Spot the Difference
J?rgen H?land via Unsplash

Spot the Difference

What is the difference between web2 & web3, really? Yes, there are tokens and initial coin offerings and drops and discords. But, today, they resemble each other quite a bit.

Here’s my mental model:?

No alt text provided for this image


Imagine a startup that sells sports cards. A web2 architecture for this app would have five parts

  1. A transaction database: user 1 sold card ABC to user 3.
  2. A metadata database: user 1’s first name is Samuel and his profile picture is found at this URL.
  3. File storage: the profile picture file is saved here.
  4. App server: the code that runs the application.
  5. IaaS/CDN (Infrastructure as a Service / Content Delivery Network): the servers that run code.

Compare this image to a web3 architecture with the web3 parts in red.?

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Only the transaction database & the file storage changed color.

We swapped the transaction database from PostGres to a blockchain like?Ethereum?or?Sui, and the file storage from AWS S3 to a decentralized storage provider, perhaps?Filecoin?or?ArWeave.

The rest of the application remains Web2, running on Amazon, Google or Microsoft servers. Many developers build web3 applications this way: games, exchanges, cross-chain bridges.

The remaining parts of the stack haven’t been recast as decentralized services, yet. Perhaps they will be.

For now, the transaction database remains the most critical decentralized component. That’s enough to confer the benefits of decentralization to users, while giving engineers the tools to build a functional app.

Porendra Pratap

Bachelor of Commerce - BCom from Nizam College at Hyderabad Public School

2 年

????

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Chris van Loben Sels

Veeva Labs | New Market Strategy | Veeva Systems

2 年

I'd be interested in your views of Moxie Marlinspike's observation that, because the app server layer is centralized, users don't really get the benefits of decentralization. For example, if OpenSea says your NFT isn't in your wallet, then for all practical purposes, it is not -- regardless of whether it is on the chain. A broader, but less related point, is that this is actually hard to prevent given the nature of platforms vs. protocols. (https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html)

Aidan Herbert

Decentralized transactional ecosystem enabler

2 年

Web3 advantage (EDGE / IIoT) is decentralization of 4 rails: identity, orchestration, transaction & security. Increased transactional -Decentralized identity: No user identity delegation, Selective disclosure (i.e. over 21) Benefits: Self- sovereign identity, No PII honeypot, externalize identity mgmt. cost. Increased customer trust; No profiling, targeting or PII resale. W3C DID & VC specs apply here. -Smart contracts for decentralized policy orchestration: Policy can be pushed to edge devices (access control, app rules, quotas, governance, etc). Enables self-protecting edge devices, no RTD to cloud core. -Immutable transactions: Data authenticity & integrity are cryptographically provable based on blockchain signing & hash-linkage. Enables processing at data source, reduces bandwidth costs, increases flexibility / agility. -Decentralized security: Leveraging hardware entropy available at edge nodes i.e. hardware root-of-trust, PUF, Discrete TPM etc. No Centralized PKI / directory - public keys can be published on blockchain using W3C DIDs etc Web3 decentralization enables scoped P2P transactions, no centralized fee taker, no paracitic business models (advertizing, etc). Higher transactional effeciency.

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Chris Selland

Leading, Building, Teaching

2 年

Yes I've been thinking this for quite some time - the blockchain is very analogous to a database. The more things change...

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John H.

Founder Aerospace Ventures and Governance Trainee Aviator Passionate Kiwi

2 年

Thank you Tomasz Tunguz for explaining to me finally why I couldn’t get my head around what had fundamentally changed between 2.0 and 3.0 - and it was free content ! :)

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