Web 3.0 does not require a blockchain

After the blockchain boom, there have been a lot of talks about Web 3.0 on the Internet, all of which claim that Web 3.0 will become a distributed Internet based on blockchain technology. This always gives people the feeling of "blockchain" and "blockchain". Isn't the current Web distributed? You brushed Weibo and used the US group. Isn't this a distributed information acquisition channel? The difference is whether the information is more concentrated. Those who claim that the blockchain will bring Web 3.0 will not be enough to understand the true meaning of the Web.

Thirty years ago, the Web changed us all. We exchange information at an unprecedented scale and speed. We learned what we couldn't have a few years ago and communicated with people from different cultures and backgrounds around the world. The Web reshapes the world in a new and unparalleled way, and affects people's daily lives.

Entrance to tens of billions of information

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To understand why Web 3.0 is not related to blockchain, we must first understand the importance of the Web. To understand the importance of the Web, let us first imagine what the world before the Web is: there are many different information systems in the world. But no system can interact with another system. Each source requires a dedicated application to handle it. As a result, most people on Earth simply do not have the ability to access information.

The Web facilitates the flow of information through a unified portal, and we only need a single browser to interact with almost unlimited resources. In addition, the network is open: anyone can create web pages and build their own servers, and because of the open standards (manual at W3C), they are all compatible. Today, the Web is not only a channel for information sharing but also a service sharing channel. More than 3 billion people worldwide can share information, shop and communicate through browsers.

In addition to the unification of information portals, the Web is cross-platform. Although the number of devices used by people is increasing, all of these devices can access the Web, and you can run them on any device with a single encoding. This is the most unique feature of the Web, so many cross-platform APP development technologies have been born. All of them are based on Web technologies. Even IoT devices support JavaScript (Web programming language). This is a crazy era. .

When the Web has achieved such great success, is there a so-called "consensus" or "incentive" in the blockchain? Is the answer?

Blockchain excuse

Blockchain practitioners must talk about "decentralization". We also stated in the article "Improving Semantic Web Weak Centralization through Incentive Collaboration". " Decentralization is an impossible Utopia. What is really feasible is Weak centralization. " In addition, another problem with the chain is that they only want to pursue the so-called "decentralization", but they do not realize that "decentralization" is a means rather than an end.

In addition to repeatedly referring to "decentralization", the chain still loves to say " clear all social levels and give everyone equal opportunities ", which belongs to another utopia. This kind of rhetoric is very useful for young people around the age of 20, and mobilized their blood of breaking the rules, and immediately legitimized and legalized the blockchain. At the same time, at the same time, they will not talk about the things that cut the leek.

Chain believers regard blockchain as the "root of trust" and they believe that data that cannot be tampered with can be trusted. So the first concept they added for Web 3.0 was "trust", which means that Web 3.0 is a trusted network. The loophole in this statement is that this trusted network is only credible from an architectural perspective. From a content perspective, you cannot avoid the spread of fake news and rumors. Once the content is "not tamperable", how can the truth be revealed? Imagine the consequences of a wiki that cannot be edited and used by criminals . The existence of supervision is to determine that a voter elite is trustworthy and let them act as agents of the people and the government to perform their duties.

The people in the chain believe in mathematics. Believing that mathematics is not a bad thing, but not everything is measured by mathematics.

We don't need to trust anyone, just believe in math. The essence of the blockchain is that anyone in the world has the right to hold a copy of the data, and mathematics can ensure that honest people reach a consensus to ensure that the data cannot be tampered with.

Rousseau wrote a book called "Social Contract Theory", which states that laborers act as productive materials, and because of the need for mutual benefit, people have created rules of mutual trust and mutual assistance. It has been found that maintaining integrity is a necessary "skill" for survival, and a social contract that regulates human ethics is created. This kind of social contract is far more powerful and reliable than mathematics, because he is related to the individual's survival interests – nothing can be higher than the individual's survival interests.

Another big hammer in the chain is the "smart contract". This contract called "smart contract" is actually a script (executable code in the computer). It is no different from what we now call "mobile phone" as "smart phone". In fact, they are all man-made mechanized programs, and there is no intelligence.

Those who argue that Web 3.0 will be driven by the blockchain believe that:

The current Internet, that is, Web 2.0, does not have a law enforcer. It is too free and suitable for sharing, but it is not suitable for punishing sin. But with truly credible data, we can use programs to automate the execution of rules, which is the basic idea of ​​smart contracts.

We do not oppose "punishing sin". We all want justice to grow. The problem is that smart contracts cannot find out who is evil and who is good.

In the end, the blockchain practitioners are most proud of the "voting mechanism." In their eyes, the blockchain vote can solve any problem.

But the blockchain is a democracy based on contribution values. The size of the floor is allocated according to the size of the contribution. This is different from the simple and rude one-person-one-vote.

