Cai Wensheng, Feng Bo, Zeng Ming Talk: The Evolution from Web1 to Web3 | Hong Kong Web3 Carnival

Moderator: Zeng Ming, former Chief Strategy Officer of Alibaba

Guests: Cai Wensheng, angel investor, chairman of Meitu;

Feng Bo, founder of Dragonfly.xyz

From Web1 to Web3, every evolution of the network paradigm will lead to a change in the social model. At the 2023 Hong Kong Web3 Carnival, co-hosted by Wanxiang Blockchain Lab and HashKey Group and hosted by W3ME, Angel Investor & Chairman of Meitu Cai Wensheng, Dragonfly.xyz Founder Feng Bo, and former Alibaba Chief Strategy Officer Zeng Ming gathered for a roundtable discussion to discuss the opportunities and challenges brought by the evolution process from Web1 to Web3 to society, enterprises and individuals. The round table was chaired by Zeng Ming.

Zeng Ming: Distinguished guests, good afternoon! After listening to the very heavy content of the day, you have changed the rhythm and the way you have changed a little. The common feature of the three of us is that the most important thing in our careers and lives is that we have accompanied the Internet since the early 90s, whether as direct practitioners, investors, or researchers, we have seen the development of the Internet to the mobile Internet and AI, and we have also witnessed the development of Crypto in the past 7 or 8 years. I would like to take this opportunity to share with you the various success stories, failures, and “rumors” I have seen over the years, and share with you what I have learned from the past and see the possible development trends in the future.

Cai Wensheng: As Zeng Ming said, when Feng Bo and I appeared, everyone often introduced me and Feng Bo as “people who worked from Web1 to Web3”. This seems to be a compliment, but it actually shows that we have not succeeded from Web1 to Web3, and we have been on the road. But I still have to praise myself, many people from Web1 to Web3 are gone, but we are still there, which means that we are veterans, and veterans do not die, but are slowly withering.

From Web1 more than 20 years ago, to Web2 and then to Web3, times have been changing, but Feng Bo and Zeng Ming and I were all involved in the earliest days. I just happened to see on the Internet today that “why is this summit called Web3 and not Web3.0?” is actually different, Web1.0, Web2.0, Web3.0 are Web1, Web2, Web3 from a technical point of view, why is it called Web3? It is also the third generation of the Internet.

In my own understanding, Web1 is the era of Yahoo and Sina, and that era was centralized, and the information we need is provided by Sina, Yahoo, etc. Web2 is Google, Baidu, WeChat, Facebook, you can interact with the boot, and you can have a choice when you boot the boot. But the problem that Web2 doesn’t solve is that registering an account requires WeChat consent or even Twitter consent. One day Twitter is unhappy, even Trump’s account can be closed, and you can’t sue it. The core of Web3 is that there will also be platforms in the future, but registering an account does not require the consent of the platform.

Second, you can take ownership of the data.

Third, the data you have can be monetized, valuable, and become the value owner of the platform, which is the core change.

I’ll start with that.

Feng Bo: I have observed that most of the participants are entrepreneurs, and Hong Kong is a good platform for you to start a business in Hong Kong.

In the industry, today is still in the Internet era, Web3 in the Internet era is just a codename, and the best Internet products for the next generation of Internet applications are Bitcoin and Ethereum, not Toutiao and Meituan. On the basis of the next generation, the second half of the Internet begins, using the form of the Internet to manage and interact with assets and valuable information.

There’s no real Web3 company yet, and now everyone is sitting here, why are there so many people? because everyone is looking for direction. Today is just a prospect, and as for what Web3 is, everyone really doesn’t know. Professor Zeng may know a little more than we do, so let’s look forward to it.

Cai Wensheng: Bo Ge first invested in Sina in the first nine years, and also entered the mobile Internet in the past two thousand and ten years, what is the difference between the mentality at that time and the current investment in Web3?

Feng Bo: At that time, the first company was AsiaInfo, which was in Kabo, the overall infrastructure of the Internet, like Ding Jian’s invention of dial-up Internet, ChinaNet, and then Sichuan Online, Shanghai Online, Sina was behind, from SSR Net, at that time we invested in software companies, and software companies saw the opportunity of the Internet, and there was BBS at that time, so they said that BBS should be changed to something that can be used by society.

It’s interesting to talk about the history of SSS Net for professional software engineers, just like DeFi is used now, and DeFi is used now for professionals and are trained. Who will use BBS? DeFi will go through the same process, and DeFi will be like opening a refrigerator, microwave oven, or mobile phone in the future, without so many cumbersome steps, and then DeFi will become the most important financial means of human civilization.

