What I expect from Web 3.0

Web 3.0 has been of much interest in the popular media and with good reason. With concepts such as metaverse and gaming coming into the fold, Web 3.0 might be the next revolution of our times. But is that all Web 3 can do? I’m going to go on my thought train here and think out loud what I expect from Web 3.0 when it’s ready.

Though there are many fields which would be impacted by web 3.0, there are some fields which will be totally revamed due to the nature of web 3. Things such as ownerlessness and openness will play a huge role in bridging the bleeding shortcomings of current day technology. Think of a platform which allows a person from rural parts (could be from lack of resources or government intervensions) of the world can get the same benefits as a person from highly developed city. Anyone will be able to raise their voice without being fearful for the outcome. (this has both good and bad results)

Ownerless

Any network which aspire to be the one and only network of the world will have to be ownerless. Being ownerless will not be exactly an easy task. Because with being ownerless comes a plethoura of new issues biggest of which is how to manage and maintain the network. But before that let’s take a look at what are the pros and cons of having an ownerless network.

PRO : No one will be able to control / govern the decisions of the network.

Since there will be no single or multiple owners to the network, no one will be able to deny another from achieving what they want to achieve within the constraints of our network. Be it silencing someone to stop their voice or cancelling someone to cause them to lose their income, with the other features described in this article, I would hope that no one will be able to control another’s actions in the network.

Governments won’t be able to track the users who want to speak against them. This is because the governments or other organizations won’t be able to remove the content they don’t like because the content is owned by the original user. Also the content will be published anonymously by the users so the government won’t be able to silence them offline.

CON : No one will be able to control / govern the decisions of the network.

Although no control seems prefferred, there are some content which would be such harmful to the society that we will have to remove those contents and track down anyone who is involved. Illegal and immoral activities like harmful substances, child porn, hitmen rings or human auctions will be able to easily thrive in such an uncontrolled environment. So although I don’t know whether this is possible or not, I would like to see a network which will truly be beneficial for the human progress than just being the internet 2.0 and dark web.

Easily Accessible / Open

Web 3 should be accessible to anyone as long as they can connect to the internet. This means that there shouldn’t be an entry fee when someone trying to access the network for the first time. And should be easy to access the network circumventing any goverment / corporation managed inhibitions. Also it would be a great opportunity to let the low income communities to get an income from their activities in the network and resources they can contribute to the scale the network. Such an opportunity will be helpful to reduce the disparities of income between different parts of the world.

High Performance

Since the network is supposed to be hosting many internal activities, everything about the network should have high performance. Be it the number of messages sent or the monetary transactions processed, it should be a scalable and usable design. Some of the use cases such as gaming and realtime communication will be requiring higher than average resources to operate and although some of these usages might be avoided from out of the network solutions, if it’s going to be a Web3 rather than another decentralized network, it will have to support these high performance requirements.

Low latency messaging

Low latency is a must for any kind of realtime communication. From multimedia conferencing to multiplayer gaming, most of the realtime apps depend on a low latency network layer. A network without such functionality would be missing key user requirements as the most of the future of the society will be moving towards a connected-via-internet kind of approach be it gaming, social media or remote working jobs.

Anonymity / Optional Anonymity

Another thing I would like to see in “the” Web 3.0 would be the support to be anonymous in your dealings within the network. Web 3.0 is supposed to connect all the people without any discrimination from their race or region. And since there are many legal or illegal prosecutions around the world for many of the values Web 3.0 represents, it would be a great feature for a user to be anonymous in the network. Every user can chose to show their real identity to the network or use an untraceable alias.

High Latency support / Large Scale Networks

If we are thinking about not-so-near future, we might want to have our network reaching to far reaches of the planet as well as other planets and starships (Think SpaceX on Mars). if the network can support that kind of environment where a transaction from one end to the other will be taking hours to reach, I think we may be having a real winner in terms of longivity. If the Web 3.0 needs to be replaced with Web 4.0 just as the next human endeavour is here, people won’t be that quick to place their trust on the network.

Self Sustainence

Network should sustain itself without any external parties having to intefer with its inner workings. For this purpose the functionalities of the network, its nodes and users should have a self sustaining economy model. This model should make sure that the network users will benefit with the scalability and stability of the network. In such a network, where everyone only have to lose from attacking the network, most of the functionality will be fruitfull ones and not random network attacks to overtake the network or its functionalities. Also that will ensure the trust of the network on the users.

Developer Friendly

No matter how good a network is, it wouldn’t matter if no one is going to build anything on top of that. Therefore the network should have the necessary APIs and SDKs which would allow developers to easily create apps on the network securely and robustly.

User Experience

Last but not the least, the experience a user would get from using the network and it’s apps should be a welcoming one. Although the first users of such a network will be mostly tech savvy, to reach the masses, we need to ensure that anyone can easily use the applications on the network and they will come back to the network in the future. For this and for dev friendlyness, there should be a strong community support both in and out of the network. To sustain these communites, the network and the application developers have to consider what compensation will be given to those communities.

Summary

So those are the things I would love to see in a planet wide (perhaps larger than planet scale) network. Such a network will be an invention which could change the path of humanity just like the fire or the wheel did. Achieving everything I have mentioned might be difficult. Let’s wait and see what the future would present us.

Originally published at https://voidcentury.com on February 26, 2022.