Web 3 - A New Web For A New World
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Škvorc, Bruno
For as long as human society has existed, humans have been unable to trust each other. For millennia, we relied on middlemen to establish business or legal relationships. With the advent of Web2.0, we also relayed the establishment of personal connections, and the system has turned against us. The middlemen abuse our needs and their power and we find ourselves chained to convenience at the expense of our own thoughts, our own privacy. Web3 is a radical new frontier ready to turn the status quo on its head, and these are the technologies we're using to make it happen.
 Hello, and welcome to this short presentation about what is essentially intermediaries. My name is Bruno. I'm from the Web3 Foundation, and I serve there as the technical educator, explaining what we do and what we are developing from a technical perspective. So I mentioned intermediaries, and intermediaries are people or more likely institutions that make sure that two parties in a deal keep their word. Basically the receiving party has to receive what was arranged, and the sending party has to be punished if they don't keep their promise. That's what intermediaries are. And intermediaries basically forward our messages, forward our transactions, make sure stuff happens on our behalf. And indeed, since humans were able to stand on two legs, we haven't been able to trust each other, and we needed intermediaries to do that for us. We needed somebody to kind of make sure that other people fulfill their promises to us. So let's dive into intermediaries a little bit and define what they really are, what they actually do. So intermediaries accept messages from outside sources, right? We are the source, and we give them a message on what to do. They also act on these messages once the message is authenticated as really coming from us, the origin of the message. Then the results of these messages need to be computed. There has to be some kind of outcome to this message, and that outcome has to be stored somewhere, right? So does that sound familiar? It's just a computer, right? It does the exact same thing. You put messages in, something happens, you store the result, and then somebody looks at it later on, and then uses that as the next input for the next message. So why have intermediaries not been replaced by computers by now? Why do we need these intermediaries and institutions if this is really that simple? And the answer is authority. Well, authority and authorization in a nutshell, because a computer does not have the ability or the authorization to decide something on our behalf without our input. And this is what these intermediaries actually do. So they make decisions when there's any kind of arbitration, when there's any kind of disagreement, they will decide who's right and who's wrong. And this is why we like them. This is why we use them today. And indeed, there are many ways to relay authority and authorization to other people, from simple things like payment checks, which are still in use today in some primitive societies like the United States of America, to elliptic curve cryptography, which is a branch of mathematics that lets you prove that you know something without revealing what you know and without letting anybody else impersonate your knowledge later on. And we have made big strides in forwarding this authorization. We made it so much simpler to forward this authorization to an authority. We have usernames and passwords. We have two-factor authentication to make things a little bit more secured or not very much if you're using SMS. We have biometrics even, which is the least secure of them all, but the most practical of them all. And with all of these conveniences, these awesome, awesome upgrades, we now have the ability to send and receive money globally in an instant. We have the ability to stalk our crushes or post our baby photos. We have the ability to find lost friends and family or argue with strangers online. We can become keyboard warriors at the click of a button. We can post blogs that reach anybody, anywhere, at any time and are automatically promoted to everybody else in that same network. We can even date online or whatever it is you call that when people use Tinder. We can also collaborate on open source code. Like this was unimaginable before. People around the world who are thousands of kilometers apart can work on the same software project without clashes and end up with an awesome product together that's launched without any central oversight that they can all agree on. And that's amazing. And let's not forget that you can also rent out your apartment without ever actually meeting the person that you're renting the apartment to. That's mind-blowingly practical, right? I mean, it lets you just earn money for an empty room without having to deal with people. It's great. And this intermediary takes care of that dealing with people, right? You don't ever have to meet them. Everything happens through the intermediaries. It's super great, super practical. But also, it's not a coincidence that the bank icon resembles a prison because in any system of perceivably hordeable power, somebody is going to hoard that power. And when people abuse that system and when they take the power of the intermediaries, that abuse becomes that much worse. So