This post was inspired by a tweet by @acidyo regarding the distinction between Web 3.0 and real Web 3.0 ( #realweb3 ).
There has been a lot of talk about the use of the term Web 3.0 and its different meaning of the term to different people. I'm not going to be talking about the semantic web aspects of Web 3.0 or about some wild ideas about AI and metaverse stuff, none of that is really essential to the core concepts. I won't even talk about NFTs. What I do want to talk about in this post are the properties of public facing Web 3.0 technology in terms of four essential axis.
- B: The amount of blockchain technology in the stack
- Q: The resilience to quantum computing
- T: The technological decentralization of the technology
- E: The economic decentralization of the technology
Now for the metric. If each of the above aspects is a percentage between 0% and 100%, or more precisely between 0.0 and 1.0, then we can define a Web 3.0 metric for public facing web technology, lets call it the Public Facing Web-3 index or PFW3 index.
- W : Public Facing Web-3 index or PFW3 index
We define W as follows:
In this post I want to talk about Web 3.0 by looking at it through HIVE, arguable the most mature and most community driven Web 3.0 technology stack there currently is.
The amount of blockchain technology in the stack
Our main example, HIVE, has quite a bit of blockchain technology in its stack. Not just the delegated proof of stake layer one blockchain HIVE, but also side chains providing higher level features. The stack doesn't quite reach up into the front-ends. something we will look into later, or down into naming services, another thing we will look at later in this post.
So how does HIVE score on the B scale? For the sake of this argument I'dd say about 75%
- B : 75%
Resilience to quantum computing
Web 3.0 is especially vulnerable to future quantum computing related risk factors. So much so that no Web 3.0 stack should exist without at least thinking about a road-map in order to mitigate this vulnerability. Web 3.0 because of its very nature is highly likely to rely on heavy key reuse for signing. A practice that will become a risk factor once quantum computers mature enough to make reversing an ECDSA private key from a signature or public key.
I'm not going to make this too much of a promotion of my CoinZdense project, and its far from complete, but by making use of the Hive CoinZdense disaster Recovery tool, users can at least take a first step to securing their accounts. It's not much yet, but
it a start.
So how does HIVE score on the Q scale? For the sake of this argument I'dd say about 25%
- Q : 25%
Technological decentralization of the technology
For HIVE, this part is a real strong point. HIVE is really decentralized. For a great part by the D-POS setup of the platform, and for a part by redundancy of services like the web front-end. While front-ends themselves may not be decentralized as much, the fact that switching between them is effortless to a great extent compensates for that.
A point of concern regarding centralization are the different levels of decentralization for side chains. The lack of decentralization for part of the side-chain ecco system doesn't seem to be due to technical limitations though.
So how does HIVE score on the Q scale? For the sake of this argument I'dd say about 80%
- T : 80%
Economic decentralization of the technology
This I think is a major strong point not just in the Web 3.0 space but in the whole crypto space. Compared to blockchains that are centered around a founding company (like the HIVE predecessor STEEM was), the economic decentralization for HIVE is really strong.
It could still be made a lot better when we look at side chains, front ends and name resolution, but compared to the most of Web 3.0 and even the most of crypto, HIVE is doing pretty darn well.
So how does HIVE score on the E scale? For the sake of this argument I'dd say about 70%
- E : 70%
The PFW3 index for HIVE
So with these numbers:
- B : 75%
- Q : 25%
- T : 80%
- E : 70%
Lets look at the index formula again:
If we fill out the numbers, the resulting W is 66%
- W : 66%
Getting HIVE further up the PFW3 scale
So 66% isn't all that shabby, but we could do better. Before we look into that, I want to discuss two things for reference:
- An ancient and no longer active web cloaking service I once wrote
- NameCoin
The concepts from these two projects could improve the B and the T metrics.
