If man in the state of nature be so free, as has been said; if he be absolute lord of his own person and possessions, equal to the greatest, and subject to no body, why will he part with his freedom, this empire, and subject himself to the dominion and control of any other power?

— — John Locke

In the last article, we discussed the difference between the two ideologies of Web3 and drew out the importance of digital assets for Web3. In this article, we focus on discussing the significance of Web3 for digital assets, and then reinforcing our conclusion that the core driver of Web3 is innovation around digital assets.

I’m sure you’re used to my writing logic. The quote I chose to start with is from John Locke, who is an influential English philosopher and social contract theorist, and commonly known as the “Father of Liberalism”. One of his quintessential contributions we usually consider to be his Labor theory of property, a theory of value, property, and ownership. Locke argues originally comes about by the exertion of labor upon natural resources and argued in support of individual property rights as natural rights. I don’t want to talk about it here, because there are so many philosophers who have done this, but I think Locke’s point of view can trigger our thinking and help us quickly enter this debate, the debate about property basically focus on three questions:

• What is property?

• What principles should be followed in the distribution of property ownership?

• Should the state intervene in the distribution of property?

Regarding the first question, I choose two representative arguments, the first is John Locke, who believes that property is a natural right derived from labor, nature itself has little value to society, and the value of commodities comes from the labor that people pay in the process of using natural resources to process and create commodities, and property is the proof of the labor spent in producing these commodities. The second argument comes from Benjamin Tucker, who is an American free-market individualist anarchist and libertarian socialist. He argues that the purpose of property is to solve the problem of scarcity, and that items related to people’s desires only become property when they are relatively scarce. For something to be economically scarce, it has to be “excludable” — one person’s use excludes others from using it.

In the field of modern economics, we generally divide property into four categories, personal property, real property, private property, intellectual property, and chattel slavery. And holding these two different views of property can lead to some interesting debates, such as intellectual property rights, the person holding the first view believes that these intangible things, such as ideas, ideas or plans, are created through human labor and What is produced by hard work should belong to a category of property, but those who hold the second point of view believe that these intangible things are not scarce in form, so these things cannot be an exclusive property.

Regarding the second question, also commonly referred to as the question of ownership, which is a key component of the development of the capitalist social system, Adam Smith said that one of the divine laws of justice is the protection of one’s property. Regarding the distribution of ownership, we have formed three general paradigms, including private ownership, public ownership, and collective ownership. This is relatively easy to understand. The so-called private ownership means that the ownership of property is owned by non-governmental legal entities such as individuals or enterprises. Collective ownership means that the ownership of property belongs to a specific collective. Public ownership is a subset of collective ownership.

Debates in the field of ownership systems usually revolve around two aspects. One is the criticism of private ownership, which usually focuses on exploitation, and the impact of the Labor theory of property. Most anarchists and socialists believe that it is unfair that the emergence of legal property forms makes private property a means of exploitation whereby the class with legal property can plunder the value of the proletariat’s labor ownership allocation. Criticisms against public ownership usually focus on two aspects. One is the fairness of value distribution. Usually, in public ownership, the value generated in the process of cooperative production is distributed in proportion to the labor contribution of individuals, but this relies on a special organization or institution, and this kind of bureaucracy usually sacrifices the interests of the few to meet the interests of the majority, which fails to bring about fair distribution results, and the second is the tragedy of the commons. Since individuals can open access to resources in public organizations, driven by egoism, individual behaviors usually seek self-interest in a way that damages the common interests, eventually leading to the exhaustion of resources.

The core of the third question is to discuss the relationship between the state and property. Modern politics usually believes that the state should be an organization that protects the legitimacy of the property of state citizens according to a certain principle of ownership distribution, and the way of protection is usually based on the formulation of laws and state violence agencies such as the police.

The debate on this issue mainly stems from anarchists, who believe that if the validity of property rights depends on whether the “property rights” need to be enforced by the state. Different forms of “property” require different levels of enforcement: intellectual property requires a lot of state intervention to enforce, ownership of distant physical property requires a lot, and ownership of carried items requires very little. By contrast, claiming one’s own body requires absolutely no state intervention. So some anarchists do not recognize the legitimacy of legal property, or only believe in assets that are fully controlled by themselves and based in part on contractual covenants.

