The first Internet creaked loudly through the modem and looked pretty ugly. On the other hand, it offered undreamt-of freedom in the nineties, it somehow belonged to no one and no one laid claim to it. After this Wild West, power shifted towards corporations in the new millennium in “Web 2.0” – the age of social networks. They centralized the network, driven by mountains of venture capital that the big players used to buy away even the most idealistic programmers and the best start-up ideas. Google, Facebook, Instagram developed surveillance systems that the world has not yet seen. They piled up data silos about the lives of the users.
Now the Internet is facing its third incarnation, and with that everything should be radically different again. At least that is what the advocates of the Web3 believe. The new buzzword is usually written in lower case like an ironic comment on Twitter. The idea: the blockchain technology, on which the crypto currency Bitcoin is already based, should pervade the entire Internet and wrest power from corporations and professional investors. “Decentralization” is the magic word: The goal is an Internet with many small, self-administered units in which everyone can hold shares – tokens. Everyone should be able to buy their shares in the future, with ownership rights that are digitally engraved on the blockchain, i.e. a decentralized, unchangeable directory. What smells like centralization is bad here: tech companies, authorities, banks.
How the idea of Web3 is giving wings to an entire scene can be seen at the digital conference 1e9 in the Deutsches Museum, which last week dedicated a day to the topic. There is a good-humored revolutionary mood on the podium. Alexander Lange, formerly at Google and now a crypto investor, raves about open, transparent systems in which everyone holds property rights instead of just the corporations that say what the web should look like. On the screen behind him, Disneyland shines as a negative example of a closed world designed by a corporation. Next to it Manhattan’s street canyons, hardly planned, but grown and exciting: The new web should be like Manhattan.
The wonderful world of the metaverse
Yingzi Yuan, who is responsible for new technologies at the game studio Ubisoft, says: “We can bring more people from Web 2.0 to Web3 and together build the wonderful world of the metaverse.” Metaversum is the catchphrase under which Facebook, Microsoft and the gaming industry imagine a kind of omnipresent virtual world in which you can immerse yourself with virtual reality glasses and in which digital objects can be bought like in a huge, virtual shopping center. Yuan and Lange dream of avatars, virtual images of their owners on the Internet. Only these can have their virtual image with the correct passcode. The network should no longer consist of fake people and copies of copies. Identity and ownership should be able to be proven in the real world, as with an entry at the office.
Christoph Jentzsch explains how that should actually work. He did his doctorate in theoretical physics before joining the team that constructed Ethereum – the blockchain on which the Web3 is primarily supposed to run. Jentzsch says: “If you drive a car at Uber and have a 5-star rating and then go to competitor Lyft, you start over there again. In Web3 I can take that with me. In Web 2, there were only data silos. ” To do this, however, serious alternatives to Uber based on blockchain would first have to be developed. The user interfaces are still notoriously impractical for laypeople. It was similar with the conference participant who presented her online game, a kind of blockchain scavenger hunt with digital objects. She had to admit that she relies on Twitter for new players – one of those central structures that should actually be superfluous in Web3.
Billions of dollars are flowing into crypto projects
Despite all the skepticism among IT professionals, the subculture of crypto preachers hit the mainstream this year. Venture capitalists are pumping billions of dollars into crypto firms that promise the Web3. Adidas has just announced that it is cooperating with Coinbase, the large online exchange for cryptocurrencies. Last week, a piece of virtual land was sold for $ 2.4 million. Exactly: land that only exists on the Internet. Fashion brands should display their clothes there as if they were on a virtual catwalk. As with many crypto business models, it remains unclear what distinguishes this from a normal website with digital model figures.
It looks like a satire on the real estate boom, but the concept of digital investment objects becomes more understandable when older people also realize: More than a generation of young people grew up with the concept of digital objects. In many computer games it is normal to buy virtual clothes or weapons, especially in the world success “Fortnite”. However, those who object that the concept of “ownership” doesn’t make much sense online, because you can simply right-click to copy any picture, will be criticized in the scene as having a “right-click mentality” – a poetic climax of this whole buzzword orgy .
It is striking how political and financial motives merge. Alexander Lange speaks of the “democratization of access to assets”: Everyone, not just professional investors with excellent relationships, should be able to buy shares in practically everything within seconds. From the start-up whose app idea he wants to support to the NFT – those ownership rights to digital works of art that were sold for millions this year. It’s Telekom’s “people’s shares” promise on steroids – and of course on the blockchain.
The blockchain problem
Blockchain is also one of the basic problems of Web3. Among other things, the hacker association Chaos Computer Club argues: The blockchain is a suitable solution for creating digital money like Bitcoin. But apart from that, there are simply no problems that can be solved better with blockchain than without. Stephen Diehl goes even further. The British programmer and blogger argues that crypto assets are just as worthless as those “title deeds” for individual stars in space that clever entrepreneurs sold in the nineties.
Several conference participants also admit that scams are a problem in the crypto system. The digital gold rush attracts rip-offs who collect money and then disappear. After all, many “tokens” are practically unregulated securities. Christoph Jentzsch says: “You can’t technically do anything about it. A lot of NFT projects are just scams. There is no central technical institution that could regulate that. But the freedom to be able to pull up new things so quickly is what it is.” value.” There is no protection for small investors. That is the libertarian spirit behind “crypto”: no state, no institutions – and no help if it goes wrong. In talks on the fringes of the conference, the European Central Bank is sharply criticized and a financial crash is predicted.
After all, the creator of the world computer looks a bit ashamed. Vitalik Buterin is attending the conference, he is wearing a black T-shirt that matches the color of his dark circles. This is what people look like who enjoy programming all night long. He distances himself from the scams. “This get-rich-quick mentality that came up there” does not fit in with his Ethereum project. The skinny man is a kind of messianic figure in the crypto world. He is considered a computer genius and at the age of 19 developed the Bitcoin idea further, building the decentralized Ethereum system with Jentzsch and others. Ethereum’s nickname: World computer – since all possible applications can be programmed with it, while Bitcoin only functions as digital money – or speculative object.
Blockchain: “The most transparent thing there is”
Buterin quickly ticks off the scammers, he speaks as quickly as he thinks, and that is very quick. He dreams of “crypto-cities” in which citizens virtually co-rule over their shares on the blockchain. The first “city tokens” are already available in Miami, where the city raised millions of dollars with their sale.
With the abandonment of regulation and central institutions, there is also a democratization of the possibilities of fraud. Nevertheless, Alexander Lange sticks: The blockchain is the most transparent thing there is, a “quantum leap from the insecure and heavily corrupted financial infrastructures of the present. This is proven by money laundering cases that have systems, such as at HSBC or Deutsche Bank.” Perhaps that explains the attraction that the Web3 exerts on many people: the system of banks and tech corporations that the revolutionaries attack is sometimes simply impossible to defend.