What are the principles of Web3?

Web3 definitely has an anti-establishment, liberal vibe, maybe the CryptoPunk is a fitting moniker after all. These "8-bit jpegs" have raised ￡128 million to date. Don't worry, we'll get down and dirty with NFTs in a future post.

I see a line in Web3 between speculation and utility.

And by speculation I mean money without utility.?

Buying, holding, flipping something, an NFT, or a coin in the hope of a return on investment with little effort expended.

Any emerging market that promises high gains and opportunities will inevitably attract its fair share of speculators and investors, plus bad actors and scammers.?

Unfortunately, given the eye-watering amounts sloshing around in Web3 it's fair to say it's attracted more shysters than previous technology waves. ? Every day seems to bring more salacious headlines.??It's fair to say that Web3 has a bit of a PR problem.

In a Bull market the speculators win. But slowly, the NFTs crash to close to zero, the speculators nurse their losses and the builders begin to enter to find the utility.

For me, software has to provide value, make a task easier,? make the life of a human better. Part of my motivation for this series is to inform on the potential utility so you see through the headlines and consider blockchain technology as just another tool.

Now, unlike the agile manifesto there is no de facto list of principles for Web3.? So, I've settled on the most commonly referenced principles of: Decentralised, Trustless and Transparent.

Decentralised

When Tim Berners-Lee put the World Wide Web in the public domain in 1993 he had a vision of a decentralised internet.? Things didn’t really turn out that way.?

The increasing centralization of the Web has ended up producing—with no deliberate action of the people who designed the platform—a large-scale emergent phenomenon which is anti-human. Tim Berners Lee

We spend the majority of our online lives in the walled gardens of the likes of Google and Meta, exchanging likes, tweets and shares for our data. Cambridge Analytica, however, was a timely reminder of how our trust may be misplaced.

In 2018, GDPR was introduced in an attempt to curb the unrestricted use of our data by centralised entities. Web3 architecture intends to solve the problem by inverting the control and giving you control of your data on the blockchain.?

Decentralisation is about getting closer to Tim Berners Lee’s initial vision of the internet, cutting out the corporate in the middle and humans owning their data.

Something you may take for granted if you are reading this in the U.K is that global internet freedom has declined for the 12th consecutive year.?

Only 18% of internet use is free from censorship e.g. India banned Tick Tock outright over a land disagreement with China.? It's much easier to censor a centralised service than a decentralised network.

In August 2022, coding and politics clashed in Web3 with the censorship of “Tornado Cash.”?

Tornado Cash obfuscated crypto transactions, the service obviously appealed to bad actors but it also had some valid use cases such as anonymous donations to Ukraine.

For the first time in history, the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC) placed code on the same threat list as terrorists.? Whilst the service couldn’t be censored, usage by a U.S citizen was now a federal crime.

The open source repository was deleted and the accounts of developers were deleted by GitHub.

Shortly after,? the Tornado Cash code was forked and deployed and the Web3 community set about building a decentralised GitHub alternative.

Trustless

“Don’t be evil” has been part of Google’s code of conduct since 2000.? In 2015, Google adopted “Do the right thing.”???

With the click of a “I agree to the terms” checkbox, centralised entities can and do change the rules while you're in the walled garden. ? They can add a paywall or they can ban you from the walled garden and kill your business with no explanation.

Ethereum is a blockchain with a “Turing complete” computer built in. You can write? promises in code, the code can’t be changed (it’s immutable), and as long as one node exists in the network it will continue to run for perpetuity, even if a company goes bust, or the world ends.? Think of it as “can’t be evil.”?

Transparency

Imagine if every transaction into and out of your bank account was publically visible.? The carbon footprint of every stage of a supply chain was auditable, you knew how much of the sale went to the artist in royalties.

The Third largest Crypto exchange in the world collapsed this week with liquidity problems due to a small shortfall of oh about $8 billion!? Even though the centralised corrupt exchange is a black box you can grab the popcorn and follow the transactions on? Etherscan.? Trust me, this is guaranteed to be the next Netflix documentary.

Community

As a bonus, for the last 6 months I’ve been operating in a Web3 community and on more than one occasion I’ve heard “we’re building web3 together”, there is a genuine feeling of building a better internet with users at the centre.??

The team is distributed, decisions are recorded on the blockchain and work is performed in the open.??

Web2 was about building and curating an audience of listeners and followers.? Web3 is about curating and building a community of contributors and leaders.? We’ll also cover DAO’s in a future post.

Let me know if this breakdown on principles was useful and feel free to DM if you are exploring this space.

If you missed it, you can find the first post in the series here.