Gavin Wood: I think the model for Web 2.0 is the same as the model for pre-internet society. If you go back 500 years, people basically just stuck to their villages and small towns. And they were dealing with people they knew. And more broadly, they rely on the fabric of society, to make sure that expectations are credible, likely to actually happen: These apples don’t rot, or these horseshoes don’t break after three weeks .
And that works well, because moving between towns is difficult, time-consuming, and costly. So you have a pretty high level of credibility that someone will cling to and they don’t want to be exiled.
But when society moved to something larger, and we had cities, countries, and international organizations, we switched to brand reputation thing. We have created these powerful yet regulated bodies and regulators, in principle, ensure that our expectations are met. There are a number of statutory requirements that you must meet in order to operate in a particular industry.
This is not a great solution, for a few reasons. One of them is, it is difficult to adjust to new industries. The government slows down, it takes a while to catch up. Another thing is that regulators are not perfect. And especially when they work closely with the industry, there is sometimes a bit of a whirlwind relationship between the industry and the regulator.
One is simply that the governing body has very limited firepower. That’s the amount of money the government invests in it. And so necessarily, regulation will be patchwork. They will be able to regulate the biggest offenders but they cannot keep a really strong influence all the time. And of course, regulatory bodies and laws vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. If you go somewhere in the European Union, then Activity X is fine; if you go somewhere else, then it’s not good. And as we become a very international society, this means really that your expectations are still unmet.
So we need to get over this. But unfortunately, a lot of Web 2.0 still exists in this very centralized model.
Are we really talking about the failure of technology? Or are we talking about a failure of governance and regulation and competition policy? It sounds like you’re saying: Yes, it’s a failure of regulation, but the answer is not that regulation is better; There needs to be a new layer of technology, because regulatory errors are inevitable. Am I describing your point of view correctly?
Yeah absolutely. Model is broken.
So let’s talk about what should replace it. We’ve talked about why Web 2.0 isn’t working. What is your handy elevator definition of Web3?
“Less trust, more truth.”
What does “less trust” mean?
I have a special meaning of trust that is trust. It is the belief that something will happen, that the world will work a certain way, without any actual proof or logical reasoning as to why it will do so. So we want less of that, and we want more of the truth – which I really mean is a bigger reason to believe that our expectations will be met.
