Trust: Moving beyond passwords
On its face, the blockchain might sound dangerous. You trust your bank to keep your account safe. But if your money is stored across millions of computers, what’s to prevent someone from claiming it belongs to them?
This is the second core principle of Web3: trust. Blockchain technology has built-in systems for robust, trustworthy security. For example, there is no backdoor on the blockchain. A bank employee with admin access could log into your account without knowing your password, but that’s impossible on the blockchain.
Another security feature is that each block of data links to all previous data, creating an ongoing chain (hence the name). So if someone wanted to claim they owned your account, they’d need to hack every record ever created—an impossible task. And they’d need to do it across 51% of all machines on the blockchain ecosystem, spread around the world, all at the same moment.
It’s easy to see why blockchain can be far more secure than a single bank server. And security on the blockchain does this while protecting your identity. Your bank needs to know who you are in the real world, but Web3 can keep your accounts completely secure without knowing more than your anonymous digital identity.
Ownership: Yours, mine, and ours
The trust built into Web3 technologies makes it easy to define ownership like never before on the Internet.
Computers created a world where copies are free and indistinguishable from the original, and Web 2.0 made ownership online almost a misnomer. Despite company’s best efforts, digital piracy and copyright infringement have flourished.
But Web3 technologies bring a new solution—certificates of authenticiy that live on the blockchain. This means secure, decentralized proof of ownership that doesn’t rely on a country’s copyright laws, called non-fungible tokens, or NFTs.
But it’s not just digital assets. One of the greatest ironies of digital ownership is that personal data suddenly became valuable, yet it doesn’t belong to us. Web3 may create a world where we do own our identity online. We can protect it, share it, or even sell it—on our own terms.
And finally, Web3’s decentralized frameworks mean the individual users own the network itself. Rather than just being users, Web3 offers a world where everyone is also a shareholder that receives benefits from participating and has a say in how the platform operates.