本文选自经济学人，了解web的下一个商业预测，本文有大量的专业词汇，如果不了解也没关系。

注意事项

经济学人等外刊文章大多数带有强烈的主观推测色彩，往往不能做到实事求是。我们的学习过程中积累地道表达是第一的，第二要带着批判的眼光去看待，第三自己去思考涉及的内容，要一分为二、更要二合为一。

学习建议：

1. 在语境中理解词汇的用法和表达；

2. 了解本文的核心观点和主旨；

Will web3 reinvent the internet business?

In parts, yes. But probably not as sweepingly as its boosters reckon 在部分地区，是的。但可能并不像其推动者所估计的那样全面。

Like seemingly everyone these days, Moxie Marlinspike has created a non-fungible token (NFT)These digital chits use clever cryptography to prove, without the need for a central authenticator, that a buyer owns a unique piece of digital property. Alongside cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin, NFTs are the most visible instantiation of “web3”—an idea whose advocates and their venture-capital (VC) backers hail as a better, more decentralised version of the internet, built atop distributed ledgers known as blockchains. Digital artists, celebrities and even the occasional newspaper have issued and sold them to collectors, often for hefty sums.

这些数字代币使用巧妙的加密技术来证明，不需要中央认证器，买方就拥有一块独特的数字财产。与比特币等加密货币一样，NFT是 "web3 "最明显的实例——其倡导者及其风险资本（VC）的支持者将其誉为更好、更分散的互联网版本，建立在被称为区块链的分布式账本之上。数字艺术家、名人、甚至偶尔的报纸都发行并出售给收藏家，往往价格不菲。

Although it looked cryptographically sound like any other NFT, however, Mr Marlinspike’s token could shift shape depending on who accessed it. If you bought it and viewed it on a computer, it transformed into a poop emoji. After a few days the NFT was taken down by OpenSea, a marketplace for digital artefacts. This played into Mr Marlinspike’s hands. For his aim was not to raise cash but to raise awareness. His token showed that NFTs are not as non-fungible as advertised. And OpenSea’s reaction illustrated that the supposedly decentralised web3 has its own gatekeepers.

虽然它在密码学上看起来和其他NFT一样，但是马林斯派克先生的代币可以根据访问它的人改变形状。如果你买了它并在电脑上观看，它就会变成一个大便的表情符号。几天后，NFT被数字艺术品市场OpenSea取下。这正中马林斯派克先生的下怀。因为他的目的不是为了筹集现金，而是为了提高知名度。他的象征物表明，NFT并不像广告中所说的那样不容易损坏。而OpenSea的反应表明，所谓的去中心化的web3有它自己的看门人。

The Marlinspike caper was the latest turn in perhaps the biggest controversy to erupt in tech world for several years. On one side sit techno-Utopians, firms offering assorted web3 services and their VC backers. They claim that web3 is the next big thing in cyberspace, that it is truly decentralised—and that it promises juicy returns to boot. Globally, the value of VC deals in the crypto-sphere reached

5bn in 2020 (see chart). Last week Andreessen Horowitz (a16z for short), one of Silicon Valley’s most illustrious VC firms and its biggest web3 champion, was reported to be raising a

3bn. A senior partner left a16z this month to set up her own firm focused on web3.

马林斯派克事件是几年来科技界爆发的最大争议中的最新转折。一方是技术专家、提供各种web3服务的公司和他们的VC支持者。他们声称，web3是网络空间的下一个大事件，它是真正的去中心化，而且它承诺了丰厚的回报。在全球范围内，去年加密领域的风险投资交易价值达到250亿美元，而2020年还不到50亿美元（见图表）。上周，硅谷最著名的风险投资公司之一和最大的web3支持者Andreessen Horowitz（简称a16z）据说正在筹集一个45亿美元的web3相关基金，以补充现有的三个总价值为30亿美元的基金。一位高级合伙人本月离开了a16z，成立了她自己的专注于web3的公司。

Pitted against them are the sceptics. They range from Mr Marlinspike, highly respected even among the techno-Utopians for creating the secure-messaging app Signal, to Jack Dorsey, who founded two platforms of the sort that web3 promises to supersede (Twitter in social media and Square in payments). They argue that a truly decentralised internet is a pipe dream—“You don’t own ‘web3’. VCs and their limited partners do,” Mr Dorsey warned last month. And a dangerous one at that for the unwary investor: since November some $1trn of the value of cryptocurrencies, the most mature province of web3, has gone up in flames.

