Bitcoin was released on January 3, 2009. It was created by an unknown person or group of people using the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto. The release of Bitcoin marked the beginning of the era of cryptocurrencies and decentralized digital currencies.
The term Web3 has been around for several years, but its exact origin is somewhat difficult to pinpoint since it has been used in different contexts by various people and organizations.
However, one possible starting point for the term Web3 is the publication of a blog post by Ethereum co-founder Gavin Wood in March 2014, titled "Web3: A Platform for Decentralized Apps." In this post, Wood outlined his vision for a decentralized web built on blockchain technology.
Since then, the term has gained popularity in the blockchain and cryptocurrency communities to refer to a vision of a decentralized web that is based on open protocols, interoperability, and user control over their data and identity.
In recent years, Web3 has become more widely used as blockchain technology and decentralized applications (dApps) have gained in popularity and adoption. The concept of Web3 is also closely linked to the development of decentralized finance (DeFi) and non-fungible tokens (NFTs), which are both built on blockchain technology.
The vision for Web3 has always had an unexplainable gap on how and why exactly we achieve a fully realized decentralized future. Blockchain as a stand alone technology has only really produced a few use-cases that have seen considerable adoption including cryptocurrencies, NFTs, and DeFi.
After all, blockchain is merely a technology for creating decentralized ledgers, it’s essentially just an advanced database technology. A database that is difficult to query, slow to access in real-time, and who’s benefits simply haven’t enabled the tokenization of assets many predicted, nor the smart contract revolution that seems both likely and just hasn’t happened yet. Decentralized Applications or Dapps just haven’t taken off yet and aren’t really able to compete on equal footing as Web2 technologies.
Blockchains also create massive amounts of data that again is mostly not available in any useful capacity for most users to access. Sure, there’s The Graph and other indexing solutions, but those solutions really just copy blockchain data to Web2 databases to gain Web2 performance. They don’t actually solve the underlying problems or make the data anymore useful. Every blockchain contains massive amounts of data that just isn’t being leveraged effectively.
This is why Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the missing technology needed to achieve Web3 and a decentralized future. AI has the potential to make sense of massive amounts of blockchain data in ways we cannot even comprehend right now. Generative AI also has the ability to write secure decentralized applications and smart contracts that were previously limited to a handful of elite programmers and developers.
At the time of writing this, AI is already capable of writing and securing smart contracts, and in a few months there will likely be dedicated AI solutions. Soon smart contracts will be a prompt away from existing.
It is the merger of AI and Blockchain technology that has the potential and power to achieve a truly disruptive decentralized future. But yet at the same time AI alone can also easily become a centralized threat to the decentralized world if put in the wrong hands. Centralized AI is very much a threat to sovereignty, privacy, and has economic and political ramifications that are capable of monopolizing and consolidating entire industries.
Furthermore, AI is going to be the driving factor in why we need to reimagine capitalism, and value creation as we enter a world where AI can easily generate wealth for its owners. Whoever possesses AI will have an unfair advantage to dominate markets, and create monopolies the world has never experienced before. This is why it is so critical that we develop AI Blockchain technologies and protocols that are decentralized and democratic to ensure there’s a counter balance between centralized AI and the distributed will of the people.
As well as build systems for a post fiat currency world, and enter the tokenized world of the future where AI is doing nearly everything from managing and maintaining decentralized protocols to swapping, trading, and managing assets. AI is going to be able to provide smart contracts as a service for a range of legal and financial services from buying property, to allocating assets.
This future is coming, and it’s coming sooner rather than later as we rapidly move towards more advanced AI technologies. Economies will crumble, as AI systems will have the potential to disrupt everything.
For the moment, it is still possible, and there is still hope that we can apply these technologies towards blockchain adoption and decentralization. However, a war is brewing between centralized AI systems owned and operated by a ruling class hell bent on subjugating the masses, and decentralized AI and blockchain systems created by the people for the people.
All the promises Web3 has been making over the past several years were never going to be possible without AI; it is the catalyst that can reduce the layers of complexity around blockchain technologies enabling mass adoption. We are either heading towards a fully centralized world, a hybrid of both centralized and decentralized systems, or a fully realized decentralized world where centralization is no longer necessary.
Whoever wins may very well determine the future of human civilization, and make or break our society.