Partner of USV: Discussing the "disruptive innovation" of Web3 from the history of the Internet

Original title: "Web3 / Crypto: Why Bother ?"
Author: Albert Wenger, Partner, USV
Original compilation: gm, Rhythm BlockBeats

"I'm not saying Web3 will solve all problems, of course it won't, it will even create new ones, but if developed properly and with the right governance, it can provide a meaningful shift in power for individuals and communities."

One of the things that always amazes me is how many people think there is absolutely nothing redeeming about Web3 or crypto. Maybe that's what they really believe in, maybe it's an extreme reaction to those Web3 supporters who think Web3 brings true liberalism. And from the beginning I tried to provide a more holistic view pointing out the possible good and bad of Web3, just like my talk at the Blockstack summit.

Today, however, I want to try to provide a convincing explanation of why the focus on Web3 makes sense, and that requires some storytelling first, and an understanding of the nature of Web3's disruptive innovation.

The late Clayton Magleby Christensen described this type of innovation as a "disruptive innovation": an innovation that provides new functionality and efficient solutions to the market but, in turn, has the potential to disrupt existing markets. the relationship between.

Therefore, in the early stage, the innovation may lead to a worse situation in other aspects except that it has a good effect in one dimension, but this dimension will eventually become more and more important, and as the innovation is widely adopted, Other aspects will gradually start to improve.

Also, an example of a "disruptive innovation" is the personal computer (PC). When the first PCs came out, they were worse than every computer today, they had little memory, little storage, slow CPUs, little software on them, couldn't multitask, etc.; but they There is also an advantage: it is cheap. And that's important for people who don't have computers at all.

But it was also this odd combination that made existing computer makers (shrinking mainframes to minicomputers) ignore the PC. They focus on all the bad parts and ignore the positives, or within the limits of their understanding, they also try to compete by making their products cheaper. But with the exception of IBM, these computer makers never embraced the PC until they went out of business or were bought by other companies.

So far, the blockchain is still a terrible database. It's slow, requires more storage and computation, and doesn't have much customer support. But at the same time it also has a completely different dimension: no one entity or one organization can control it, as people try to express this dimension by saying that it is "decentralized", although it does not work well.

OK, so how is this any different than PCs being cheaper? Because to some people it's important. Why? Because most of the power that big corporations and governments have comes from the databases they operate and control.

For example Facebook can decide who can read and write from their database and who can see which parts of it, and they can change this database individually. As it turns out, it's also Facebook's source of power around the world. Right now, many people have rightly seen this power as a problem, but have yet to see how the structure of primitive web technology directly contributes to this extreme centralization.

And it would be useful to go back to the early days of the Internet and see how it got to where it is today. When Tim Berners-Lee invented HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol), he unleashed what we now think of as permissionless distribution, when anyone could create a web page and anyone with a browser Anyone can access it.

This was an astonishing breakthrough at the time, because previously almost all publishing had to go through the publisher, who decided what should be published or not. While some complain about the loss, I see this as an opportunity to gain knowledge for many creators and learners who were previously marginalized or shut out entirely.

Additionally, HTTP is a stateless protocol, meaning that there is no memory built directly into the protocol, and thus no concept of a database. So if a user wants to build something like a shopping cart that can hold multiple items, they need to implement data storage somewhere that isn't part of HTTP itself.

And Marc Andreessen and his team at Netscape invented "cookies" to help with this problem, but unfortunately, this mechanism is far inferior to the REST proposed by computer scientist Roy Fielding (Roy Fielding) in the paper many years later. (Representational state transfer, presentation layer state transition) comes elegantly.

Meanwhile, a cookie is a file sent with an HTTP request that can be read and then written by a web server. In the early days, people would write the items in the shopping cart directly to the cookie file.

But because these files are located locally on the client computer, it means people can't start shopping on their desktop computers at work and then finish shopping when they get home. As a result, cookies these days often only contain the user ID, with all other database functionality residing on the server.

Thus, all powerful Internet companies are true database providers. Facebook is a database of people's profiles, contacts of friends, and their status updates, Paypal is a database of people's account balances, Amazon is a database of SKUs, payment credentials, and purchase history, and Google is a database of web pages and query history.

Of course, over time, many competitors to these large companies have been born, but the operational database has always been at the core of their strength, and only they can decide who has the right to read and write to this database and what they can access. which parts of .

In other words: it turns out that unlicensed release is not enough, we also need unlicensed data. Why do we need this? Because we need to avoid leaving a few large corporations controlling the vast majority of what happens on the Internet, which would lead to regulatory distortions in our efforts to correct power imbalances, we need to consolidate power imbalances.

And know the consequences of not doing so. Comparatively, this is why almost everyone hates the cable companies and electric companies that control them (some of their data).

It's worth noting that we also didn't know how to do permission-free until the Bitcoin paper was published. At that time, we had distributed databases, we had federated databases, but all of these were still handled by a small number of entities, such as almost all financial networks, ACH or VISA and so on.

We don't have a protocol to maintain consensus, which means it's hard to agree on what to put in the database, and it's hard to decide who is allowed to join the protocol or leave.

It cannot be overemphasized that Web3 is such a transformative innovation. Also to be clear, I'm not saying it will solve all problems, of course not, it will even create new ones.

But despite this, permissionless data remains a critical missing piece of the internet, and its absence has led to a massive concentration of power. Therefore, if developed properly and with the right governance, Web3 can provide meaningful power transfer for individuals and communities.

If widely adopted, Web3/crypto technology will start to improve in other ways as well. It will be faster, more efficient, easier and safer to use. Just like the PC was a platform for innovation that never happened to mainframes or minicomputers, Web3 will be a platform for innovation that never came from Facebook, Amazon, Google, etc.