When we all started out on the Internet, companies ran their own servers — email servers, web servers for personal or corporate websites etc. We pulled data from other people’s servers, and they pulled data from ours. Everything was distributed. This was actually the point, by design — ARPANET, the forerunner to the Internet, was architected in such a way that if a chunk of the network was taken down, the rest of the network would stay up. Your requests for information would route around whatever problem had occurred. This was effectively ‘web1’.
Over time, the Internet has become more centralised around a number of ‘big tech’ companies for a variety of reasons:
- Servers can now be ‘spun up’ at the point of need and financed as operational expense using Amazon Web Services, Azure, Google Cloud etc. instead of costly capital investment. Lots of companies use a small number of these platforms.
- Services like Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace allow companies to provide email, file sharing etc. and pay for the vendors to take care of the servers that run them instead of employing people to do it in-house.
- People have coalesced around platforms where other people are instead of communicating point-to-point. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, WhatsApp and Snapchat are good examples.
- Although the Internet as a whole is resilient to failure, the architecture of ‘web1’ meant that your web or email servers could catastrophically go offline. Individual servers are vulnerable to problems such as ‘distributed denial of service’ (DDoS) attacks, where they are deliberately hit with more requests than they can handle and become unable to serve legitimate visitors. This could also happen if there is a ‘real’ spike in demand, e.g. if the content you are hosting or service you are running suddenly becomes extremely popular. People have mitigated this by using services from ‘content delivery networks’ (CDNs) such as Cloudflare and Fastly which, amongst other services, ‘cache’ copies of the content all over the world on their own network of servers, close to where the requestors are.
This is ‘web2’. Companies no longer need to buy, manage, administer and patch their own servers as they can rent them, or the applications that run on them, from specialist firms. But this creates a different set of issues. New entrants to these web2 service markets struggle to get a foothold, and the over-reliance on a small number of big players creates vulnerabilities for the system as a whole. For example, when Fastly had an outage in 2021, it took many its customers offline. Companies like Fastly reduce your risk on a day-to-day basis but increase the overall risk of the system by being a point of concentration. They are a big single point of failure.
‘Blockchain’ has been a buzzword for a long time now. The idea of blockchains is attractive: they are decentralised, with no company or state owning them. A blockchain of ledger entries exists across a network of computers, with work being done by — and between — those computers to agree on the canonical version through consensus. In other words, those computers talk to each other to come to agreement on what the blockchain ledger looks like, and nobody has ownership or control. Everyone has also heard of cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin. The Bitcoin blockchain is a distributed ledger of ownership of the currency. The big buzz at the moment is around NFTs, each of which is effectively a digital ledger entry on a blockchain that records someone is the ‘owner’ of something.
A blockchain doesn’t live on your mobile device or in your web browser, it lives on servers. In order to write a new entry onto a blockchain, you need to start by sending a request to one of these servers. This is actually a limitation. From Marlinspike’s blog post:
“When people talk about blockchains, they talk about distributed trust, leaderless consensus, and all the mechanics of how that works, but often gloss over the reality that clients ultimately can’t participate in those mechanics. All the network diagrams are of servers, the trust model is between servers, everything is about servers. Blockchains are designed to be a network of peers, but not designed such that it’s really possible for your mobile device or your browser to be one of those peers.”
A number of platforms have sprung up that provide the ability to write to popular blockchains. People would rather use these platforms than create and run something themselves, for many of the reasons that the ‘web2’ platforms came to be. People do not want to run their own servers. This brings its own problems in that in order to add a ledger entry to a blockchain, you now have an additional ‘hop’ to go through. The quality and architecture of these platforms used to access a blockchain really matters.
At the moment, calls and responses to these platforms are not particularly complex; there is little verification that what you get back in response to a request to retrieve data is actually what is really stored on the blockchain. These access platforms also get visibility of all of the calls that are made via their services. If you’re writing something to the blockchain, via a platform, they’ll know who you are and what you wrote because they helped you to do it.
“So much work, energy, and time has gone into creating a trustless distributed consensus mechanism, but virtually all clients that wish to access it do so by simply trusting the outputs from these two companies without any further verification. It also doesn’t seem like the best privacy situation.”
The author illustrates the point with an example of an NFT that he created which looks different depending on where you take a look at it from. He can do this because the blockchain doesn’t actually contain the data that defines the NFT itself, just a link that points to where the NFT is. So, as he owns the location of the NFT image, he can serve up different content depending on who or what is asking to see it. At some point, OpenSea, one of the popular NFT marketplaces, decided to remove his NFT from their catalogue. It was still on the blockchain, but invisible to anyone using OpenSea. This is interesting as it shows how much control a ‘web2’ platform has over the ‘web3’ blockchain.
If you have to go through one of these ‘web2’ platforms to interact with a blockchain, therefore losing some of the distributed benefits, why do the platforms bother with the blockchain at all? Writing new entries to a blockchain such as Etherium is very expensive. So why not have a marketplace for NFTs where ownership is simply written into a database owned by a company like OpenSea? The author’s conclusion is that it is because there is a blockchain gold rush, for now at least. Without the buzzword and everyone piling in, a platform like OpenSea would never take off.
Postlight recently published a podcast episode with Michael Sippey called “On web3, Again” which is well worth a listen. The whole episode is great, but there are some pointers from about 35m25s in on how to start to experiment with all of this yourself, if you have the disposable income to do it.
Thanks Andrew! Good summary of the article. It’s really clarified my understanding of the article too.
Fundamentally, web3 is asking us to turn our backs on the commodification of the internet. It’s like asking us to build our own generators to supply electricity to our houses or dig our own weeks instead of turning on a tap. It makes it really obvious that web3 really doesn’t have a future outside of geeks and speculators.