What exactly should we believe about Web 3?
What’s going on with the decentralized internet?
The Internet originated in the Web 1.0 era, followed by Web 2.0. Today, the third web age has arrived, namely Web 3.0 – a new variant of the web based on the concept of a decentralized internet.
A decentralized internet is of course also an internet where the user is the sole owner of the data. No tech giant can keep our information, everything is stored on a peer-to-peer infrastructure based on blockchain technology and can only be shared with our permission.
Eric Newton, director of innovation at Arizona State University, came up with a rather interesting way of defining a decentralized internet:
“There is no big business or big government in a world of decentralized networks. The decentralized network is to information what a farm is to food. On top of it, everyone can cultivate their own “information”. “
Advantages of Web 3.0
Developers who are fed up with being “abused” by centralization are rushing forward to the era of decentralization.
While the decentralized web is still in its infancy as part of the tech community, numerous companies are already offering huge salaries to developers, hoping to attract more pioneers and bigwigs to work for them. The reason why they are willing to spend more real money is because they realize that the blockchain established by decentralized technology is really powerful:
Guaranteed security and privacy
One of the great advantages of the decentralized Internet is that user information is completely under their control. Information can only be truly shared if we ourselves want to share it.
As Eric said, there will be no more corporate giants to sell our data to advertising companies, and Google will not be able to issue targeted lead ads. The new friends we just met don’t inexplicably appear on the “people you may know” list the next day.
reliability
The centralized internet largely relies on a client-server model and is therefore extremely vulnerable to a single point of failure. A server failure at a company that supplies the world with massive amounts of data could have catastrophic consequences.
Last year, Meta’s WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram apps crashed for hours, instantly wiping about $65 million off their market value. This is just one company, and if the entire Internet goes down, the consequences are simply unimaginable.
But the decentralized internet is entirely expected to avoid such problems, because web content is stored on countless endpoints. It is difficult for hackers to take down every node on the decentralized internet, and the failure of some nodes will not bring down the entire server.
No more reliance on centralized trust authority
The bulk of the centralized Internet is generally controlled by large technology companies. Users will store a lot of sensitive data on these platforms, and we can only trust these companies to work hard to ensure data security.
Although the data is safe in most cases, sometimes these companies also make a fool of leaking sensitive information and betray our trust. In extreme cases, this may even pose a threat to the safety of the user’s life.
But the decentralized Internet does not have these problems, because we are the masters of the data. We decide what data we see online, not the Internet deciding what data we expose.
All good? is it possible?
Although there are many benefits, there are also many experts who believe that the decentralized Web 3.0 is completely a bubble under the hype. They predict that the wave will soon subside, just like the JavaScript frameworks of yesteryear.
Guido Van Rossum, creator of the Python programming language, tweeted not long ago: Let the burning fireball destroy Web3.
His views are not without merit. After all, many developers don’t even think that the decentralized Internet is a good thing even from the root. The specific issues are as follows:
without any form of review
The lack of censorship in the decentralized Internet is also a double-edged sword. Although there are many benefits, the risks are not small.
One of the big risks is that any individual user may experience internet abuse/bullying. The smarter individual users are, the better they can secure their sensitive information online, keeping it safe and secure in most situations. But with a little carelessness, the information posted online may be used to do evil, or even launch online or offline targeted attacks. After all, there are no moderators or robots in Web 3.0 to hide or delete comments.
And the absence of these protections is because proponents believe they violate a fundamental principle of Web 3.0: data is owned, not censored.
But there is a simple solution to this. Developers can give people the option to filter out inappropriate content and leave only the safer parts. If you have to watch dangerous/inappropriate content, you can also make a clear statement, so that everyone can freely choose what they want to watch and what they don’t want to watch according to their own wishes.
The proliferation of NFTs and cryptocurrency scams
Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) are also a type of cryptocurrency project, mainly in the form of digital artworks, and have achieved non-replicable properties with the advanced security measures of blockchain technology.
Non-fungible tokens have been around for several years, and although there have been news of NFTs being sold at high prices in the cryptocurrency market before, their full take-off will start in 2021.
NFTs and cryptocurrencies have become the basic form of most financial activities on the decentralized Internet, relying on a fairly secure form of financial exchange. They don’t exist in the bank at all, which eliminates the potential for a single point of failure. Whether it is money or tokens, it is safe and secure in the user’s digital wallet.