When I arrived in Web2, the first company I invested in was Douban, when Wu Shichun came to me when he started his business, he introduced Chen Hua who did search to me, and we made Kuxin Company. But at that time, the search was to crawl a lot of useless information, and then we invited Yiming, tried train tickets, travel, and real estate information, but none of them had good information value, and then sold the company. Later, Yiming tried to make real estate with things, but it didn’t work out.

At that time, the mobile Internet began, and the mobile Internet screen was small, so it needed news headlines, and everyone read the headlines, so he named it “Today’s Headlines” as a starting point.

Entrepreneurs, you should also think about it, the real methodology is not a 360-degree turn, but fine-tuning, fine-tuning can find a very big opportunity, Web3 is a good opportunity for all entrepreneurs.

Dr. Feng first joined Sina in 1997 until the bubble burst in 2000 and then suspended. Zhang Yiming was the first to vote when he was doing Kuxin, but because he voted too early, he didn’t follow up later.

Feng Bo: The Crypto industry is also like this, we are experiencing great progress in human civilization, whether it is infrastructure construction or application development, it is not local, just like the Internet, although there is local Adoption, but the most important thing is the basic update, technological update, and social revolution of all mankind. Don’t be in a hurry in the process, because Crypto is too free, one click can ruin a lifetime, and too free will cause a lot of unnecessary sacrifices. Entrepreneurs should pay attention to the most fundamental and essential innovation, let the times unfold slowly, and don’t be in a hurry.

Cai Wensheng: Actually, I am the same, my first entrepreneurial project at that time was the navigation website 265 in the Web1 era, which was sold to Google in 2008 and sold for 20 million US dollars, and I am already very satisfied. But then I had a good friend Pang Dongsheng, who imitated 265 and made 2345, and later listed on the A-share market, with a maximum of 40 billion yuan, so sometimes it’s not right to cash out too early.

Later, I started Meitu on the mobile Internet, and it was too early, and the earliest short video was Meipai from Meituan, but because it came out too early, I didn’t think about it seriously, so the opportunity was given to Kuaishou and Douyin.

The inspiration from my failure experience and Feng Bo is that the entrepreneurial industry is a long-distance race, and sometimes don’t worry too much about short-term benefits, if you focus too much on the immediate value, you will not be able to get the maximum development.

When I came to the venue today, I was very shocked, and there were many people outside the venue. I’m afraid to attend this kind of occasion now, because when you go to this occasion, countless people will want to take pictures and exchange WeChat with you. I miss 20 years ago, when I didn’t know anyone in Beijing, I could sit in the audience and listen to others’ sharing, or I could take the initiative to find useful things I wanted. Everyone should cherish their time as an unknown person, because that is a good opportunity to accumulate.

Feng Bo: I ask Professor Zeng a question, you have studied deeply, in the future technological revolution, one is the form of Web3 applications, one is Crypto, and the other is AI, how do you think these three things will develop in the next ten years?

Zeng Ming: Discussing the future is the riskiest thing.

Feng Bo: It’s also the safest thing to do, because no one knows.

Zeng Ming: Everyone uses slightly different words, and I discuss Web3 as an overall concept that represents the big technological changes in the future. It has three drivers of technological changes, but which one is the hottest one is the hottest Metaverse about three years ago, and the technological driving forces behind the Metaverse are actually AR and VR.

Speaking of “investing too early”, I went to see the demo of Magicleap’s AR glasses for the first time. The first thing I felt after reading it was that it wasn’t a question of whether it worked well or not, it was that you really couldn’t tell what was real and what was virtual in the future. The latter product has some passes in Energy saving and Portability, and finally the product does not come out. But if AR technology broke through at that time, it was actually a big breakthrough in human-computer interaction, from the earliest keyboard to the thumb input of mobile phones, and then to the voice that is now becoming popular, voice has also gone for 10 years. The next step would be a creative breakthrough if you could interact with AI or the Internet through your eyes. And then there’s brain-computer connectivity. This is a breakthrough in human-computer interface, and in this sense, AR and VR are still very exciting technologies.

If Apple’s products this year can surprise everyone, it will be a big breakthrough, and if it doesn’t, it may have to be tossed for another two or three years.

Second, we have been talking about the development of Blockchain and Crypto, from Bitcoin to now only more than ten years, the success is with Bitcoin’s strong consensus, Ethereum New computing platform, Smart contracts. Crypto is essentially a revolution in production relations, which provides a decentralized network that can make the circulation and trading of assets more efficient, but the problem now is that there are not enough digital assets to circulate and trade.