与他们对立的是怀疑论者。他们中有马林斯派克先生，甚至在技术乌托邦中也因创建安全信息应用Signal而备受尊敬，还有杰克-多尔西，他创建了web3承诺取代的两个平台（社交媒体的Twitter和支付的Square）。他们认为，一个真正的去中心化的互联网是一个空想——"你并不拥有'web3'。多西先生上个月警告说："你不拥有'web3'，风险投资公司和他们的有限合伙人拥有。对于不明就里的投资者来说，这是一个危险的问题：自11月以来，加密货币的价值约为10万亿美元，这是web3最成熟的领域，已经在火焰中消失。

The feud may seem abstruse. But the stakes are big. It could change the trajectory of the internet—and the multitrillion-dollar business models that it has enabled.

这场争斗可能看起来很玄乎。但其中的利害关系很大。它可能会改变互联网的发展轨迹，以及它所促成的价值数亿美元的商业模式。

The centre cannot hold

The history of modern computing is a constant struggle between decentralisers and recentralisers. In the 1980s the shift from mainframes to personal computers gave more power to individual users. Then Microsoft clawed back some of that power around its proprietary operating system. More recently, open-source software, which users can download for nothing and adapt to their needs, took over from proprietary programs in parts of the industry—only to be reappropriated by giant technology firms to run their mobile operating systems (as Google does with Android) or cloud-computing data centres (including those operated by Amazon, Microsoft and Google).

现代计算机的历史是一场去中心化和再中心化之间的不断斗争。在20世纪80年代，从大型机到个人电脑的转变给了个人用户更多的权力。然后，微软围绕其专有操作系统夺回了一些权力。最近，用户可以免费下载并适应他们的需求的开源软件，在部分行业中取代了专有程序——但却被巨型技术公司重新使用，以运行他们的移动操作系统（如谷歌的安卓系统）或云计算数据中心（包括亚马逊、微软和谷歌运营的数据中心）。

The web3 movement is a reaction to perhaps the greatest centralisation of all: that of the internet. As Chris Dixon, who oversees web3 investments at a16z, explains it, the original, decentralised web lasted from 1990 to about 2005. This web1, call it, was populated by flat web pages and governed by open technical rules put together by standards bodies. The next iteration, web2, brought the rise of tech giants such as Alphabet and Meta, which managed to amass huge centralised databases of user information. Web3, in Mr Dixon’s telling, “combines the decentralised, community-governed ethos of web1 with the advanced, modern functionality of web2”.

web3运动是对也许是最大的集中化的反应：互联网的集中化。正如在a16z负责web3投资的克里斯-迪克森所解释的那样，最初的、去中心化的网络从1990年持续到2005年左右。这个web1是由扁平的网页组成的，并由标准机构制定的公开技术规则来管理。下一次迭代，即web2，带来了Alphabet和Meta等科技巨头的崛起，它们设法积累了巨大的集中式用户信息数据库。Dixon先生说，Web3 "结合了web1的去中心化、社区管理的精神和web2的先进、现代功能"。

This is possible thanks to blockchains, which turn the centralised databases to which big tech owes it power into a common good that can be used by anybody without permission. Blockchains are a special type of ledger that is not maintained centrally by a single entity (as a bank controls all its customers accounts) but collectively by its power users. Blockchains have outgrown cryptocurrencies, their earliest application, and spread into NFTs and other sorts of “decentralised finance” (DeFi). Now they are increasingly underpinning non-financial services.

