what you can do today think about what you your capabilities are and the people that build those things and the decisions they have to make to build the things you use now in fact some of the people are in this room who built the last wave so thank you for empowering us all so strongly and we we will work hard to make sure that even more rights are afforded to people great so let's let's get into what went through yes the most recent wave in this technological progress is web three it offers great new powers but it also drastically improves existing structures and in order to discuss it in detail I want to go through what the progression to why three so first there was the Internet that's the physical wiring and the network protocols governing how computers communicated with each other that's you know the internet starting to get built in the 1670s and has been growing ever since it was primarily academic and military at first and then open up for commercial use in the 90s that's a big lag time of course there were a lot of other people already connected and starting to use things like messaging boards and chat systems and email and all kind of stuff then what one point out came in and you know that coincided with the commercial explosion right around the same time in the web is just a document an application platform right so it's it began as just simple pages and link to other pages clickable hyperlinks and it was extremely successful most information available on the Internet is made available through the web today over half the people on the planet use or rely on the web in some way most users of the Internet use the web which has led to them not understanding the difference between and the internet on the web these things are kind of hard to distinguish so the internet is the wires and the connectivity protocols and the web is the web pages the web apps the websites the web browsing web 1.0 is a term used to refer to the web from its start in 1990 we back calculate that web 1.0 term but it refers to the period between 1991 and early two-thousands during that period the web was primarily made of static read-only content web 2 came about in the early 2000s as the content on the web started becoming more and more interactive the key characteristic of web 2.0 is under that dynamic interactive nature it is often described as a read write web because users can read information or write and publish their own think of all the kinds of web applications that you use today things and mobile things on the web all kinds of interactivity all kinds of participatory systems all kinds of networks the social networks are a big part of web 2.0 but there are other kinds of applications like that think about markets think about systems like uber and airbnb and so on that just plugged into web 2.0 and created new economies now with web 3 what we get is trust we get read/write and Trust we are building verifiability in the core layer and we're gonna dig into it deeper so you know if we squint at it web 1.0 was about linking content together across the internet all static stuff web 2.0 was about linking programs to that content and building rich dynamic applications across their devices and what's going on now is that the relationship is getting inverted we're linking content and programs directly to each other bypassing intermediary organizations removing intermediaries and gaining public verifiability so what 3.0 is turning centralized apps into decentralized protocols it's much harder to build a decentralized protocol I'm sure a lot of people here know that but it's really important because of the properties it confers to the users of these applications it's really taking what Bitcoin did to money and doing it through all kinds of services services and applications so let's take a deeper dive look at it it's really nice 1.0 how many people here use these things that's great yeah it's funny seeing how many of these are still round web 2.0 lots of great applications there also lots of data lock-in and data rent-seeking and data monopoly stuff going on there's a really big problem with web 2.0 which is the advertising model the advertising business model is one of the trickiest things in the entire system where it's created a massive economic pressure to just keep people engaged as much as possible and keep people on the pages and hey guess what things like content that makes you angry causes you to be more engaged so all these systems are just optimizing for people to get angry so if you felt angry in the last 5 years unless you know three to five years and you use a lot of social media then you know maybe that's why there's a lot of stuff not reflected here this is just a subset of the activity that's going on there's a lot of stuff in in the web 3 world and so this is just a sample this is similar to web 2.0 of course right there's a lot of stuff that wasn't there so the thing to think about with web theory is that it's really the confluence of a number of different things going on Bitcoin kind of kicked open the peer-to-peer world again it thawed the peer-to-peer winter and they reminded everybody that we could build peer-to-peer decentralized systems at the same time or a little bit later than Bitcoin but at the same time as Bitcoin was picking up steam dozen 1213 a number of people started building what we now know as the decentralized web that is a a whole movement a very significant movement of a lot of different parties that are trying to think that they're reworking how the web itself with browsers operates and changing the way in which we retrieve information and we process it that seems really familiar it sounds like part of web 3 but this is slight it's a lot of intersection and some some differences the big difference I think is the decentralized web and block chains aren't a analogous there's a significant difference between the two what block chains do is that they systematize things like economics