What exactly is Web3?

What exactly is Web3?

Web3 is one of the hottest concepts in the field of science and technology in the past two years, but there is still no standard answer to the definition of Web3. A lot of understanding of Web3 is based on the virtual currency industry (commonly known as "currency circle") based on logic.

The core concept of the Blockchain Service Network (BSN) is to promote the establishment of a new public layer on the Internet, serve all walks of life and various types of distributed applications, and ultimately create the next generation of distributed Internet. Based on this concept, BSN also has its own understanding of Web3.

Today we will discuss what Web3 is from our own point of view. We hope that at this point in time when Web3 is booming, we will share our views, contribute to the unification of Web3-related standards and concepts, and help everyone A better understanding of Web3, and a better understanding of BSN.

01 Origin of the term "Web3"

1. Early Internet Technical Terminology

"Web3" first appeared as an Internet technical term in the 1990s. At that time, the main function of the Internet was to display data, that is, web pages for people to read. However, in the opinion of some technology pioneers, the Internet in the future should be able to process data, and let machines process data on a large scale-this idea has been realized in part by the AI ​​model today, so they proposed the concept of Web3 .

The earliest definition of Web3 contained two core concepts: First, data should be readable by machines, not just for humans, so formats such as XML and RDF appeared at that time to standardize data for machine recognition and Second, when most people's understanding of the Internet is still at the stage of web pages, the concept of Web3 is already conceiving "Data Web", that is, data networks, thinking about how to make the Internet perform large-scale data processing. At that time, people thought that the Internet was just a distributed file storage network. Files were stored everywhere. Users obtained file content by calling IP addresses, similar to the process of browsers obtaining web page content. Based on the vision of Web3, the Internet in the future should be a "distributed database network". Data is not only stored and called in the form of files, but also can be read and calculated by machines on a large scale, thereby improving human productivity. and data processing capabilities.

2. Web3 under the currency circle discourse system

The Web3 that most people hear today is actually mainly a marketing tool for the currency circle. In 2014, Gavin Wood, one of the co-founders of Ethereum, proposed the concept of Web3 when attending a meeting, and defined Web2 and Web1 based on Web3 forward and reverse, thus establishing a complete set of Web3 narratives of currency circle logic .

In this set of narrative logic, from the emergence of the Internet to 2004, it belongs to Web1. The main feature is to provide content in the form of static web pages, and users can only browse; Web2 is from 2004 to the present. Provided, users can also produce content, but these content data are still stored in the private database of each website; while the future Web3 emphasizes that users not only produce data, but based on distributed technology, users can also own and control data, and through virtual currency The token economy and value transfer allow data to generate value.

Due to the characteristics of the virtual currency itself, the definition of Web3 is actually limited to the application layer. To some extent, it mainly exists as a marketing concept.

02 Web3 understood by BSN

1. Broadcast communication and distributed technology

Humans invented the telephone in 1873. At first, the telephone could only be used for communication between two people. It is conceivable that when multiple people need to discuss a matter by calling, first of all, it is necessary to synchronize information through multiple calls between the two, and any one person makes an opinion or makes a feedback, It is necessary to conduct multiple phone calls between two pairs again, and even the different opinions and feedbacks are notified in the same order, which will also affect the final discussion results. After repeated several times, the communication will become very chaotic, and it is very likely that after making countless phone calls between two pairs and consuming a lot of time and resources, the final result cannot be reached.

People began to realize that if these people could discuss on the same phone, the efficiency would be greatly improved, so around 1980, the conference call was finally invented. In the same scenario, with the help of conference calls, everyone can participate in discussions at the same time, and solve problems efficiently in a short period of time without making thousands of calls.

From the perspective of data transmission, the phone call between two parties can be understood as point-to-point communication, while the conference call is broadcast communication. The current Internet logic is similar to a phone call between two parties. All data transmission on the Internet is carried out point-to-point.

The emergence of Bitcoin has epoch-making significance. Its greatness lies in the simulation of broadcast communication logic through the peer-to-peer structure of the Internet. Because of this, Bitcoin can efficiently reach various consensuses. People often regard consensus as one of the most prominent features of Bitcoin. In fact, consensus is only the result of efficient communication. Without broadcast communication, consensus cannot be reached. It is precisely because of this change in communication methods that the efficiency, accuracy, and reliability of data transmission have been greatly improved, which in turn has greatly improved human productivity.