这要归功于区块链，它把大科技公司赖以生存的集中式数据库变成了一种公共物品，任何人都可以不经允许而使用。区块链是一种特殊的账本，它不是由单一实体集中维护的（如银行控制其所有客户的账户），而是由其权力用户集体维护的。区块链已经超越了其最早的应用——加密货币，并扩散到NFT和其他种类的 "去中心化金融"（DeFi）。现在，它们正日益成为非金融服务的基础。

The portfolio of a16z offers a glimpse of this wild new world. It already includes more than 60 startups, at least a dozen of which are valued at more than $1bn. Many are developing the infrastructure for web3. Alchemy offers tools for other firms to build blockchain applications, much as cloud-computing provides a platform for developers of web-based services. Nym has built something called “mixnet”, a decentralised network to mix up messages in a way that means literally no one else can tell who is sending what to whom.

a16z的投资组合提供了对这个狂野新世界的一瞥。它已经包括了60多家创业公司，其中至少有十几家公司的估值超过10亿美元。炼金术为其他公司建立区块链应用提供了工具，就像云计算为基于网络的服务的开发者提供了一个平台。Nym已经建立了一个叫做 "mixnet "的东西，这是一个去中心化的网络，以混合信息的方式，这意味着实际上没有人可以知道谁在向谁发送什么。

Other a16z investments are serving end users. Dapper Labs creates NFT applications such as NBA Top Shot, a website where sports fans can buy and sell digital collectables such as key moments in basketball games. Syndicate helps investment clubs to organise themselves into “decentralised autonomous organisations” (DAOs) governed by “smart contracts”, which are rules encoded in software and baked into a blockchain. And Sound.xyz allows musicians to mint NFTs to make money.

其他a16z的投资是为终端用户服务的。Dapper Labs创建了NFT应用程序，如NBA Top Shot，这是一个网站，体育迷可以购买和出售数字收藏品，如篮球比赛的关键时刻。Syndicate帮助投资俱乐部将自己组织成由 "智能合约 "管理的 "去中心化自治组织"（DAO），这些规则被编码在软件中并被植入区块链。而Sound.xyz允许音乐家们铸造NFT来赚钱。

What all these companies have in common, explains Mr Dixon, is that it is hard for them to lock in customers. Unlike Google and Meta they do not control their users’ data. OpenSea, in which a16z also has a stake, and Alchemy are just pipes to the blockchain. If their customers are unhappy, they can move to a competing service. Even if he wanted, he could not keep them from leaving, says Nikil Viswanathan, Alchemy’s boss. “As a business, I would love to have proprietary choke points. But there aren’t any. We tried to find them.”

Dixon先生解释说，所有这些公司的共同点是，他们很难锁定客户。与谷歌和Meta不同，他们不控制用户的数据。OpenSea（a16z也有股份）和Alchemy只是区块链的管道。如果他们的客户不满意，他们可以转移到一个竞争的服务。Alchemy的老板Nikil Viswanathan说，即使他想，他也无法阻止他们离开。"作为一个企业，我希望有专有的扼制点。但是没有任何。我们试图找到它们"。

The idea is that this makes web3 companies try harder to satisfy customers and keep innovating. Whether they can do this while also making pots of money is another matter. It is not clear how much demand exists for truly decentralised projects. That was the problem of early web3 offerings (then called “peer-to-peer” or “the decentralised web”). Services such as Diaspora and Mastodon, two social networks, never really took off. Their successors could face the same problem. A service like OpenSea would be much faster, cheaper and easier to use “with all the web3 parts gone,” says Mr Marlinspike.

我们的想法是，这使网络3公司更加努力地满足客户，并不断创新。他们是否能做到这一点，同时还能赚到盆满钵满是另一回事。目前还不清楚对真正的去中心化项目有多少需求。这就是早期web3产品（当时称为 "点对点 "或 "去中心化网络"）的问题。诸如Diaspora和Mastodon这两个社交网络的服务从未真正起飞。他们的后继者也可能面临同样的问题。像OpenSea这样的服务会更快、更便宜、更容易使用，"所有的web3部分都消失了"，Marlinspike先生说。

Or can it?

A more fundamental problem is that even if web3 worked as smoothly as its immediate predecessor, it may nevertheless lend itself to centralisation. Lock-in, reckons Mr Marlinspike, tends to emerge almost automatically. The history of the internet has shown that collectively developed technical protocols evolve more slowly than technology developed by a single firm. “If something is truly decentralised, it becomes very difficult to change, and often remains stuck in time,” he writes. That creates opportunities: “A sure recipe for success has been to take a 1990’s protocol that was stuck in time, centralise it, and iterate quickly.”

