Web3 is real collaboration… because of Atomic Trustless Composability…

Collaboration requires trust and transparency. In Web3, trust is outsourced and transparency is native.

Like all ideas during their infancy, Web3 is polarising. On the one hand enthusiast say it will change the world, on the other hand sceptics say its bullshit. Obviously, one could say that both are right, because they are, but one is definitely more right than the other. Web3 has a lot of bullshit, but it has already changed the world in ways we can still not fathom.

In my opinion, Web3 adds the layer of value transfer to Web2 through transactions in an atomic, composable and trustless way. I know this is a mouth full, but its important so just roll with it for now.

Before we get into the technicalities, let me address the sceptics in the room. Blockchain utility is not the same as crypto speculation, Web3 includes both. Web3 is an idea, and like all ideas it is formed differently in every person’s mind meaning that Web3 is wishy washy but it tends to be widely underpinned by the desire for workflows to be trustless and permissionless.

On the one hand, Web3 wont transform our world into Utopia because Web3 will not rid us from shit heads. On the other hand, Web3 will mitigate the effect these shit heads have because we can outsource trust and permission to the blockchain. Furthermore, Web3 will not solve political problems over night, but unlike any other social experiment in history, thanks to not needing trust or permission, we are able to iterate and evolve through an array of social constructs other wise known as political ideologies, without dealing with the concequences of political stigma. If that doesn’t teach us something, evolution is simply not for us.

On to the technicals.

Transactions

Value transfer occurs in a transaction and for that transaction to be secure it must be atomic, meaning it either occurs entirely or it doesn’t. Certainty that a transaction fully rolls back if it is not entirely successful is essential. In Web2, for a workflow to be atomic, the designers of each module within this distributed workflow must agree to a protocol that communicates and handles errors. First off, such a protocol in a general sense doesn’t exist and if it did, developers would have to trust each other’s roll back processes. Atomic trustless transactions are native to Web3.

Atomic Trustless Composability

Here is where it gets exciting, at least for nerds like me. Composability is not new and in Web2, composability is driven by JSON and WebAPIs enabling high degrees of interactions between highly distributed services and workflows. In Web2, these services run in highly modular topologies where in some cases, each function runs within its own runtime while communicating with other functions that are running on the other side of the world. Additionally, each function trusts that the other functions are up and running, will execute what they are supposed to and that their connectivity is not compromised.

Conversely, Web3 is a completely different beast. It runs on a blockchain which is more than a just a massively distribted computer, its actually a single runtime living on a global network where every function executes within this unique global runtime with shared memory. For the reader that is a developer, this is a wild statement. All developers know how powerful the flexibility of shared memory is when designing software and appreciete the difficulties of building coherent distributed workflows. Please note that although blockchains are distributed, the execution of smart contracts is not distributed across multiple runtimes since their execution context is a single global runtime. In Web3, there is just no need to trust that services are running, available and functioning correctly because, again, it's all the one single runtime from the perspective of a smart contract developer.

For a non-developer, imagine coherently coordinating a group of 10 people evenly distributed across 5 different rooms, each room in a different country. Compare that with coordinating 10 people in the same room. Thanks to Web2 the former is far from impossible but the latter is obviously easier to manage efficiently. Web3 would enable 100k people to perform a synchronised dance on a global stage… are you starting to get the picture?

Web3 allows developers to design atomic composability meaning that a workflow can be defined to either execute entirely or not at all where the workflow leverages off smart contracts developed by completely different and disconnected teams.

Basically, Web3 allows us to collaborate even without liking each other.