About Web3

web1 was a decentralised internet. People would host their own websites and emails on their own servers at home.

Later we began instead choosing to publish content on centralised platforms like myspace, facebook, reddit, instagram and to entrust email to Hotmail and gmail. This is web2.

The basic premise of web3 is to make everything decentralised once again.

Since the average person does not want to run their own servers, we should build systems that can distribute trust without having to distribute the infrastructure.

This means the architecture should anticipate the inevitablility of centralised client/server relationships, while using cryptography (rather than infrastructure) to distribute the trust.

One of the most surprising things about the current state of web3, is that despite being built on “crypto,” there is actually very little cryptography involved.

As long as writing software requires so much energy and focus, it will tend to serve the interests of the people making it rather than what we may consider our broader goals.

Unfortunately, I believe distributed systems have a tendency to exacerbate this trend by making things more complicated and more difficult, not less complicated and less difficult.