Look back at Gavin Wood's accurate prediction of Web3.0 in 2014

吴说

特邀专栏作者

2022-01-06 15:29

This article is about 3716 words, reading the full article takes about 6 minutes

AI Summary

Expand

Original translation: Wu said blockchain

This article was originally published on Gavin Wood's blog "Insights into a Modern World" on April 17, 2014, when Gavin was still serving as the co-founder and CTO of Ethereum, and Polkadot had not yet been founded. In this blog, Gavin comprehensively explained what the Web 3.0 era should look like in his mind, and the four components that make up Web 3.0.

As we step into the future, we see an increasing need for a zero-trust interactive system.

Even before Snowden, we realized that trusting our information to arbitrary entities on the Internet is fraught with danger. In the wake of Snowden, however, this awareness has largely fallen on those who believe that large organizations and governments often try to overstep their powers. So we realized that trusting our information to corporate bodies was basically an inherently wrong model. The opportunity for an enterprise to stay out of our data is simply the cost of the effort minus its expected benefit. Given that companies' revenue models often require them to learn as much as possible about their users, realists will realize that the potential for surreptitious abuse is unlikely to be overestimated.

The protocols and technologies on the web, and even the Internet as a whole, are a good technology preview. SMTP, FTP, HTTP(S), PHP, HTML, and Javascript are the main tools that all contribute to the cloud-based applications we see today, such as Google's Drive, Facebook, and Twitter, not to mention other Countless applications, such as gaming, shopping, banking and dating. In the future, however, these protocols and technologies will have to be redesigned according to our new understanding of the interaction between society and technology.

Web 3.0, or what might be called a "post-Snowden" web, is a reimagining of those things we already use the web, but with a fundamentally different model of interaction between parties. Information that we deem public, we release. We assume the information is consistent and we put it on a consensus ledger. We will keep the information we consider private and never disclose it. Communications always take place over encrypted channels and only end with anonymous identities; never using anything traceable (such as an IP address).

In short, we design systems that mathematically enforce our prior assumptions, since no government or organization can reasonably be trusted.

release

First of all, we already have a lot of decentralized and encrypted information release systems. What these systems do is to take the short internal address (ie hash value) of some information, and in the future, the information itself can be obtained based on the hash value. New information can be submitted to it. Once downloaded, we can guarantee it is the correct information because the hash is inherent to it. This static publishing system does most of the work for HTTP(S) and all of the work for FTP. There have been many implementations of this technique, but the easiest to cite is BitTorrent. Every time you click on a BitTorrent magnet link, all you're doing is telling your customer to download the data corresponding to that hash.

secondary title

communication

The second part of Web 3.0 is an identity-based anonymous low-level messaging system. This is used for communication between people on the web. It uses strong cryptography so that some guarantees are made about the information; they can be encrypted with an identity's public key to guarantee that only that identity can decode it. They can be signed by the sender's private key to guarantee that it really came from the sender and provide the recipient with a secure communication to receive. A shared secret can provide the opportunity for secure communication, including between groups, without proof of receipt.

Since each of these provides the final message logistics, the use of transport-protocol-level addresses becomes unnecessary; what was once composed of a user or port and an IP address is now merely a hash.

Messages will have a time-to-live to be able to distinguish between published messages, which may want to live as long as possible to ensure as many identities see it, and instant signal messages, which want to be transmitted on the network as quickly as possible. Thus, the binary opposition of delay and lifespan is interchangeable.

The actual physical routing will take place through a game-theoretic adaptive network system. Each node tries to maximize their value to other nodes, asserting that other nodes are valuable to their incoming information. A node whose information is of no value will be disconnected and their location will be connected to some other possibly unknown (or possibly secondary) node. In order for a node to be useful, information with some specific properties will be required (for example, sender address or subject, both unencrypted, starting with a specific bit string).

consensus

The third part of Web 3.0 is the consensus engine. Bitcoin brought to many of us the idea of consensus-based applications. However, this is only a tentative first step. A consensus engine is a way to agree on certain rules of interaction, knowing that future interactions (or not) will automatically and irreversibly execute exactly as specified. It is effectively an all-encompassing social contract and draws strength from consensus network effects.

The fact that a breach of one agreement can affect all others is key to creating a strong social contract, thereby reducing the chances of breach or willful neglect. For example, the more isolated the reputation system is from the personal social interaction system, the less effective it will be. A reputation system combined with a similar feature of Facebook or twitter would be more effective than a system without it, because a user's intrinsic worth depends on what friends, partners, or colleagues think of them. A particularly poignant example is the dilemma of whether and when to befriend an employer or a date on Facebook.

A consensus engine will be used for all trusted information releases and modifications. This will happen through a fully universal global transaction processing system. The first viable example of this is the Ethereum project.

secondary title

front end

browser"browser"and user interface. Interestingly, this looks fairly similar to the browser interface we already know and love. There will be URI bar, back button, and of course, the lion's share will be used to display Dapps (i.e. webpages/websites).

Using this consensus-based name resolution system (unlike Namecoin in applications), URIs can be reduced to a unique address (ie hash) of the application's front end. Through the information distribution system, this can be extended to the collection of files required by the front end (for example, an archive containing .html, .js, .css and .jpg files). This is the static part of the dapp (-let).

It does not contain dynamic content, but is served through other communication channels. In order to collect and submit dynamic but public content whose origin must be absolutely certain and which must remain constant ("fixed") forever, such as reputation, balance, etc., there is a javascript-based API for communicating with Consensus engine interaction. To collect and deliver dynamic, potentially private content that is necessarily volatile, subject to destruction or lack of availability, a P2P messaging engine can be used.

There will be some superficial differences, and we'll see a shift from traditional client-server URL patterns like "https://address/path" to something like "goldcoin" and "uk.gov" The new form of address. Name resolution will be achieved through a consensus engine-based contract that users can easily redirect or augment. Periods will allow multi-level name resolution, e.g. "uk.gov" might pass the "gov" subname into the name resolver given by "uk".

We will see background DApps or dapplets play an important role in our Web 3.0 experience due to the permanently transient nature of information provided automatically or incidentally to browsers through updates from consensus backends and maintenance of peer-to-peer networks.

After the initial sync process, page load times will be reduced to zero as static data is pre-downloaded and kept up to date, while dynamic data (delivered via the consensus engine P2P messaging engine) is also maintained up to date. While syncing, the user experience will be very reliable, although the actual information displayed may be out of date.

For users of Web 3.0, all interactions will be anonymous, secure and, for many services, trustless. For those services that require a third party, these tools will give users and application developers the ability to spread trust across multiple different, potentially competing entities, greatly reducing the amount of people that have to be placed in the hands of any particular single entity amount of trust.

secondary title

Migrating to Web3.0

This transition will be gradual.

On Web 2.0, we will increasingly see websites that utilize similar Web 3.0 components on the back end, such as Bitcoin, BitTorrent, and Namecoin. This trend will continue, and Ethereum, the true Web 3.0 platform, will likely be used by sites that wish to provide proof of transactions for their content, such as voting sites and exchanges. Of course, systems are only as secure as the weakest link, so these sites will eventually migrate themselves to Web 3.0 browsers, which can provide end-to-end security and trust-free interaction.

According to the "Notice on Further Preventing and Dealing with the Risk of Hype in Virtual Currency Transactions" issued by the central bank and other departments, the content of this article is only for information sharing, and does not promote or endorse any operation and investment behavior. Readers are requested to strictly abide by the laws and regulations of the region and do not participate in Any illegal financial conduct. Wu said that without permission, it is forbidden to reprint or copy the content, and those who violate it will be investigated for legal responsibility.