web5 is likely to be until we part

Having seen a repeated article-opinion-translation to the original post of the Signal founder “web3 will not: we go home” https://habr.com/en/post/673836/, I could not resist the temptation to give an extended op-ed refutation. And it didn’t fit in the commentary.

My opinion is that Moxie drew only emotional conclusions, although he named the reason correctly: “Everything rests on the reluctance of people to keep their servers. Because keeping servers is hard, and we want to push one button. “ and if you dig more fundamentally, then everything can appear in more rational abstractions.

Rational analysis down to the levels of abstraction “IMHO” is as follows:

• The problem is NOT in the servers, but in the difficulties of remote control over them – who objectively controls them, who has the keys to the server / apartment. So each of us with a server or two in our pocket walks every day – and nothing. But with remote servers, everything is just a little more complicated.

• The problem is that absolutely the entire web2.0 Internet was built on one fundamental premise:

people DO NOT know how and will NEVER be able / will not store private keys (passwords, any entropy) on their own, and therefore all systems have a centralized design to the limit, so that “if anything” rolls back. Centralization has its secondary benefits, on which empires are built by people who understand the “barriers”, but everything started with the keys earlier (web1→web2.0). As a result, this led to the fact that you cannot have your root-of-trust key from really important data, period, by design. Or rather, you can – but go and build the entire system and servers yourself, the rest do not need it (i.e. they are not ready to pay for it). However, evolution is inexorable, and any monopoly growth comes to the need to become distributed – to increase its level of complexity, for the sake of efficiency and further growth. However, user authentication (storing his private keys and opening a barrier to his data) is such an important part of keeping the user from crawling into another empire that google and apple have been competing for years to profit from creating open standards, but eliminate the risks of the possibility of user leakage – and all this pandemonium is completely around the generation and storage of private keys primarily. That’s why Apple and Google have their own phones (and their homemade security chip inside!). That is why Microsoft blew its phone – leaned into decentralized

identity – an open standard push where the user MAY BUT NOT SHOULD store their private keys.

In general, those who are in the subject know very well that NFT is a rather poor implementation of the concept of verifiable credentials from a decentralized identity, and it is no coincidence that Vitalik now sang about this decentralized identity again and about the problem of decentralized reputation (the second existential problem after the keys), but naturally again having come up with own narrative, how else to intercept the agenda. Fundamentally, bitcoin is also just a system of decentralized identity + protocol (“standard”) of revaluation of the value of energy produced on the planet every ~ 10 minutes.

• So the rational conclusion from all this is simple:

web3 concept (in the scientific world known as verifiable execution, for example, and blockchain is not required for it) – will inevitably come, because:

a) distribution (including the responsibility of keys to users) one way or another is increasingly needed for further cost-effective scaling of information systems serving the world of people,

b) all this will happen one way or another due to the progress of any homomorphic encryption and other interesting technologies. Progress that is in part faster is also due to the efforts of Vitaliks and Tol to raise attention and money for both the opportunities and the Do Kwon epic fails. Including the progress of technologies / products that make risks and managing their keys for users no more difficult than passwords today (hah!), Or even easier (tbc).