What is Web3? (Transcript)
A full transcript of the speech by Juan Benet, Founder of Protocol Labs and Creator of IPFS, presented at Web3 Summit 2018.
This speech gives us a clear definition of what Web 3.0 is and guides us to understand how blockchain technology fits in the history of the Web and encourages us to upgrade the Internet.
In honor of
and , a full text version is created from the YouTube video so that the vision of Web3 can be shared with wider audiences on the planet. Japanese translation is available here.How’s it going?
Are you enjoying today? Yeah?
It’s an awesome event
So I wanted to talk about
what is Web3
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 Web3 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 Web3 is a part of
a much larger phase
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 abruptness speed
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 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 then
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 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 controls 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 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 computing
is this heavy
that think about
what you can do today
think about what
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 will work hard
to make sure that even
more rights are afforded to people
Great, so let’s get into
what Web3 is
The most recent wave in this
technological progress is Web3
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 Web3
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
60s-70s 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 Web1.0 came in and you
know that coincided with
the commercial explosion
right around the same time
In the web, it’s just a document
and an application platform
right?
So 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 on the Internet and 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 2000's
during that period the web
was primarily made of
static read-only content
Web2 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 the 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 Web3
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 Web 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
and applications
So let’s take a
deeper dive
It’s the Internet
If you wanna look at it
It’s really nice
Web 1.0 how many people here
use these things? That’s great
Yeah it’s funny seeing how many of
these are still around
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
3–5 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 the Web3 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 Web3
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
that’s in ‘12-’13
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 Web3
But this is slight
it’s a lot of intersection and
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 is eating finance
software is 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 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 a big part of
the Web3 work is
to bridge these gaps
It’s to make things like
the decentralized web and blockchains
talk to each other
To make all the
blockchain systems
accessible to people
all kinds of software systems
that will enable people
to issue 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
that 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 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 a
counter intuitive thing
it doesn’t immediately
jump to use cases
It’s like “what is this
verifiability thing?”
“how can I use it?”
But so the way that 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 guarantee
the user 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 also
ethical protocol
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 forkable
there’s permissionless entry
It provides a service over time
So it’s you know think of
Bitcoin or Ethereum or
Polkadot or all of the, you know
think of all of the blockchain systems
that we know 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 it
but the economic model is
what makes it drastically more reliable
than systems that we’ve seen in the past
in the peer-to-peer 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 Web3
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 of being able to create commodities
out of things that right now are
fixed resources so things like
storage and computation and bandwidth
and all sorts of stuff like that
Software is eating the world
And as the Internet
this new technology
Web3 and blockchains
will fundamentally change
how we collaborate
how we build businesses
how we design governance systems
how we operate global
organizations
Software is eating economics
Software is eating 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-jurisdiction
It’s computable law
And it’s native
to the Internet
So it’s 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 the
jurisdiction 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
John Perry Barlow and
A 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
might be 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
think about all of that
and we still think that this is
preferable to the alternatives
where the alternatives
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 bake in
the rights now
to lock the web open
to make sure that people can
communicate and can associate
can be protected and you know
it’s really up to us
This is uh, this is Gav’s description
of web 3.0 Gav is I think the one of
the leading people who have coined
the web 3.0 movement
“Web3 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
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 Web3 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 Web3
This is like my my take on it
and you know I try to be as broad
and comprehensive as possible
so that people that are completely
unfamiliar with us in the
system can kind of approach it
So Web3 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 Web3 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 seeker 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 able
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
Polkadot as a project is
a far ahead than a lot of
other parties
Libp2p 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 parties without
requiring any kind of deal or any kind
of systematic thing to be built
These things should be work
in the open there should be
infrastructure that anybody
can plug into and use trustlessly
At the end of the day
all this Web3 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 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
Ethereum is about verifiability
Polkadot is about verifiability
IPFS is 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 Web3 or decentralized web project around it
And I was astonished to see so much
stuff going on. If I compared to say
2014 just four years ago
and there might have been like
five or six things there
So 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
Here I resumed in view
Pause
What about the other Web3?
What!?
So it turns out if you do
a Google search for trends,
web3 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 dream the Tim had
when he started that entire
movement was to make all of
this stuff much more interoperable
to remove intermediaries
from the systems to decentralize
the control of the information
It sounds very familiar right?
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 and 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
Hypertext was coined in 1965 and
it took a very long time to get
from there to the web which was
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 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 decentralized
web movement and the blockchain movement
and the link data movement
are part of Web3
And Web3 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 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 future 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
will 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 to be like
one of the first avenues here right?
like we want to be the last last line
It’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
build 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 it’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
In the web 1.0 world there were
you know very few browsers
That’s the whole history of browsers
in the background like the whole genealogy
lots of different things
Web 2.0 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 Web3
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 Web3
Help build 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 Web2
So make sure you
don’t do that and
build a bright future
Thank you.
