Web5 — The Niche Tech Solves The Niche Problem
Recently, Jack Dorsey’s Bitcoin-focused TBD business unit has just announced the born of Web5 — a decentralized web model. Let’s see how web5 works and what problems it can solve, then we may decide on the real potential of web5 compared to other current models.
What On Earth Is Web5?
We have been knowing about web1, web2, web3, now we have web5?! Where’s web4? Literally, web5 could be considered as a marketing ploy to make people feel the superiority of this web model. Or we could understand web5 is the result of the combination of web2 and web3. 2 + 3 = 5.
Makes sense, right?
Web5 Is Also Decentralized, What’s Wrong With Web3?
Unlike Web3, where everything must be encrypted or “blockchained,” everything. Web5 only makes use of the Bitcoin blockchain. Bitcoin is the most decentralized network in addition to being a favorite of Jack Dorsey, a good framework for building completely decentralized networks. Meanwhile, blockchain is supposedly not the most effective system at the moment.
The ownership of digital identities and personal data is the sole objective, which is simultaneously emphasized. Web5 is based on the idea that identity and personal information are now considered third-party property on the internet. In order to give people back control over their identity and data, Web5 wants to develop a new class of apps and protocols that decentralize data storage.
What Problems Will Web5 Solve?
Our personal information will be kept in tens of thousands of conventional company databases in the Web2 economy. These social media firms are the owners of the digital identities of many billions of people worldwide.
General Data Protection Regulations and other personal data protection laws already exist. The security of data held by thousands of businesses, however, cannot be guaranteed. The fact is when users want to use any kind of online platform such as Facebook, Twitter, etc, they all need to sign up, and expose their personal data, then their digital footprints are all tracked and stored by the platforms. No one knows what could happen to those data, users cannot even control it though it belongs to them. Take an example from the Cambridge Analytica back in the US presidential election in 2016, where Facebook users’ data was used to analyze and psychologically manipulate via the distributed content on their newsfeed, which profoundly influenced the voting results. Trump won, could say, mostly because of this. This leads to the only answer for data security is letting the users own it, 100%. This is the thing that Web2 cannot do and can never achieve with the centralized model.
Web5 was developed to return to consumers ownership of their own digital identities and personal information.
How Can It Be Possible?
Web 5 is based on four primary technological pillars in order to realize the goal of building a genuinely decentralized web platform, including:
Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs)
Verifiable credentials (VCs)
Decentralized Web Nodes (DWNs)
Self-Sovereign Identity Service (SSIS)
Developers can concentrate on creating user experiences by using these areas. Additionally, it enables programs to store data and maintain identities independently. In other words, this new decentralized web makes use of the decentralized technology already present in Bitcoin.
At present, Umbala SocialFi Platform also applies Umbala Decentralized Identifiers (UID) and Umbala User Data Node (UDN) to solve the problems of data ownership in web2.
Some of the features of UIDs:
UIDs are self-generated & self-owned
No centralized providers or trusted authorities
No special utility token or subjective consensus
Highly resistant to all forms of interdiction
UIDs can be made universally discoverable
The feature of UDN:
UDN is an emerging standard for user data storage and relay that enable entities of any type (people, organization, etc) to send and store encrypted or public messages and data, enabling a wide variety of decentralized social apps, and protocols to build on top.
All In All
Web5, in general, is a new decentralized model built on the BTC blockchain that aims at solving the data security issue existing in web2 that web3 hasn’t able to solve completely yet. The foundation and potential of web3 could be substantial but the founders of web5 believe it could resolve issues more effectively of being niche.
Web3 will go mainstream when it can solve the scaling issues, energy costs, and compute power of it, but Web5 is expected to cost less time as it solely aims as resolving a niche issue and is built on the BTC blockchain. Still, it takes time to prove, whether it can be mainstreamed soon or not. Just wait to see!
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