Jack Dorsey's Web 5 Excludes Half of the World
Why would Jack Dorsey's Web 5 Exclude Half of the World? Probably even more.
What is Jack Dorsey's Web 5?
Web 2 + Web 3 = Web 5
Web 2 is broken. Several big corporations are owning all of your accounts and all your data. They can erase you and your business from the web when ever they feel like it. Web 3 started with blockchain and crypto. With an idea of you owning your account. Mostly done with Public/Private keys that are the unique identifiers for your wallet/account. One of the main complaints that Jack has about Web 3 is that Web 3 is infested with VCs and that it is a fake Web 3. As we on Hive call it Web 2.5.
Jacks idea of Web 5 is based on Decentralized Web Platform. He first announced it with the project BlueSky. From platforms to protocols. Everyone on Hive is already familiar with this even if they don't know it. You can use Peakd, HiveBlog, Ecency, LeoFinance... every platform with one account that you own because you own Keys for it. Data on Hive is stored by witnesses that run the infrastructure and you selected them by your vote.
Decentralized Web Platform is based on nodes run by every individual using the protocol. Everyone in the world will host their own data and share it with everyone using the protocol (or with whom they chose). Every node will have an Identifier (that will be like your username), in a form of Private/Public Key (most probably a bitcoin wallet as Jack is a bitcoin maxi).
Great idea in theory.
Reasons why Web 5 is not possible
In practice it has several problems. @theycallmedan and @starkerz often talk about them in they CTT podcast
Two main problems that are often pointed out are that not everyone will be able to afford to run a node or that most will don't know how to do it.
https://twitter.com/jack/status/1585724288274931714
After the last Jacks tweet about it i asked in the comments will everyone have to run their own node. When asked how will they do it, most of the responses was that the plan is to build a node that will be chap to buy and easy to just plug in at your house. You can set up a password on your phone, why would you not be able to just plug in a device in your home.
We are now going back to the map on the start of this post and a question that no one answered me on that tweet. And let's face it, communication on twitter, especially under a famous people tweet, is kinda not possible.
This is a map of average internet speed in the world form Fastmetrics.
Main Problem - The Infrastructure
Let us assume that everyone cares about owning their data, and the node will be really chap and easy to install and run. So everyone in the world will be happy to spend 15-20$ on a hardware to install in their home and will know how to do it.
Netflix says you need 5 Mbps to stream full HD content and a data rate of 25 Mbps (megabits per second) for 4K Ultra HD content. And that is if you don't use that internet for anything else. Now if we go by those numbers and check out the map we would see that there are 5-6 countries that have those speeds in the whole world.
Now if you are not lucky to live in a place with great internet you will know the struggle of the important part that those Web 5 nodes will have to use. Upload Speed
If you check the article on Fastmetrics you will find a table with average upload speed per country. And you will see that they are quite depressing.
| Country | Upload speed | Population |
|---|---|---|
| India | 2.69 | 1,417,173,173 |
| Indonesia | 1.82 | 275,501,339 |
| Pakistan | 0.57 | 235,824,862 |
| Nigeria | 1.56 | 218,541,212 |
| Brazil | 3.92 | 215,313,498 |
| Bangladesh | 2.65 | 171,186,372 |
| Mexico | 1.90 | 127,504,125 |
| - | - | - |
| SUM | 2,661,044,581 | |
| Upload speed and population of some of the biggest countries in the world. |
I excluded China as the speeds didn't make sense but you can assume that it is not great on average. And with China there we already got to the number of over half of the world population. And that is just 8 countries on the list.
How would this look in practice. I am someone with decent tech knowledge and would be happy to spend some money on the node. I live in Serbia, 60km from the capital. Few bigger towns have a great unlimited internet. Me, i have 0.7Mbps of upload speed (when i am lucky). I also have an 4G internet with 100GB of data per month. How long would that 100GB last?
Can anyone imagine how would it look and feel if anyone would like to access anything that i would host on my personal node?
Everyone running their own node is a great idea. Maybe, sometimes, in the far future when internet is fast everywhere, and internet and mobile providers become altruistic and give unlimited data for a really cheap price to everyone.
Until then, Jack will build a really good servers for nodes that will be free you only need to give him access to your data. Hmm that sounds familiar, i seen that somewhere already.
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