I feel that Crypto is in an awkward phase of going from 1.0 to 2.0. On the one hand, Infrastructure needs to continue to make breakthroughs, which is why Layer2 has received so much attention in the past two years, and ZK has made many breakthroughs, because the Ethereum ecosystem or other supply chain ecosystems must solve the problems of scalability, applicability, and cost on the basis of security and privacy protection. On the basis of the development of infrastructure, the next round of breakthroughs in application innovation will be formed.

Originally, I was relatively pessimistic last year, and I didn’t think the next wave of Crypto would develop so quickly. But in the past six months, the big breakthrough in AI is still very shocking, and I think GPT is a technological breakthrough in general artificial intelligence.

Is ChatGPT the final winner? Is it the impact form of this round of intelligent AI products? There are still a lot of variables.

To sum up, I think the three pillars of Web3 technology, AI, have surprised us and entered the next stage of development, and we will see great breakthroughs in the next two years. Personally, I believe that the breakthrough of AI technology will bring great value to the Crypto world, and AI will create a lot of digital assets, which can bring greater value to all participants through Blockchain and Crypto. The combination of these two could lead to the creator economy of the future, and I think that’s a big direction. In that sense, we will usher in Crypto 2.0.

If AR and VR glasses take two or three years to brew, I think the first big bang of Web3 will usher in about three years. Whether it’s the application or the infrastructure, it’s going to be very exciting, and that big bang should move the economy forward for about 10 years.

Feng Bo: Today, Hong Kong welcomes everyone to participate in Web3, and wants to transform itself into a new city in the process of the evolution of new civilization. Let’s look back, what kind of civilization is we in now? I think we are moving towards a software civilization and saying goodbye to industrial civilization.

In the software civilization, we already have the value-anchored Bitcoin, and the best product created by human beings with the Internet is Bitcoin, because the previous business model has changed the local Meituan and Toutiao, but Bitcoin has changed how people make money and how to anchor value, which is the biggest product of the Internet.

The second success is Ethereum, which is a genetic organism that represents the trust mechanism of the future software civilization. On this basis, when we enter this civilization, the big bang of Web3 is based on this, and the future depends on the countless new applications created by everyone. Where did this app come from? We don’t know, the times and the aesthetics are correct.

Cai Wensheng: Why are Web3 and blockchain so difficult? Because it is more of a change in production relations, touching on the change of organizational structure and even the structure of the state, it will definitely be distrusted or even hindered by the original traditional vested interests.

Now the development of AI means an increase in productivity, and any country and society must embrace it. AI can drive Web3 to achieve greater development, so I agree with Professor Zeng Ming that the next three years may produce a big explosion.

The development of the Internet in the past 20 years has been more about the change of information, and has not touched the level of value and redistribution, but now it has arrived. It’s like the Internet hasn’t changed the banking system much before, at best it’s made a little more efficient. The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank in the United States may also be an opportunity for these traditional banks to rethink whether they want to embrace Crypto and Web3.

Feng Bo: Today, there is no economic crisis, there is no financial crisis, it is the crisis of fiat currency, and the crisis of fiat currency is how the dollar is made, how it is distributed, how it is distributed, and how it is stored, and this system has completely failed. The counterparty of the US dollar is Bitcoin, what does Bitcoin create? decentralized governance structure, mining, blockchain technology. Continuing this technology, mankind has only begun a series of developments of Ethereum.

This thing is a technological and social revolution, and the Internet has changed how human beings exchange value, how to exchange labor, how to exchange financial services.

DeFi is like e-commerce facing traditional trade, so in the future, if we want to move the entire financial service to the chain, this large system will require a long infrastructure process.

Zeng Ming: I would like to add two points, which is very interesting, the previous technological revolution was technology-neutral for society, and only the technological revolution of blockchain is very different.

Let’s start with BTC, BTC has a very clear value on the first day of its birth, and decentralization to today’s Network society, it has a very clear value.

Feng Bo: The individual is the foundation, the freer, the more efficient, the two engines of human civilization: freedom and efficiency. The Internet is already free and efficient, but Web2 companies are making it less free, but it’s efficient.

Now Web3 is pure freedom and pure efficiency, freedom and efficiency are the most advanced systems, and human civilization will always evolve towards advanced and systems.

Zeng Ming: There are two very relevant and interesting questions here, Web2 to Web3 user migration.

