What is Web3 anyway? | Wired

Gavin Wood: I think the Web 2.0 model is very similar to the social model before the Internet. If you go back 500 years ago, people basically just stick to their small villages and towns. They trade with people they know. Broadly speaking, they rely on the structure of society to ensure that expectations are credible and are likely to actually happen: these apples have not rotted, or the horseshoe will not break after three weeks.

This is quite effective because moving between towns is difficult, time-consuming and costly. So you have a pretty high degree of credibility, someone will stay, and they don’t want to be exiled.

But as society has become larger, we have cities, countries, and international organizations, and we have turned to this weird Card Reputation thing. We have created these powerful but regulated institutions, and the regulators ensure that our expectations are met in principle. To conduct business in a specific industry, you must meet certain statutory requirements.

This is not a good solution for several reasons. One of them is that it is very difficult to regulate emerging industries. The government is slow to move and it will take some time to catch up. The other is the imperfect regulatory agency. Especially when they work closely with the industry, there is usually some revolving door relationship between the industry and the regulator.

The other is that the firepower of the regulatory agencies is very limited. This is how much money the government invests. Therefore, supervision will be incomplete. They will be able to supervise perhaps the biggest criminals, but they will not be able to maintain a truly powerful influence at all times. Of course, regulatory agencies and laws vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. If you go somewhere in the EU, then activity X is fine; if you go elsewhere, it’s not good. As we become a very international society, this actually means that your expectations have not been met.

So we need to go beyond this. Unfortunately, Web 2.0 still exists in this very centralized model.

Are we really talking about the failure of technology? Or are we talking about the failure of governance, regulation, and competition policy? It sounds like you are saying: Yes, this is a failure of supervision, but the answer is not better supervision; a new technical layer is needed, because supervision failure is inevitable. Did I describe your point of view correctly?

Yes, absolutely. The model is broken.

So let’s talk about what should be used instead of it. We have been discussing why Web 2.0 does not work. What is your definition of Web3’s convenient elevator?

“Less trust, more truth.”

What does “distrust” mean?

I have a special meaning to trust, which is essentially belief. This is a belief that certain things will happen and the world will behave in a certain way without any real evidence or rational arguments to explain why this happened. So we want less, we want more truth-what I really mean is more reason to believe that our expectations will be met.