What did Cai Wensheng, Feng Bo, and Zeng Ming say at the Hong Kong Web3 Carnival?

The Web3 week in Hong Kong has come to an end, and the warm-up of the conference is still going on.

Last week, the "2023 Hong Kong Web3 Festival (Hong Kong Web3 Festival 2023)" co-hosted by Wanxiang Blockchain Labs and HashKey Group and hosted by W3ME was held at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Center. The conference invited technology leaders, experts and scholars in relevant industries, as well as representatives of Hong Kong regulatory agencies, to express their views on the latest regulatory policies, standards and future development of Hong Kong's Web3 and virtual asset industries.

activities,Cai Wensheng, Angel Investor & Chairman of Meitu、Feng Bo, founder of Dragonfly.xyz、Zeng Ming, Former Chief Strategy Officer of Alibaba (host)Gather together for a roundtable discussion and chat about the opportunities and challenges brought by the evolution from Web1 to Web3 for society, enterprises and individuals.

Cai Wensheng believes that Web3 can just adapt to the development of AI, "Will the development of AI make most people unemployed? It will definitely. I think Web3 can solve this problem."

Feng Bo said, "There is no economic crisis or financial crisis today, but the crisis of the legal currency (dollar)."

Zeng Ming questioned the hot issues of Web3 in the past period of time, "I think the user migration from Web2 to Web3 in the past year or so is a false proposition. No one discussed how to migrate from Google to ChatGPT. Everyone's reaction on the first day was Google is doomed."

The roundtable discussion is as follows:

Cai Wensheng:When Feng Bo and I appeared on the stage, people often introduced me and Feng Bo as "people who worked from Web1 to Web3".

From my own understanding, Web1 is the era of Yahoo and Sina, which was decentralized, and the information we need was provided by Sina and Yahoo. Web2 is Google, Baidu, WeChat, and Facebook. You can interact with each other when you turn it on, and you can choose. However, the problem that Web2 has not solved is to register an account, which requires the consent of WeChat or even Twitter. One day Twitter is unhappy, even Trump's account can be closed, and you can't sue it. The core of Web3 is that there will also be a platform in the future, but the registration of an account does not require the consent of the platform.

Second, you can control the data yourself.

Third, the data you own can be realized and valuable, and become the value owner of the platform. This is the core change.

Feng Bo:In the industry, today is still in the Internet age, and Web3 in the Internet age is just a code name.The best Internet products for next-generation Internet applications are Bitcoin and Ethereum, not Toutiao and Meituan.

There is no real Web3 company yet, and now everyone is sitting here, why are there so many people? Because everyone is looking for direction. Today is just looking forward to the direction. As for what Web3 is, in fact, everyone does not know. Professor Zeng may know a little more than us, so we can look forward to it.

Feng Bo:At that time, we invested in software companies. The software companies saw the opportunity of the Internet. At that time, there was a BBS, so they said that they should change the BBS to something that the society can use.

The historical stage at that time was very interesting. The discussion was that SSS Net was used by professional software engineers, just like DeFi now.Those who use DeFi are all professionals and have been trained. Who will use BBS? Ordinary users may not use it.DeFi will go through the same process. In the future, DeFi will be like turning on refrigerators, microwave ovens, and mobile phones without so many cumbersome steps. At that time, DeFi will become the most important financial means of human civilization.

Cai Wensheng:My first entrepreneurial project was 265, a navigation website in the Web1 era. I sold it to Google in 2008 for $20 million, and I am very satisfied. But then my good friend Pang Dongsheng imitated 265 and made 2345, which was later listed on the A-share market with a maximum of 40 billion yuan, so sometimes it is not right to cash out too early. Later, I started Meitu on the mobile Internet. It was too early. The earliest short video was Meipai produced by Meituan.

The inspiration from Feng Bo and I’s failure experience is that the entrepreneurial industry is a long-distance race, and sometimes you should not pay too much attention to short-term benefits. If you focus too much on the immediate value, you will not be able to achieve maximum development.

Feng Bo:I asked Professor Zeng a question. You have studied deeply. In the future technological revolution, one is Web3 application form, one is Crypto, and the other is AI. How do you think these three things will develop intertwined in the next ten years?

Zeng Ming:I discuss Web3 as an overall concept representing a major technological change in the future. It has three major drivers of technological change, but which one is the hot spot that keeps changing. One is the hottest Metaverse about three years ago. The technical driving force behind Metaverse is actually AR and VR.

Speaking of "investing too early", I went to see the demo of Magicleap's AR glasses for the first time. My first feeling after watching it was that it was not a question of whether the effect was good or not, but that you really couldn’t tell what was real and what was virtual in the future. The latter product did not pass some tests on Energy saving and Portability, and finally the product did not come out. But if AR technology made a breakthrough at that time, it would actually be a breakthrough in human-computer interaction.

If Apple's products this year can surprise everyone, it will be a big breakthrough; if it fails to achieve the effect, it may have to toss for another two or three years.