After the above analysis, we have learned the modern definition of property and the concepts related to property. In fact, it took a long time to stimulate discussion to be unified, and some representative property views and property ownership distribution methods have been formed. However, with the rapid development of Web technology after the 1990s, the world view of Cyberspace gradually took shape. Many new problems have arisen, which are described in detail in the previous article on the development history of Cyberspace. After summarizing, I believe that the root causes of these problems are the following two problems, including the tragedy of the network commons and the Limitations of the Existing Digital Asset System.

First, a brief introduction to the tragedy of the commons, the tragedy of the commons is a situation in which individual users, who have open access to a resource unhampered by shared social structures or formal rules that govern access and use, act independently according to their own self-interest and, contrary to the common good of all users, cause depletion of the resource through their uncoordinated action. The concept originated in an essay written in 1833 by the British economist William Forster Lloyd, who used a hypothetical example of the effects of unregulated grazing on common land (also known as a “common”) in Great Britain and Ireland. The concept became widely known as the “tragedy of the commons” over a century later after an article written by Garrett Hardin in 1968.

In fact, the tragedy of the commons is happening in Cyberspace. As we can see in our previous introduction, the network infrastructure that Cyberspace relies on usually follows the principle of open protocols, that is, anyone can open access to network resources, which forms a huge Cyberspace commons, and the unlimited utilization of network resources is reappearing the tragedy of the commons, which can be reflected in the following three aspects:

• Excessive waste of public network resources, resulting in environmental pollution: Cyber-related hardware resources are usually scarce resources, not unlimited supply. Taking storage devices as an example, some open applications are very easy to encounter storage devices when audit management fails. It is exhausted and new services cannot be provided. Imagine a scenario where Wikipedia or Medium eventually exhausts storage resources due to a large number of self-interested behaviors, and in order to expand to accommodate more information, more hardware resources need to be produced, thus Additional unnecessary pollution to the environment.

• The heavily commercialized paradigm of cyberspace utilization lacks the spirit of humanism: When we abstractly understand the network as a public resource, specifically, it should represent an attention resource, and we will find that Cyber-related users, including technology companies or ordinary users, use the cyberspace to build monopoly-oriented commercial activities, which makes it difficult for non-profit humanistic information or applications to obtain sufficient resources.

• The high redundancy of invalid information increases the cost of information acquisition: The value of information in the cyberspace is self-evident, and the commons attribute makes invalid information redundant, which greatly affects the collection and acquisition of real effective information. Large interference greatly increases the cost of obtaining effective information, and this makes it easy for people to get lost in the desert of information, resulting in negative effects such as misjudgment, anxiety, and fear.

For these problems, the current mainstream solutions are usually based on censorship and access, and for more serious problems, resort to the law, but such solutions are obviously expensive, inefficient and clumsy, and usually the solution of the problem is lag, that is, the problem must be generated before it can be solved.

Next, I will introduce the infringement of users’ digital assets by network technology companies. In the discussion in the previous section, we have introduced relevant discussions around property. I personally agree with Andrew J. Galambos’ definition of property. He defines property as a person of life and all non-reproductive derivatives of his life, property having the following elements:

Original property, which is one’s life;

Main property, including thoughts, thoughts and actions;

Secondary property includes all tangible and intangible property derived as an individual’s primary property.

Under such a conceptual framework, digital assets can be considered as intangible assets, because the value of digital assets is often irrelevant to the physical equipment that carries it. You would not think that owning a Beatles record is equivalent to owning it. All of the songs, because the value of the songs comes from the creation of the band, the ownership of the songs should belong to the band, or the brokerage company signed by the band, so we can see that the ownership of digital assets is usually established in the contract. In contrast to the copyright legal system, a contract represents an agreement between relevant subjects. The content of this agreement describes the ownership of the relevant digital assets, and copyright law ensures the smooth execution of the contract.