If you follow the definition of Web3 I just mentioned, in fact, the fundamental problem of this problem is that the original Crypto environment cannot make applications with a large number of users. If we really put everything from the perspective of Web3, we have breakthroughs in AI technology, Crypto as the infrastructure of the value network, and there may be technological breakthroughs in AR and VR in the future.

We can imagine that maybe in two or three years there will be a very shocking game, which uses NFTs, uses all the value exchange networks, and actually uses AIGC technology to bring a breakthrough in experience. If you can still see it with VR glasses at that time, it will be a completely immersive experience, and then it will be a product that has reached a qualitative leap in Web2, and it may be the prototype of complete Web3 technology, and then the migration of users will naturally occur.

The migration of users from Web2 to Web3 over the past year or so is a false proposition in my opinion. When ChatGPT appeared today, it had 100 million users in two months, no one was discussing how to migrate from Google, and everyone’s reaction on the first day was that Google was going to be finished. Everyone is thinking of countless ways to move the so-called traditional Web2 users to Crypto and move to Web3 in the narrow sense, but I think that is going in the wrong direction, and we must not have created enough user value to let users come up directly.

Feng Bo: I think the biggest difference between Web2 and Web3, or Web3 and Web2, is the difference in aesthetics. The great migration has begun, and as for which bridge the crowd crosses, you may not know.

The first win for e-commerce was SaaS in 2002, and SaaS was locked up at home for the first time. But after SaaS, many people are trying e-commerce for the first time. Back in the year 2000, there was a panel dedicated to what kind of users are suitable for e-commerce, and the conclusion was all humans, and we spent a long time discussing what kind of users are suitable for Crypto?

For example, when the first Online World Cup penalty video was sent to Sina, it took us 4 hours to record it, and how did we design Tiktok from then on? In the same way, the evolution of human beings and the instrumental civilization are based on one system after another, and we are only in the early systems today.

Cai Wensheng: Let me add that the popularity of large-scale users may have a certain relationship with hardware and technology.

Indeed, Web1 China’s Internet in 2003, when there were only 20 million users, in 2003 SARS happened, everyone at home, at that time it was the game that drove its development, and e-commerce was the next two years, when Shanda came out with the game “Legend”, which was the emergence of an application. The second application is bandwidth, which was basically no broadband subscribers in China until 2003 and entered broadband in 2003.

Feng Bo: The most troublesome thing at that time was the charge, and the SMS charge saved the Internet for many years.

Cai Wensheng: The explosion of the mobile Internet is related to two things, in the early days, he had been investing in the mobile Internet from 2004 to 2008, and he had invested in the Saipan system at that time. Including HTC at that time, the system was not good enough, the technology was not comprehensive, the iPhone was born in 2009, including Android in 2010, the entire operating system brought a huge revolution.

Taking China as an example, the real popularity in China was the emergence of Huawei and Xiaomi in 2011 and 2012, which successfully reduced the selling price of mobile phones to less than 2,000 yuan.

Feng Bo: After the new mobile phone came out, the highest installed capacity at that time was Toutiao and Dianping, because after buying a mobile phone, it must be installed.

Cai Wensheng: Google has just come out with seven or eight thousand yuan for the first generation and the first unit, and it is difficult for you to accept.

The Crypto we are talking about, now the Ethereum fee has been reduced to 1 or 2 US dollars, but it is still equivalent to more than a dozen yuan.

The second condition, like the game in 2003, is that the game is the easiest to pull the user. As Bo Ge said just now, in 2004 and 2005, he made money by sending text messages through SP, which was a bit of a game entertainment.

Feng Bo: I voted for OKEX, and Lao Xu told me before, do you know? If you think about it today, the banking system of the dollar has collapsed. I believe that in three years, there will be 2 billion people in the world who will deposit digital currency, and it doesn’t matter whether it is earned by games, running, or playing 3D mahjong, the important thing is that DeFi will become the financial system that the world depends on for survival. Including NFTs, NFTs are a tool, NFTs are the smallest economy of all mankind, just like Tiktok is the smallest TV station in the world.

We are now experiencing a technological revolution that for the first time since human civilization has taken care of everyone. The original innovations were all Benefit rulers, and this was a revolution for all.

Zeng Ming: In this sense, only the three of us have discussed a lot and have a lot of consensus.

I think Bitcoin is a bit like a genius product that came out of nowhere, a little bit out of its time, and we spent a lot of time pushing the values and worldview behind Bitcoin a big step forward through a round of innovation in blockchain, Ethereum, and DeFi.