Second, we have been talking about the development of Blockchain and Crypto. From Bitcoin to the present, it has only been more than ten years. The success lies in the strong consensus of Bitcoin, the new computing platform of Ethereum, and Smart contracts. The essence of Crypto is a revolution in production relations. It provides a decentralized network that can make asset circulation and transactions more efficient, but the current problem is that there are not enough Digital assets to circulate and trade.

I think Crypto is at an awkward stage of development from 1.0 to 2.0. On the one hand, Infrastructure needs to continue to make breakthroughs, which is why Layer 2 has received so much attention in the past two years, and ZK has made many breakthroughs.Because of the ecology of Ethereum or other supply chain ecology, on the basis of security and privacy protection, the problems of scalability, applicability, and cost must be solved.On the basis of infrastructure development, the next round of breakthroughs in application innovation will be formed.

Originally, I was relatively pessimistic last year. I think the next wave of Crypto’s development is not so fast. But in the past six months, the big breakthroughs in AI are still very shocking. I think GPT is a technological breakthrough in general artificial intelligence.

Is ChatGPT the final winner? Is it the impact of this round of smart AI products? Now there are still big variables.

To sum up, I think the three pillar technologies of Web3, AI, have brought us surprises and have entered the next stage of development. We will see great breakthroughs in the next two years. I personally think that the breakthrough of AI technology has brought great value to the Crypto world,AI will create a lot of digital assets, and these assets can bring greater value to all participants through Blockchain and Crypto.The combination of these two may give birth to the creator economy in the future, which I think is a great direction. In that sense, we will usher in Crypto 2.0.

If AR and VR glasses take two or three years to brew, I think the first big explosion of Web3 will be ushered in in about three years. Whether it is applications or infrastructure, it will be very exciting at that time, and that big explosion should be able to drive the entire economy forward for about 10 years.

Feng Bo:Let's review again, what stage of civilization are we in now? I think we are moving towards software civilization and saying goodbye to industrial civilization.

In the software civilization, we already have value-anchored Bitcoin. The best product created by humans using the Internet is Bitcoin, because the previous business model has changed local Meituan and Toutiao, but Bitcoin has changed How people make currency and how to anchor value, this is the biggest product of the Internet.

The second successful one is Ethereum, which represents the trust mechanism of the future software civilization. On this basis, when we entered this civilization, the big bang of Web3 was based on this foundation, and the future will rely on countless new applications created by everyone. Where does this app come from? Neither do we know that the era and aesthetic is correct.

Cai Wensheng:Why are Web3 and blockchain going so hard?Because it is more of a change in production relations and involves changes in the organizational structure and even the national structure, it will definitely be distrusted or even hindered by the original traditional vested interests.

The development of AI now means the improvement of productivity, and any country and society must embrace it. AI can promote greater development of Web3, so I agree with what Professor Zeng Ming said, there may be a big explosion in the next three years.

The development of the Internet in the past two decades is more about the change of information, and has not touched the level of value and redistribution, but now it has arrived. Just like the Internet did not change the banking system much before, at most it made it more efficient. The collapse of the Silicon Valley Bank of the United States may also be an opportunity to make these traditional banks rethink whether to embrace the opportunity of Crypto and Web3.

Feng Bo:There is no economic crisis or financial crisis today, but the crisis of legal currency. The crisis of legal currency is how the dollar is made, how it is distributed, how it is distributed, and how it is stored. This system has completely failed. The opponent of the US dollar is Bitcoin. What has Bitcoin created? Decentralized governance structure, mining, blockchain technology. Continuing this technology, humans began a series of developments in Ethereum.

DeFi is like e-commerce facing traditional trade, so in the future we want to move the entire financial service to the chain. This large system requires a very long infrastructure construction process.

Zeng Ming:Starting from BTC, BTC has a very clear value on the first day of its birth, and it has a very clear value when it is decentralized to today's Network society.

Feng Bo:The individual is the foundation, the freer it is, the more efficient it is, the two engines of human civilization: freedom and efficiency. The Internet is already very free and efficient, but Web2 has made it less free, but very efficient.

Now Web3 is pure freedom and pure efficiency. Freedom and efficiency are the most advanced systems. Human civilization will always evolve towards advanced systems.

Zeng Ming:Here are two very relevant and interesting questions, user migration from Web2 to Web3. The fundamental problem is that applications with a large number of users cannot be made in the original Crypto environment. The so-called moving from Web2 to Web3 will find out what exactly do I want Crypto to do? If we really look at everything from the perspective of Web3, we have a breakthrough in AI technology, with Crypto as the infrastructure of the Value network, and there may be technological breakthroughs in AR and VR in the future.

We can imagine that maybe two or three years later there will be a very shocking game. This game uses NFT, uses all value exchange networks, and actually uses AIGC technology to bring breakthroughs in experience. If you can still use VR glasses to watch at that time, it is a completely immersive experience, then it will be a product that has achieved a qualitative leap towards Web2, it may be the prototype of a complete Web3 technology, and user migration will naturally occur at that time .

