Divide By None™
Web 3.1 is a much needed improvement that finally delivers on much of the initial hype that surrounded Web 3.0. So, it would probably help if we begin by defining what Web 3.0 really is, then explain what Web 3.0 was allegedly supposed to be, and then we will move on to how we at DBN are revising those promises so that we can actually deliver on the core expectations.
Web 3.0 (and Crypto in general) is a scam. Most of the projects that were launched in the Crypto space ended up being rug pulls of one kind or another, and the rest were just trash that many people wasted their time and money into. And its easy to be fooled into thinking that the failure was due to “just a few bad apples”. Or to think that there is some way to separate the legit projects from the scams. But the reality is that the underlying principles of Bitcoin, and Crypto in general were always one major rug pull from the beginning.
It is likely that many of you remember that we were once told that Crypto would save us from the evil greedy bankers; there would not be any middle man, and therefore we would be safe from harm. What happened to that? We now see Crypto bros celebrating that BlackRock (the people who literally organised one of the biggest government bailouts to bankers in modern history) is getting deeply invested into the Crypto world. These are the same Crypto bros who told us that the holders of Bitcoin are the ones who have the power to make decisions about Bitcoin, due to “decentralisation”. Do you see the problem here?
We recently undertook a massive personal project to get into Bitcoin mining, because: why not? Initially, we had huge moral objections to being involved in that space because we are not fans of Bitcoin, but over time we realised that if we could figure out a way to be profitable through Bitcoin mining, we could then use the profits to do positive things such as inventing ethical alternatives to what we see in the Crypto world. In other words: we could take the Crypto money and use it to create a better form of digital currency. But little did we know how much of a nightmare that project would be.
Most so-called Open Source software is not truly open. In fact it is often quite difficult to work with. The documentation is almost always either non-existent or of a very poor quality with massive gaps where essential knowledge is missing. And therefore, we expected to find something similar with the Bitcoin project. But we were wrong. We did not encounter the typical difficulties: Bitcoin and the Blockchain are obfuscation on steroids. We are convinced that Bitcoin was created by a group affiliated with a Government agency—such as the CIA—because the Bitcoin project is poorly designed in terms of innovation and problem solving. But a tremendous amount of effort has gone into DELIBERATELY making it as difficult as possible for any software developer to understand how to build applications upon this technology.
And these are not problems that can be solved in the typical method: by buying reference manuals or learning guides from Amazon. We bought multiple highly rated books on the topic and found all of those books to be completely useless on the topic of Bitcoin mining. And 99% of the web sites that we encountered on this topic were even more useless. They would either tell us to join a "mining pool" or they would have massive amounts of essential knowledge missing. And the official Bitcoin website was very difficult for us to work with. It does have a lot of information, but they have gone out of their way to essentially invent a new language to describe the Blockchain, so we found ourselves constantly confused by what we were reading.
As we progressed through our study, we found many bizarre decisions in the Bitcoin's technical design and implementation. And if it weren't for the 1% of good websites on the topic of Bitcoin, we might have spent additional months or even years using trial and error to try to overcome all of this nonsense. Like, for example, they give no reason at all for why they have inconsistency in the direction that they order some of the values such as Bitcoin addresses.
Surely, you're scratching your head, wondering what it is that we're saying. Now, to be clear, these values are not just regular numbers, so the example we're about to provide to you is not to be taken literally. But imagine that in one instance you're expected to provide a value in this form: "12345". And suddenly, for no apparent reason, in a superficially different situation you're being expected to write that exact same value as "54321". This is ridiculous and we have never encountered anything like this in our entire lives. Therefore, in our opinion, there is no way that the inventor of Bitcoin is just one man. It must be a team of people who were very well funded and must have spent many months or even years creating what is essentially a labyrinth.
Now, you might be thinking to yourself: "Why is this a problem? Maybe its a good thing that this is hard to learn, so that only the brightest minds can engage with the network." And perhaps this was the original intent. But it is not what they promised us. They said that Bitcoin was decentralised and that anybody could participate without any need for a middle-man. But this is clearly a lie. They have gone out of their way to make sure that you CANNOT particpate directly and completely, on your own, and they made sure that you will go seek out a middle-man like Sam Bankman-Fried, who is even less trustworthy than a greedy banker!
