Thread by @livecryptoo

RChain: 3 Lessons Web 3.0 Can’t Afford to Ignore

There’s a tendency in the tech world to toss out old tech and go all-in on a new replacement.

“Oh, don’t use that. That’s the old thing! Use the new thing instead.”

This advice is best suited to those who adapt quickly to technological change—in other words: a small percentage of humanity.

Jumping quickly to ‘the new thing’ may come with harmful second or third-order consequences for most people; this is especially true for energy-hungry technologies like cryptocurrencies that adversely affect our planet.

These technologies haven’t even reached a global scale yet, so humankind may only be seeing the beginning of what’s to come.

Despite the potential or actual costs of adoption, today’s technology innovators are racing toward revolutionary new ideas, like decentralization

scalable architectures, self-sovereign data, NFTs, and blockchains.

#RChain wholeheartedly and enthusiastically rejoices at the global excitement for these technological changes, and they are core to what Rchain is building.

But new tech needs to make life better for its users, especially when considering billions of users

One particular blind spot for innovators appears to be Web 3.0, the next evolution of the world wide web.

There are three lessons the blockchain hasn’t yet learned from Web 2.0 but should. #Web3 won’t succeed without:

Advanced addressability.

Decentralized advertising.

The most powerful search mechanisms the world has ever seen.

Let’s look at how these solutions work today and how they can evolve for the meaningful adoption of #Web3 by the global market.

Web 3.0 Needs to Improve Upon Web 2.0

If Web 3.0 is to be an advancement over Web 2.0, people should be able to quickly identify meaningful improvements to the key 2.0 features that made it such a powerful combination of technologies

Web 1.0 brought the world wide web and essential search functions.

Web 2.0 was built on Web 1.0 and brought interactivity (e.g. social media and online communities), rich media experiences (e.g. streaming video and audio), and advanced search (e.g. in-media content and source code).

Quite significantly, Web 2.0 is backed by vast amounts of advertising revenue. Experts predict that the global advertising market will reach nearly $800B by 2026.

Yet, where are the advertising solutions for Web 3.0? Who is building the next ad networks?

And how to ensure they’re not created by the same people who made the surveillance ad networks today?

It is imperative to continue offering today’s impressive ad tech like real-time bidding auctions and behavioural targeting while giving users the choice to share and sell their data to advertisers

Though Rchain is firmly against many of the tactics used by Web 2.0 ad networks, the need and value of ad tech on the web are undeniable. A lot of questions pop up in mind:

Where is Web 3.0 heading?

Upon what will it be built?

How is it advancing what people already have that makes the web work?

What will interactivity, rich media experiences, and advanced search look like on Web 3.0?

It seems that not enough work is currently done to satisfy these questions, as, at the moment, Rchain cannot find meaningful answers to these questions.

Rchain believes Web 3.0 proponents and innovators are throwing the Web 2.0 baby out with the bathwater.

They are not advancing the fundamentals of the web itself that led to its adoption. They’ve completely forgotten how important the features of Web 2.0 are.

Web 3.0 Needs to Enable A Global Market

One of the most potent notions of the web today is the unified global market.

Thanks to search engines like Google, Duck Duck Go, and Bing, anyone could quickly and easily look for what they wanted. Web 2.0 allowed any content to become searchable, and the results reflected that.

Today’s search engine results include content, references, agents, people, etc.

Assets on the web became accessible to anyone in an instant. That enabled a global market.

The storage mechanisms for today’s web are simple: centralized file systems with clear bounded ownership.

Anyone can store data on AWS S3, Google Drive, or even their private server hosted in a data centre or from their own home.

Web 2.0 made storage reasonably ubiquitous.

The fully-realized Web 3.0 storage mechanism is the blockchain.

Digital assets stored on a chain, or managed through a chain, become opaque to search engines. If there’s no ability to tag or otherwise look through data collected through the chain, there’s no way to search for it.

If data is on IPFS, how can Google search the data’s contents? That’s a real challenge.

It is necessary to take a step forward going into Web 3.0 instead of regressing backwards.

There is no global market without searchable, accessible data.

The need is for much more than currency-enabling blockchains that keep primitive records of transactions.

Web 3.0 won’t be successful if it cannot offer or perpetuate a unified global market.

1. Web 3.0 Needs URLs, Not Addresses

The unified global market needs a way to locate data on the web. Blockchain-based web storage needs a usable URL system, as there always has been.

But how should on-chain addressing work?

Almost nobody is addressing this.

Very few blockchains can support file storage, and almost none of them support files of any substantial size.

Web 3.0’s storage mechanism can’t be a parallel system that supports (or smells like) a blockchain

. The web needs to live on the blockchain itself. And for that to work, it requires addressability.

Chain files need to be found and retrieved. The location of resources needs to be a compositional structure

like the web’s current URI composition (URN + URL).

t’s how browsers work, and it’s a great model for the future. But on-chain URI composition will need some re-thinking.

The #Dappy browser is tackling blockchain addressing while also highlighting and fixing the limitations of #DNS as it works today.

Dappy’s website states: Dappy replaces the traditional DNS layer with a naming system executed on a blockchain platform.

The lookups (when your client accesses the website) are resolved by a network of independent companies, a network collectively certifying the domain names and encryption certificates.

Please look at their name system documentation to understand how it works.

Though projects like Solid and IPFS are doing commendable work on the storage and sovereignty aspects of Web 3.0 data

users need to be able to locate and access data stored on the chain.

Today’s URI composition can work, but it requires advances to function on a #blockchain.

2. Web 3.0 Needs Digital Advertising at Scale

The world’s most popular Web 2.0 apps are free to use.