How does Web3 bring data back to users? Start with Mirror and Dstar
Original article: https://mirror.xyz/cystalyaya.eth /F37gxuPO4ol-B5eRmDUXeOsUJLswIvFtxqXTjd379jY
Original Author: https://twitter.com/Crystalyaya521
Before the topic, let’s make a multiple-choice question together:
Now, there are two choices in front of you, the left is 500W US dollars, the right is a huge hard drive, which contains the shopping data of 5 million people, you can take it as you like.
The former or the latter? Well, although in the real world, no one will provide you with these two things to choose from, but this question can at least lead to some thoughts, and these thoughts are also what I want to mainly discuss when writing this article about Web3:
1、Can data be an asset?
2、Why do you say that the core of Web3 is to return the power of data to the user?
3、How far are we from Web3 scaling？
4、Two Web3 products worth in-depth experience at present.
Now, let’s talk about Web3 begin with these four questions.
1、Can data be an asset？
In the question at the start of the article, Maybe 90% of people will choose the left without hesitation because 5 million US dollars is what I really owned. Although this 500 the shopping data of 10,000 people can also be sold to the platform or used to develop products for profit, the fatal problem is that the data can be copied. What if the data I get is only one of N copies?
Going a step further: Admittedly, data has “value,” but can it be an asset? How to measure it?
To answer this question, we must first reach a consensus on the definition of “asset”.
Referring to WiKi’s definition of an asset, the asset should meet the following 3 key points:
1. Demonstrate ownership
2. Exchange to goods
3. Can bring profit to individuals or businesses
Obviously, from the perspective of these three key points, the “data” at this stage is indeed an asset, but it is only the asset of a small number of enterprises, not personal.
Take the most common scenario as an example. You order a pizza on a takeaway platform, pay for it, and the platform summons a rider to deliver it to you. After an order ends, you not only receive a takeaway but also create purchase data. This data includes your name, contact information, delivery address, and consumption amount, as well as your food taste.
However, although this data is created by you, the ownership does not belong to you, and you cannot use this data to exchange products, nor can it bring you any benefits. So, for you, this piece of data created by you is not your asset.
What about the platform?
They may combine your data with the data of hundreds of thousands of people in the surrounding area to generate various rich dimensions for interpretation and judgment. Then, based on the accumulation of these data, the platform will know how many food delivery staff you should have in the area where you order takeout, what kind of restaurant is the most profitable to open here, and it will also give you accurate recommendations based on your taste. Ads for your products. Data shows that in 2017, Toutiao obtained 20 billion advertising revenue through a similar data operation method.
In this link, users are regarded as “data cows”, feeding platforms and enterprises continuously. That is to say, if you are using a service for free, you are not the user, but the product itself.
So, data is like a private key, if you can’t really control it, it’s not yours.
2、Why do you say that the core of Web3 is to return the power of data to the user?
Now that data has been proven to be valuable and invaluable, how can the individuals who create the data also profit from it? And bring back the power to the user?
This problem was unsolvable in the web1 and web2 stages until the concept of Web3.0 was proposed in 2014.
So, what exactly is Web3? Represented by a picture that has been wildly circulated by the community, it looks like this:
In the Web 1.0 stage, users can only serve as content receivers, and the account needs to be bound to the platform, and the data is owned by the platform.
In the Web 2.0 stage, users can output content in addition to receiving content. Although the account still needs to be bound to the platform, the birth of the FLAG allows users to log in to multiple platforms with one account, but the data is still owned by the platform.
At the stage of Web 3.0, users can log in to all applications with one wallet, user data back to individuals, users can manage their own data on the chain, and can generate income from these data.
for example:
When I was doing tasks on the project galaxy platform before, coingecko released a DeFi 101 task. As long as you have interacted with any of the following platforms once, you can receive the task NFT.
It has been shown here that I meet the conditions and have pledged on the platform of Yearn, Although I have forgotten when I stake. But this behavior data belongs to “me”, so I get NFT rewards.
Also because of this inadvertent interaction, when I logged into Rabbithole, I also completed the skill task and increased the skill value on the platform.
So, inadvertent on-chain interaction data has been rewarded by 2 different platforms, and it is certain that more platforms will reward me for this behavior in the future.