From the experience of use, the so-called contribution size of the blockchain is nothing more than who has more cash and who has turned more cash into computing power. This kind of "contribution" can really reach the chain. "Fair" and "equality"? This mechanism itself runs counter to the blockchain, a financial game, don't expect him to solve all problems.

There are too many problems with blockchains that are not self-consistent and will not be detailed. To sum up, the Web 3.0 considered by the chain mainly includes the following points:

1. Blockchain as fact layer and incentive layer
2. Future applications are DApps
3. The future of the Internet is decentralized
4. The most fundamental goal of decentralized Internet is data validation, allowing users to have their own data.

The above four points, this article agrees with the second half of the fourth point, that is, " let users have their own data ", this is the only " consensus " of this article and the chain.

Below, let's imagine what Web 3.0 does without a blockchain.

Real Web 3.0

Keywords: Semantic Web, Linked Data, Social Interconnected Data, SoLiD, Personal Assistant, Modular Productivity Software, Semantic Control Panel, Machine Learning, Knowledge Mapping.

Before you understand Web 3.0, you need to understand what Web 2.0 is. Web 2.0 does not have a clear definition. He has only one concept. The basic understanding of this concept is that the content of the website is generated by the user, which is often referred to as UGC (user-produced content) or PGC (expert-produced content). The difference between Web 2.0 and Web 1.0 is that the content of the Web 1.0 era is only readable and not writable. In the Web 2.0 era, the content is both readable and writable . The following figure is a good representation of the difference between Web 2.0 and Web 1.0. :

One of the greatest inventions on the Web is "hyperlinks." Nowadays, hyperlinks may appear to be somewhat outdated or "old", because in today's APP world, the concept of hyperlinks has not been mentioned anymore. More is the "link", and it is this "link" that is the essence of the Web.

Regardless of whether it is Web 1.0 or Web 2.0, the meaning of "link" in the website is "the mutual jump between pages." This kind of jump is just a simple index, and does not contain any semantic information. That is to say, humans can understand the relationship between the "link" and the current web page through the context, but the computer can't understand it at all.

In order to solve the problem of " letting the computer understand the link ", an integrated technology of "Linked Data" has been created.

Someone here will think about it, what is the use of " let the computer understand the link "? Congratulations on finding the core issue of this article, which is why we need to let computers understand human knowledge? This is also the core of Web 3.0.

Let the computer understand human knowledge is equivalent to a Semantic Web. Semantic Web is an intelligent network that can judge according to semantics. It can realize the barrier-free communication between people and computers. It is like a giant brain, with a high degree of intelligence and a very powerful coordination. Every computer connected on the Semantic Web can not only understand words and concepts, but also understand the logical relationship between them, and can do the work that people do. It will free humans from the heavy labor of searching related web pages and turn users into Almighty God. Computers in the Semantic Web can use their own intelligent software to find the information you need in the vast resources on the World Wide Web, thus developing an existing information silo into a huge database .

Linked data is called "structured data on the World Wide Web" and is one of the themes of the Semantic Web. The biggest feature of connected data is the association of data from different sources. These different sources can be different systems within an organization or different systems of different organizations. The content, storage location and storage method can be different, but in the end they are related.

There are several basic principles for linking data:

1. Resources. Before publishing data for a domain, we need to determine what resources to publish. Anything, as long as you think it makes sense, and what is quoted, can be called a resource;
2. Resource ID. Any resource is identified by an HTTP URI (Uniform Resource Identifiers). All of them need to be identified by HTTP URI, which is to enable data to be accessed through the HTTP protocol, and truly realize Web-based access and interconnection;
3. Resource description. Resources can have multiple descriptions, such as HTML, XML, RDF, and JPEG. The documents of the document web are mainly represented by the HTML format, and the data of the data web is mainly represented by the RDF format (Resource Description Framework). RDF describes a resource as a set of triples (subject, predicate, object);

The above points are well described in "The Future of the Web, Semantic Interconnect is Dead, Please Embrace Free Editing".

In other words, associating data means that the data is linked to each other to form a huge information network, just like the web pages linked to each other on the Internet, except that the basic units become smaller-sized data .

Linked Data Web 3.0 has the following advantages over blockchain Web 3.0:

1. Linked data is the infrastructure for implementing machine intelligence. Once machine intelligence is implemented, the above mentioned fake news, rumors and other issues can be solved;
2. Linking data can transform the data of the whole world into structured data. After a large amount of data is processed together, a personal assistant can appear to empower each person's daily life;
3. Linking data can make data interoperable. Now if we want to integrate 36kr and billions of media information, we need to write crawlers, then do data cleansing and unify the data fields. Every website is different, and each website requires a customized, targeted crawl. We used to have RSS (an information aggregation standard), and later RSS retired overnight, even Google's RSS reader was off the assembly line, and the associated data would replace RSS.

