Web3: Next Generation Internet, with Bruno Skvorc, Carolina Velásquez, Alex Siman, Alfonso Rocha

Thank you, Karolina. Hi. So, excuse my voice. I had a little cold yesterday. Um, so I'm I'm Bruno and I work as a technical educator at the Web3 Foundation, which is a nonprofit foundation in Zoo, Switzerland.

Our mission is to launch decentralized internet protocols and help uh move web 2 in the direction of web 3. So we want to uh decentralize the the current walled gardens that are that are kind of preventing the sharing of data outside of their um capsules that they've been they've been uh created in and where they are being sold from. And in fact to uh actually explain what web 3.0 is we have to briefly mention web one and web two. So web one was the the good old classic web where um you would essentially read static websites.

If you wanted somebody if you wanted to put up a website, you would write some HTML, you would put it on online. People would have to find it usually through other people's websites who would link to it. There was no dynamic search engine. Um everything was much more manual. Everything was what much more crude.

But um everything since everything was so read only, so only the owners of the websites could could post information, you could argue that things were much healthier back then. Uh you didn't really have the hostile environment of the internet that you have today. Um it was more like an information um repository rather than an argument warrant, you know. Um so then came web 2.0 know which was the read write web where people could uh write things into websites and other people could read them and this included videos, images, forum posts, whatnot.

So this was the dynamic web. You could uh websites became more dynamic. Um JavaScript took over the web. We had proper web applications not just websites. And these applications grew and grew in functionality until we got our uh behemoths of life improvement that we have today and that we simply do not want to leave behind.

Uh these behemoths make life insanely practical, right? You you have your Ubers, you have your uh Airbnbs. I mean, who would have thought that 15 years ago, 15 years ago, you couldn't really sell the idea of a website that lets you rent your house to a complete stranger without ever meeting them and getting money for it. That's insane. And yet here we are in 2020 and it's perfectly normal within the limits of COVID, of course.

So, um, it's it changed our landscape, right? We have these, uh, these these various PayPals that let us send money everywhere in the world. We have our Ubers, we have our Airbnbs, we have our Instagrams that let us stalk our crushes, and we have our Facebooks that let us get in touch with grandparents or people who are not very technologically uh savvy from from high school. You have Twitter to argue with strangers. You have uh you know all of these decentralized all of these big centralized applications that help you connect different corners of the world in different ways.

Um but that's the problem with web 2. It's also very centralized. We we have these walled gardens where um you have the database of one application that doesn't necessarily need to trust the applica the the database of another. So what's true in I don't know your Twitter world doesn't have to match the truth in your Facebook world. So these two spaces don't have the means to communicate and to share truth.

And because of that you have this um not only this information mismanagement, but you also have this um this this this world garden approach where the the application that forced you to build your data in one place actually repackages it and sells it to other providers, other customers and even yourself back in the form of ads. Um, and what's more, these platforms have no intention to actually share this information because they are driven and funded by you staying there. So, if you're allowed to share your information with other places, you can leave. And if you leave, you're not looking at their ads. This is also why most of the content you see is designed to make you angry and you have no effect on how much stuff you're going to see that makes you angry because anger makes you click more.

If you're happy, if you see posts that you agree with, you will not generally interact with them. Um, and so this is the psychology. This is the the scops that these uh platforms are playing with you in order for you to leave as much of your psyche as possible in their database so they can sell it and use it and make money off of you, which is fine. I mean, we live in a capitalist society. to encourage profit um in all corners of life.

But uh we should for one be able to opt into it and two perhaps even share a part of those profits if it's my data being sold. Right? So with this advent of super centralization and many hacks and security leaks that happen in these platforms, I mean you have all of those Facebook leaks that we don't even care about anymore how how frequent they are. Um you have those you have your Tinder leaks, your Uber leaks. You have a lot of different leaks both of both privacy and and financial data and all sorts of data.

Um if you combine that with the with the data abuse and the walled garden approach the the web 2.0 space starts to look problematic. So web 3 wants to solve that and we solve that by introducing um the web 3.0 is is basically composed of three three facets. One is uh linked data so that different protocols can understand information no matter where it comes from.

That data is understandable to every application. There's distributed data so that every node in in a network, every computer that's using this data can reach the data it needs. And then finally, there's the blockchain which is why we're all here, which adds truth to that data. So it makes sure that the distributed data is complete and truthful and so that every node that gets it knows what it needs and what it wants and knows that it is true. And with the blockchain we get this um one truth of the world that is mathematically provable.

