(2014-04-23) Wood Less Techy What Is Web30

Gavin Wood: Less-techy: What is Web 3.0? Organisations and governments routinely attempt to stretch and overstep their authority. Thus we realise that entrusting our information to organisations in general is a fundamentally broken model.

Web 3.0, or as might be termed the "post-Snowden" web, is a reimagination of the sorts of things that we already use the Web for, but with a fundamentally different model for the interactions between parties. Information that we assume to be public, we publish. Information that we assume to be agreed, we place on a consensus-ledger. Information that we assume to be private, we keep secret and never reveal.

There are four components to the post-Snowden Web: static content publication, dynamic messages, trustless transactions and an integrated user-interface.

The first, we already have much of: a decentralised, encrypted information publication system. Two systems that already implementation much of what is necessary exist: Freenet and BitTorrent.

The second portion of Web 3.0 is a messaging and publication system for transient information

The third portion of Web 3.0 is the consensus engine. A consensus engine is a means of agreeing some rules of interaction... Consensus engines will be used for all trustful publication and alteration of information. This will happen through a completely generalised global transaction processing system the first workable example of which is the Ethereum project.

The fourth and final component to the Web 3.0 experience is the technology that brings this all together; the 'browser' and user interface. Funnily enough, this will look fairly similar to the browser interface we already know and love.