Over at Recode, the appropriately named Peter Kafka tries to explain Web3 today. This is an impossible task since no one agrees about what Web3 is, and I found myself laughing throughout the entire piece. This isn't Kafka's fault. In fact, I was only laughing because he did a good job of representing all sides of the Web3 boondoggle. Here's how he begins:
Let’s start here: At its core, Web3 is a rebranding of crypto and blockchain, the technology based around a worldwide network of computers that talk to each other and validate and record transactions without human intervention or centralized oversight.
God knows, crypto and blockchain could use a rebranding, but inventing a brand new internet that's dependent on a slow, user-unfriendly, and highly tech-heavy pair of technologies is probably not the way to do it.
Then there's a bit that I won't excerpt—scroll down to "But Web3’s most fervent evangelists" if you want to read it—which describes the almost pathetic reason behind this yearning for a new web: all the good real estate on the current web has already been taken by the likes of Facebook, Google, Hulu, the New York Times, and so forth. So please, can't we just start over?
But my favorite part is Kafka's description of DAOs—decentralized autonomous organizations—which have produced some epic objects of Twitter snark over the past few months:
But more rational people who talk up DAOs think they are an excellent way to quickly and fairly spin up groups of people to work together, whether it’s a full-fledged company or a one-off project. You can, say, efficiently hand out equity stakes in a project to financial investors, strategic partners, and people who are actually working on it — all stuff that traditionally takes lots of lawyers and paperwork and time, and gets even more complicated if those participants live in different states or countries.
....I’ve talked to very sober people who tell me DAOs will be transformative for, say, startups that want to quickly get off the ground: One investor tells me the difference in speed is like the difference between email and the kind that arrives in an envelope.
“Right from the beginning of any project, you can now have an instrument of sharing the value of that project with more stakeholders,” says Jonathan Glick, an entrepreneur and investor who’s become intrigued by Web3 in general and DAOs in particular. “It is a quantum leap improvement in the way to organize people around projects.”
This is patently ridiculous. You can already spin up a group of people to work together in very little time using the ordinary old internet—but only if you're willing to dispense with all those tedious contracts and things that take "lawyers and paperwork and time." That might be all right if you're starting up a lemonade stand with your sister, but certainly not for anything more complicated. And I'd advise against this lackadaisical approach even for the lemonade stand no matter how much you trust your sister.
There's a techno-utopian belief in some quarters that blockchains can encode self-executing contract provisions, many of which are described as "interesting." But nothing is self executing and even the most interesting provision can be written down in English too. More to the point, a contract provision is meaningless unless there's someone to interpret and enforce it. That's where the lawyers, courts, and police forces come in. And once they're involved, what does blockchain buy you?
I remember back in the heady days of the 1990s arguing with evangelists about the web. The evangelists were certain that the web would put traditional marketing out of business because traditional marketers were just too slow and clumsy to understand the ethos of digital-native web users who disdained the obvious lies and hype of old-school product peddlers. Their naivete was almost charming. Big corporations pay a lot of money to employ the best marketing minds on the planet. And you think these guys will never figure out the web? I just laughed. Not only will they figure it out, they'll own it within a few years. And they did.
The same is true for all this new twaddle. We already have well-known ways of recording transactions that are faster, more efficient, and at least as trustworthy as blockchains. We have well-known ways of using crypto to encode things and well-known ways of creating reliable money. And contracts require lawyers and courts and terms of art because that's what it takes to protect everyone's interests—something that techno-evangelists are notoriously bad at acknowledging. It's no coincidence that the only real use case so far for blockchain-based cryptocurrencies is black market transactions where you actively don't want lawyers or contracts or police forces involved.
Surely the great lesson of Web1 and Web2 is that people are people no matter what technology you're using. The internet can certainly produce changes at the margins,¹ but it changes neither human nature nor hundreds of years of commercial practices encoded in laws, contracts, court opinions, treaties, and industry norms. You may not like our current Web2, but creating a brand new one won't change anything without some very heavy handed rules indeed. And getting rid of heavy handedness is the whole point of Web3, isn't it?
¹For example, my observation that "The internet makes smart people smarter and dumb people dumber." Though I make exceptions for certain very smart people.
I remember back in the heady days of the 1990s arguing with evangelists about the web. The evangelists were certain that the web would put traditional marketing out of business.
A similar argument is frequently used with respect to real estate brokers. They just open doors!