The most authoritative answer for what the grand vision of Web 3.0 was allegedly supposed to be, comes from the book The Network State, by the investor Balaji Srinivasan. What follows is a brief exerpt from that book:
Technology has allowed us to start new companies, new communities, and new currencies. But can we use it to create new cities, or even new countries? A key concept is to go cloud first, land last—but not land never—by starting with an online community and then materializing it into the physical world. We get there in seven steps: (1) Found a startup society. This is simply an online community with aspirations of something greater. Anyone can found one, just like anyone can found a company or cryptocurrency. And the founder's legitimacy comes from whether people opt to follow them. (2) Organize it into a group capable of collective action. Given a sufficiently dedicated online community, the next step is to organize it into a network union. Unlike a social network, a network union has a purpose: it coordinates its members for their mutual benefit. And unlike a traditional union, a network is not set up solely in opposition to a particular corporation, so it can take a variety of different collective actions. Unionization is a key step because it turns an otherwise ineffective online community into a group of people working together for a common cause. (3) Build trust offline and a cryptoeconomy online. Begin holding in-person meetups in the physical world, of increasing scale and duration, while simultaneously building an internal economy using cryptocurrency. (4) Crowdfund physical nodes. Once sufficient trust has been built and funds have been accumulated, start crowdfunding apartments, houses, and even towns to bring digital citizens into the physical world within real co-living communities. (5) Digitally connect physical communities. Link these physical nodes together into a network archipelago, a set of digitally connected physical territories distributed around the world. Nodes of the network archipelago range from one-person apartments to in-person communities of arbitrary size. Physical access is granted by holding a web3 crypto-passport, and mixed-reality is used to seamlessly link the online and offline worlds. (6) Conduct an on-chain census. As the society scales, run a cryptographically auditable census to demonstrate the growing size of your population, income, and real-estate footprint. This is how a startup society proves traction in the face of skepticism. (7) Gain diplomatic recognition. A startup society with sufficient scale should eventually be able to negotiate for diplomatic recognition from at least one pre-existing government, and from there gradually increased sovereignty, slowly becoming a true network state
While it is easy to accept that the author of the book seems to have good intentions as he refers to things like "coordinating the members for their mutual benefit", there is a considerable flaw with his logic. He speaks dismissively of labour unions, but in those organisations, collective actions make sense because there is a very specific and tangible goal that most members can agree on. But outside of those circumstances, even in cases where everyone in a group looks similar on the outside, they may live very different lives and have very different goals at any given time. Therefore, to satisfy every member of a large group, the goals of the collective action are likely to be so homogenised that everybody is disappointed even if the goals are accomplished.
Another important question is, what kind of action can a large group of people engage in that is not purely performative, anyway? In a footnote, the author clarifies that actions include:
crowdfunding, job placement, bulk purchasing, and collective bargaining with corporations and states.
Crowdfunding can have mixed outcomes, ranging from spectacular to outright fraud. And it is not clear what tangible improvements or solutions that cryptocurrencies bring to crowdfunding. At this point, it seems laughable to believe that crypto can solve the problem of scams within crowdfunding.
Job placement sounds like a very speculative idea that is fraught with the same problems: scams and other forms of deception. Is there any proof that a mob of crypto bros is more capable of selecting the best candidates than can be done via face to face interviews?
Bulk purchasing is an absurd idea. Can you imagine ten thousand people from all around the world chipping in to buy 1,000,000 toilet rolls at a discounted price? What happens next? The amount of money you save from buying in bulk will now be forfeited as you spend immense amounts of money on dividing all the rolls equally and distributing them to each member via postage. And what have we gained by doing what is effectively the job of an international logistics organisation? Nothing!
Finally, the author mentions collective bargaining with corporations and states. But the problem with this, is that to engage in such bargaining requires some form of effective leverage. You can't expect to get a response, let alone a positive outcome, if your version of "leverage" is: "Microsoft, you better do what we want or we will create an NFT meme of a sad frog!". In other words, steps one and two of the so-called Network State are just the author trying to sell us crappier versions of things that already exist!
The way the author describes step three just seems more like a live-action-role-play (LARP) than a serious plan. Anybody who has worked in an office job knows the perils of arranging meetings for the sake of having meetings. Nothing is accomplished other than wasting everyone's time and creating the illusion of team-building. But in reality, no amount of meetings is going to magically increase the level of trust that people have for one another. It is hard to build trust, especially when the members of the group are engaged in a zero-sum game where there is a strong finanicial incentive to throw other members under the bus.
And what kind of goal is it to "build an economy using cryptocurrency"? We already have an economy, so why do we need to built another one? What tangible benefit would that bring? Of course, in theory it would be great to overcome the many problems that exist in our present economy. But why not just focus on fixing our present economy, instead of building a crappier alternative?