Blockchain technology originated from Bitcoin, which allows IT systems to carry out broadcast communication, just like holding a "telephone conference" for IT systems, changing the way of data transmission between IT systems, which will also bring new opportunities to IT systems. form. From the perspective of IT architecture, most of the current IT systems on the Internet are unilateral systems controlled by a single entity, or private information systems, and each system manages its own business and data. Based on efficient broadcast communication, the distributed technology represented by blockchain will promote the formation of a multi-party system, or public information system. At that time, multiple roles with the same rights will jointly manage a system, and the system business and data. The resulting advantages of transparency, credibility, and interoperability allow IT systems to collaborate more efficiently in a new way, improving overall efficiency and driving the productivity of human society.

2. What is the real Web3

The current Internet technology system can only effectively serve the unilateral system, and conflicts with the requirements of the multi-party system. Under the premise of not changing the underlying physical facilities of the Internet, in order to run the multi-party system, the cloud environment, operating system, database technology, etc. need to be changed. To have a distributed cloud environment, distributed operating system, the database also needs to be shared by multiple parties data environment.

What BSN does is to build the basic distributed cloud environment required by the multi-party system, and the blockchain is currently the most suitable technology for the multi-party system operating system. Therefore, BSN is fully compatible with various types of blockchains and their underlying frameworks such as public chains, alliance chains, open alliance chains, and private chains. How to choose depends on the user's own business needs.

The Internet in the future must be able to handle distributed applications and run multi-party systems. Therefore, the core concept of BSN believes that the Internet will form a two-layer structure: one is a private layer based on point-to-point communication, which specializes in handling unilateral systems and traditional Internet applications; the other The layer can be called the public layer, which is based on broadcast communication and is used to deal with multi-party systems and distributed applications. Distributed technology plays a key role in this layer, and this layer is the real Web3.

This doesn't mean the traditional Internet is dead. In the Web3 logic of the currency circle, Web1, Web2, and Web3 are mutually iterative, and the new system will completely replace the original one. The private layer and public layer of the Internet in the BSN concept will coexist. According to different business scenarios and different data processing requirements, any organization, enterprise or individual can choose to deploy IT systems in the private layer or the public layer, or It is deployed on both layers at the same time.

03 The next generation Internet should have a broader definition

As the definition of Web3 in the currency circle spreads widely, it has gradually brought about a consequence, which is the confusion between the concepts of Web3 and "next generation Internet". The reference from Web1, Web2 to Web3 has made many people mistakenly believe that Web3 is the next generation Internet, which is actually inaccurate.

When discussing the next-generation Internet, it must first be clear that the essence of the Internet is actually a communication tool and an infrastructure for data transmission. Its function is to allow data to be transmitted from one point to another. The social networking, shopping, payment, etc. that people usually use, like virtual currency, are just an application. The so-called Web3 in the currency circle is based on the business logic of virtual currency, and the virtual currency itself is only an application based on a distributed architecture. Therefore, the definition of Web3 in the currency circle is actually an application on the next-generation Internet, not the next generation of the Internet itself.

An application should not be confused with an infrastructure just because it is the first or primary application on that infrastructure. Just like e-mail on the early Internet, the entire Internet infrastructure was basically used to send and receive e-mail from the 1960s to the 1990s, but e-mail cannot be regarded as the Internet because of this.

To define the next generation Internet, we should start from the essence of the Internet. As far as the communication level is concerned, the next generation Internet will be a two-layer structure with parallel private and public layers, and distributed technology is the core of the public layer. Just like there are hundreds of millions of websites on the Internet now, there will be hundreds of millions of distributed network environments on the public layer of the next-generation Internet, and BSN is one of them.

As a project based on distributed technology, BSN hopes to build the basic distributed cloud environment required by the multi-party system by promoting the concept of the Internet public layer, and provide all future new operating systems, communication protocols, databases, and development tools based on distributed technology. The establishment of foundations and application scenarios will eventually promote the establishment of the next generation of distributed Internet, and contribute to the progress of Internet technology, productivity, and even the entire human civilization.

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