The Impenetrable Web 3.0: Creating an Internet for Maximal Freedom
Balaji Srinivasan stated recently on Tim Ferris’ podcast that the digital realm is where new wars are being waged, not against countries, but against average, ordinary citizens. Individuals in digital worlds face the risks of de-platforming, digital ostracization, and are sometimes digitally “imprisoned” to experience only permitted sites, to such an extent that an individual loses their right to free speech and free assembly.
This dystopian world seemed inevitable in Web 2.0, but perhaps Web 3.0 will turn the tide, allowing users to fight back. Web 3.0 — as a collection of protocols that are open to all, trustless, secure, composable, and censorship-resistant — can in theory create a digital land of freedom and free enterprise, impenetrable to mob and governmental forces that seek to annihilate individual identities and choices.
We at Sukhvati foresee three key pillars to the impenetrable Web 3.0, in order to ensure that its core propositions of openness, trustlessness, security, and censorship-resistance can never be challenged by nefarious actors.
1. Pseudonymity and Anonymity — Speak Truth to Power
Pseudonymity in crypto first commenced with Bitcoin’s notion of a public key/address. That feature has blossomed into a social norm in crypto of creating a unique digital identity, not just as a string of text to receive transactions, but as a voice that commands a following. See, for example, Crypto Punk 6529. Punk 6529 obviously feels empowered to speak her or his mind on Twitter, and she or he does so cogently.
This ability to securely shield your real-world identity from your digital identity not only offers protection to you physically, but aids in maximizing freedom of expression. Knowing that you are physically safe or that where you live and who your relatives are will never be revealed empowers you to speak truth to power and to interact, trustlessly, with all users in the digital realm.
2. Decentralized Virtual Private Network — Go Anywhere You Desire
While Crypto aims to be decentralized, all protocols invariably start in a centralized manner. And so it is not surprising that many platforms, such as Centralized Exchanges (CEXs) and even some open-sourced Decentralized Finance (DeFi) protocols, block certain users based on the geographic location of their ISP address. In theory, the teams behind CEXs or DeFi applications could drop such geofencing measures if they would only practice pseudonymity or anonymity as outlined above, but because credentials still matter in launching a project and trustless credentials have not yet found their footing in crypto networks, many project teams intentionally tread carefully in the physical world, respecting some jurisdictions’ laws lest they be held liable for legal violations.
Despite geofencing, individuals can elect to bypass those digital gates in their countries through Virtual Privacy Networks (VPNs). However, the pitfalls and risks of VPNs are well-known, chief among them being that the user must trust a third party (the VPN provider) to not snoop on their activity and leak that data to other third-parties, such as advertisers or governments. Furthermore, the more reputable VPN-providers are centralized, just as any successful company in Web 2.0 is centralized; and so, in theory, it is rather easy for an ISP (or the government in whose jurisdiction they operate) to know if and when you are using a VPN. In some countries, that suspicion alone is enough to risk your physical well-being.
Enter a possible solution: a trustless, token-driven, secure network of pooled VPN servers around the world, sitting not in easily-located data centers, but in closets and living rooms of ordinary people like you and me. As some have called it, this is a Decentralized VPN, or “dVPN.” Several peer-driven teams are working in this nascent space, but the one we have our eyes on is the Boring Protocol, being built on Solana.
3. Decentralized Cloud Storage — Content Anywhere, Everywhere, Always and Forever
The pitfalls of Web 2.0 are so serious that I personally find them dystopian. Historical records can be rewritten without any notice to users of a platform, and despite the [naïve] belief that on the internet “everything lives forever,” content can absolutely be made to disappear, at least from your [digital] perspective. Pseudonymity and dVPNs go a long ways in helping us to realize the Web 3.0 vision, but so long as there is a single-point of failure (i.e., third parties) involved in the hosting of digital content, no information is secure or to be trusted.
This systemic risk to information will change with the Inter-Planetary File System (IPFS), a peer-to-peer hypermedia protocol. We at the Sukhavati Network have built our protocol atop IPFS logic. The idea in a nutshell is that data can be securely, trustlessly, quickly, and cheaply stored and retrieved across a network of thousands of individual and isolated servers spread across the globe, tucked away in home offices and closets, as opposed to being housed in the few dozen data centers of a few companies. Yes, Google and AWS want to serve their customers well, but more powerful than their customers are the police force (and as of late, the mob) of the jurisdiction in which they operate. Sukhavati’s decentralized, pseudonymous cloud service providers care about one thing only: the smart contract.
Conclusion
With these three pillars of Web 3.0, perhaps we can begin to glimpse an optimistic future, one where freedom of expression, assembly, and commerce reign strong in the digital realm, free from capricious edicts from governments and from mob-like vagaries that have whiplashed across much of the Web 2.0 realm. And most importantly, and most excitingly, this is a world that we can build together, literally one-hard-drive-tucked-in-a-closet-at-a-time.
Disclaimer
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About Sukhavati Network
Sukhavati Network is a decentralized cloud network service that is focused on storage. The network is built on hardware-based Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) and the Substrate framework to inspire and incentivize improvements on distributed storage ecosystems.
Sukhavati creates a decentralized gateway that covers both Web 3.0 and Web 2.0 storage services. It allows unified data storage, retrieval, and management on Web 3.0 applications.
Website: https://sukhavati.io/
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