Thammasat University students interested in artificial intelligence (AI), future studies, economics, business, soft power, and related subjects may find it useful to participate in a free 24 January Zoom webinar on Web3.0 – Exploring the Decentralized Future.
The event, on Wednesday, 24 January at 3:30pm Bangkok time, is presented by Tokyo College, The University of Tokyo, Japan.
The TU Library collection includes several books about different aspects of Web3.0.
Students are invited to register at this link:
https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_jLnb6DU-TD6o_DJqNCVepQ#/registration
The event webpage announces:
As centralized technologies wield increasing influence over our society, the significance of Web3.0—decentralized, fair, and open web technologies—has never been more critical. Join us in envisioning a secure, transparent, and inclusive digital landscape, uncovering the transformative potential of the decentralized web in this forward-looking exploration.
The speaker will be the British computer scientist Gavin Wood, co-founder of Parity Technologies, a blockchain development company, co-founder of Ethereum, founder of the Web3 Foundation, a foundation dedicated to building a decentralized web, creator of Polkadot, a project to make different blockchains interoperable, and Kusama, Polkadot’s experimental network.
The commentator for the event will be Professor Kenichi Ueda of the Graduate School of Economics, Graduate School of Public Policy, and Center for Advanced Research in Finance, The University of Tokyo.
The moderator will be Professor Gento Mogi of the Graduate School of Engineering, The University of Tokyo.
Web3 (also known as Web 3.0) is an idea for a new iteration of the World Wide Web which incorporates concepts such as decentralization, blockchain technologies, and token-based economics.
Some technologists and journalists have contrasted it with Web 2.0, wherein they say data and content are centralized in a small group of companies sometimes referred to as Big Tech.
The term Web3 was coined in 2014 by Ethereum co-founder Gavin Wood, and the idea gained interest in 2021 from cryptocurrency enthusiasts, large technology companies, and venture capital firms.
The concepts of Web3 were first represented in 2013.
Journalists and academic researchers have described Web3 as a possible solution to concerns about the over-centralization of the web in a few Big Tech companies.
Some have expressed the notion that Web3 could improve data security, scalability, and privacy beyond what is currently possible with Web 2.0 platforms.
The New York Times reported that several investors are betting $27 billion that Web3 “is the future of the internet”.
Some Web 2.0 companies, including Reddit and Discord, have explored incorporating Web3 technologies into their platforms.
Some legal scholars quoted by The Conversation have expressed concerns over the difficulty of regulating a decentralized web, which they reported might make it more difficult to prevent cybercrime, online harassment, and hate speech.
But, the news website also states that, “[decentralized web] represents the cyber-libertarian views and hopes of the past that the internet can empower ordinary people by breaking down existing power structures”.
Some other critics of Web3 see the concept as a part of a cryptocurrency bubble, or as an extension of blockchain-based trends that they see as overhyped or harmful, particularly NFTs.
Some critics have raised concerns about the environmental impact of cryptocurrencies and NFTs.
Cryptocurrencies vary in efficiency, with proof of stake having been designed to be less energy intensive than the more widely used proof of work, although there is disagreement about how secure and decentralized this is in practice.
Others have expressed beliefs that Web3 and the associated technologies are a pyramid scheme.
Jack Dorsey, co-founder and former CEO of Twitter, dismissed Web3 as a “venture capitalists’ plaything”.
Dorsey suggested that Web3 will not democratize the internet, but it will shift power from players like Facebook to venture capital funds.
In 2021, Gavin Wood explained to an interviewer:
I think the model for Web 2.0 was much the same as the model for society before the internet existed. If you go back 500 years, people basically just stuck to their little villages and townships. And they traded with people that they knew. And they relied on, broadly speaking, the social fabric, to ensure that expectations were credible, were likely to actually happen: These apples are not rotten, or this horseshoe doesn’t break after three weeks.
And that works reasonably well, because it’s difficult and very time-consuming and expensive to move between towns. So you have a reasonably high level of credibility that someone is going to stick around and they don’t want to be exiled.
But as society moved into something larger-scale, and we have cities and countries and international organizations, we moved on to this weird kind of brand reputation thing. We’ve created these powerful but regulated bodies, and the regulators, in principle, ensure that our expectations are met. There are certain statutory requirements that, to operate in a particular industry, you must fulfill.
This is not a great solution, for a few reasons. One of them is, it’s very hard to regulate new industries. The government is slow, it takes a while to catch up. Another is that regulators are imperfect. And especially when they work closely with the industry, oftentimes there’s a bit of a revolving door relationship between the industry and the regulator.
Another is simply a regulatory body has very limited firepower. It’s how much money the government puts into it. And so necessarily, regulation is going to be patchy. They will be able to regulate maybe the biggest offenders but they aren’t able to retain a really strong influence all the time everywhere. And of course, the regulators and the laws differ from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. If you go somewhere in the EU, then Activity X is fine; if you go somewhere else, then it’s not fine. And as we become a very international society, this effectively means that your expectations are still not being met.
So we need to move beyond this. But unfortunately, Web 2.0 very much still exists in this very centralized model. […]
I think a degree of truth is necessary. And by this I mean openness, transparency. Blockchain technology uses both cryptography and certain game theory economics to deliver its service. We need to understand the node infrastructure of the network; is it really peer-to-peer or is it actually run from one data center by a company that manufactures and sells hardware and is required to be consulted before a new node can come online? The details make the difference as to whether it’s basically just Web 2.0 in disguise or whether it is actually legitimately open, transparent, decentralized, peer-to-peer.
(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)