What is the environmental impact of Web3?
This article is part of a special issue of VB. Read the full series here: Smart Sustainability.
Assessing the environmental impact of an ecosystem as vast as a digital communications network is a guessing game, even for industry experts. How many data centers can be identified? How many stealth centers are operating (especially in the military and government sectors)? How many are operating above or below their capacity? What power do they take “from the wall”?
The questions keep coming up, but when trying to measure the energy consumption and carbon footprint of the internet, you also have to consider all the transactions that take place on it. Web3, like the conventional web, has layers, so the only way to analyze its durability is by segments. The application layer will be the hardest in terms of environmental impact and ultimately climate change.
A useful evaluation of Web3 must contain this: if Web3 represents an evolution of Web2 for the good of humanity, it must also be more sustainable. This means less power for more online services that will come with the advent of Web3; at the moment here in mid-2022, that doesn't seem like a workable proposition.
Web3 definedOver the past 40 years, the Internet has been classified into three stages of development: Web1, Web2, and Web3. Web1 entered public use in the early to mid-1990s, before smartphones. Websites were mostly static, providing only text and a few images. Web2 came into play in the 2000s with interactive websites; portable devices (smartphones, tablets, smartwatches) allowed users not only to use content but also to create it. The cloud, which came into being in late 2006 with the introduction of AWS's S3 storage, changed everything, as it made available the full integration of society life on computers - from finance to personal life. .
The 2020s are a springboard to a new Internet, the Web3, which represents the decentralization of everything. Decentralization means not having a central agent responsible for major decisions; the opposite would be a service such as Google, which singularly handles many types of transactions on the Web2.
On Web3, we can expect to see and use many more 3D videos, augmented reality applications, faster and more impactful video games, AI/ML powered applications for business and entertainment, and a number of other things we don't normally see on today's Web2.
Decentralized finance, or DeFi, will be another central resident of Web3. The first major cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, was also the first Web3 project to succeed in this industry. Bitcoin is decentralized through a distributed architecture (called blockchain) in which each segment has many agents interacting with each other in search of consensus. Yes, it takes a lot of work and time, which goes against the idea of automation, which carries so many applications today.
Why cryptocurrency is gaining so much powerHere is an example of how cryptocurrency works in democratized online transactions:
Joe and Diane want to make a sell transaction on the bitcoin network. To do this, it must be verified, validated and registered. The people in charge of validating the transactions are the “miners” who compete with each other to be selected for this service. Every time a miner does their work, the miner receives a bitcoin reward. When a miner has created a new block in the network containing valid transactions, other miners will verify that everything is correct. If there are any inconsistencies in the information, that block of transactions is rejected and another miner will be selected to redo the job.Sounds more complicated than most people would like? Probably, and that's why this type of transaction can take a long time to become commonplace. Yet the idea of having a universal currency unrelated to governments or other institutions (such as banks and hedge funds) is appealing to a growing number of people around the world.
Currently, the computational load required to perform these transactions is alarmingly high, but relatively few people...
This article is part of a special issue of VB. Read the full series here: Smart Sustainability.
Assessing the environmental impact of an ecosystem as vast as a digital communications network is a guessing game, even for industry experts. How many data centers can be identified? How many stealth centers are operating (especially in the military and government sectors)? How many are operating above or below their capacity? What power do they take “from the wall”?
The questions keep coming up, but when trying to measure the energy consumption and carbon footprint of the internet, you also have to consider all the transactions that take place on it. Web3, like the conventional web, has layers, so the only way to analyze its durability is by segments. The application layer will be the hardest in terms of environmental impact and ultimately climate change.
A useful evaluation of Web3 must contain this: if Web3 represents an evolution of Web2 for the good of humanity, it must also be more sustainable. This means less power for more online services that will come with the advent of Web3; at the moment here in mid-2022, that doesn't seem like a workable proposition.
Web3 definedOver the past 40 years, the Internet has been classified into three stages of development: Web1, Web2, and Web3. Web1 entered public use in the early to mid-1990s, before smartphones. Websites were mostly static, providing only text and a few images. Web2 came into play in the 2000s with interactive websites; portable devices (smartphones, tablets, smartwatches) allowed users not only to use content but also to create it. The cloud, which came into being in late 2006 with the introduction of AWS's S3 storage, changed everything, as it made available the full integration of society life on computers - from finance to personal life. .
The 2020s are a springboard to a new Internet, the Web3, which represents the decentralization of everything. Decentralization means not having a central agent responsible for major decisions; the opposite would be a service such as Google, which singularly handles many types of transactions on the Web2.
On Web3, we can expect to see and use many more 3D videos, augmented reality applications, faster and more impactful video games, AI/ML powered applications for business and entertainment, and a number of other things we don't normally see on today's Web2.
Decentralized finance, or DeFi, will be another central resident of Web3. The first major cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, was also the first Web3 project to succeed in this industry. Bitcoin is decentralized through a distributed architecture (called blockchain) in which each segment has many agents interacting with each other in search of consensus. Yes, it takes a lot of work and time, which goes against the idea of automation, which carries so many applications today.
Why cryptocurrency is gaining so much powerHere is an example of how cryptocurrency works in democratized online transactions:
Joe and Diane want to make a sell transaction on the bitcoin network. To do this, it must be verified, validated and registered. The people in charge of validating the transactions are the “miners” who compete with each other to be selected for this service. Every time a miner does their work, the miner receives a bitcoin reward. When a miner has created a new block in the network containing valid transactions, other miners will verify that everything is correct. If there are any inconsistencies in the information, that block of transactions is rejected and another miner will be selected to redo the job.Sounds more complicated than most people would like? Probably, and that's why this type of transaction can take a long time to become commonplace. Yet the idea of having a universal currency unrelated to governments or other institutions (such as banks and hedge funds) is appealing to a growing number of people around the world.
Currently, the computational load required to perform these transactions is alarmingly high, but relatively few people...
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