Everybody can check and make sure that the web 3's state of the truth is true according to everybody else. So you have this one truth that everybody shares and not that that that no one can really manipulate at least on a um technical and mathematical level. And so by doing this you help these various applications share data because you with your private key with your um cryptographic key pair you own your little part of that data and you own your profile and you alone have a way to say what happens to that data. Right now if you want to send a message to a friend in another part of the world through Facebook you literally have to ask Facebook hey f Facebook would you please send a message to my friend through your servers and that's fine until it works until it doesn't work right so um in web 3 you are in control uh there is no one to stop a transaction from one place to another place and a transaction can be money it can be just a hello message or it can be content that somebody doesn't want you to see like the great Chinese firewall So the idea is to decentralize the web in a way that lets every application access every other application's data and do it freely and without any gatekeepers or centralized custodians that you need to ask for permission on what to do with your data. That's basically the gist of web 3 and what we're trying to do.

Okay. Thanks Then if we have the control we are not the product. Yes. Yes. is is is that I think then here we also have Alonso de la Rocha.

Hi Alonso. He is a research engineer at protocol labs. Alonso, what experience do you have with web 3 and how can with web 3 help usually already mentioned several of those things and I agree with him. I mean it's of of removing our dependency on centralization and central centralized entities. The internet have transformed into a critical infrastructure.

So the more resilient uh this infrastructure is the better for us. We are able to to have other dynamics in the internet as Bruno mentioned where we are not the product. we don't have these intrusive fats and and we can be owners in our data. So in the end what we can is to fully imagine the internet. There are a lot of things in the internet that are currently broken as Bruno mentioned with the data the ownership of of the ownership of the of our own data and the dynamics and the economy of the internet.

But also from a technical point of view we also have um I mean we can fix a lot of things by by using web three. We can have crypto by design because we don't have to imagine a weird protocol like TLS in order to be able to know that the source of the content is the actual source of the content because we will have crypto by design. We will have content addressing. This is really I mean this is something that I've been obsessed for a while and is that if you have to send a message to someone that is in your same room or maybe in your same neighborhood, you have to go to the backbone of the internet as Bruno suggested ask Facebook if you can send that message and then come back. This is really inefficient.

I mean we are moving into a state in which all the traffic will be generated from the edge of the network and we are still the internet the architecture of the internet is still built in a way where you have to go to the backbone of the internet and back in web3. We are building all of these foundations and all of these models to allow us to contact in and to people in the edge of the network to discover not where a resource is stored but the actual resource. So for instance, if I'm if a lot of people regularly access Facebook and and they they download the Facebook app, you have to go to the Facebook data center and download it. But with all of these protocols we're working on, you have a way in which to request to the actual network where I mean someone hey give me the content and the one that is nearer to you will give you the content. So we will be able to have a more efficient uh architecture of the internet and then what for me it's more exciting we will be able to aggregate all the resources of the internet.

So we will end up in a scenario in which instead of having to resort to big uh entities to get resources we will be able to aggregate all the resources in the internet storage the bandwidth the networking the computation so that if I have spare computation I would be able to leave it to others to use it for a reward and the other way around I would be able to to rent those free resources that are aggregated throughout the internet in order to use it. So I feel that there are a lot of things we still don't know all the things that we can do. We are starting to see the blockchain. We saw how bitcoin decentralized the financial system and how the defy are we already have a way of lowering the barriers into the financial system. Well that same dynamics I think we will see it in a few years in the internet where we are also lower the barriers for the internet and everyone would be able to become part of the infrastructure of the internet.

Thanks, Alonso. Our third panelist is the founder of Subocial Network. Please welcome Alex. Alex, uh, what is the future of social media using blockchain and decentralized protocols and how has the web three involved and what does blockchain contribute there? Uh, hello guys.

Uh I'm Alex and uh um we're working on a project that is uh supported by Web3 Foundation where Bruno works and we're building an open protocol for decentralized social networking uh that is based on substrate blockchain framework and uh IPFS uh technology for content and um what is the features of our solution is that it allows anyone to launch something similar to today's most popular uh social networks that like Twitter, Reddit, Medium and even Quora or Stack or Flow. So the basic idea is that uh among all of these social networks there are very common things like uh there are channels, groups and then there are posts and comments uh posts and votes and then you can follow some things and uh we just decided to create this stuff on in a web three way. So there is no central authorities that owns this content but uh the people who run the infrastructure like um blockchain nodes and IPFS nodes. Uh so anyone um can join and post it their own content. Um so what is uh what was your main question?

Can you please we have we have a lot of question here in the in the chat. difference is what happens to the web three foundation when we get web four well I don't know maybe Bruno yeah um we'll either well I guess we'll have to rename the foundation um no it's like um the there's an unwritten goal of the foundation has always been to self-destruct uh when you have a foundation you don't want to um you don't want to be the embodiment of the sherky principle and the Turkey principle states that a uh an institution that is the solution to some problem will do its best to keep that problem alive because it needs that problem to to stay alive. Uh we don't really want that. Um the foundation has a budget and that budget is running out. We want to make the biggest impact excuse me before then.