This is absolutely unimaginable in the Web1 and Web2 stages. You can’t be rewarded on WeChat because have a hit on Douyin, but Web3 can.
Here, review the 3 key points of the asset concept just mentioned:
1. Demonstrate ownership
2. Exchange to goods
3. Can bring profit to individuals or businesses
In a sense, Web 3 has fully realized the “assetization” of data. Your on-chain behavior data truly belongs to you, and it can bring you benefits and can also be exchanged for NFT and other commodities.
Once users experience the freedom of having “data rights”, it is difficult to return to the shackles of Web1 and Web2. Therefore, the future of the return of “data rights” brought by Web3 will be difficult to suppress once it becomes popular.
3. How far are we from Web3 scaling?
To answer this question, we still have to reach a consensus on one word — scale.
What exactly is “scale”?
Here we need to quote the “S-shaped” curve principle of Genrich Altshuller, the father of TRIZ and the former Soviet inventor:
For any category, whether it is a technological improvement, product innovation, or the development of companies and industries, over time, they will show the same “growth vein” and follow the same evolutionary law, and this law is shown on the graph, which is An “S-shaped” curve.
The evolution of this S-shaped curve is divided into four stages: infancy, growth, maturity, and decline. A breakout point in the middle of infancy and growth is called the “breaking point”. Before the breaking point, The process is relatively slow. Once the breakthrough point is broken, the development of things will enter an exponential growth stage. After reaching the “limit point”, it will enter a complete explosion period, and then it will show a downward trend and enter a recession period.
That is to say, the breaking point is the “potential point” for a thing to explode, and the point that is really widely used to let more people know is the “limit point”.
Therefore, when we say, “How far are we from the scale of Web3”, we are actually estimating how long it will take for the Web3 process curve to go from the breaking point to the limit point.
To speculate about this time period, we need to review the historical process of Web1.0-Web2.0 first.
Looking back at the development of the Internet, it can be roughly divided into the following five periods.
Before 1993, the Internet was in the stage of experimental exploration, and the invention of TCP/IP technology officially opened the Internet era.
In 1994, the first year of Web 1.0 was launched, and the form of websites based on WWW (WorldWide Web) applications rose rapidly around the world, from Yahoo, Hotmail to Sina, Sohu, and NetEase, becoming the representatives at that time.
The Internet in this period mainly solved the problem of insufficient audience information at that time by aggregating a large amount of content. The commercialization capability was relatively simple, and the platform mainly relied on advertisements to realize its monetization.
From 2001 to 2008, with the substantial increase in the speed of fixed access bandwidth and the substantial reduction in costs, various new forms of Internet services and business models emerged, from the early text and pictures-based to the later ones. Different product attempts have appeared in various fields such as voice communication, video playback, retail e-commerce, and network application security.
However, the enrichment of functions did not bring about a change in the output mode, and users were still in the stage of being “fed”. Until around 2015, platform-level applications such as Tencent and Facebook emerged one after another, which made user habits begin to change. At this time, users Start interacting with the platform, opening up two-way output channels, and the Web2.0 era has begun.
From the perspective of this process, it took 21 years for Web1.0 to transition to Web2.0, and it has only been 7 years since Web2.0 started to explode.
According to this speed, assuming that 2022 is the first year of Web3.0, which is the breaking point of the S-shaped curve, according to the rapid explosion process of Web2, it may only take 3–5 years for Web3 to go from the breaking point to the limit point, that is, Web3 The time to really scale is between 2025 and 2027.
Whether it takes three years to reach the “extreme point” or five years to the “extreme point” depends not only on the development status of blockchain technology but also on a very important factor — the establishment of consensus.
This consensus includes consensus on energy distribution in the real world and virtual world and consensus on the unification of governance rules.
The explosion of Web3 requires not only the promotion of individuals and technologies but also the support of energy. However, the normal operation of the virtual world still requires the stable power supply of the physical world.
That is to say, Web3 has to compete not only for data rights from Web2, but also for resources and production capacity, but from the point of view of persuading the physical world not to pull the plug, it may take a lot of effort.
Going a step further, even if the energy issue can be resolved, the consensus on the rules will take time to grind.