However, this paradigm is usually inefficient, expensive and non-universal. First of all, the inefficiency is mainly reflected in the resolution of disputes that arise during the execution of the contract, since the transfer of ownership of digital assets is usually based on the signing of a contract by both parties, due to the complexity of the text system, contracts based on the text system are prone to disputes due to different semantic interpretations, so the execution of the contract will not be particularly smooth. When a dispute arises, only the relevant copyright laws can be relied on. However, compared with the emergence of new types of digital assets, the formulation of laws must be behind, because no matter what kind of legal system, it is not advisable to formulate laws based on metaphysical reasoning and deduction. Legislation is a hassle, imagine how many ups and downs the legislation around cryptocurrencies has gone through, so this approach is inefficient for the protection of contract enforcement for new types of digital assets.

Second, those who have had court experience will know that resorting to legal proceedings to resolve disputes means a lot of time, effort and cost, and this method is an expensive option, both in terms of time and money. Finally, it is non-universal. In different sovereign states, especially two states with different political philosophies, such as democratic states and religious states, their views of property may appear different, that is, property established within the legal framework of one party. The ownership system sometimes does not apply to the other party, which is often a problem in cross-border trade, so it is difficult to find or establish a universal concept of property and form relevant legal provisions.

Therefore, disputes over digital assets are a high-probability problem. And subject to the limitations of this paradigm, an unavoidable problem is becoming particularly serious with the rapid development of the network, that is, the illegal occupation of users’ digital assets by network technology companies. We know that the existing network application architecture usually adopts C/S Architecture, that is to say, the digital assets created or owned by users are stored in the database of these network technology companies in physical form, which is completely different from being stored in the user’s personal mobile hard disk, PC or mobile phone.

This situation has created soil for the encroachment of digital assets, which is mainly reflected in three aspects: the right to profit, the right to trade and the right to destroy: first, imagine the problem of non-public data leakage. Some cyber technology companies with ulterior motives use free software services to collect some of your data that you do not wish to make public, and sell it to the buyers who need it without permission, which reflects the encroachment of the right to profit; and the right to trade is usually limited by the product form. In order to pursue monopoly income, most of the cyber technology companies want to have loyal users, and allowing users to freely choose to withdraw their digital assets means the loss of users, which is usually not advocated; The last is the encroachment of the right to destroy. One of the simplest scenarios is that your favorite online game company goes bankrupt, and the game characters or virtual equipment you spend a lot of time building will disappear mercilessly, which is something you don’t want to see.

The arrival of Web3 allows us to see the possibility of further solving these problems, which is mainly reflected in two aspects: a more orderly collective ownership cyberspace, and a more advantageous implementation of digital assets.

First of all I think Web3 can make Cyberspace more orderly by issuing some kind of certificate of ownership type of cryptocurrency, thus creating a network of collective ownership. Generally speaking, the solution to the tragedy of the commons includes two common paradigms, the distribution of ownership and the establishment and enforcement of rules, and these are important features of Web3. Between the current mainstream Web3 infrastructure development paradigms, I think that It is more appropriate for a collective ownership network.

Taking Ethereum as an example, it is difficult to say that holding ETH means that you own a part of the network. After integrating into the POS model, you can think that ETH is equivalent to the dividend certificate of the Ethereum network to a certain extent, but the network is actually owned by the network. A state shared by all holders of this certificate, in which no one claims 100% exclusive ownership of a certain storage area or bandwidth, and the resources in the network will be freely and unrestrictedly used by ETH holders (Because any transaction needs to pay gas). The advantage of such a mechanism design is that by putting the network in a state of community co-management, it eliminates the tragedy of the network commons, which is embodied in:

• More reasonable utilization of network resources: In a collectively owned cyberspace, since cyberspace resources are no longer owned by unowned resources, their utilization will tend to be more reasonable, because obtaining a certain part of cyberspace resources usually means a cost;