now you have institutions like PayPal and TransferWise who have closed accounts left and right without any kind of justification to people they simply do not like or to people they are ordered not to like. TransferWise itself has closed my business account with money still in it and refunded some customers overnight and invented the reason I have yet to hear back from their support two years later. Instagram has had its own metadata leakage and allowed people to access private profiles of other people and to stalk them by using geotags on their photos. Facebook is no stranger to controversy. They have leaks so often we don't even care anymore. Every week something new leaks and we just, whatever. Twitter has been no stranger to corporate censorship and to shutting down accounts it disagrees with and that's becoming more and more of a problem on many other platforms as well. And Medium itself has built such a walled garden of posts that is impossible to exit practically that they are basically holding your content hostage and using it to drive revenue to the popular bloggers while your content is there to drive that traffic and they share nothing with you. Tinder and OKCupid have both been data mined. Tinder has leaked through Facebook integration. OKCupid was data mined and some identities were exposed. You can Google that. It's a very interesting case study. And GitHub itself has, earlier, has last year just closed down some accounts from Iranian developers and caused them to lose months and months of their open source work just because one fat guy in a cigar told other people, I don't like you. And because he said I don't like you, GitHub said you no longer have your account. So the sanctions towards Iran have caused people to lose accounts and a lot of their work. Airbnb itself is being hunted in some areas of the world where people are being chased down by institutions who are under the foot of the hotel lobby and others who do not like this business model. And having one central intermediary through all of this, through which all of this data goes makes it that much easier to identify these people who need to be hunted down. So power is being hoarded, abused, and when it's being accessed by people who have no, who weren't supposed to access it, the abuse is that much worse. The hackers can get your data. They can use it in different ways. And it's all around a very unhealthy system. It's becoming a very dangerous system. Like Buckminster Fuller said, you never change things by fighting existing reality. We cannot fix this. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing one obsolete. So we now have these walled gardens where these institutions do not necessarily trust each other. One computer at Facebook doesn't necessarily trust the server state of Twitter. Their vision of the world doesn't necessarily have to be in sync. When somebody has that many likes there, they don't have that many likes there. When one post is the truth here, it doesn't have to be the truth there. And they're doing this on purpose. They have no interest, no incentive to agree on content because they rely on ads. And their ads are driven by your rage. So they give you clickbait. They give you posts that make you upset. And they make you drain your focus. They make you drain your willpower in one location so that you have no more to drain in their competitor's place. This is the system that we have built and encouraged. They are competing with each other by keeping the walls closed and by keeping the state of the world isolated in each of these networks. And this is harming users but benefiting them individually. So now we bring the blockchain into matters. The blockchain brings us a global state of truth that everybody can check at any moment in time. It's just math. And if you have a global state of truth that nobody can say is not true, then the systems can trust each other. Then we have the walled gardens that are becoming un-walled. The gardens are starting to talk to each other because they have no choice. If they lie, it is obvious that they lie because we can check that they're lying mathematically. But also, we don't really need these systems anymore because we can trust each other. We now are participants of this global system of trust and we can trust that each of us is telling the truth about what they are saying. So we have commoditized trust. We have turned it into an online resource and now we have the Internet of Value and Trust because we have tacked a trust level onto the content that we have. And so in the beginning, there was the primitive Internet where people were skeptics and told everybody that it would never work. Then there was the wonderful read-only Internet with lots of directories, handmade directories, static web pages. Nobody was actually evil. Then Web 2.0 came and this is where we are now, walled gardens and insane practicality. So practical we don't want to leave it even in spite of all the evil that we see. And now we have Web 3.0. So Web 3.0 is the read, write, trust web. It's the verifiable web. It's the web where you can verify a content's truth. And that's huge. That's mega-powerful. But the Web 3.0 is not just blockchain. These are blockchain apps that I use every day but the Web 3.0 is more than that. It's much more than that. So the Web 3.0 is three things. It's linked data. It's data that machines have