Web 3.0: Rise of the decentralisation!
By: Santosh Roy
Tags: Blockchain Technology, Privacy Protection, Web 3 Point 0, Cryptocurrency, Smart Contracts

Prelude:

Internet or Web 2.0 is now an integral and essential part of our lives. It is the key that controls, our social behaviour, interaction, livelihood, entertainment, and identity. The socio-economic fabric has become intertwined with data, in a manner that has created a unique hierarchy where the consumer is the end product.

In its entirety, this is the beginning of the inescapable digitisation of humanity. There is no barrier to hold this contentious progress. The sanity of the progress is now held by very thin threads, that can still change the course of this flow in the future. Albeit the present is uncertain, the future is still ours to decide.

It is now time for us to boldly set sail in this digital ocean to establish the sentinels of the incorruptible future.

The framework needed to securely build the ecosystem for Web 3.0 has to be human-centric, permissionless, trustless, and decentralised. Personal data should be protected and users must be in complete control of their interaction with the web.

Many of the requirement for this disruptive technology appears to be incompatible with each other.

How can a network be permissionless and yet protect the privacy of the user? And most importantly how can this all be trustless?

Of course, the solution is very complex than the current technology in use.

Tech solution based on the blockchain can bring us very close to this digital utopia. It will be very much possible that humans are no longer needed as the end product of interaction but the initiator of this interaction.

Web2.0 (Central authority) vs. Web3.0 (Decentralisation)

I will start with three examples, to show the finer points of the two sides.

Problem 1:

Alice writes a very important email to Bob.

Alice uses GMail to do so.

Alice has put her trust in GMail to deliver the message to Bob.

Gmail will also hold the information on its server.

Malicious actor scenario 1: Bob claims that he has not received this email. He simply deletes the email from his inbox and empties the trash. Alice will have a very hard time to prove her statement as there is no publicly verifiable information for this transaction.

Malicious actor scenario 2: Gmail has a glitch and the information is lost from its cloud servers. While Alice thinks she had successfully sent the email, Bob will never receive it. Again the absence of any public information regarding this makes it a difficult task to prove anything.

Malicious actor scenario 3. Charlie intercepts the message, alters it and sents it to Bob. Bob has no way of knowing that a change has occurred. Alice is also unaware of this change. There is no way for Bob to check the integrity of the message.

Solution 1:

Blockchain easily solves this problem in every way. Bob and Alice or anybody can verify that the transaction has taken place. Bob and Alice can independently check the integrity of the message. The message becomes immutable. The entire system is trustless and the truth can be verified through consensus.

Problem 2:

A financial institution spends millions on bookkeeping and audit. The transactions are not publicly verifiable nor it is safe to disclose such information. Information is not immutable and the time series of the events can be altered. Loans, contacts etc requires the intervention of a court of law in case of non-compliance.

Solution 2:

Smart contract and private blockchain between the company and the auditor can solve this in one go. The actual implementation might be time-consuming. But soon there will be a lot of tailored made options available on both Ethereum and Cardano blockchain using ERC20 tokens.

Problem 3:

Implementation of a large scale public project. In most developing countries, corruption is rampant and public money is mostly lost to the corrupt politicians, officials and builders. It is simply impossible to keep track of the funds over many years. Due to the consistent inflation of fiat currency, it is also hard to determine the actual cost of the projects with time.

Solution 3:

The entire fund can be distributed through a blockchain solution, where the issued token is deflationary by creation. Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash and Ethereum can be a good fit for this kind of scenario.

Importance of personal data:

This brings us to the core issue of this predicament, whether this complex eco-system is at all needed for the future. The energy cost, the hardware requirement and the software expertise are yet to be fully evaluated and integrated with our current perspective.

The important question is how much we are willing to compromise on the control of our personal data? The very nature of any communication protocol is the exchange of information. To be able to precisely control privacy will be the major factor of the futuristic society. This disruptive construction needed for the next generation of humanity has already started in the form of cryptocurrencies. The journey will soon bring us the best amalgamation of digital consensus and human consciousness.