• Low-cost network management: Since the cyberspace is jointly managed by the community, for self-interest, everyone spontaneously participates in cyberspace construction and maintenance because they become the owner of the cyberspace, which greatly reduces the cost of cyberspace management and maintenance. ;

• Network applications with more humanistic spirit: Due to the more reasonable use of the cyberspace, some non-profit and humanistic cyberspace applications will have room for development, and it will be easier to find sustainable business models;

The advantages of Web3 for digital assets are also a part that we cannot ignore. This is due to the fact that Web3 uses blockchain as the infrastructure of the data layer and application layer. Its advantages are:

• The blockchain provides us with a digital asset custody system, which not only allows us to achieve remote exclusive ownership of digital assets at the physical level, but also achieves effective proof of ownership of digital assets. Since the state information maintained by the blockchain has a very high cost of forgery and illegal modification, we can basically think that the blockchain has the characteristics of immutability. Compared with the third-party centralized server, through the blockchain Except for the owner, the digital assets under custody do not have the ability to modify or delete them. As long as you want, these digital assets will exist permanently at the physical level;

• Blockchain provides us with a low-cost, trusted transaction settlement system. With the asymmetric encryption algorithm, we have achieved effective proof of ownership of the corresponding digital assets through technology, which helps us to have the transaction rights of digital assets in the network environment, and this transaction rights do not need to rely on the permission of a third party, and the cost of the transaction process is small;

• Blockchain provides us with a non-controversial contract execution system. This is due to the so-called smart contracts. In the above explanation, we have already known that contracts based on the text system will cause semantic disputes, and it is inefficient and expensive to resolve such disputes through law, and the emergence of smart contracts can effectively solve the above-mentioned disputes The problem is, because the content of smart contracts does not depend on the text system, but only on code logic, it is not easy to cause disputes due to differences in culture or personal interpretation, and the execution process of smart contracts is open, which also makes the results of contract execution verifiable. All of these greatly improve the efficiency of contract execution around digital assets and reduce related costs;

To sum up, I think that Web3 will be better by building a cyberspace of collective ownership by virtue of its superiority in digital assets compared to other network paradigms.

If man in the state of nature be so free, as has been said; if he be absolute lord of his own person and possessions, equal to the greatest, and subject to no body, why will he part with his freedom, this empire, and subject himself to the dominion and control of any other power?

— — John Locke

In the last article, we discussed the difference between the two ideologies of Web3 and drew out the importance of digital assets for Web3. In this article, we focus on discussing the significance of Web3 for digital assets, and then reinforcing our conclusion that the core driver of Web3 is innovation around digital assets.

I’m sure you’re used to my writing logic. The quote I chose to start with is from John Locke, who is an influential English philosopher and social contract theorist, and commonly known as the “Father of Liberalism”. One of his quintessential contributions we usually consider to be his Labor theory of property, a theory of value, property, and ownership. Locke argues originally comes about by the exertion of labor upon natural resources and argued in support of individual property rights as natural rights. I don’t want to talk about it here, because there are so many philosophers who have done this, but I think Locke’s point of view can trigger our thinking and help us quickly enter this debate, the debate about property basically focus on three questions:

• What is property?

• What principles should be followed in the distribution of property ownership?

• Should the state intervene in the distribution of property?

Regarding the first question, I choose two representative arguments, the first is John Locke, who believes that property is a natural right derived from labor, nature itself has little value to society, and the value of commodities comes from the labor that people pay in the process of using natural resources to process and create commodities, and property is the proof of the labor spent in producing these commodities. The second argument comes from Benjamin Tucker, who is an American free-market individualist anarchist and libertarian socialist. He argues that the purpose of property is to solve the problem of scarcity, and that items related to people’s desires only become property when they are relatively scarce. For something to be economically scarce, it has to be “excludable” — one person’s use excludes others from using it.

In the field of modern economics, we generally divide property into four categories, personal property, real property, private property, intellectual property, and chattel slavery. And holding these two different views of property can lead to some interesting debates, such as intellectual property rights, the person holding the first view believes that these intangible things, such as ideas, ideas or plans, are created through human labor and What is produced by hard work should belong to a category of property, but those who hold the second point of view believe that these intangible things are not scarce in form, so these things cannot be an exclusive property.