to understand and know how to parse and know how to process without a translator in the middle, without an adapter written by humans that needs to be in place for the machines to understand each other. And we've had that since like 2000 or so. Then there's the distributed data. So we need to make sure that all the computers that need the data have the data so that we can make sure that these computers can actually talk and can exchange this data. But there's something missing because we've had this since torrents, right? Something is missing. And this is where blockchain comes in. Blockchain adds trust to that data so that now the machines that have the data can make sure that their copy is as legit as everybody else's copy and that the copy coming in is as legit as the one that they expect. So now we have the internet that is linked and that is trusted and that is distributed. And that's the essence of the Web 3.0. This is what we're building at the Web 3.0 Foundation. Web 3.0 is a system of being able to send a message anywhere, anytime, to anyone, anyhow, without fear of censorship or downtime. That's all there is to it. And that message can be hello in a chat program. It can be forbidden content that the Chinese firewall doesn't want you to see. Or it can be a financial transaction. You can send money to anyone, anywhere in the world. That's all there is to it. So all we want is to make it possible to transfer messages from anywhere to anywhere. Now our system is the internet of blockchain in a way because we are building Polkadot and that's a system that allows other blockchains to talk to each other. We are not competing with them. We are making all of them better by allowing them to share their strengths through one common system. I don't really have time to go into this diagram, but I would love to explain it later if you grab me. Essentially, these pink boxes are these chains that are communicating. And they're communicating through these central system and these pink lines in the middle. They are the communication messages between the blockchains. We have built a system which lets independent and completely unrelated blockchains securely speak to each other without relayers, without humans doing the translation. And this allows us to pull the greatest strengths of all the independent blockchains into one system and makes the Web 3.0 possible. So what we are doing with this is we are locking the web open by adding a new infrastructure layer on top of everything that exists right now by upgrading the system and making the blockchains talk to each other and allowing all the accompanying systems like IPFS, the Interplanetary File System, or Whisper, or Swarm, and all of these other things that are being developed to talk to other blockchains through this system, we are effectively locking the web open and making it forever impossible to go back to the dystopian way of aggressive data harvesting, repackaging, and selling our own data back to us that we are stuck in the Web 2.0 world. So this is essentially what we're doing. Please go to Web 3.0 Foundation to find out more if you're interested. Grab me afterwards. I would love to explain everything that we do. And if you're interested in the practical side of things, we have a workshop tonight, substrate workshop. Substrate is a framework for developing your own blockchain that can talk to Polkadot. It's two hours, and in two hours you will be developing your own blockchain. It's free to attend. Just go to this URL. We'll have a hands-on workshop. Bring your laptop. Just make sure you install the prerequisites. Everything's on this URL. And I hope to see you there for a practical introduction of everything that I've talked about here. I have a few seconds for questions, which I will take now. Thank you. That's it. Yes. I've checked out the Web 3.0. Here. Where? Where? Oh, okay. I've used the Web 3.0 applications myself with applications like MetaMask. And although I think it's quite innovative, one thing that I did notice was that various applications that were previous not monetized were now monetized because blockchain is a generally monetized platform. So what I'm wondering is, could blockchain be used for just data without a financial token or coin attached to it? Yes. So the use of your blockchain is entirely up to you. So the question was, could applications on the blockchain be used without a financial incentive involved? The blockchain itself, no, because you need an incentive on the core layer to keep people participating in the blockchain. Otherwise, it falls apart. But applications on the blockchain itself, yes, absolutely. They can and they do. There are many applications that do not have an incentive built in and that can function perfectly well by just providing some primitives that you can use in other apps or directly and that do not require any kind of financial incentive. Interacting with the blockchain itself still requires you to pay some transactions. That's some details that we don't really have time to go into right now. But there are many applications that you do not need to have a financial incentive for and that are perfectly suited for the blockchain. And of course, there are many more that are absolutely ill suited for blockchain and 99.9 stuff should never touch a blockchain. So 99.9% just getting that out there. But there are things that are perfectly suited for it and that can and should use it, yeah. I think we're out of time. Any other questions real quick? No? Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
