Why we are excited about Web 3.0
Type Human’s purpose is to accelerate the emerging Web 3.0 and decentralising internet paradigm. We believe this is currently the most exciting frontier for innovation and entrepreneurship and humanity’s best opportunity to address many of the current social, economic and governance challenges. In previous articles, we have already discussed how the internet evolved and what is wrong with the current Web 2.0 paradigm, foreshadowed opportunities as we move from Web 2.0 to 3.0, considered how this transition will affect charitable work, and proposed how we might now organise work and govern communities as liquid cooperatives.
This article briefly presents where the Web 3.0 transition began, and why we are so excited about distributed ledger technology.
In 2008, amid the aftershocks of the global financial crisis and palpable outrage at the banking system that brought it about, a concise nine page white paper uploaded under the (still mysterious) name of Satoshi Nakamoto quietly ushered in a technological, economic and social revolution. Most people by now have heard of Bitcoin, but blockchains, or the underlying distributed ledger technology that enables bitcoin to function can still a confusing concept for many. Put simply, just as the internet and web revolutionised our ability to directly communicate information with one another through ‘peer-to-peer’ systems such as email, the first blockchain opened the process to directly exchange value with one another through a new ‘peer-to-peer’ system of money. Since the early days of the internet many had dreamed about such ‘ecash’ systems, but because digital information can be copied and reproduced so easily, no one had been able to figure out a viable way to solve the ‘double spend problem’. Satoshi’s blockchain proposal assembled a number of existing innovations into a novel combination with radical consequences. By bringing together time stamped records of transactions, cryptographic hashes, public and private keys, and, most ingeniously, an incentive model designed to encourage computing power to competitively participate in a peer-to-peer network that rewards reproducing the ‘true state’ of the ledger, Satoshi not only pioneered a new model for exchanging value, but for governing human agreements.
So many of our institutions, from passport agencies, to banks, to universities, have evolved to fill the ‘trust-gap’ that stems from uncertainties that arise from dealing with ‘strangers’. How do we know that someone is really who they claim to be? That they really sent the money they promised? That they really hold the education credentials or experience they claim?
Blockchains offer new solutions to these old problems by enabling individuals to participate in trusted and secure modes of exchange through the internet, including proving the veracity of records and artefacts in unfalsifiable ways. That’s why we regard the invention of the first blockchain as a ‘civilisation disrupting’ moment. Since this time, developments in distributed ledger technology such as The Ethereum Project, The InterPlanetary File System, The 0X Project, beckon not only a new wave of individual sovereignty, but also new ways to cooperate by creating and managing resources through community arrangements.
These are the reasons we are so excited about these innovations and the new community systems we can construct with them. Type Human will be posting regular articles here that expand upon this vision, providing easy-to-understand explanations of how many blockchain applications work, and examining emerging projects in greater detail. We would be delighted if you join us on this journey, so please get in touch if you are as excited about this work as we are.
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