Regarding the second question, also commonly referred to as the question of ownership, which is a key component of the development of the capitalist social system, Adam Smith said that one of the divine laws of justice is the protection of one’s property. Regarding the distribution of ownership, we have formed three general paradigms, including private ownership, public ownership, and collective ownership. This is relatively easy to understand. The so-called private ownership means that the ownership of property is owned by non-governmental legal entities such as individuals or enterprises. Collective ownership means that the ownership of property belongs to a specific collective. Public ownership is a subset of collective ownership.

Debates in the field of ownership systems usually revolve around two aspects. One is the criticism of private ownership, which usually focuses on exploitation, and the impact of the Labor theory of property. Most anarchists and socialists believe that it is unfair that the emergence of legal property forms makes private property a means of exploitation whereby the class with legal property can plunder the value of the proletariat’s labor ownership allocation. Criticisms against public ownership usually focus on two aspects. One is the fairness of value distribution. Usually, in public ownership, the value generated in the process of cooperative production is distributed in proportion to the labor contribution of individuals, but this relies on a special organization or institution, and this kind of bureaucracy usually sacrifices the interests of the few to meet the interests of the majority, which fails to bring about fair distribution results, and the second is the tragedy of the commons. Since individuals can open access to resources in public organizations, driven by egoism, individual behaviors usually seek self-interest in a way that damages the common interests, eventually leading to the exhaustion of resources.

The core of the third question is to discuss the relationship between the state and property. Modern politics usually believes that the state should be an organization that protects the legitimacy of the property of state citizens according to a certain principle of ownership distribution, and the way of protection is usually based on the formulation of laws and state violence agencies such as the police.

The debate on this issue mainly stems from anarchists, who believe that if the validity of property rights depends on whether the “property rights” need to be enforced by the state. Different forms of “property” require different levels of enforcement: intellectual property requires a lot of state intervention to enforce, ownership of distant physical property requires a lot, and ownership of carried items requires very little. By contrast, claiming one’s own body requires absolutely no state intervention. So some anarchists do not recognize the legitimacy of legal property, or only believe in assets that are fully controlled by themselves and based in part on contractual covenants.

After the above analysis, we have learned the modern definition of property and the concepts related to property. In fact, it took a long time to stimulate discussion to be unified, and some representative property views and property ownership distribution methods have been formed. However, with the rapid development of Web technology after the 1990s, the world view of Cyberspace gradually took shape. Many new problems have arisen, which are described in detail in the previous article on the development history of Cyberspace. After summarizing, I believe that the root causes of these problems are the following two problems, including the tragedy of the network commons and the Limitations of the Existing Digital Asset System.

First, a brief introduction to the tragedy of the commons, the tragedy of the commons is a situation in which individual users, who have open access to a resource unhampered by shared social structures or formal rules that govern access and use, act independently according to their own self-interest and, contrary to the common good of all users, cause depletion of the resource through their uncoordinated action. The concept originated in an essay written in 1833 by the British economist William Forster Lloyd, who used a hypothetical example of the effects of unregulated grazing on common land (also known as a “common”) in Great Britain and Ireland. The concept became widely known as the “tragedy of the commons” over a century later after an article written by Garrett Hardin in 1968.

In fact, the tragedy of the commons is happening in Cyberspace. As we can see in our previous introduction, the network infrastructure that Cyberspace relies on usually follows the principle of open protocols, that is, anyone can open access to network resources, which forms a huge Cyberspace commons, and the unlimited utilization of network resources is reappearing the tragedy of the commons, which can be reflected in the following three aspects:

• Excessive waste of public network resources, resulting in environmental pollution: Cyber-related hardware resources are usually scarce resources, not unlimited supply. Taking storage devices as an example, some open applications are very easy to encounter storage devices when audit management fails. It is exhausted and new services cannot be provided. Imagine a scenario where Wikipedia or Medium eventually exhausts storage resources due to a large number of self-interested behaviors, and in order to expand to accommodate more information, more hardware resources need to be produced, thus Additional unnecessary pollution to the environment.