 Hello, and welcome to this short presentation about what is essentially intermediaries.  My name is Bruno.  I'm from the Web3 Foundation, and I serve there as the technical educator, explaining  what we do and what we are developing from a technical perspective.  So I mentioned intermediaries, and intermediaries are people or more likely institutions that  make sure that two parties in a deal keep their word.  Basically the receiving party has to receive what was arranged, and the sending party has  to be punished if they don't keep their promise.  That's what intermediaries are.  And intermediaries basically forward our messages, forward our transactions, make sure stuff  happens on our behalf.  And indeed, since humans were able to stand on two legs, we haven't been able to trust  each other, and we needed intermediaries to do that for us.  We needed somebody to kind of make sure that other people fulfill their promises to us.  So let's dive into intermediaries a little bit and define what they really are, what  they actually do.  So intermediaries accept messages from outside sources, right?  We are the source, and we give them a message on what to do.  They also act on these messages once the message is authenticated as really coming from us,  the origin of the message.  Then the results of these messages need to be computed.  There has to be some kind of outcome to this message, and that outcome has to be stored  somewhere, right?  So does that sound familiar?  It's just a computer, right?  It does the exact same thing.  You put messages in, something happens, you store the result, and then somebody looks  at it later on, and then uses that as the next input for the next message.  So why have intermediaries not been replaced by computers by now?  Why do we need these intermediaries and institutions if this is really that simple?  And the answer is authority.  Well, authority and authorization in a nutshell, because a computer does not have the ability  or the authorization to decide something on our behalf without our input.  And this is what these intermediaries actually do.  So they make decisions when there's any kind of arbitration, when there's any kind of disagreement,  they will decide who's right and who's wrong.  And this is why we like them.  This is why we use them today.  And indeed, there are many ways to relay authority and authorization to other people, from simple  things like payment checks, which are still in use today in some primitive societies like  the United States of America, to elliptic curve cryptography, which is a branch of  mathematics that lets you prove that you know something without revealing what you know  and without letting anybody else impersonate your knowledge later on.  And we have made big strides in forwarding this authorization.  We made it so much simpler to forward this authorization to an authority.  We have usernames and passwords.  We have two-factor authentication to make things a little bit more secured or not very  much if you're using SMS.  We have biometrics even, which is the least secure of them all, but the most practical  of them all.  And with all of these conveniences, these awesome, awesome upgrades, we now have the  ability to send and receive money globally in an instant.  We have the ability to stalk our crushes or post our baby photos.  We have the ability to find lost friends and family or argue with strangers online.  We can become keyboard warriors at the click of a button.  We can post blogs that reach anybody, anywhere, at any time and are automatically promoted  to everybody else in that same network.  We can even date online or whatever it is you call that when people use Tinder.  We can also collaborate on open source code.  Like this was unimaginable before.  People around the world who are thousands of kilometers apart can work on the same software  project without clashes and end up with an awesome product together that's launched without  any central oversight that they can all agree on.  And that's amazing.  And let's not forget that you can also rent out your apartment without ever actually meeting  the person that you're renting the apartment to.  That's mind-blowingly practical, right?  I mean, it lets you just earn money for an empty room without having to deal with people.  It's great.  And this intermediary takes care of that dealing with people, right?  You don't ever have to meet them.  Everything happens through the intermediaries.  It's super great, super practical.  But also, it's not a coincidence that the bank icon resembles a prison because in any  system of perceivably hordeable power, somebody is going to hoard that power.  And when people abuse that system and when they take the power of the intermediaries,  that abuse becomes that much worse.  So now you have institutions like PayPal and TransferWise who have closed accounts left  and right without any kind of justification to people they simply do not like or to people  they are ordered not to like.  TransferWise itself has closed my business account with money still in it and refunded  some customers overnight and invented the reason I have yet to hear back from their  support two years later.  