Early thoughts on the web5 initiative by and the TBD team.
You might think that it's “Ethereum on Bitcoin,” it’s not. In fact, there are no smart contracts at all and no new blockchains/sidechains. So what is it?
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The web5 initiative has roots in the decentralized identifiers (DID) ideas that date back to the mid 2010s or earlier. I worked on similar ideas in 2015-2016 and learned several lessons.
(Anyone interested should search IIW archives for community discussions.)
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The core idea revolves around a decentralized identifier (DID) which is a non-human readable identifier (think a really long hash). A DID is often saved at a blockchain, and this is where the Bitcoin blockchain comes in.
Only DIDs at Bitcoin layer.
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You cannot save a lot of data at Bitcoin (scalability & storage limits) but you can certainly register DIDs. Even for DIDs you typically need to move to off-chain storage (outside of Bitcoin) quickly given transaction costs and scalability limits (we did this in 2016).
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Other than the DID, typically *nothing else* is at the blockchain level. No smart contracts. No virtual machine like EVM. And therefore no new token to secure a separate global ledger.
(The no new token is certainly a selling point in some Bitcoin circles.)
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The other two imp components are (a) decentralized storage, user-controlled storage that they typically pay for, and (b) verifiable credentials.
The apps run locally with the user (or at user-controlled node). The apps don’t run at a blockchain, unlike the EVM.
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You’re not going to use this design to build an automated market maker like Uniswap (there is no smart contract that can take your liquidity).
You can, however, use this design to build a decentralized Google Docs, where users control their data & share directly with users.
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At a high-level, this design space is totally opposite to modern smart contract platforms. This is more peer-to-peer and arguably complementary to smart contract platforms.
This is not an Ethereum competitor.
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Our learning is that devs are a lot more interested in smart contracts than they are in p2p apps. Still, I’m excited that now there is a serious engineering effort behind p2p apps with TBD and web5.
As an industry, it’s great that different designs are explored!
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Also, the term web5 and the website is new, but the work behind it has been going on for 4-5 years; identity.foundation for example was started in early 2017.
Congrats to for pushing this forward and now getting a large company like Block fully behind it.
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Yep, this is the collective effort of countless people I've collaborated with since beginning my work on it at Mozilla in 2012, and much of it we figured out together. We're open and humble about the fact we're standing on the shoulders of a community, as Mike said in his talk ❤️
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Time for a Web5 prediction poll!
The term Web5 will:Show this poll
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