A blockchain project with similar ideas is called "Blockstack". In all fairness, they have done very well. They use the blockchain to build a complete application ecosystem (including upper-level applications and developers), and you can think of him as an emerging operating system that uses blockchain tokens to grow rapidly .

In Blockstack's ecosystem, everyone has a unique ID that can access all of the applications in the Blockstack ecosystem, while giving users complete control over the data they produce, as well as authorizing their own data for trusted applications.

The project with the same concept in the Web is called "SoLiD", the English is called Social Linked Data, and the Chinese can be translated into social internet data. What is Solid? In this article we introduce the core concepts of SoLiD.

SoLiD and Blockstack are basically the same in concept. The biggest difference is that SoLiD goes one step further and has the "associated data" and "data interconnect" features that Blockstack does not have. Once the associated data is used, the entire Internet becomes computable, and the Semantic Computing Engine and Semantic Control Panel will become a reality.

This is Web 3.0, which is the only consensus we have on the chain and the "data is owned".

A Web 3.0 that does not require a blockchain should have the following characteristics:

1. Data is owned. The structured, unstructured data of the user's friend relationship, circle of friends, and topics of interest are stored in a Pod. Pod is the abbreviation of Personal Online Data. In Web 3.0, whether it is WeChat or Weibo The user's data is read in the Pod, and the user can also cut off the data access authorization for an application at any time. Since the data generated by the user is separate from the application, the user can avoid the Internet service provider from randomly locking and deleting data, thereby seamlessly switching between applications without losing any data or social relationships. This allows data to be reused , and developers can reuse existing data when creating new applications or improving existing ones, some of which may be created by other programs (but only with the user's permission).

2. Data interconnection. The data interconnect uses a collection of "associated data" technology, and you can understand the associated data as a JSON API with a common field definition. For example, before the data is associated, the developer may specify that the user's avatar may be avatar or photo, so when the data is interoperable between the two applications, field alignment will occur. The associated data is defined as the user's avatar can only be avatar, not photo, these unified field definitions, also known as Ontology, ontology can define all entities in the real world, and eventually become a huge ontology Network, this ontology network describes all the attributes of humans and nature. On the basis of the ontology, there is also the large-scale Semantic Web of the Web to store the knowledge corresponding to the ontology. At this time, many semantic calculations can be completed. Small enough to record what color your underwear is wearing every day and a few underpants are not washed, to the wisdom of assisting your work (imagine Iron Man dressing, it is so high-tech).

3. Pull the data. Pulling the data is easy to understand. Please take a look at how Iron Man wears clothes.

Iron Man's clothes, like Lego, are modular and intelligent. Each module can actively find Iron Man and then piece together into a complete battle suit.

In the Web 3.0 era, data is also modular. In the official definition of SoLiD, this modularity is not a Module, but a Shape (for the time being, there is no more suitable Chinese translation. The following refers to this module with Shape. Data)

Shape will actively find users like Iron Man's suits and actively pull the data to the user. Now, looking for something, we need to access the search engine, then look at each page and get the answer. In the "Pu era", you don't have to search for any information, just need to explain what you want, and Shape will find you.

So why are we still unable to reach the "Pu era"? Because your data is scattered, it used to be scattered across various websites, and it is now scattered across apps. Linked data exists to address this fragmented status quo.

So when will we mark the entry into the Web 3.0 era?

The answer is when a large number of users start using Pod. This Pod may be a smart speaker in your home or a service on the cloud. We believe that data is unlikely to store decentralized storage such as IPFS. First, their stability has yet to be verified. Second, relying on the ability of retail investors, it is difficult to support the infrastructure used by hundreds of millions of people. When entering the Web 3.0 era, Pod providers are a huge business opportunity. At this time, Apple or Google is doing the whole family business. If they don't open the data and don't link the data, they will be eliminated. In addition to Pod providers, software or platforms that manage user data, as long as they are easy to use, will become the darling of the times. There is also a third category of big opportunities, the Semantic Control Panel, the Semantic Control Panel – the next generation of personal productivity platforms following mobile phones and computers. This article explains why "Semantic Control Panel" or "Modular Productivity Software" will We have a greater impact.

The meaning of the birth of the Web is to make data sharing and make it easier for everyone to get information. Decentralization has never been the goal of the Web. If decentralization makes data sharing simple, easy, and has a positive impact on end users' lives, work, and learning, then it's worth doing. Further, through the "token incentives", everyone will flock to it. Once the tide recedes, the blockchain project with only one chicken feather will not exist for a long time.

What is capable of withstanding the test of history is the real thing.

Author: steam memory

Source: Authing Certification Cloud (WeChat Public Number)

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