一个更根本的问题是，即使web3像它的前辈一样顺利运作，它也可能成为中心化的产物。Marlinspike先生认为，锁定几乎是自动出现的。互联网的历史表明，集体开发的技术协议比单一公司开发的技术发展得更慢。他写道："如果某样东西是真正的去中心化，那么它就很难改变，而且常常停留在时间上"。这就创造了机会。他写道："一个肯定的成功秘诀是采用1990年的协议，将其集中化，并快速迭代。"

Centralisation and lock-in have been incredibly lucrative. In fact, a16z has made billions from Meta, in which it was an early investor; one of a16z’s founders, Marc Andreessen, sits on Meta’s board to this day. Web3’s VC boosters may be counting on something like this happening again. And to a degree, it already is. Despite being a relatively recent phenomenon, web3 already exhibits signs of centralisation. Because of the complexity of the technology, most people cannot interact directly with blockchains—or find it too tedious. Rather they rely on intermediaries such as OpenSea for consumers and Alchemy for developers.

集中化和锁定已经获得了令人难以置信的利润。事实上，a16z已经从Meta公司赚取了数十亿美元，它是该公司的早期投资者；a16z的创始人之一Marc Andreessen至今仍是Meta公司的董事。Web3的风险投资助推器可能指望这样的事情再次发生。而且在某种程度上，它已经在发生了。尽管是一个相对较新的现象，Web3已经表现出集中化的迹象。由于技术的复杂性，大多数人不能直接与区块链互动，或者认为这太乏味了。相反，他们依靠中介机构，如消费者的OpenSea和开发者的Alchemy。

Albert Wenger of Union Square Ventures, a VC firm that started investing in web3 firms a few years ago, points to other potential “points of recentralisation”. One is that the ownership of the computing power that keeps many blockchains up to date is often very concentrated, which gives these “miners”, as they are called, undue influence. It could even allow them to take over a blockchain. In other systems the ownership of tokens is heavily skewed: at recently launched web3 projects, between 30% and 40% is owned by the people who launched them.

几年前开始投资web3公司的风险投资公司Union Square Ventures的Albert Wenger指出了其他潜在的 "再中心化的要点"。其中之一是，使许多区块链保持最新的计算能力的所有权通常非常集中，这使这些 "矿工"（他们被称为）具有不适当的影响力。它甚至可以让他们接管一个区块链。在其他系统中，代币的所有权是严重倾斜的：在最近推出的web3项目中，30%到40%是由推出这些项目的人拥有的。

These dynamics, combined with the latest crypto crash that may cool enthusiasm for the sector among investors, suggest that web3 is unlikely to displace web2 altogether. Instead, the future will probably belong to a mix of the two approaches, with web3 occupying certain niches. Whether or not people keep splurging on NFTs, for example, such tokens make a lot of sense in the metaverse, where they could be used to track ownership of digital objects and to move them from one virtual world to another. Web3 may also play an important role in the creator economy, another buzzy concept. Li Jin of Atelier, a VC firm, points out that NFTs make it much easier for creators of online content to make money from their wares. In this limited way, at least, even the masters of web2 see the writing on the wall: on January 20th both Meta and Twitter integrated NFTs into their platforms.

这些动态，再加上最近的加密货币崩溃，可能会冷却投资者对该行业的热情，表明web3不太可能完全取代web2。相反，未来可能会属于这两种方法的混合体，而web3将占据某些利基市场。例如，无论人们是否继续花钱购买NFT，这种代币在元空间中都有很大的意义，它们可以用来追踪数字对象的所有权，并将它们从一个虚拟世界转移到另一个。Web3也可能在创造者经济中发挥重要作用，这是另一个热门的概念。风险投资公司Atelier的李进指出，NFTs使在线内容的创作者更容易从他们的商品中赚钱。至少在这个有限的方面，即使是web2的主人也看到了墙上的字：1月20日，Meta和Twitter都将NFTs整合到他们的平台上。