• The heavily commercialized paradigm of cyberspace utilization lacks the spirit of humanism: When we abstractly understand the network as a public resource, specifically, it should represent an attention resource, and we will find that Cyber-related users, including technology companies or ordinary users, use the cyberspace to build monopoly-oriented commercial activities, which makes it difficult for non-profit humanistic information or applications to obtain sufficient resources.

• The high redundancy of invalid information increases the cost of information acquisition: The value of information in the cyberspace is self-evident, and the commons attribute makes invalid information redundant, which greatly affects the collection and acquisition of real effective information. Large interference greatly increases the cost of obtaining effective information, and this makes it easy for people to get lost in the desert of information, resulting in negative effects such as misjudgment, anxiety, and fear.

For these problems, the current mainstream solutions are usually based on censorship and access, and for more serious problems, resort to the law, but such solutions are obviously expensive, inefficient and clumsy, and usually the solution of the problem is lag, that is, the problem must be generated before it can be solved.

Next, I will introduce the infringement of users’ digital assets by network technology companies. In the discussion in the previous section, we have introduced relevant discussions around property. I personally agree with Andrew J. Galambos’ definition of property. He defines property as a person of life and all non-reproductive derivatives of his life, property having the following elements:

Original property, which is one’s life;

Main property, including thoughts, thoughts and actions;

Secondary property includes all tangible and intangible property derived as an individual’s primary property.

Under such a conceptual framework, digital assets can be considered as intangible assets, because the value of digital assets is often irrelevant to the physical equipment that carries it. You would not think that owning a Beatles record is equivalent to owning it. All of the songs, because the value of the songs comes from the creation of the band, the ownership of the songs should belong to the band, or the brokerage company signed by the band, so we can see that the ownership of digital assets is usually established in the contract. In contrast to the copyright legal system, a contract represents an agreement between relevant subjects. The content of this agreement describes the ownership of the relevant digital assets, and copyright law ensures the smooth execution of the contract.

However, this paradigm is usually inefficient, expensive and non-universal. First of all, the inefficiency is mainly reflected in the resolution of disputes that arise during the execution of the contract, since the transfer of ownership of digital assets is usually based on the signing of a contract by both parties, due to the complexity of the text system, contracts based on the text system are prone to disputes due to different semantic interpretations, so the execution of the contract will not be particularly smooth. When a dispute arises, only the relevant copyright laws can be relied on. However, compared with the emergence of new types of digital assets, the formulation of laws must be behind, because no matter what kind of legal system, it is not advisable to formulate laws based on metaphysical reasoning and deduction. Legislation is a hassle, imagine how many ups and downs the legislation around cryptocurrencies has gone through, so this approach is inefficient for the protection of contract enforcement for new types of digital assets.

Second, those who have had court experience will know that resorting to legal proceedings to resolve disputes means a lot of time, effort and cost, and this method is an expensive option, both in terms of time and money. Finally, it is non-universal. In different sovereign states, especially two states with different political philosophies, such as democratic states and religious states, their views of property may appear different, that is, property established within the legal framework of one party. The ownership system sometimes does not apply to the other party, which is often a problem in cross-border trade, so it is difficult to find or establish a universal concept of property and form relevant legal provisions.

Therefore, disputes over digital assets are a high-probability problem. And subject to the limitations of this paradigm, an unavoidable problem is becoming particularly serious with the rapid development of the network, that is, the illegal occupation of users’ digital assets by network technology companies. We know that the existing network application architecture usually adopts C/S Architecture, that is to say, the digital assets created or owned by users are stored in the database of these network technology companies in physical form, which is completely different from being stored in the user’s personal mobile hard disk, PC or mobile phone.