and law and so software eating finance software eating law in a way that the centralized web isn't doing that and what's more the blockchain stuff didn't start in the web you could you can't really call Bitcoin the web it was a protocol that was built to run separately it did not work with the browser people had to like contort tons of things to make it work with a browser and so what's what a big part of the web 3 work is is to bridge these gaps is to make things like the decentralized web and block chains talk to each other to make all the blockchain systems accessible to people all kinds of software systems that will enable people to Asia transactions to use the protocols and the applications that are being built I'll leave the last one as a surprise for later a big part of all of this is verifiability making things verifiable is I would argue the key property in this entire space it's making things able to be checked to be true that simple thing unlocks tons of other properties it makes sure that whoever is providing if somebody's providing a service is verifiable you can check that they're actually checked providing the service correctly if somebody if some service makes a guarantee they're not looking our data and they're doing so in a verifiable way then you can check that it's it's a really fantastic thing it's kind of like the hyperlink so when the hyperlinks were first invented a lot of people didn't get it some people understood the massive significance of being able to just jump from one page to another and in the computational media but a lot of people didn't understand it and this is kind of the same sort of invention it's on counter intuitive thing it doesn't immediately jump to use cases what is this very probability thing how can I use it but so the way that you should you should approach it is to say at any point in time when I'm building an application and I'm making some sort of social contract with a user where I want to guaranteed the user some some property ideally you can make it verifiable and if you can make it verifiable you can build a much safer much more resilient and and also ethical protocol and and there's a part of this whole endeavor which is you can think of as open services these verifiable systems are producing things like utilities where we have some open source code system that gets deployed and then it's deployed in some sort of open way where the whole thing is workable there's permissionless entry it provides a service over time so it's you know think of Bitcoin or aetherium or polka-dot or all of the you know think of all of the blotching systems then we know there's there's some element here that's different from other systems in the past it's in a somewhat autonomous it's not exactly autonomous a lot of people run in but the economic model is what makes it drastically more reliable than systems that we've seen in the past in the period of year world peer-to-peer couldn't compete with centralized systems peer to peer couldn't afford to pay people 24/7 to maintain infrastructure or to scale the infrastructure as needs arose but the economic models of blockchains enable you to do that and that's extremely powerful there's another part of the web free world which is things like market protocols it's maybe what underlies some of these open services but it also allows people to trade all kinds of goods think think of being able to create commodities out of things that right now are fixed resources so things like storage and computation and than with an all sorts of stuff like that software is eating the world and as the Internet this new technology web 3 and blockchains will fundamentally change how we collaborate how we build businesses how we design governance systems how we operate global organisations software is eating economics stuff we receiving law and these two things are gonna have drastic implications in all kinds of systems but it's kind of far out it's one of those things that when the technology first arrives some set of people might see the future they start trying to build it the first thing it looks really clunky they kind of do some you know trivial things like oh yeah I can build a little contract and you know I can move an asset around and maybe you can give somebody a digital asset but the amazing thing about this whole smart contract system is that it's the basis of a jurisdiction it's a proto to restriction its computable law and it's native to the Internet so extremely extremely powerful thing and I don't think we're even gonna tap the potential of that for many years to come and so I would say if you if you want to improve the future if you want to bake rights into the system if you want to lock the web open as the decentralized web movement wants to do then think about how to encode it into into the jurisdiction of an of the Internet which is these blockchain systems in a way the Internet is becoming a nation it's like this weird thing who here remembers temporary Barlow and the Declaration of Independence of cyberspace number of people for all of you who did not raise your hand you have to see that it's a really critical thing it's this amazing declaration of what is how cyberspace and the Internet are different from the normal meatspace world and there's you know some time lag between the Declaration of Independence of cyberspace and now but it seems like we're getting a jurisdiction now at least a very very simple one and over time that's gonna pick up steam so this might be five years maybe fifteen years but in time this thing is quite powerful and will assert itself and so we have to think very carefully about what things were built into it what kind of properties we we put in place right now there's a fork in the road we could go towards things that seem very you know very safe right now and extremely privacy heavy but that make a completely opaque system that nobody can see or control which sounds great right like all