Web 3.0 cracking the hard nuts(Part 1)
Those are a series of thoughts around a new buzzword that surfaced in the recent few years. Some people call it the third iteration of The internet.
I will explore the following new web 3.0 technology as a technical and financially viable alternative to Major Cloud providers and Infrastructure providers.
I am not talking only about AWS, Google, and Azure. I can, with confidence, includes major Infrastructure telecom players such as AT&T and Vodafone.
The upcoming series will cover the following.
- Theoretical and philosophical chit-chatting (this article).
- Networking infrastructure will use Helium as an example.
- Decentralized cloud, here there are many players. I focuse on only one but will mention some as examples. Akash Network, RunOnFlux, and Definity a.k.a the Internet Computer Protocol.
- Decentralized Storage, as well there is a lot of options Storj, FileCoin, Sia.
Those are not an inclusive list of technologies. There are many others. I am just giving some of the platforms I tested during my journey.
Based on my initial assessment, those technologies can provide natural alternatives to the current cloud and, in some cases, especially in the case of Helium, can beat them in the scale and spread. Of course, it is not a thing to wipe them out.
New game, new rules
Comparing Web 3.0 technology and solutions to Web 2.0 is not the goal here. The goal is to solve a business and technical problem with a web 3.0 foundation.
We still will look at the solution from a practical point of view, so we will leverage existing technology and services that are already available and backed by decent community and support.
The main goal here is not about building a new blockchain network and indeed not giving any financial advice about crypto investing. The target is to create a technical solution based on an existing public-provided blockchain network, a.k.a, permissionless network.
The Web 3.0 Philosophy
When the internet become public in Web 1.0, it kind of treated as news or media 2.0, it was mainly provided by the corporate and government, which mainly provide everything, contents, infrastructure, and most important governance, the only role of the Internet user is to consume those contents.
In the Second Iteration, Web 2.0, Users will create their content and share it with other users. Still, the central organization provides the required infrastructure and, in consequence, the governance of the contents.
The implication of this Web 2.0 was revolutionary regarding the number of users and diversity of applications.
The main goal of a company that provides the service and store the data is to monetize and Control, you can think of it as my Infrastructure my rules.
The keyword behind web 3.0 is decentralization. Web 3.0 breaks my infrastructure my rule in the current Web by giving each user access and download a local copy of the data (ledger) and participate passively (Node owner) or actively (consensus, validator) in the network technically and governance.
No one owns the network.
A smart contract and coded protocol set The rules. Soullessly executes what participant agreed on. Each transaction goes through a fully automated programmatic voting process.
Web 2.0 fail where Web 3.0 can shine
Web 2.0 comes when the technology is ready and contributes to advancing it, the scale required by Web 2.0 application moves the system from monolithic to distributed systems. The distributed system may sound similar to decentralized, but the fundamental difference is governance.
The distributed system is still governed and managed by an entity or groups. Scaling up distributed system is only limited by the organization’s financial and technical capacity driven by the profits they can gain from monetizing the users and compliance with the local regulatory.
On the other hand, decentralization gives the user the capability to run and operate their infrastructure. The protocol incentivize the participant with digital cryptocurrency or digital Token, which they can use to consume other services.
The decentralized network, scale-up to an interplanetary scale, which will be covered in decentralized storage solution IPFS later on, and limited by users acceptance, the more user participate, the bigger the network becomes.
Final thoughts
When I started to look at Web 3.0, it was mainly driven by technical motivation about the next practice, avoiding tokenomics and crypto madness. Still, tokenomics and cryptocurrency are coded in the fabric of web 3.0, not only the business model. Still, the actual source code, the scaling of the networks have a symbiotic relationship with the health of the Token, Business in the Web 3.0 future will need not only blockchain experts but also tokenomics experts.
