Keep the Web Free, Say No to Web Three.
Today, everyone seems to have heard the phrase “Web3”, and indeed, it has grown a lot in the past several years. Now (as of Apr 19, 2025), Metamask, one of the vast choices of Web3-compatible wallets, has nearly 16 million users (Mozilla AMO and Chrome Web Store combined). It can be said that the entire Web3 user community is already quite large. At the same time, various blockchain-driven Internet services have also broken the stereotype of many people that blockchain is a inefficient system. Websites such as xlog allow users to publish content on decentralized networks (however, storing content directly on block chains, which I will explain later) and maintain ownership and consistency through digital signatures (smart contracts). It has a bit of a decentralized flavor.
However, I noticed a suspicious point: technology giants seem to be a little too fond of the concept of Web3, and that’s quite weird. You know, tech giants like Google have used the 3E tactics to defeat decentralized networks ; and it is even harder for me to imagine any reason for a company like Meta to support decentralization. I have never heard of any technology giant providing significant funding to widely recognized decentralized projects such as I2P 1 or Fediverse (of course, if they really provide significant funding, it is probably because they want to control these projects ), while Web3 is the only decentralized project I have seen that is constantly promoted with the strong participation of a large number of capitalist forces – this is really much more suspicious than it appears on the surface. At the same time, many other concepts advocated by Web3, such as a new idea fir democracy, are also very questionable and even worrying.
Some Knowledge
It is now 2025, and everyone basically understands what blockchain is. The essence of blockchain is an ever-expanding linked list in which each node contains the hash value of the previous node ; and the entire linked list is distributed in a database of a global computer. However, blockchains like this still seem to have only economic uses, namely being able to pay bills. (Of course, what is paid is not the value of a hash value on the blockchain itself – that does not exist, but an economic phenomenon; or the “stock price”) The length of the blockchain can also be called the block height; the computers participating in this global linked list are not working for free, so they will get “proof of work”, which is the so-called mining (might be over-simplified)… Since it is a global linked list, you can imagine how complicated in fact it will be.
Decentralization, at the same time, also occurs on this planetary chain: simply because the computers are distributed, and each blockchain node can be considered to hold the data of the entire chain, there is indeed no center. Moreover, the encrypted address that holds the transaction is generated by the user and is not necessarily associated with the user’s identity, which can also be considered a form of anonymity.
Everything Looks Fine: But That Will Not Work As Web
You might be wondering, what good is such an ever-expanding ledger for someone who wants a decentralized internet? One straightforward approach is to attach the information one might share and store (The Decentralized Internet’s all sorts of data) to the transaction body, thus storing and distribute it as the block is confirmed by nodes – but that means that every node computer in the network will hold data from the entire Internet, such as various tweets, blogs, and files; of course, though security can be protected through encryption, the storage capacity required will always be immeasurable. For reference: the entire Ethereum storage capacity is currently within terabytes, a nothing compared to the Web2, where we are at now.
So instead of sending data to block chain, the actual data of the Web3 is generally in IPFS network. IPFS is not a blockchain, but more likely a BitTorrent Modernized version. Another concept is Smart Contract (mentioned above). I personally don’t acknowledge the smartness within those “contracts”, as they are essentially some scripts running on very slow hardware (that is, the block chain as a computer, made possible by letting nodes to run some script) basis. Smart Contract serve as a Digital Signature (mentioned above, too), like what OpenPGP do, to prove the Integrity and Authenticity of the content.
When a user want to publish something, they sign their content with their private keys, upload it to IPFS, and spread the signature across the Web3 block chain with smart contract to ensure authenticity.
Here we already have multiple problems. The most important one we might have notices till now: IPFS, Smart Contracts, Blockchain access… these are nothing free, so who is going to pay for the usage? Letting end users pay these fees will greatly degrade their experience, for they generally need to pay no money (but with data, of course, but Web3 can have advertisements and trackers too) to use conventional web services to publish posts and images.
Gateway: Why Web3 Is Not Decentralization
Things are getting worse now: a decentralized Internet cannot expect every visitor and publisher to own a bunch of hard drives to store all/most of the chain’s data, as it is still large (terabytes!), or to directly connect to the IPFS network (complex & require a lot of resources) and become an Etherum miner (otherwise, it will be much slower than I2P). Therefore, there will inevitably be a problem of using a centralized access entry point to access decentralized storage. That is to say, although the underlying logic is indeed IPFS decentralized storage and smart contracts decentralized chains… but! In reality, most of end users still need to interact with a centralized server similar to a “gateway” (the access entry point) to obtain the specific data they want. In fact, this is also the reality for most of the so-called on-chain information services currently available. In some cases, due to the distributed nature, the data could only be retrieved with certain gateways, making availability still an issue.
