In the journey to developing Web3, we must understand what is motivating decentralization. We are attempting to reinvent the Web to address deficiencies. These deficiencies put individuals in jeopardy of censorship, cancellation, and political persecution. They are vulnerable at the hands of Big Tech platforms, state actors, and adversarial groups intent on harm. Historical ideals to preserve the “free and open Internet” have been abandoned. If a “free and open Internet” is to be preserved, it cannot rely on the honor and voluntary cooperation of humans. Technologies must become permissionless, trustless, and unassailable, so that dishonorable and uncooperative humans can coexist.
- Protect a user’s right to free speech by having the user take custody of their own data. Ensure that the user’s data cannot be made inaccessible.
- Protect a user’s right to free association. Ensure that the data in the user’s custody can be published to whatever audience the owner wishes to reach.
- Protect an audience’s right to free association. Ensure access to data published by others. Ensure that applications can compose that data for the intended use, including for social collaboration.
- Protect a user’s access to platform capabilities for providing the application services that process that data.
- Protect a user’s ability to transact business with others without being subject to third party intermediaries cancelling them.
- Protect a user’s privacy. Ensure the user can share their data only with others who are granted authorization. In some circumstances, a user may want to remain anonymous, so that their real-world identity cannot be exposed for doxxing. Hostile detractors often try to cancel people by targeting their business, sources of income, reputation, relationships, sensitive information, even their personal safety.
Let’s keep these requirements in mind as we explore technologies that can help realize Web. Restore the ideal of a free and open Internet in the face of large factions of society who are hostile to (or wobbly on) freedom and openness.
I focused on the needs of end users, which amounts to the protection of rights. However, the preservation of a free and open Internet in the face of hostility to freedom and openness may require something more than humans can be entrusted to provide. There is a property called sovereignty that is novel to software. Sovereignty is manifest in Bitcoin. That is, the rules encoded in the protocol control the behavior of Bitcoin, but nothing outside the software has any power to alter those rules without becoming something other than Bitcoin. Neither coders, miners, nodes, or any external authority have any practical power to alter the rules or interfere with the operation of Bitcoin. This quality is unique to Bitcoin in the scope of digital money. Sovereignty is a quality that would be desirable to have in other technologies to strengthen Web3.