You can not safely ignore Web3!
Our Response to Mike Elgan’s “You can safely ignore Web3” article in the Computerworld Opinion Column.
“The two biggest buzzwords in tech right now — the “metaverse” and “Web3” — describe platforms that don’t exist, aren’t expected to exist even by boosters for a decade at least, and probably will never exist.”
You can’t ignore what is disrupting the financial industry today. With the crypto market capitalization at 828 Billion Dollars, you can not deny that Web3 technologies are in use in the “real world.” That kind of capital taken out of the traditional financial markets, has an undeniable impact. Don’t forget that distributed technologies disrupted the recorded audio industry (Limewire) and movie industry (Pirate Bay) more profoundly than the audio cassettes or DVDs did.
The assertion that Web3 is hard to define is wrong — it is the Internet where the compute and storage is at the edge of the network, supported and hosted by decentralized technologies and cryptographic consensus. BitTorrent requires no blockchain. IPFS storage requires no blockchain. DAG databases require no blockchain. They require networking, discovery, cryptography and communication protocols but are as unrelated to the blockchain as humans are from Klingons.
I and many of my colleagues have been working with Web3 technologies since 2008, across a number of companies, delivering distributed solutions, solving tough problems. Peer-to-Peer protocols, distributed synchronized storage, cloud computing, smartphones and the communications networks that they ride have brought us the first glimpse of what Web3 will look like.
Will the next generation of art museum experience be housed on NFTs and rented on your VR Headset?
“The bottom line is that, despite the chatter, Web3 isn’t happening. And you can safely ignore it.”
Web3 is here now, affecting the world you live in, but if you’d like to ignore it, you will be missing out on some spectacular shifts in data privacy and data utility. Data will no longer be held in centralized repositories ready for the next breach, ransomware or hardware failure, but distributed to the network for safe keeping. Any data will only be milliseconds away from use, locked behind biometric and knowledge locks.
Where Web3 goes is up to a lot of very gifted, highly motivated, and skilled people, but you can not deny that it is here now as evidenced by crypto currencies, NFTs, DeFi and distributed gaming.
Oh, and the Metaverse is just a rendering layer for content, like when your computer was put into your smart TV. You can browse the Web, do messaging, check out content, do some gaming… just in another dimension of presentation. If you have some time I’d love to chat.