This is where the trust issue arises. Of course, technically speaking, it can be said that because the underlying layer is blockchain, the data is indeed decentralized; however, to a user who has no intention of participating in blockchain mining and IPFS distribution, whether such a decentralization exist itself is unknown. You should know that companies like Google also store user data on their servers distributed all over the world. The technology giant is also decentralized, internally, in order to reduce risks and improve disaster recovery capabilities. However, a Google user has no reason to think that they are using a decentralized service, because Google’s decentralization is for Google itself, not for its users, and the internally decentralized network does not even include the end user because it appears in front of them as a centralized service. and users can get none of the decentralization’s benefit such as promoting more free speech . The exact same thing could happen when the vast majority of end users use gateways rather than direct participation (or even the entire Web3 project design itself does not allow end users to participate in this network, but only allows them to use, in the worst case, a specific, commercial gateway) to access various Web3 services, there is no essential difference between them and using Google . Because in both cases, they all trust that the other party will properly handle (that is, store and transport) their data in a decentralized, conscientious and respectful manner. In the best case scenario, the gateway is run by a non-profit, conscientious organization. But in that case, wouldn’t it be more convenient to just use the services of a trustworthy nonprofit organization? Or wouldn’t it be more decentralized to use tools like BitTorrent, I2P, and Fediverse?
In other words, I2P, BitTorrent and IPFS themselves are all decentralized, no doubt about it. While I2P users can run I2P programs locally and BitTorrent users can run BitTorrent clients, both of which directly accessing the decentralized network, in most cases, IPFS end users in Web3 have to rely on a centralized gateway server, which itself is worthy of extra consideration. The purpose of smart contracts is to ensure consistency and ownership; but the key problem is that most users and visitors cannot install a huge, resource-consuming full-node wallet on their computers. Therefore, the credibility of the contract also depends on a centralized gateway. Compared with I2P’s off-channel public key authentication, or even OpenPGP’s fingerprint comparison authentication, this is far inferior. If I really need decentralization, I can buy a Raspberry Pi, install I2P, build an eepsite blog, and then sign each article with my PGP private key before publishing, ensuring integrity and authenticity . I can even use I2P to implement fully decentralized (even more decentralized than Fediverse, because I can use my own local server without exposing my IP) chat and email.
The Danger of “Democracy”
Bringing democratic elements into economic activities is not a new idea at all, especially for the left, it can be said to be a cliché. Cooperation, public ownership, the idea of a democratic planned economy, OGAS and Cybersyn… However, when the left talks about these things, it often starts from the beautiful vision of building a fairer society; the “democracy” of Web3 and the so-called cryptocurrency “decentralized autonomous organization” (cryptocurrency financial / DeFi DAO) seems to be moving in a completely opposite and worrying direction.
The left often mocks capitalist democracy: it seems like “one citizen, one vote”, but in reality it’s “one dollar, one vote”. However, that still “seems” “one person, one vote”, and can be considered democracy; in the Cryptocurrency DeFi DAO, even this “seeming” is gone, and it becomes a naked vote with money; whoever has more money is more likely to have their demands taken seriously.
The common voting structure is “square voting” plus voting by tokens. This could be used to determine a person’s preference rather than simply asking binary questions, done by charging each vote some tokens (credits). If everyone have a fixed and consistent number of the credits assigned to them, that is a wonderful future for democracy; however it is a very bad idea to make the tokens/credits and have a monetary nature, as what have been done to tokens in Cryptocurrency. Again, if the points used for voting are equally assigned, fixed, non-tradable, and non-monetary, then this is a perfect democratic method, but once it has a monetary nature, in simple terms, it is bought, it is equivalent to openly and legally allowing the rich to have more control than (and eventually will become the control over) the poor.
The concept of DAO decentralized autonomous organization itself is very good, and if applied properly, it is very beneficial to democracy. But tying it deeply to cryptocurrency that you have to pay for votes, is a extremely dangerous path.
The Future
True Decentralization, based upon data sovereignty ensured by letting most of the user’s data handled locally (or at least, not handled by big tech), is the hope of the future of Internet. Perfect examples include: Fediverse (Federated Communications like Matrix, XMPP, SimpleX.Chat and Federated Social Media like ActivityPub), I2P (Invisible, Decentralized, Censorship-resilient and Highly Anonymous Network) etc.. They helped protect civil liberties and equality as they promote decentralization that everyone can participate and be benefited from.