of us are kind of for that but what dangers lie ahead maybe those things might actually accidentally cause other catastrophes so we should think very carefully and we should so if we so if we think about all of that and we still think that this is preferable to the alternatives where the alternative is might be things like you know techno totalitarianism that there's a whole other talk there of like how the things that we're building now things like machine learning and robotics and all that kind of stuff we're building the tools of the state in a terrifying way you know there's like these two crazy alternatives and we have to think as far ahead as we can and decide and then bacon the rights now to lock the web open to make sure that people can communicate and can associate can be protected and it's really this is a this is gabs description of web 33.0 gaba is i think the one of the meeting people who have coined the web 3.0 movement so well three is an inclusive set of protocols to provide building blocks for application makers these building blocks present a whole new way of creating applications things different from from the from the way that technologies are built today these technologies give users strong and verifiable guarantees about the information they're receiving what information they are giving away and what they are paying and what they are receiving in return and this is I think one of my favorite lines consider web 3 to be an executable magna carta the foundation of the freedom of the individual against the arbitrary authority of the despot that's great did talk about jurisdiction right I was kind of playing around with the idea of what if Wikipedia had you know an extensive entry on web 3 this is like my my take on it and you know I try to be as broad and handsome as possible so that people that are completely unfamiliar with us in the system can kind of approach it so what three is a broad movement and a group of associated technologies and people aiming to make the web and the internet more decentralized verifiable and secure the goals of web 3 include trustless infrastructure things that you can use and trust without worrying that they might turn against you removing intermediaries so not having to trust the some party it's not going to become a rent rent secure in the future and giving users power and ownership over their data identity security and transactions there's really a whole bunch of other things there this is you know might take quickly and very very concretely for those of us around here that are new to to all of this and don't yet understand what all these technologies are these things add capabilities and functionality for securely linking data and programs so again you know authenticated links between data and programs executing somewhere they add verifiability and they cause autonomous transaction processing peer-to-peer connectivity so that means all our devices should be able to interact with each other all our devices should be internal to interact with people in the other side of the globe directly without dealing with intermediaries and trustless interoperability so this is a really key point that I think polka-dot as a project is a far ahead than a lot of other parties let me repeat a project that I work on is also in that direction where it should be great to build systems that can automatically interoperate without requiring any kind of conversation between between parties without requiring any kind of deal or any kind of systemic thing to be built these things should be work in the open there should be infrastructure that anybody can plug into and use Stressless Lee I think of the day all this web 3 stuff you know this you know cloud of buzzwords what they do what it does is it provides decentralized computation and storage which is really all you need for you know computing and - and it enables fully autonomous applications things that will run whether or not you're there to run them in the future that's a very important property that no system in the past had all systems in the past had to be maintained by some organization by some group of people that cared about continuing to run this thing now you know how can that be how is it possible well very strong economic incentives so bitcoin is about verifiability aetherium is about verifiability polka-dot it's about verifiability I profess this about verifiability that's a huge ecosystem by the way I saw this infographic this infographic is amazing has two sides for each of the columns has two sides one is kind of like the old world stuff and then the other the right hand side is like the web 3 or decentralized web project around it and I was astonished if you see so much stuff going on it I compared to say 2014 just four years ago and there might have been like five or six things there so this is this is a very powerful movement with a lot of momentum let's keep it going let's aim it in the right direction and let's see where we are in four years he resumed in view pause what about the other web three what so it turns out if you do a Google search for trends web three is not a new term it's been around since 2004 and what that meant was the linked data Semantic Web web who here knows what that is a lot of people who here thinks that it succeeded in all its aims don't laugh this stuff is important and you'll see why the the dream the Tim had when he started that entire movement was to make all of this stuff much more interoperable to remove intermediaries from from the systems to decentralize the control of the information it sounds very familiar right the his approach was different his approach was around modeling ontology and modeling data and building a whole suite of Technology around connecting computers in the machine-readable web but a lot of the goals were the same you know this picture this old picture has you know web 2.0 a few large websites are specialized on specific content types it'd