The cduck project
In 2000 and 2001, after a web hosting provider where I had been hosting a service like this had gone bust, I wrote a distributed version of an URL cloaking service. The times were very different for web hosting. Simple static web hosting was free if you didn't mind long and ugly URLs, but want your own domain and you had to fork out money. DSL in those days had horrible upstream unsuitable for hosting any real size content at home, plus it was still rather unreliable as a technology.
So what did cduck do? It basically hosted a self made that's me DNS server and a single frame HTTP server that allowed users to cloak their long URL website under their own short URL.
The idea was that I get my own domain, you get your own domain, and two or three more friends also get their own domain, we configure our cduck nodes to cloak for all our domains and then configure the DNS servers for our own domains to point at all of our DSL IP addresses.
Now at the moment someone wanted to visit my website at www.capibara.com, the TTL value for DNS were set short enough that one of the DSL hosted cduck nodes would get queried. Each active node when queried would return its own external IP, so a node going down had hardly any impact on name resolution and the IP returned would almost always be one from an active node. Then a HTTP request would follow, and the node would simply return a small single frame HTML page pointing to some geocities URL.
That was it, really simple, zero cost cooperative decentralized web name resolution and cloaking.
NameCoin
For those who don't know it, NameCoin is an interesting crypto that among other name registration and resolution services basically implements an alternative to DNS on a blockchain. While not usually associated with Web 3.0, I personally believe that we should look at NameCoin that was created 12 years ago, both as the first Web3 chain in existence, and technology wise as the missing link in Web3 for many Web3 efforts.
The whole dot-bit could potentially form the name resolution backbone for the whole of Web 3.0 if cooperation between projects would make it possible.
NameCoin to DPOS bridge and on-chain cduck services?
Now lets dream. What if we could create bridges between NameCoin and DPOS? Hive could manage name resolution for core services for hive.bit through the same DPOS mechanisms used by witnesses to vote for other provenance issues. app.hive.bit could be exempt from direct witness provenance, and could be used to provide chain supported cduck like services for more decentralized web front-ends. Witnesses could run instances of web front-ends and no individual would need to own esential domain names.
Now let's imagine this would be implemented in the best way possible. what would happen to our metrics. Basically this influences the T and the B metrics.
We started out at:
B : 75%
Q : 25%
T : 80%
E : 70%
W : 66%
I'm suggesting that bridging to NameCoin, integrating DPOS based and Appcentric name resolution and integrating on-chain cduck services would get the B up to a whopping 95% while doing almost the same for the technological decentralization that would go up to 90%. The impact on E might not be that high, the removal of domain ownership[ from single economical owners still is an important step that would move E up to 75%.
- B : 95%
- Q : 25%
- T : 90%
- E : 75%
So lets recalculate:
- W: 76%
We would go roughly 10% up by implementing these name resolution related features into HIVE.
CoinZdense
If next to these measures we also address quantum resistance, something I'm working on in my coinZdense project, we could likely add another 10% or so to the mix. I'm not going to abuse this post by using it to promote my project. This post is not about that.
Economic decentralization
So how about the last achievable 10%..15%? That part would be the tricky part. You want substantial and essential services to be decentralized economically and technically, but at the same time you don't want to stifle entrepreneurship or pilots. HIVE isn't doing too shabby on economical decentralization, but the improvement room we must admit could be problematic.
Hey thanks for the tag, you got yourself a new follower!
it's a bit late here but post looks really interesting so will have to read the rest tomorrow!
Namecoin was a brilliant idea, and definitely deserves a revisit. Imagine URLs as a functional NFT which, once mined and owned, is YOURS.
https://reddit.com/r/Namecoin/comments/13ch1b6/web_20_vs_web_30_its_a_scale_not_a_binary_concept/
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I never thought we'd see that day, everything in sci-fi seems to be coming to pass. What next, Sliders?!?!
This post has been manually curated by the VYB curation project
Anyone reading this post now, also check out this post by @lordbutterfly, it has a similar purpose to my PFW3-index, but its more narrow AND deeper than my index proposal.
I feel strongly that a good and objective index should combine aspects from my PFW3-index with the index proposed by @lordbutterfly.
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