You go back, Jack, do it again; Web2 architectures hamstring Web3

Perfecting Equilibrium Volume One, Issue 42

Now you swear and kick and beg us that you're not a gamblin' man

Then you find you're back in Vegas with a handle in your hand

Your black cards can make you money so you hide them when you're able

In the land of milk and honey, you must put them on the table

You go back, Jack, do it again, wheels turnin' 'round and 'round

Editor’s Note—This is Part Three of a seven-part series called?Isn’t #web3 Just Another Nerd Buzzword and Why Should I Care Anyway?

1. Is it right to be treated so badly? How Web2 abused click-through agreements and broke commerce
2. Do you know what's going on over here? Stupid nerd names; why should you trust Web3 when it’s trustless?
3. How independent blockchain is the backbone of Web3
4. A new sensation: A distributed Web3 architecture
5. You say you want a revolution; how Web3 empowers content and IP creators
6. The Transition: what’s needed to move from Web2 to Web3
7. The Future is Here: How to take advantage of Web3 today

The Web3 Reader for September 15 2022

There’s a story so cute an editor would cut it out of a novel: a corporate executive is struggling to listen to music on his transistor radio. Frustrated, he goes back into his office…which happens to be #sony. Akio Morita shows that radio to his engineers, and the co-founder of Sony asks the billion Yen question:

Why?do we build radios like this?

He gets the answer every CEO has heard at some point: Well, that’s the way we’ve always done it.

That’s true. In fact, that’s one of the early stages new technologies invariably pass through in Thomas Kuhn’s?The Structure of Scientific Revolutions?– the new technology is used to incrementally improve the old technology’s architecture.

Tube radios were?big and heavy and large, and big powerful speakers fit them perfectly.

Transistor radios were small and could run on batteries, making them practically portable. Large luggable units had room for OK speakers, but the really popular pocketable units…well, they only had room for a?tiny tinny speaker that turned music into mush.

They did have one new thing; a jack for a rudimentary wired ear bud.

But Morita wasn’t having it. He told those engineers to start with a clean sheet of paper and come up with a new design.

They came up with the #Walkman.

Transistor radios and cassettes could be built incredibly tiny if no one tried to stuff a speaker into them. And tiny headphones could be built offering much better audio fidelity than those speakers.

That’s where Web3 is currently stuck these days. Take?this missive from Tomasz Tunguz, Venture Capitalist at Redpoint. Tunguz shows a diagram of a Web2 app, then the same app with Web3 tech swapped in.

Only the transaction database & the file storage changed. 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.

Ummmm…yup. It’s a Web2 app with a Web2 architecture. Swapping in #ethereum doesn’t make it a Web3 architecture.

Tunguz does see this.?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.

They already are. It’s not very apparent yet, because everyone keeps using blockchains like Ethereum, whose primary purpose is to keep 100 percent track of token transactions. Which is a lot like buying a Tesla to replace your horse and buggy…and then towing the Tesla with that horse, and complaining that the new rig is slow.

Once blockchains are used on their own, a truly distributed Web3 architecture is much simpler.

So lets lay out a Web3 architecture. We’ll start by laying out the principles that define what we’re trying to build. After all, it’s kinda important to know whether you’re building a 100-pound canoe or the?100,000-ton USS Gerald R. Ford.

There’s an architecture and methodology for?building canoes out of bark, for example.

The Ford? Not so much. Even if you do happen to have 100,000 tons of bark laying around.

So what principles are the foundation of Web3?

Perhaps there is only one: Total Transparency. All participants must have complete access to the entire original data record.

Sounds simple! And it is, the way Monty Python’s?How To Play The Flute?is simple – just blow in one end, and move your fingers up and down the outside so the right notes come out! There’s a lot of architecture between Total Transparency and a working Web3 application. Shall we dive in?

• Data must be permanently recorded: This is required for access to the entire original data record. Blockchain is perfect for this; changes, updates and the like are written to new blocks, leaving previous data undisturbed. So users can access the data along with its entire history and every paramutation.
• Data must be a service: You cannot have Total Transparency without access.
• Storage must be a distributed service: You cannot have Total Transparency without access, which means you cannot have chunks of the data locked away.

In fact, that might be a good working definition of a successful Web3 architecture: Totally Transparent Data supported by Everything As A Service.

Making everything a transparent background service also removes one of the big blockages of Web3 growth: The majority of people want things to be as simple as picking up a bucket of chicken at KFC, rather than the drudgery of frying up raw chicken at home. But most of Web3 is a lot harder than frying chicken. It’s a lot closer to preparing fugu, actually. When blowfish is prepared correctly, fugu is a delicious delicacy. But just one slip of the knife, and?a single bite of the spoiled fugu can kill?because of the blowfish’s potent neurotoxin.

Why is anyone surprised there is a reluctance to adapt Web3 when one bad line of code locked away 11,539 ETH [$34 Million] forever. Or that you can accidentally throw out $350 million and then have to spend?8 years digging through a landfill?looking for it?

Web3 will gain acceptance when it gains the Web3 equivalents of KFC and the licensed chefs who routinely prepare fugu. And that requires building Web3 apps on a Web3 architecture.

Coming Next

Friday, Sept. 16:?The Week in Review; Plus Somewhat Off-Topic-Scanning all that Feola.Foto film with a digital camera

Feola.Foto

Iced in Tug Boat, Hampton Bays, NY. Pentax ME Super, Pentax SMC M 200 f/4, Kodak Kodachrome 64

Corrections and Clarifications

Yes, this five-part series now has seven parts. That’s just a function of the way I write; I can see the beginning and the end, and I work out the path in between while writing.