Henry Wang, First Proponent of Web3.0, demystifies Web2, Web2.5 and Web3（Episode 2/8）
Recently, Henry Wang, SmartMesh Founder and Advisor to MetaLife Social, who first coined the term Web3.0 back in 2003, participated in a fireside chat in the live broadcast room of “Simple Talk”. Henry shared with the audience the past, present and future development of Web3.0 and the Metaverse, as well as realizing One World One Web. He has also discussed in detail Tim Berners-Lee and Gavin Wood’s supplement to the definition of Web3.0, and Elon Musk’s view about Web3. Below is the transcript of the
chat:
Moderator: What are Web2, Web3 and Web2.5?
Henry: I first conceived the concept of Web3 in 2003. At that time, Web 2.0 had just evolved and I was part studying for a Ph.D. in computer science at the University of Washington while working as the business development
director for a semiconductor design company. While I was in a foreign country, I found that although the Internet is interoperable in various countries, the languages and nationalities of different countries are not interlinked and caused inconvenience among many things. Before the emergence of the Web2 concept, I was exploring combining machine translation (AI) with the Web to form the One World One Web, and I defined it as Web3 at that time.
In 2006, the father of the World Wide Web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, adopted the definition of Web3 Semantic Web and added the concept of decentralization to Web3. Tim is the designer of the HTTP protocol who originally intended to
design the distributed system. With the emergence of Web2 applications like
Facebook and Twitter provide users with free centralized social networks in exchange for users’ data, all data and billing systems are monopolized by the internet and social media giants. Rather than creating the distributed system, Tim’s protocol is hijacked by the giants to monetize the data and value of the data. While users continue to use the service for free, the value they create does not belong to the users themselves.
Tim subsequently proposed that the Web must be decentralized, and gradually added decentralization, personal data sovereignty and privacy protection to the definition of Web3. He promoted a project SOLID (SocialLinked Data) with the personal data structure in SOLID called POD (PersonalOnline Data), i.e., each user’s data belongs to the user and users can bring their own data from the application to application, such as from Facebook to twitter, From Twitter to WeChat. Since data belongs to users, so is the value of the data.
The Web Contract Tim led at that time hoped that the giants would endorse and support the decentralization of the Internet. Unfortunately, Web2companies do not buy into the call for personal data sovereignty, none would give up their monopoly interests on user data and data value. Looking back, I think that although Tim’s proposal in SOLID has data sovereignty and encryption technology privacy protection, it lacks a blockchain and token economy that motivates all parties.
By 2014, Polkadot founder Gavin Wood introduced the concept of blockchain into Web3. In 2017, I proposed and implemented the offline token payment protocol, which completes the Web3 protocol stack. Why are offline communications and offline payments important to Web3? Because the core of Web3 is all about decentralization. If your system is disconnected from the power and the network and your mobile phone can no longer communicate and pay, then the system is still centralized. Like autonomous driving, if you need to rely on the Internet to ensure that there is no failure, and if the Internet fails, you will definitely crash, then who would dare to ride in an autonomous car? The ability to operate normally both offline and off-chain is the beginning of the true Internet of Everything andWeb3.
In 2017, I have also defined Token Switching — token exchange for the Internet of Value and Web3, which is different from the Packet Switching package exchange defined by Leonard Kleinrock for the Internet of Information. The Web3 protocol stack was completed in 2017, but it was relatively unknown, just like the concept of metaverse was relatively unknown although we were talking about the virtual world, we did not call It the metaverse. It was not until the popularity of NFTs and the listingb of Roblox that the concept of the metaverse became popular, and Web3 only
surfaced when people discovered the Web3 behind the metaverse. At present, the popularity of Web3 has surpassed the metaverse.
Web2 is centralized. The feature of Web2 is that users interact with the centralized database and application servers, and all the value is taken away by the platform operator.
In Web3, the centralized database and servers are removed, users have direct interaction with each other, and its currency system has become a point-to-a-point system based on blockchain. There are no middlemen as intermediaries. Only a system with this complete decentralized system can continue to operate both offline and off-chain. MetaLife is the point-to-point communication and social network between mobile phones.
Imagine, if the base station is now down or out of power due to a natural disaster and the centralized Internet to which the mobile phone is connected is cut off, can communication between the two adjacent mobile phones still are possible? The answer is No! MetaLife on the other hand, supports offline communication and socialization among multiple mobile phones. The low-energy Bluetooth wormhole protocol jointly created by MetaLife and SmartMesh enable mobile phones to communicate and socialize without networking across Android and Apple platforms. Regions on earth where the Internet doesn’t serve and even on other planets like Mars, MetaLife allows people to connect to a mesh network without relying on the centralized Internet, which is where the name MetaLife intergalacticsocial network comes from.
MetaLife is the first real Web3 decentralized social network. All its information is stored in a micro-chain on the user’s mobile phone, no developers and hackers can obtain user privacy information from this decentralized datastore. In case the user lost his/her mobile phone, the user can set up MetaLife in the new mobile phone by importing the private key of his/her wallet and recovering their micro-chain via the distributed social graph that he/she has established over time. Although user data may be stored in other user’s micro-chain in a distributed manner, it is
cryptographically signed and can’t be decrypted by others without the appropriate key sets. The token economy built on this foundation is a milestone, the first true Web3.
Elon Musk laughs at many people who work on Web3, saying he can’t see Web3. That is because what he sees is only Web2.5, a centralized user data structure and application coupled with a decentralized token incentive
system. When Musk acquired Twitter, he will issue his own coins on Twitter or use existing coins for incentives, that is Web2.5 and not Web3 since all users’ profiles and data are stored with and owned by Twitter. The most important thing is that users’ profiles with the phone, address and age, once leaked, the user’s privacy is leaked.
There is really no revolution between Web2.5 and Web2, it just adds some small incentives while Web3 on the other hand is a complete revolution. The centralized social graph is completely different from that of a decentralized social graph. The metaverse is built on the centralized social graph, e.g., Facebook or Twitter, is either Web2.0 or Web2.5 with the objective to create value and profit for the company, and it is closed. The data and value in the
Metaverse built on Web3 is users’ own, MetaLife is an open platform for the creator economy.
To be continued in episode 3/8…
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