Internet of Reality
Web 3.0 broken down for the majority
“First. Have you ever questioned the nature of your reality?”
-Westworld
By now you’ve probably heard of bitcoin, Blockchain and maybe even encountered some ideas around democracy of data and the issues around centralization.
Here’s the Blockchain industry in a nutshell.
Privacy!
They (Google, Facebook and all other cool tech companies) are stealing your data and reaping all the profits!
We (people printing fake internet money and trying to exchange it with your real money) will bring about change! An Internet revolution.
Big Brother is watching you!
Revolution in this context means the “next internet” — often called the “internet of trust” or the “internet of value”, “decentralized internet” (whatever that means).
With this, they mint (mostly) fake internet monies that make the SEC very nervous.
Think about it. Go pitch privacy and data ownership to your parents and you’ll quickly realize what’s “right” vs what they actually care about are two completely different things. I can’t tell you how many times people around me have said “well, I don’t really care about privacy.”
What they are really trying to say is they DO care. They just don’t care about the points you’ve raised.
People hate on Google and Facebook’s privacy policies all the time, but that doesn’t stop them from spending more and more time on these platforms.
This is because you can’t sell people on ideologies. We use smartphones and the internet, not because it’s right or politically correct to do so, but because it’s sexy and often times, improves the quality of our lives — or at least perceived “quality”.
You can’t sell people on ideologies.
— Me
Your average consumer might know how to “smartphone” or how to “internet”, but don’t actually know or care how it works. Web 3.0 should be no different.
For the record, I’m not saying that blockchain technology is not going to bring about big changes to the internet. I’m just trying to raise the point that cypherpunks have, for the most part, started an important movement.
Except that no one truly understands what this means for our future, including themselves.
Web 3.0 is coming
Web 1
Ice Age
First version of the internet. Not interactive. Not based on communication. One-way transmission. I’m too young to really give examples here, but it’s not that important for our purposes today.
Web 2
The Interactive Web — Today
This is the internet we all know and love. Interactive. P2P. I think textbooks call this the “age of information”, or the “ocean of information” — where data and information is everywhere and accessible to everyone whenever we wanted.
… at least that’s what was promised.
In reality, the age of information is kind of like the middle ages. There are impregnable castles and lords who control all aspects of their kingdom and land.
And the aforementioned ocean is really more like a collection of dams — what we actually see and interact with on the internet, is merely the subjective expression of data and information that the owner wants us to see.
But let’s not point fingers. This was the only way the internet could work and really it’s the fundamental limitations of a P2P network.
First, what does it mean to be P2P
This is important.
Imagine that there are 4 people communicating with each other.
Alice, Bob, Carol, David
Offline, they can just sit around a table and talk freely.
Everyone can interact, real-time. Bob says he’s hungry.
There is no dispute on what Bob said. Everyone heard/witnessed it, simultaneously and synchronously. It’s how real world communication works. Essentially, this type of communication is “n-to-n”. Not P2P.
Online, however, all interactions happen 1:1, P2P.
When Bob says he’s hungry, this message is transmitted to only one person, let’s say in this case, Alice. Only Alice and Bob knows that Bob is hungry.
Carol and David has to depend on Alice or Bob’s version of the story. If Alice says something different from Bob, Carol and David would have no idea which version of the story is true.
The problem with this situation — online, natively, there are no tables for everyone to sit around and just talk freely.
Enter, our 5th participant, Eve. The intermediary.
So your Messenger chat room with your friends looks like everyone is there around the table talking to each other real-time — but actually there’s no table and what’s really happening is, Eve is acting like a table. She is wondering around the chat room listening to everything and conveying messages to the other 4 participants as if she’s not there.
The internet today is big tech providing their tables for consumers. They have shareholders so they monetize the conversations and interactions we have around their table (rightfully so).
Google, Facebook, Youtube, this Medium channel is no different. This is just how the internet we understand today is fundamentally built. Besides, we’re just talking about some ‘messages’. What’s the worst that could happen? Haha.
Bitcoin came along and this is what it ultimately solved — the famous Byzantine generals problem is precisely what this situation is about. What Alice, Bob, Carol and David needed was a neutral table. A table, that no one owns nor controls. Bitcoin is that table.
Web 3.0
Now let’s bring that table to the web. That’s web 3.0.
Why is this so important? How can this change the web?
Some buzzwords you may have heard. Immutable. Censorship resistance. Privacy preserving. Trustless. Interoperable. Data ownershp. Internet of value. Fat protocol. And let’s be honest, whatever else that makes investors open their wallets.
I’m not saying these ideas are trivial. These words represent some of the features of web 3.0, but not the inherent value. Like any other fancy tech sweeping the world today; deep learning, IoT etc. what’s really important is how we can create value using those features.
One of my favorite movies of all time, is THE MATRIX. Which I’m pretty sure was built on Web 3.0.
The Internet of Reality
the internet of trust
the internet of value
the internet of …. reality?
“First. Have YOU ever questioned the nature of your reality?”
Definition
Cyberspace has always been virtual, but now it’s becoming real.
Reality:
existence that is absolute, self-sufficient, or objective, and not subject to human decisions or conventions.
First, what does it mean to exist — in absolute and self-sufficient form.
The demise of the Roman Empire left hundreds of thousands of historical artifacts in it’s ruins. Collectors find them and museums display them. For many, these items hold our ideas of “value”.
For something to hold value, it must first exist. And if something exists, they cannot one day cease to exist.
On the contrary, if a game platform with a ruling empire were to be erased, or the entire platform were to be canceled or shut down, all of the digital assets and history that were native to that platform (swords, characters, records etc) would also cease to exist.
A Mona Lisa replica will always be a replica, not matter how perfect it is — Even if it is 100% identical, down to the molecular level, its unique history will distinguish the original from the rest.
You can’t apply this to data however, say an image or an MP3 file. There is nothing that distinguishes what an “original” is, because there’s no history. The concept of originality doesn’t make sense here, at least up till today.
To exist is to have unique absolute history.
In the physical world, everything abides by the laws of physics.
Data that lives on the web 3.0 stack don’t have any physical properties (yet), but does have every other property of existence.
For example, in the physical world you could destroy an item, but you can’t just DELETE something. Matter is not subject to human decisions or conventions.
In web 3.0, I look at data as matter. The difference is, here, matter doesn’t follow Newton’s laws of physics. Think of Web 3.0 as a parallel universe with it’s own laws of physics. Today, we mostly call them “protocols”.
If you think about it, we trust that the laws of physics that govern our physical world is neutral because we understand that it’s outside of anyone’s control.
Going back to our first example of the table. I trust Google, Facebook and other big tech companies. But not as much as how much I trust the laws of physics.
A protocol on the web 3.0 stack is trustless, therefore, inherently neutral. Which then means, it can be considered as the physics of the web 3.0 reality.
— it is absolute, self-sufficient, or objective, and not subject to human decisions or conventions.
In the web 3.0 universe, all data is interoperable, just like how all matter is interoperable in the real world.
In Conclusion
Here is the vantage point I take.
Cypherpunk geeks challenge internet fundamentals like privacy, interoperability and censorship resistance — freedom in a sense. In my opinion, they have actually been building the foundations of a new layer of reality this whole time. This movement applies everywhere.
Cyberspace will become just as real as space. Virtual reality will become virtually real. Augmented reality, could be add-on reality. Theoretically, there will be no differences between these artificial and real realities.
Physicists are studying parallel universes. Primitive as it may be, we’ve just built one.
Hashed is a leading crypto assets VC and network builder based out in Seoul, Korea and San Francisco. I work as a research analyst.
Written by: Kevin Sohn
