Why it’s too early to get excited about Web3
Tim O'Reilly,
O'Reilly,
Mar 24, 2022
According to Tim O'Reilly, " "Web3" as we think of it today was introduced in 2014 by Gavin Wood, one of the cocreators of Ethereum. Wood's compact definition of Web3, as he put it in a recent Wired interview, is simple: 'Less trust, more truth.'" Well, that's one way to put it. As O'Reilly explains, "Wood's point is that the blockchain replaces trust in the good intentions of others with transparency and irrevocability built into the technology." I'm in agreement with that as a basic statement of intention; after all, if we have to depend on the good intentions of others to progress, then we won't progress. But there's more to web3 than that; there's the whole question of decentralization, and as O'Reilly remarks, "Blockchain developers believe that this time they've found a structural answer to recentralization, but I tend to doubt it... the rapid consolidation of bitcoin mining into a small number of hands by way of lower energy costs for computation indicates one kind of recentralization. There will be others."
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