Instagram has had its own metadata leakage and allowed people to access private profiles  of other people and to stalk them by using geotags on their photos.  Facebook is no stranger to controversy.  They have leaks so often we don't even care anymore.  Every week something new leaks and we just, whatever.  Twitter has been no stranger to corporate censorship and to shutting down accounts it  disagrees with and that's becoming more and more of a problem on many other platforms  as well.  And Medium itself has built such a walled garden of posts that is impossible to exit practically  that they are basically holding your content hostage and using it to drive revenue to the  popular bloggers while your content is there to drive that traffic and they share nothing  with you.  Tinder and OKCupid have both been data mined.  Tinder has leaked through Facebook integration.  OKCupid was data mined and some identities were exposed.  You can Google that.  It's a very interesting case study.  And GitHub itself has, earlier, has last year just closed down some accounts from Iranian  developers and caused them to lose months and months of their open source work just  because one fat guy in a cigar told other people, I don't like you.  And because he said I don't like you, GitHub said you no longer have your account.  So the sanctions towards Iran have caused people to lose accounts and a lot of their  work.  Airbnb itself is being hunted in some areas of the world where people are being chased  down by institutions who are under the foot of the hotel lobby and others who do not like  this business model.  And having one central intermediary through all of this, through which all of this data  goes makes it that much easier to identify these people who need to be hunted down.  So power is being hoarded, abused, and when it's being accessed by people who have no,  who weren't supposed to access it, the abuse is that much worse.  The hackers can get your data.  They can use it in different ways.  And it's all around a very unhealthy system.  It's becoming a very dangerous system.  Like Buckminster Fuller said, you never change things by fighting existing reality.  We cannot fix this.  To change something, build a new model that makes the existing one obsolete.  So we now have these walled gardens where these institutions do not necessarily trust  each other.  One computer at Facebook doesn't necessarily trust the server state of Twitter.  Their vision of the world doesn't necessarily have to be in sync.  When somebody has that many likes there, they don't have that many likes there.  When one post is the truth here, it doesn't have to be the truth there.  And they're doing this on purpose.  They have no interest, no incentive to agree on content because they rely on ads.  And their ads are driven by your rage.  So they give you clickbait.  They give you posts that make you upset.  And they make you drain your focus.  They make you drain your willpower in one location so that you have no more to drain  in their competitor's place.  This is the system that we have built and encouraged.  They are competing with each other by keeping the walls closed and by keeping the state  of the world isolated in each of these networks.  And this is harming users but benefiting them individually.  So now we bring the blockchain into matters.  The blockchain brings us a global state of truth that everybody can check at any moment  in time.  It's just math.  And if you have a global state of truth that nobody can say is not true, then the systems  can trust each other.  Then we have the walled gardens that are becoming un-walled.  The gardens are starting to talk to each other because they have no choice.  If they lie, it is obvious that they lie because we can check that they're lying mathematically.  But also, we don't really need these systems anymore because we can trust each other.  We now are participants of this global system of trust and we can trust that each of us  is telling the truth about what they are saying.  So we have commoditized trust.  We have turned it into an online resource and now we have the Internet of Value and  Trust because we have tacked a trust level onto the content that we have.  And so in the beginning, there was the primitive Internet where people were skeptics and told  everybody that it would never work.  Then there was the wonderful read-only Internet with lots of directories, handmade directories,  static web pages.  Nobody was actually evil.  Then Web 2.0 came and this is where we are now, walled gardens and insane practicality.  So practical we don't want to leave it even in spite of all the evil that we see.  And now we have Web 3.0.  So Web 3.0 is the read, write, trust web.  It's the verifiable web.  It's the web where you can verify a content's truth.  And that's huge.  That's mega-powerful.  But the Web 3.0 is not just blockchain.  These are blockchain apps that I use every day but the Web 3.0 is more than that.  It's much more than that.  So the Web 3.0 is three things.  It's linked data.  It's data that machines have to understand and know how to parse and know how to process  without a translator in the middle, without an adapter written by humans that needs to  be in place for the machines to understand each other.  And we've had that since like 2000 or so.  Then there's the distributed data.  