And in fact, if you look at some of the blockchains that we've launched, which are uh right now Kusama and Polka Dot, both of those have an onchain treasury and the onchain treasury is constantly being uh refilled from various mechanism of mechanisms of the chain. And the treasury is meant to take over funding the ecosystem later on. So even if the foundation stops tomorrow, there is enough funding in place on those chains to keep things like research and development funded uh for a good while to come. And um there are mechanisms on how that treasury is dispersed. I'm I'm not going to go into detail unless uh people really ask and are interested.

But you can learn all about this on wiki.poke.network network uh where we explain all the mechanisms of our our blockchains and how we are ensuring that longevity so that we are not actually necessary for these blockchains to survive. Okay. Okay.

And we have another question is um what about big companies such as Facebook and Google they are not based in on blockchain. We will they survive Alonso or Alex I would not worry about these companies. They have so much money so they can survive for a couple of decades. I guess at least they burn too much on autonomous vehicles for example. But uh blockchain is not a silver bullet.

It's just one of the solutions approaches to solving the decentralization of our current internet. And for example uh this IPFS filecoin I mean IPFS part is it doesn't have blockchain and it's also um key component of decentralized um product. So to add to to Alex response I agree that for me web 3 is more than just blockchain. I mean it's blockchain is just a use case of web 3 but we also have other protocols we we're working in order to try to transition from this centralized internet to a decentralized web one where we are building the transport layer we are building for instance um all the people working in web 3 they are building ways of having um pure randomness so there's a project really cool that is called dand that is the first randomness beacon because there are a lot of applications that need randomness, real life need randomness and we still don't have a way of of generating this real randomness. So I mean if you want to check the project is dan.

lo and you will see that there are a lot of things around web 3 that are being developed that will definitely help to develop the next generation of the internet where we don't rely on these big guys with big pockets like Google Facebooks and etc. Okay. Uh Bruno you are an educator. How can uh web three no sorry how can we start learning working with it? So there are many ways uh to get started.

I would I would suggest going through to our wiki page. So that's polka dot network wiki polka dot.net network and find the wiki there. Um that is like as comprehensive a resource as you can hope for. We have it's like it's it's a proper book at this point.

If you read that, you will be um like an intermediate level uh expertish in in polka dot if you read it in full. And then if you want to get your hands dirty and start building, there are two resources I can recommend. One is substrate.dev. So substrate.

dev dev is a platform which has tutorials for the substrate framework and that framework is what polka dot the blockchain and kusama the blockchain are based on and in fact it is also the framework that Alex's project subsocial is based on. So we have a framework that um is of like incredibly high quality because it powers all of these different blockchains. And by using this framework, you get all the functionality that we've developed for these blockchains as plug-and-play modules. You can pull them in, you can exclude them, but you can also develop your own modules and plug them in. And on substrate.

dev, you will find tutorials on how to put on how to put together your own custom blockchain and how to use this framework. um they are all user friendly and none of them should take more than an hour to complete. So this is an excellent uh learning starter. And then on that very same website you have the recipes category which is a list of smaller tasks but very specific to to certain problems. So it's like if you had an idea on how do I do this or that, it's probably already been done in recipes.

So you can check that out and check out the tutorials on substrate.dev to get your hands dirty. Now, uh this is pretty low-level stuff. So, this is for if you want to build a chain, if you want to build a blockchain, um but if you want to build something on top of an existing blockchain, you will have to learn how to plug into it with JavaScript or other tools in other languages. For that, I started a resource center uh at leap.

com. So, dleap.com.le.com.

And there you can find tutorials on how to build a custom user interface like a website that connects to any substrate based blockchain and talks to it through through JavaScript. Uh more tutorials are coming soon. It's it's pretty new. So there are only like about 10 or so posts there right now. Um still it's going to be much more useful in the in the coming weeks.

So that's that's how you get started. But in any case, please don't hesitate to get in touch. Um, personally like at I'm at Bruno3.foundation. Um, on Twitter, you can find me on Twitter.

