Related: Cryptography
As long as humans exist, distrust will too.
As long as distrust exists, the need for decentralization and trustless systems will too.
Web3 is the current embodiment of this requirement.
We figured out how to get everyone to agree on a single ledger with the help of a fancy hashed up Merkle tree.
We then figured out how to make this a computer with the EVM.
We made it faster with Solana.
Whatâs next? Getting this to the masses, thatâs what.
But Web3, I feel, is approaching this problem from a wrong direction. It isnât possible to create a video streaming platform onchain (atleast, not a version which is feasible) simply because of the logistics of having every node store the video and then reliably deliver it to the viewers. Some web3 devs try and fail, and this only fuels the web3 non-believers.
My argument, is that it was never meant for this purpose. The blockchain was never meant to be a replacement for Web2, as a whole. Rather, I see it as a proponent for data neutrality, a way to break the moats and the walls that these web2 monopolies have on our data. I see web3 technology as a way for consumers like you and me to be able to compartmentalize our data and only give applications and companies access to just the subsets of this data that is necessary for this service. I propose a hybrid approach: a centralized server self-hosted by consumers that holds all the data ever generated by said user, and a web3 wallet guarding it. Companies would require to ask you to sign a contract with your wallet address to be able to access only the subset of the data they require, explicitly stated in the contract to be signed. These companies could also do blind computation, something I thought would never be possible but it is now, with the help of services like Nillion. The future is actually bright.
This would let users to have agency over their data, and would force the new-age companies into being crystally transparent about their true intentions with your data. It would force them to build better services instead of creating deeper data moats.
But time and time again, people have displayed one pattern: the masses are NOT interested in hosting their own servers đ . AWS and GCP wouldnât have become such big endeavours if it were untrue.
Maybe weâre at a standoff. I think we need to wait for hardware to catch up until this becomes a thing. Maybe if people had a way to reliably store and produce large amounts of data and processing on demand in their own households, which also happened to be very low power-consuming, this solution would take off. Or if there was a way to store data reliably onchain with low latency and low footprint, that would work too.
But until then, this technology is a solution looking for problems. All the blockchain or the EVM have been able to solve is the pain point of cross-border payments and decentralized finance logic. I applaud immensely for those innovations. But mass adoption is still not on the horizon.
This however, does not mean I have lost hope on this technology. I have complete faith in the very nature of humans, which is to not trust another. There will always be a requirement for decentralized systems, and what we blockchain developers have managed to collectively achieve today in this regard will always be valuable, maybe not today, or in the near future, but definitely in the far future.