Because NFTs are very valuable, and the price of cryptocurrencies has risen over time, many speculators who do not understand the rationale behind them have joined the Web 3 field. This group of people who thought they could make a fortune with tokens/cryptocurrency ended up falling victim to scams.
The most common form of fraud today is the “carpet-pulling fraud”. As an NFT scam, minters will hype their projects on social media platforms, attracting more people to invest in these digital tokens. When the price of NFT rises sharply, the mint will suddenly shut down the project and directly take away the money of investors, causing the price of NFT to drop rapidly. The most well-known case is the Frosties scam, when fraudsters swindled a total of $1.1 million 100 from 40,000 community users.
In addition, airdrop scams, phishing scams, pump-and-dump scams, and bidding scams are rampant in the decentralized community. With an estimated $2.8 billion in losses caused by cryptocurrency scams each year, it will only get worse in the future if proper measures are not taken.
Centralized technology still has tenacious vitality
There are many advantages to a centralized organization, at least I can’t imagine what the world would be like without the FAANGs (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Google). There was no Facebook for social users, no React and React Native for developers, no one to maintain Google Workspace, and we would say goodbye to Chrome, Dart, and Flutter. Regardless of the controversy, these tech giants have literally brought us a plethora of amazing technologies that serve each of our lives. If they all disappear overnight…the sky will collapse, I’m afraid it will.
And these centralized companies, no matter how bastards, have at least traces of fraudulent behaviors against users, which can help us correctly attribute the problem to the culprits behind the scenes. This is basically impossible on the decentralized internet, where the emphasis on anonymity will force us to put in a lot of work to successfully track down cryptocurrency/NFT fraudsters.
It is precisely because of this that many people are still skeptical about the decentralized Internet.
The good has been said, the bad has been said, so what should we do in the end. It’s simple, just follow the benefits.
The decentralized internet will continue to grow, it just won’t replace the centralized internet
QuickNode specializes in decentralized technology for Web 2 and Web 3 businesses. Web 3 applications are still being created using a lot of Web 2 technologies, so I’m afraid the centralized ecosystem will continue to keep pace with the decentralized ecosystem.
Decentralized Internet is not that kind of expansion system, its mission is not to replace the original centralized technology, but to provide better alternatives in specific fields. Odysee is basically YouTube without censorship, Mastodon is Twitter without censorship, and Pixelfed is Instagram without censorship — and it never leaks your data to businesses that specialize in targeted advertising.
So, it is up to you to choose which way to go. The dominance of Google and Apple in the tech industry will remain strong, after all, they also control so many amazing products.
Web 3 developers are not “clowns”, and the decentralized Internet will gradually improve
Web 3.0 and the decentralized internet are still in their infancy, but have shown amazing potential. The possibilities of blockchain technology have not been fully realized, and we look forward to more developers participating and working together for the future of the decentralized ecosystem.
Currently, companies are struggling to find enough Web 3 developers, blockchain engineers, and other decentralized technologists in the labor market. In order to promote the full popularity and maturity of Web 3, technical people are working hard to provide a smoother learning and ascending channel.
It doesn’t matter if the hype is – what matters is how to go beyond the hype
The hype and controversy will eventually subside, and it is the actual performance that can make the final decision. When the decentralized Internet is really ready to replace the centralized Internet in an all-round way, there will be various technical means to help reduce risks in the ecology, and further explore the possibility space that we are still unimaginable.
At the same time, we should also make more people aware of the existence of this interesting technology. Over the years, we’ve seen the birth and iteration of the iPhone and watched how it got better every step of the way. Flight technology has also evolved from the Wright Brothers’ early planes to Tesla’s spaceships.
The Internet also never stops. As mentioned earlier, Web 3 is unlikely and should not replace the centralized Internet. But this is just a current assessment, and maybe in a few years, as people actively build it into a technical solution with more benefits and less risks, our judgment will completely change. At that time, centralized technology itself will take the initiative to withdraw from the stage of history.
In conclusion, this wave of decentralization of the Internet is by no means a pure hoax, and Web 3.0 developers are striving for a viable goal. We look forward to the implementation of decentralized technology, and we may welcome the huge treasure that has not yet been discovered with an open mind.
about the author:
Yin Long Ma, front-end developer. Web 3.0 enthusiast.
Original link:
The text and pictures in this article are from InfoQ
This article is reprinted from https://www.techug.com/post/guido-van-rossum-the-father-of-python-the-fire-of-hype-may-destroy-web-3/
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