What is a “rule” consensus? Here is still an example of the Internet:
In 1969, the network was just born, and the first generation network was named ARPAnet, which was proposed by the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency ARPA.
Although there was a network at that time, the computers were not compatible. The work done on one computer could not be used on another computer.
At that time, a scientist proposed: “All computers are created equal, and if we want these equal computers to share resources, we need to establish a set of standards that everyone abides by on the basis of these system standards, so that all computers follow the same set of standards. development, and then you can connect with each other and share information.”
So, in 1974, a man named Winton Cerf proposed the TCP/IP protocol, which made this protocol an interoperability protocol. After that, all computer networks followed this protocol. Such a massive internet system in which all of us are connected.
That is to say, on the surface, this man named Winton Cerf just proposed a protocol called TCP/IP, but in essence, he agreed on a set of rules recognized by all mankind. Without this set of rules, there would be no Web1, Web2, or even Web3 today.
Therefore, no matter how free and democratic Web3 is, it also needs to unify the definition of this meta-rule on top of the code.
The code is the law, but the law needs to be uniform.
4. Two Web3 products worth in-depth experience at present.
I talked about the big trends earlier, and now I’ll go into the small details and talk about two Web3 products that I personally like:
One is Mirror, a decentralized content product that is favored by many people, and the other is Dstar Note, a privacy note product I just discovered recently.
Let me start with 4 reasons why I like Mirror:
1. login with Wallet, no registration required.
“Enough Decentralization”
2. Decentralized data permanent storage.
“All content data belongs to the creator”
3. Crowdfunding mechanism
“Solve the problem of commercial realization and provide a financial guarantee for content exporters”
4. Restraint is a virtue.
“Only output one function, enough restraint, and enough focus”
It can be said that, as a content exporter, Mirror is one of the few platforms that allows creators to focus on creation.
The next one is Dstar Note, a blockchain notebook based on Internet computers. Mirror is more inclined to share and belongs to the social class Web3, while DstarNote pays more attention to privacy.
Privacy products are actually a minority in Web2. The privacy password I have been using is 1password, but one day, I saw this message:”The world’s most popular password manager, 1Password abandoned the native development approach it had been following for 15 years, moving to the Electron framework and completely rewriting all of its programs, which caused a huge negative reaction in the community.”
It can be said that Web2 cannot achieve absolute privacy, even for products with a valuation of tens of billions. As long as the server is hosted by a centralized server, the information is controlled by a large company or cloud server provider and is at risk of being stolen at any time.
So, from that time node, I was looking for a product for decentralized privacy notes, and then I saw Dstar Note on the ICP chain.
Its principle is to make each notebook a server, and then by using the InternetComputer (ICP) blockchain, users can create an ICP server “jar” with the ICP identity, which is a notebook.
Then encrypt the information locally with the AES256 encryption scheme converted by the mnemonic and upload it to the notebook you created.
That is to say when the cloud server “jar” is created, you have your own cloud server, all information will not be found by anyone, even if the node is not safe, it is also protected by the AES256 encryption scheme.
Even the password book I created myself requires authentication:
The reason why Dstar Note is a Web3 product that impresses me is that it is private enough and secure enough. Of course, like mirror, it is restrained enough without some fancy functions, and it is enough to focus on privacy.
Sometimes, restraint can inspire creativity.
Every time I write an article to discuss an issue, I always like to think of it as grand and systematic, but in fact, some small changes have already occurred in life:
When I open the browser, it’s more Brave than Chrome;
When writing articles, I use mirror instead of WeChat public account;
When saving content, use Dstar Note more than Evernote;
When running, the open software is StepN, not Joy Run;
When financial management, use more defi, rather than fund tools
I just discovered that Web3 has quietly entered my life, and all my actions are being rewarded by Web3.
If we say that the essence of Web1.0 is union and the essence of Web2.0 is interaction, then the most fascinating part of Web3.0 is fairness.
In the Web3 system, users’ time, generated behaviors, and contributed data can be rewarded fairly. This incentive model will liberate the fear in the underlying drive of human beings, and then replace it with individual creativity.
Once the creativity of all individuals is stimulated and rewarded, isn’t such a future worth looking forward to?