So we need to make sure that all the computers that need the data have the data so that we  can make sure that these computers can actually talk and can exchange this data.  But there's something missing because we've had this since torrents, right?  Something is missing.  And this is where blockchain comes in.  Blockchain adds trust to that data so that now the machines that have the data can make  sure that their copy is as legit as everybody else's copy and that the copy coming in is  as legit as the one that they expect.  So now we have the internet that is linked and that is trusted and that is distributed.  And that's the essence of the Web 3.0.  This is what we're building at the Web 3.0 Foundation.  Web 3.0 is a system of being able to send a message anywhere, anytime, to anyone, anyhow,  without fear of censorship or downtime.  That's all there is to it.  And that message can be hello in a chat program.  It can be forbidden content that the Chinese firewall doesn't want you to see.  Or it can be a financial transaction.  You can send money to anyone, anywhere in the world.  That's all there is to it.  So all we want is to make it possible to transfer messages from anywhere to anywhere.  Now our system is the internet of blockchain in a way because we are building Polkadot  and that's a system that allows other blockchains to talk to each other.  We are not competing with them.  We are making all of them better by allowing them to share their strengths through one  common system.  I don't really have time to go into this diagram, but I would love to explain it later  if you grab me.  Essentially, these pink boxes are these chains that are communicating.  And they're communicating through these central system and these pink lines in the middle.  They are the communication messages between the blockchains.  We have built a system which lets independent and completely unrelated blockchains securely  speak to each other without relayers, without humans doing the translation.  And this allows us to pull the greatest strengths of all the independent blockchains into one  system and makes the Web 3.0 possible.  So what we are doing with this is we are locking the web open by adding a new infrastructure  layer on top of everything that exists right now by upgrading the system and making the  blockchains talk to each other and allowing all the accompanying systems like IPFS, the  Interplanetary File System, or Whisper, or Swarm, and all of these other things that  are being developed to talk to other blockchains through this system, we are effectively locking  the web open and making it forever impossible to go back to the dystopian way of aggressive  data harvesting, repackaging, and selling our own data back to us that we are stuck  in the Web 2.0 world.  So this is essentially what we're doing.  Please go to Web 3.0 Foundation to find out more if you're interested.  Grab me afterwards.  I would love to explain everything that we do.  And if you're interested in the practical side of things, we have a workshop tonight,  substrate workshop.  Substrate is a framework for developing your own blockchain that can talk to Polkadot.  It's two hours, and in two hours you will be developing your own blockchain.  It's free to attend.  Just go to this URL.  We'll have a hands-on workshop.  Bring your laptop.  Just make sure you install the prerequisites.  Everything's on this URL.  And I hope to see you there for a practical introduction of everything that I've talked  about here.  I have a few seconds for questions, which I will take now.  Thank you.  That's it.  Yes.  I've checked out the Web 3.0.  Here.  Where?  Where?  Oh, okay.  I've used the Web 3.0 applications myself with applications like MetaMask.  And although I think it's quite innovative, one thing that I did notice was that various  applications that were previous not monetized were now monetized because blockchain is a  generally monetized platform.  So what I'm wondering is, could blockchain be used for just data without a financial  token or coin attached to it?  Yes.  So the use of your blockchain is entirely up to you.  So the question was, could applications on the blockchain be used without a financial  incentive involved?  The blockchain itself, no, because you need an incentive on the core layer to keep people  participating in the blockchain.  Otherwise, it falls apart.  But applications on the blockchain itself, yes, absolutely.  They can and they do.  There are many applications that do not have an incentive built in and that can function  perfectly well by just providing some primitives that you can use in other apps or directly  and that do not require any kind of financial incentive.  Interacting with the blockchain itself still requires you to pay some transactions.  That's some details that we don't really have time to go into right now.  But there are many applications that you do not need to have a financial incentive for  and that are perfectly suited for the blockchain.  And of course, there are many more that are absolutely ill suited for blockchain and 99.9  stuff should never touch a blockchain.  So 99.9% just getting that out there.  But there are things that are perfectly suited for it and that can and should use it, yeah.  I think we're out of time.  Any other questions real quick?  No?  Okay.  Thank you.  Thank you.  Thank you.  Thank you.
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