When I reach a pausing point for a current project, I'm going to look at the possibility of using blockchain technology for election security. I think elections at least avoid one of cryptocurrencies' problems with using blockchain in that they have an end point: once all the votes have been cast and counted, you can freeze everything, and not have each additional transaction gobble up more computing/storing/communicating capacity ad infinitum.
I don't know a whole lot about blockchain technology, but as I understand it, it's just cryptographic methods applied to a distributed ledger (right?). Nothing terribly daunting.
Anyway, step one will be outlining the desirable characteristics of a voting system, whether implemented through blockchain or not. First draft:
1. No one but the individual voter should be able to see how someone voted, or even -- and this is something that current systems fail at -- IF the individual voter voted at all. I think the last is important because people can lose their jobs in a lot of states just because they exercised their right to vote ... and whether someone voted or not is a matter of public record right now. This might be difficult to implement given other considerations.
2. Anyone should be able to query the blockchain to find results for particular elections.
3. Anyone should be able to verify that only eligible voters voted in the election, and should be able to compare data from the blockchain with external information -- like voter counts at polling stations -- to identify any discrepancies ... of which there should be none.
4. Individual voters should be able to pull up their votes at any time after they have cast them in order to verify them or, possibly, to change them prior to the end of voting.
5. Voting should be available through many means, including ideally just logging onto the internet from anywhere and providing proof of identity somehow. This would allow for making whether you vote or not your own secret.
Anything else?
If you're moving to online voting, then you have to be able to distribute ballots (coins?) to each voter and insure they are the ones using them.
At least you are not "mining" coins, just passing around NFT's.
I've never understood why there has to be any electricity involved in the actual vote when paper and pencil work perfectly fine already.
"Anyone should be able to query the blockchain to find results for particular elections."
But here's the problem: even taking as a given that the blockchain is flawless and
(contra current reality) everybody has 100% faith that all voting was properly done by registered voters, you've overlaid an opaque techno-layer on the process. No human can actually read the underlying code, and very few normal humans are going to grasp what the code is doing anyway. So you haven't solved anything, as anybody (even those with the tech savvy and resources to "query the blockchain") is still going to have to take it on some degree of faith that the results that pop up on their screen are real.
Which is of course fine--all of us take it on some degree of faith that everything we encounter is real, generally speaking--but it doesn't address the problem of anti-democracy people or election losers or just plain idiots going around sowing doubt by saying the system is rigged or corrupt or hacked.
https://xkcd.com/2030/
Whether someone voted or not SHOULD be a matter of public record.
That doesn't require block chain or crypto.
We already have a good system in WA. The state KNOWs who it mailed ballots to. It knows who mailed or dropped off their ballots. I can check when the state mailed my ballot to me, and when they received it. The election officials verify my signature on the mail-in/drop-off envelope. Before the counting starts the envelopes are opened, ballots in their security envelope are removed, and set aside. The outer envelope is stored separately. At that point there is no identifying data to tie me to my ballot - as it should be.
If someone decides to vote in person, I presume they use some method like we had in MA. Two people at each station handle checking in by address, verify your name in a ledger, cross it off in a matching ledger, and hand you an unmarked ballot. You mark up your ballot, fold it, and slide it through a slot into a locked box. Within the locked box is another locked box. When the inner box fills, take out the inner box, mark the count of ballots on it, take it to a secure holding area while a new, empty inner box is locked, put in the outer box and locked in. Rinse and repeat till the polls close. Counting is by machines that, as far as I know, produce a paper trail that can then be compared to the actual contents of each inner ballot box. After a ballot box has been counted it is locked back up with the ballots and put in another secure area. I presume the paper trail has a way to tie back to each box in case of audit. Audits can be done by taking a box back out of storage, recounting the ballots, and seeing if there are any discrepancies. Ballots can also be counted by hand if that is found.
There are a few other nice touches. The ballots are printed on special security paper - and you won't find that stuff at Office Depot. Each ballot has a unique control number. If two envelopes show up with the same valid control number, questions will be asked. If an envelope shows up with a valid control number but a bad signature, same thing. If an envelope shows up with a control number that was not issued, the ballot will not be counted, etc.
If you're serious, you'll need to solve these problems: https://verifiedvoting.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/The-Myth-of-_Secure_-Blockchain-Voting-1002.pdf
Spoiler alert: Our safest bet for casting votes is paper ballots and laws in place that guarantee manual auditing of every election afterwards.
Indeed. The security of paper ballots is analogous to the adage that you can't hack a grandfather clock. What exactly are the problems that blockchain-based voting would be trying to solve, and why are those serious enough to warrant embracing a whole new set of intractable problems?