I once chatted with a friend, and at the end of the conversation, he repeatedly asked a question: Will all the companies of Crypto be utopias in the end? I said at the time that even if it is a utopia, the civilization of human society is driven by the social practice of utopia again and again, and every utopia will always leave something valuable to push society forward.

Thanks to the development of AI, in the Web3 era, the next few technological innovations will have a huge explosive force.

As we’ve said before, the whole Crypto is like a robot, not a human-to-human collaboration, but more like a machine-to-machine collaboration. If AI explodes, it’s more about machine-to-machine. Ethereum’s smart contracts are the simplest commands, but simple commands that can be executed by machines are probably the smartest in the machine world.

After so many years of hard work for the future, maybe there will soon be a real technological explosion, and my feeling is getting stronger and stronger.

Cai Wensheng: We know that the development of technology will bring a lot of unemployment, just like the emergence of cars and tractors at that time, many farmers lost their jobs. More than 100 years ago, 95% of the United States were farmers, now less than 2%, and later the development of the tertiary industry (information industry) has left industrial workers unemployed.

Will the development of AI in the future make most of them unemployed?

Feng Bo: Better employment.

Cai Wensheng: I think Web3 can solve this problem. What do you do with the remaining 80 percent?

For example, when I was in my fifties, every time I went back to my hometown, I found that my classmates had not worked every day for 20 years, playing mahjong every day, and my hometown was rural, and they did not do farm work.

Cai Wensheng: 80% of them may not be able to find a job in the future, but they can still make money. In the future, playing games will also give you money, and in the future, you will also be given money when you watch movies, and what should be entertaining in the future can also make money through Web3, solving 80% of employment in disguise.

Feng Bo: Better employment is hard work in the farmland, the same.

Zeng Ming: We still have a few minutes to spare, what else do you two want to talk about?

Feng Bo: I think Hong Kong has chosen a good historical time to welcome entrepreneurs like you. Hong Kong has traditional finance, and there are hard-working Hong Kong people, if Hong Kong continues the current momentum, it will definitely become an economically important city in the future, and I also wish Hong Kong and so many friends who support Hong Kong to usher in a new financial and technological spring.

Cai Wensheng: In fact, before each major reform, most people are blindly optimistic in the short term, thinking that they will soon change all aspects of the world, but they are always too pessimistic about the medium and long term.

I remember in 2000, when Wang Juntao was the CEO of 8848, he held a 24-hour survival trial, allowing several people to watch a room and give him cash to see if he could survive. At the time, we could all imagine that the Internet had made it impossible for us to eat, but we still have to eat. Looking back over the past 20 years, the Internet has indeed changed everything around us, the way we communicate, the way we shop, the way we entertain.

Feng Bo: Aren’t we making a bet? Three people say when humans don’t eat, I say it’s 200 years, you say 20 years.

Cai Wensheng: The three of us were having dinner at noon, and Feng Bo asked his child, “In 200 years, do you want to eat?” and his child replied, “No.” Zeng Ming and I both criticized Feng Bo, you are too pessimistic, my point of view with Zeng Ming is that in about 30 years, we may not eat anymore.

Feng Bo: Now there are 1.5 million people in Japan who don’t leave their homes, just doing what they want to do on the Internet, where they can make money and eat some very simple drinks and food.

Cai Wensheng: Many people will fasting now, and there is one person who has already experimented, Kuzweil, the author of “The Singularity is Near”, who has lived by taking pills every day in recent years, and one day he may not even use pills, just charge it, dare to imagine.

Now we do often encounter short-term difficulties, for example, I used to ask my friend for many years to buy bitcoin and ethereum, and then I was very uncomfortable, because he told me every few days that it fell again, and I said why don’t you look at this matter by year? If you look at it on a daily basis, on a yearly basis, Bitcoin and Ethereum are often in a state of decline. If the time is extended to 2009 to the present, it will increase tens of thousands of times. Ethereum appeared in 2014 for only a few cents, and now it has risen tens of thousands of times.

If you stretch the time and take the year as the dimension, the industry is still developing rapidly. In the same way, AI may be combined with Web3, and in the next 20 years, it’s hard to imagine what the next 20 years will look like, but people must be optimistic and positive. There is a good saying, because you believe, you will see in the end.

I think the fundamental reason is that after 2015, the dividends created by technological progress are not enough to drive the global economy to move forward. Perhaps in the next three to five years, when various technological advances converge and we enter the next technological explosion cycle, it may lead to further development of the global economy, and the overall environment will be much better.

Thank you!