One Million Devs on Ethereum: The Architecture of Web3 and How We Get There

Joseph Lubin––Devcon V, Osaka, Japan––October 10, 2019

Hi, everyone. I want to speak today about what I think will be the broad architecture of the decentralized World Wide Web and how we will get there. To give away the punchline: the critical element is you.

Today’s Web2 world consists of siloed walled gardens. There really isn’t much of an open web anymore. Google’s front end serves and monetizes everyone else’s content. Facebook, Twitter, and a bunch of other gardens have trapped us all behind their walls.

It didn’t start that way. The Internet started with the promise of a certain style of decentralization. It was about building robust network architectures such that damage to one part of the network would not render other parts unusable. On packet-switched networks, as opposed to circuit-switched networks, messages could be more easily dynamically routed around the damage.

The socially aware technologists soon framed this characteristic of decentralization in the context of political control. John Gilmore, an early famous cypherpunk, stated that “The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.”

The Internet started with the promise of a certain style of decentralization.

These early cypherpunks were the godparents of all of us here today.

On today’s Web 2.0, we give away our personal information and our power in order to exist on the Internet. For most cybercitizens, it would be debilitating to be deprived of Gmail, Google search, Google docs, Twitter, Amazon’s services, Apple’s ecosystem, and the various Facebook properties.

The Web is broken — or incomplete — because it has no native constructs for identity or money.

Without a native construct for money, the web turned to advertising as its core business model.

Without a native construct for secure and private identity, the web grew exploitative before we could recognize that an advertising technology cancer was growing and killing the patient.

Read the entire speech at ConsenSys.net/blog