This situation has created soil for the encroachment of digital assets, which is mainly reflected in three aspects: the right to profit, the right to trade and the right to destroy: first, imagine the problem of non-public data leakage. Some cyber technology companies with ulterior motives use free software services to collect some of your data that you do not wish to make public, and sell it to the buyers who need it without permission, which reflects the encroachment of the right to profit; and the right to trade is usually limited by the product form. In order to pursue monopoly income, most of the cyber technology companies want to have loyal users, and allowing users to freely choose to withdraw their digital assets means the loss of users, which is usually not advocated; The last is the encroachment of the right to destroy. One of the simplest scenarios is that your favorite online game company goes bankrupt, and the game characters or virtual equipment you spend a lot of time building will disappear mercilessly, which is something you don’t want to see.

The arrival of Web3 allows us to see the possibility of further solving these problems, which is mainly reflected in two aspects: a more orderly collective ownership cyberspace, and a more advantageous implementation of digital assets.

First of all I think Web3 can make Cyberspace more orderly by issuing some kind of certificate of ownership type of cryptocurrency, thus creating a network of collective ownership. Generally speaking, the solution to the tragedy of the commons includes two common paradigms, the distribution of ownership and the establishment and enforcement of rules, and these are important features of Web3. Between the current mainstream Web3 infrastructure development paradigms, I think that It is more appropriate for a collective ownership network.

Taking Ethereum as an example, it is difficult to say that holding ETH means that you own a part of the network. After integrating into the POS model, you can think that ETH is equivalent to the dividend certificate of the Ethereum network to a certain extent, but the network is actually owned by the network. A state shared by all holders of this certificate, in which no one claims 100% exclusive ownership of a certain storage area or bandwidth, and the resources in the network will be freely and unrestrictedly used by ETH holders (Because any transaction needs to pay gas). The advantage of such a mechanism design is that by putting the network in a state of community co-management, it eliminates the tragedy of the network commons, which is embodied in:

• More reasonable utilization of network resources: In a collectively owned cyberspace, since cyberspace resources are no longer owned by unowned resources, their utilization will tend to be more reasonable, because obtaining a certain part of cyberspace resources usually means a cost;

• Low-cost network management: Since the cyberspace is jointly managed by the community, for self-interest, everyone spontaneously participates in cyberspace construction and maintenance because they become the owner of the cyberspace, which greatly reduces the cost of cyberspace management and maintenance. ;

• Network applications with more humanistic spirit: Due to the more reasonable use of the cyberspace, some non-profit and humanistic cyberspace applications will have room for development, and it will be easier to find sustainable business models;

The advantages of Web3 for digital assets are also a part that we cannot ignore. This is due to the fact that Web3 uses blockchain as the infrastructure of the data layer and application layer. Its advantages are:

• The blockchain provides us with a digital asset custody system, which not only allows us to achieve remote exclusive ownership of digital assets at the physical level, but also achieves effective proof of ownership of digital assets. Since the state information maintained by the blockchain has a very high cost of forgery and illegal modification, we can basically think that the blockchain has the characteristics of immutability. Compared with the third-party centralized server, through the blockchain Except for the owner, the digital assets under custody do not have the ability to modify or delete them. As long as you want, these digital assets will exist permanently at the physical level;

• Blockchain provides us with a low-cost, trusted transaction settlement system. With the asymmetric encryption algorithm, we have achieved effective proof of ownership of the corresponding digital assets through technology, which helps us to have the transaction rights of digital assets in the network environment, and this transaction rights do not need to rely on the permission of a third party, and the cost of the transaction process is small;

• Blockchain provides us with a non-controversial contract execution system. This is due to the so-called smart contracts. In the above explanation, we have already known that contracts based on the text system will cause semantic disputes, and it is inefficient and expensive to resolve such disputes through law, and the emergence of smart contracts can effectively solve the above-mentioned disputes The problem is, because the content of smart contracts does not depend on the text system, but only on code logic, it is not easy to cause disputes due to differences in culture or personal interpretation, and the execution process of smart contracts is open, which also makes the results of contract execution verifiable. All of these greatly improve the efficiency of contract execution around digital assets and reduce related costs;

To sum up, I think that Web3 will be better by building a cyberspace of collective ownership by virtue of its superiority in digital assets compared to other network paradigms.