The most commonly cited problem is absentee voting for overseas military personnel and expatriates, especially in countries with slow and/or unreliable postal services. In the past, those voters had to mail a request for a ballot to be mailed to them, then return the ballot by mail; three mailings had to be completed in time, two within the time between printing of the ballots and the deadline, Election Day in some jurisdictions. Fax, e-mail, and Internet downloads now shorten that process: https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/international-travel/while-abroad/voting.html
But see the article cited by Citizen Lehew for reasons that voting over the Internet can’t execute the most critical steps in assuring that a vote is valid.
(3) sounds tricky...
Improving the integrity of voting in the US along the lines you suggest would require a majority constituency in favor of doing so. We may get there in the future, but right now I think it's pretty clear no such politically-effective majority exists. One of our two major parties prefers inefficient, untrustworthy, game-able elections.
No offense, but if you want a verifiable election, this is not the way to go.
Verifiable paper trails that can be recounted is the only thing that will convince technologically illiterate people (that's the vast majority of us) that an election was fair. Trying to explain to someone why randoms can't just edit a cryptographically signed ledger is a near impossibility, and of course, they can always say that the NSA has a backdoor to the signing technology.
IOW, this is a dangerous waste of your time. If you managed to succeed, you'll only end up building a system that will never be trusted by a majority of your fellow citizens.
So...trying to monetize share ware and open source??
Block chaining everything--the ledger that ate the world!!!
Crypto everything? Maybe people should use VPN's all the time. Computational and energy (carbon) costs? Should be better now.
As for companies "owning" everything--what's Mozilla's share of traffic? Web3 won't stop people from using Facebook as their primary web interface.
Yeah ... "no human" involvement. Except where the codes that run the whole shebang are created. Apropos of nothing, oh look! It's "Patch Tuesday" again!!
'Shebang', eh? I saw what you did there.
Somehow I missed Web2 ...
Web1 was webpages. Web2 is social media and such. https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/web-1-0-web-2-0-and-web-3-0-with-their-difference/
"The evangelists were certain that the web would put traditional marketing out of business."
And they were right. Newspaper advertising is dead, there are no catalogs, and while their are tv commercials they reach a tiny fraction of the early 90s audience. Now it's SEO, micro-targeting granular data along with coopting influencers or making your own fake influencers.
We get catalogs almost every day, as well as postcard ads, coupon packets, etc.
8 word precis: Because crypto, because blockchain, because magic fairy dust
Problems in NFT land....
https://petapixel.com/2022/01/28/over-80-of-nfts-minted-for-free-on-opensea-were-fake-or-plagiarized/
That is, 80 percent of the NFTs were fakes, plagiarized or stolen. That implies that 20% of the NFTs were ‘real’. Though someone has to explain to me what that means, exactly.
I actually do agree that we need to open up web real estate somehow... in case you're wondering why every new business name is something like "Sprunt"... all the normal names were bought up by domain vultures years ago.
Ironically, though, any new Web3 paradigm needs to go the OPPOSITE direction if it wants to cure what ails us. Anonymity is destroying open internet discourse, since its overrun by Russian trolls and other bad actors, and anonymity is crushing our servers with "denial of service" attacks, etc.
What need a way are structural ways built into the network to verify/guarantee someone's identity.
But the whole point of -- or at least a big motivator for -- Web2 was that people wanted to behave badly without consequences ... Which is _precisely_ the whole point of 'anonymity' for all practical purposes. So while I'll agree with you that the paradigm needs to change, the direction you (and I, for that matter) want to see it go will be met with immense, determined, and above all, coordinated oppostion.
Hear, hear!
If you're not following:
https://web3isgoinggreat.com/
then you're missing out on one of the great comic masterpieces of our time. Because it's all true.
> the only real use case so far for blockchain-based cryptocurrencies is black market transactions where you actively don't want lawyers or contracts or police forces involved
I've been thinking that the killer app for bitcoin is international currency transfers. Basically getting rid of the $15 to $50 middleman fee for doing an EFT. Bitcoin seems like it might be sufficiently liquid and sufficiently safe over the course of a couple of days to be used for this purpose. Although I haven't tried to use it that way yet...
I have to agree. Blockchain is just a mechanism for criminals to 'safely' receive shakedown money. All of its other uses seem to be extremely inefficient ways of accomplishing stuff that can be done with a database for far less money.
Funny how often 'states rights' came down to the right to own slaves, innit?