You can find me on Riot or Element, how it's called now. I will always be around to help you out and to answer any questions you might have and to direct you to more learning resources if you're interested. Thank you, Bruno. Thank you very much. Uh, we have time for another question.

um what projects are you aware of that are building web 3 and how do they compare maybe so I mean I can talk from our part um like I mean in protocol labs for instance what we're building is all the models because we think that you cannot move from the actual internet to build an alternative internet from scratch so in the end what you need is to build the models that would allow us to upgrade the internet and there are a lot of projects around I mean Bruno has talked about blockchain and blockchain specific we're working also like in lip peerto-peer that is the transport layer for decentralized web we're working on IPLD that is a way Bruno mentioned the linking of data between different systems and IPLD in the end is a specification to communicate with different DAX structures and DA that structure is the model the content model of the decentralized internet and the decentralized um world. We have for instance what I mentioned DAND there are a lot of so web 3 is blockchain but is way more so out there there's a lot of projects that are building these small models that would allow us to upgrade uh the internet also there are projects built over um over these models again where you have for instance subsessional network is an example that uses substrate you will find a decentralized alternative to to WhatsApp have a decentralized alternative for everything. So within the web3 ecosystem, we have people working in the protocols and in the in the substrate for this upgrade of the internet and also some companies that are already and projects that are already building the use cases, decentralized alternatives to the centralized systems and I highly recommend checking it out in the web 3 ecosystem. Okay. And do you know if Google or Facebook is helping or supporting data development of week three?

Yeah. So I I would I would add that uh Google and Facebook are interested in what brings their shareholders more money and uh for example Facebook tried with Libra and uh then government of US wasn't really happy because having such a huge uh user base like 2.5 billion users active users as you know on Facebook they can do um great competition to US dollars so government government was of US was not happy with this and uh about Google I don't know what are they doing on this but I heard about Twitter so Twitter co he said that uh they're considering to create sort of open protocol u or maybe alternative to Twitter but I I actually have doubts doubts about this because from the history of uh Twitter I know that um in the early days they had an open API guys that uh um G gave you a lot of freedom and features. But once community created different applications like for mobile, for the desktop, Twitter acquired or copycat such applications and then limited API access and now you need to pro uh a lot of things to get access to Twitter API for example and you will not get all the features. So you cannot compete with Twitter main products like official products.

So I I I heard lots about this and the reason is that uh most of the solutions like uh Google Facebook Twitter they based on on advertisement and they make like 90% uh of revenue on advertisement while we scrolling through their feeds and on Google you also can consider Google results like a feed. So you scroll through it and you see advertisement. So if a blockchain will help you them to make more money with this model then yes if they find another monetization where blockchain will help them of course they will switch to this but but to add to this I think that they have already seen the value of of technically of many of the of the things that are being developed because for instance having a content addressable network you have a CDN by design and already companies like Netflix have seen that in their deployments their cloud deployments they found content able network to be really useful in order to load all the the exchange of of the images in their cloud infrastructure so that they can have it in a fast way in the region that they're needed. So I don't know of course from a use case point of view they will focus on the thing that makes them money but also technically they have seen the value to this in some aspects and some dimensions and or at least that's my point of view. Okay, thanks.

Thanks for also thanks all. I think that's um exciting um protocol. It is exciting the team to talk about that. But it is all for for the time. We don't have enough time for the moment and thank you very much u for Bruno, Alex, and Alonso.

Maybe Victoria is okay. I'm back. So uh thank you very much Karolina for moderating this panel. Um well I know you very well because you are one of the teachers in the master um um the director of in Spanish. Uh you are teacher of our module in corda.

So I know uh you are sharp in Spanish but obviously for you was a bit tough in English but thank you so much for doing it. Bruno thank you so much for joining us again in this session. I don't know Bruno both and Alonso and Alex for joining us this edition. If you want to say a few words before we continue you are allowed to do that 30 seconds because we have told the second panel well the last panel that we are a few minutes late because that's actually true. So uh Bruno Alonso Alex if you want to say a few words before we continue.

Go ahead. So, thank you for having us here and as Bruno said, contact us for every anything that you need or if you want to have a deep dive into the web 3 ecosystem. Yes, thank you very much. Yeah, thanks for having us. And um please don't be afraid to explore web 3.

It sounds intimidating and it sounds complicated but it's actually once you get into it um much more user friendly and intuitive when you start thinking about how how stuff works. So I welcome you to to get in touch. I will drop some of my contact information in bre in the chat so that everybody can see it and uh feel free to to hit me up on on Twitter or any other medium where you feel comfortable and I can give you some pointers on on where to get started. We also have a bunch of grant programs open so you can apply to to be paid to develop something for the foundation. So if you have a development team and and no ideas but want to learn, want to join the ecosystem, again there's lots of opportunities.

Uh we're looking forward to to getting you on boarded and teaching you about decentralized internet. Thanks. Fantastic. So again, thank you so much Karolina, Bruno, Alonso, and Alex. I guess we can continue the conversation in some future editions of the European Blockchain Convention.

Once again, thank you so much to the four of you. We will continue now in the next tab and I hope you'll stay with us. Bye. Thank you so much. Yeah.

Thank you. Bye.