I think the user migration from Web2 to Web3 in the past year or so is a false proposition.When ChatGPT appeared today, it passed 100 million users in two months. No one discussed how to migrate from Google. Everyone’s reaction on the first day was that Google was going to die.

Everyone is thinking of countless ways to move the so-called traditional Web2 users to Crypto and to the narrow Web3. I think that is the wrong direction. We must not have created enough user value to allow users to come up directly. .

Feng Bo:I think the biggest difference between Web2 and Web3, or Web3 and Web2 is the difference in aesthetics. The big migration has already begun, and you may not know which bridge the crowd will cross. The first victory of e-commerce was SARS in 2002. For the first time, SARS was locked at home by everyone. But after SARS, many people tried e-commerce for the first time.

In 2000, there was a group discussing what kind of users are suitable for e-commerce, and the conclusion was all human beings. What kind of users are suitable for Crypto? All human beings, but we don't have many application systems because of infrastructure bottlenecks.

Cai Wensheng:The outbreak of the mobile Internet has something to do with two things. The birth of the iPhone in 2009, including the emergence of Android in 2010, brought about a huge revolution in the entire operating system. Taking China as an example, the real popularization in China was the emergence of Huawei and Xiaomi in 2011 and 2012, which successfully reduced the selling price of mobile phones to below 2,000 yuan.

It’s hard for you to accept that the first generation of Google’s first device cost seven to eight thousand yuan just after it came out. The Crypto we are talking about, now the Ethereum fee has dropped to 1 or 2 US dollars, but it is still equivalent to more than a dozen yuan, can it be lowered to another level? The maturity has reached another level.

The second condition, just like games in 2003, games are the easiest to attract users. In 2004 and 2005, I used SP to send text messages to make money with a monthly subscription, which is a bit of a game entertainment.

Feng Bo:I believe that in three years' time, there will be 2 billion people around the world depositing digital currency. It doesn't matter whether it is earned from games, running, or playing 3D mahjong. The important thing is that DeFi will become the financial system on which the world depends.

We are now going through a technological revolution, and this technological revolution is the first time since human civilization to take care of everyone. The original innovations were all Benefit rulers, this is a revolution for all people.

Zeng Ming:I think Bitcoin is a bit of a genius that just came out of nowhere, a bit ahead of its time. We have spent a lot of time to push the values ​​and worldview represented by Bitcoin forward through rounds of innovations in blockchain, Ethereum, and DeFi, taking it a big step forward.

We have also said before that the entire Crypto is like a robot, not a collaboration between people, but more like a collaboration between machines. If AI breaks out, more things will be between machines. Ethereum's Smart contracts are the simplest commands, but simple commands that can be executed by machines may be the smartest way in the machine world. After so many years of hard work facing the future, we may soon usher in a real technological explosion, and my feeling is getting stronger and stronger.

Cai Wensheng:We know that the development of technology will bring a lot of unemployment, just like the appearance of cars and tractors at that time made many farmers unemployed. More than 100 years ago, 95% of the United States were farmers, and now it is less than 2%. Later, the development of the tertiary industry (information industry) made industrial workers unemployed.

Will the development of AI make most people unemployed? Most definitely.

I think Web3 can solve this problem. How to say? What is the remaining 80% going to do?

For example, I was in my fifties at that time, and every time I went back to my hometown, I found that my classmates hadn’t worked every day for 20 years and played mahjong every day. My hometown is a rural area, and they didn’t do farm work. In the future, 80% may not be able to find a job, but they can still make money. In the future, you will be given money for playing games, and you will be given money for watching movies in the future. In the future, things that should be entertaining can also make money through Web3, solving 80% of employment in disguise.

Cai Wensheng:I used to ask my friends for many years to buy Bitcoin and Ethereum, and then I felt very uncomfortable because he told me that it fell again every few days. I said, why don’t you look at this matter on a yearly basis? If you look at it by day or year, Bitcoin and Ethereum are often in a state of decline. If the time is extended from 2009 to the present, it will increase tens of thousands of times. Ethereum appeared for only a few cents in 2014, and it has risen tens of thousands of times now.

If you stretch the time, in terms of years, the industry is still developing rapidly. Similarly, AI may be combined with Web3. In the next 20 years, it is difficult for you to imagine what the next 20 years will be like, but people must be optimistic and look forward positively. There is a good saying, because you believe, you will see in the end.

Zeng Ming:Now the overall macro environment for everyone to start a business is very difficult. I think the fundamental reason is that after 2015, the dividends created by technological progress are not enough to drive the global economy to take another step forward. Perhaps in the next three to five years, various technological advances will be integrated together, and when we enter the next technological explosion cycle, it may drive the further development of the global economy, and the overall environment will be much better.