A Brief History of Information

Blockchain technologies can be seen as a continuation of Humanity's history of shared storytelling: they are a way to mathematically come to consensus in a narrative, which allows us to share that story between multiple parties without it being changed.

consensus: a state where multiple parties come to an agreement.

ex: How many marbles does Alice have? Alice says 3, Bob says 3 and Christie says 3. Alice, Bob and Christie have reached consensus.

Blockchain differs from typical methods of consensus which are vulnerable to degradation over time through word of mouth. Even written stories are not absolute and are subject to change through re-writings and translation. With Blockchain technologies, a narrative can¹ be absolute and forever fixed throughout time.

Web 1.0

Before Blockchain, and before the modern-day Web, this was the primal state of the internet. At this stage, the notion of a worldwide information network had only begun to dawn, with always-on servers being used for the first time for static information serving.

With this early state of the Web also came a low threat level: bad actors were either uncommon or deemed not a concern. This was about to change however.

Web 2.0

With the Web growing as a utility came the rise of dynamic services such as email and later social media. These are centralized services, with many trust assumptions baked in:

• You must trust the service provider does what you ask it to.
• You must trust the service provider doesn't misuse the information you give it.
• You must trust the service provider acts fairly and not only in it's own self-interest.

However, each of these tenants has been violated time and time again, either because of logical mistakes² or because it was simply more lucrative³ to do so.

While Blockchain cannot protect us from logical mistakes, it can protect us from such abuses of power as are inherent in a centralized system. This includes most importantly censorship and discrimination.

At the same time as the rise to prominence of dynamic services made the Web much, much more lucrative⁴, so did the threat level increase substantially, with cyberattacks becoming more prominent⁵. This is something with which Web 2.0 struggles in particular since services are centralized and most importantly opaque: it is impossible to verify if a service provider is secure enough, you once again have no choice but to trust them.

Web 3.0

The decentralized Web. Built on top of strong cryptographic guarantees, this new Web lays the basis for trustless worldwide services which are not controlled by a centralized entity. Web 3.0 data does not need to make any trust assumptions, meaning it is possible to engineer services where your trust cannot be abused by a central entity: with a well thought-out system, anyone in the world can verify the origin and integrity of the data being served to them.

Web 3.0 is in effect a safer, more democratic successor to Web 2.0.

This new Web is built with the highest adversarial conditions in mind and is even resistant to state-sponsored actors. Web 3.0 can be private, permissionless, final and unstoppable.

The state of Information going forwards

With Web 3.0 currently in its cradling phase, the potential is there for a revolution in the way in which existing systems exchange information. However, this will most likely first be just an evolution on the short -or even long- term as research advances in the field.

Web 3.0 is not a silver bullet. Like any tool in engineering, it offers interesting properties and drawbacks around which we can create new systems and products. Unlike what the hype might want you to think, Web 3.0 is not there to change the world, but rather a specific subset of the world that can benefit from these properties.

It is important to realize that despite it's already considerable financial impact, Web 3.0 is indeed only in it's early stage, and this is a good thing! It means that individual like you and me still have a lot to contribute to this growing ecosystems, with many problems waiting to be solved and business opportunities waiting to be found.