be great to have many websites containing and semantically syndicating arbitrarily structured content there's a whole other you know stack of technologies there with a big you know crypto box yeah a lot of people didn't know what to do with the crypto box guess what we know what to do with the crypto box and so this is where we plug in and see at the very top Trust is the big thing that this whole thing got to unfortunately a lot of the link data web ended up getting sucked into the major data monopolies so it turns out that you know the most successful linked data systems ended up powering the knowledge graph and the Facebook Open Graph and not really the amazing decentralized vision that Tim and that in hundreds of other people were working on but guess what these things take time this is the history of hypertext and this is not even counting ideas from the past hypertech's was coined in 1965 and it took a very long time to get from there to the web which was the the first radically successful hypertext system there were other important successes in between but these things things take time and guess what 1980 Enquirer I believe that that was Tim berners-lee as well so the web was not his first project so if you think that you know he failed with link data and you know he's not gonna you know that didn't work out and then he's gonna back out absolutely he's not and guess what the battle must rage again so Tim is at it again and and the important thing here is that Tim and the entire link data Semantic Web world has a lot of the same goals it's just that technology was different and the technology didn't account for a lot of the things that we know how to account for and so there is some important unification here that could happen nothing that it will nothing that it ought to but it could happen and there's a lot of people that care but the very same things that we care about just in very different ways and so I think that the centralized web movement and the blockchain movement and the link data movement are part of web 3 and web 3 is support should ought to support these three movements in their own their own goals the end of the day what is more linked than a blockchain really isn't like the best definition of you know structured linked data that isn't gonna go away ever isn't that kind of fulfilling the vision of the link data world better than than a lot of the linked data systems out there so I hope that in the future we have a digital system and that takes into account our rights that takes into account how people use those systems and how potential problems might be created I hope that we have a trustless decentralized infrastructure that we can just use that we don't have to worry that it's manipulating us that we don't have to worry is a massive vector for propaganda that we don't have to worry might own us in the future or might stop existing how many services have you used that just disappeared so I want to build a permanent and stable feature with all of this tech and I think a lot of the people here do and to get there it's gonna require a lot of cooperation and interoperability and building sane protocols going back to you know if you think back to that slide with a ton of different protocols there's probably a lot of people there they're replicating work that are doing the same thing over and over again and while competition can be useful sometimes spreading too thin we'll just cause the movement to fail remember that these things take time if we go back to that hypertext thing you know we don't want we don't want to be like one of the first avenues here right like we want to be we want to be the last last line who's gonna take a lot of cooperation and a lot of interrupts so I think take this as a challenge to think through the protocols and applications of your building and think about other parties and other groups that are building similar things and consider working with them and bringing them to some sort of shared ground build a standard with a shared protocol build a shared system and the web 3 Foundation is a great group that can help steward that there are other groups as well and this is a large movement this is a decentralized movement so that's kind of ironic there's all kinds of centralization then we must have in order to decentralize but use it take advantage of it there's a lot of people that want to help you you just have to you know show up I wanted to have one last note and talk about browsers because this is something that I would love to see in the next year or two on the web 1.0 world's there were you know very few browsers that's the whole history of rousers in the background like the whole genealogy lots of different things web 2.0 what kind of settled on these there's a lot more not shown here web 3.0 browsers are very different some browsers look similar to existing browsers and they browse the web that way some browsers are actually a single webpage that you go to in the server somewhere that connect you to the blockchain and allow you to send transactions other browsers are things we call wallets other browsers are extensions on your browser that add capabilities so we don't really know what the browser of web 3 ought to be we have a bunch of experiments and we should have a lot more experiments because the the big thing here is that we don't have good usability yet that is a major challenge so leave you with that help build a great web 3 help builds secure systems think ahead about the things you're building and make sure you don't build something you're gonna regret there's a lot of people right now that really regret what they did with web 2 so make sure you don't do that and build a bright future thank you [Applause]

Channel: Web3 Foundation

Views: 166,472

Keywords: web3 foundation, web3 summit, juan benet, ipfs, protocol labs, web 3.0

Id: l44z35vabvA

Length: 30min 47sec (1847 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 26 2018