But a much deeper problem with the author's third and fourth steps, is that he seems to imply that trust is something that merely needs to be built. As if it were an infrastructure project, designed by a competent engineer. But the truth is that we really should not give much trust to most of the people that we meet. Even if—hypothetically—we were to assume that zero of the members are outright criminals out to scam us, it simply is delusional to think that a crowd would be able to form enough consensus to fund and build a town and then be happy with the outcomes.
The biggest problem should be obvious if we use basic common sense, combined with an understanding of the way our financial system works. There is presently no way for a hundred thousand people to take out a loan, collectively. What would happen if a minority of those debtors were unable or unwilling to continue their mortgage payments? Would that mean that the entire majority would default and lose all the equity they repaid so far? And the suggestion of crowdfunding a single apartment or house is even more absurd. If 10,000 people chip in to buy one house, who gets to live in that house? They cannot all fit in there at one time! Are they supposed to take turns living in there, with each member getting one day every every years?
What the author describes in step five is a hodgepodge of deep-tech buzzwords that intend to distract you from how mundane and pointless the idea actually is. That is, he is describing some kind of metaverse: a videogame-inspired world where instead of being entertained by game mechanics and some kind of grand quest to save Princess Zelda, you get to experience what it would be like for the harassment and death threats that are typical on a platform like Twitter to be an immersive audiovisual experience. Who asked for this?
Why would any (rational) person want some random dude on the internet to be able to apply for a kind of digital passport that automatically grants that random dude permission to visit you virtually? What happened to the gold old days when somebody had to have your consent before they were able to contact you or invade your privacy?
Not only that, but have you ever tried wandering into the online discussions of crypto bros? Their conversations on Twitter an other platforms are mostly just people spamming the chat with the name of some random cryptocurrency that they are hoping will gain in value. The rest of the chat is people either (A) producing charts that are essentially fake evidence that a particular cryptocurrency is guaranteed to "go to the moon" in the immediate future, or (B) people debating whether or not they trust the fake evidence, or (C) outright criminal scammers, trying to convince you that they know the best, and most trustworthy person for you to hand all your money over to. So, basically, this author is basically advocating for us to do all of this in a virtual metaverse. Again: who asked for this?
When we finally examine steps six and seven, it becomes clearer what the intentions of the author are, especially when taken together with the full understanding that the decentralisation of crypto is fake. That is, these seven steps are clearly about amassing real world power, but that power was never intended to be wielded collectively. The author, and others like him are doing what rich and powerful people have always done throughout much of history: using people in order to gain clout for other elites like him who will remain at the top of the social hierarchy he is building. He will count your financial success as if it were part of his own set of accomplishments, and he will then present that on the world stage to gain power for himself and his cronies.
He is attempting to build some kind of online cult that is capable of standing up to governments, against the wishes of the elected officials and potentially against the wishes of voters. He is pretending to create decentralisation when in reality he is doing the exact opposite.
Web 3.0 is a one big, giant rug pull.
First, it is important to consider that there are two aspects to the web: (A) the technical details and (B) what we hope to actually build and/or accomplish with those technical components. In regards to what will ultimately be built or accomplished in Web 3.1: we at DBN cannot answer that for you. Otherwise that would not really be decentralisation, would it? True decentralisation means that you (yes YOU the reader) are an important decision maker in what comes next. We are not some kind of elite visionaries who decide the future. We will all figure it out. Sometimes we will collaborate amongst ourselves in small groups, or very large groups. Some of those collaborations will be exclusively internal to the DBN companies' staff, while at other times we will invite the broader community (including YOU) to collaborate with us, openly. And of course, we always encourage you to form your own teams to collaborate, even if your team is just you alone!
Having said all that, we at DBN definitely do have some great solutions to what we perceive to be substantial technological flaws of the current World Wide Web. Our solutions, however, are just the foundation of what will be built in Web 3.1. We do not have psychic powers and therefore, it is simply not possible for us to build perfect systems that will suit your requirements. As such, we are building our platforms to be very flexible and adaptable so that if we do get something wrong, you will always be able to edit your installation of our software to suit your needs. And if you feel that your changes would benefit others, we would encourage and support you to share or sell your modifications to others! And when you finally feel sure that our tools are working for you, then it might be time for you to get started on some kind of creative project. A film perhaps? A video game? A song? Or something else entirely?
Here are the technical challenges that we see as most important for us to address:
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