Web4

Context

This concerns: Society Protocol's Overview of Blockchain's Security Issues and reviews its proposed strategic solution, i.e. transitioning from Web3 to Web4.

Source URL : https://societyprotocol.io/articles/fake-everything

This is the second part of the synthesis by ChatGPT, as prompted by Michel Bauwens.

Contextual Quote

"verything we've explored reveals a fundamental truth: in current blockchain architectures, all metrics of decentralization can be falsified. Asset valuations, security mechanisms, governance structures, and even the underlying social coordination—all exist at the consent of invisible cabals. This isn't merely an occasional risk of bad actors, but an irreparable systematic reality embedded in the architecture of these systems.

As blockchain ecosystems continue to develop and gain mainstream adoption, we face a sobering future. Cabals will increasingly consolidate their power, systematically outcompeting traditional centralized institutions through regulatory arbitrage and opacity of operations. These cabals—operating sophisticated, distributed organizations with global reach—will gradually displace legacy financial cartels, not by delivering true decentralization, but by offering a valuable alternative that still concentrates power and wealth among a select few. The masses will continue to participate, lured by promises of decentralization and financial inclusion, while unknowingly strengthening very similar power structures to the ones they sought to escape.

Society Protocol aims to accomplish a fundamental reimagining of our approach to digital coordination, which is the only way to disrupt this inevitable trajectory.

Society Protocol disrupts this trajectory by bringing the social layer on-chain, creating genuine transparency around the very elements that cabals exploit. By establishing persistent, verifiable identities with real reputational stakes and immutable history, we transform the fundamental architecture of digital coordination—not through incremental improvement, but through a paradigm shift that fulfills the original promise of decentralization Web3 can never achieve. This evolution from blockchains Web3 vision to Web4 with Society Protocol represents a transformative approach to human coordination: one that enables genuine decentralization through visible, sovereign digital citizens, each with persistent reputations and meaningful state. By implementing true sybil-resistance and modeling the natural laws of time and energy, we create systems where digital identities have consequence, actions require real energy, history is verifiable, and trust emerges without centralized control. The future of human coordination isn't in static assets controlled by invisible cabals—it's in living systems where the social layer itself becomes the foundation."

- Society Protocol [1]

Discussion

Society Protocol's transition from Web3 to Web4

Society Protocol's proposed answer is not to abandon blockchain technology but to change what the blockchain represents.

In its view, Web3 primarily places assets on-chain. Society Protocol's proposed Web4 instead places the social layer on-chain. The fundamental unit is no longer merely the token or account but the persistent human Actor behind it.

This is presented as the transition from:

Web3: blockchain → assets → anonymous or pseudonymous accounts

to:

Web4: synchronized state → persistent Actors → people, relationships and assets

Society Protocol describes its Web4 system as having persistent identities, genuine sybil resistance and a history extending across an individual's life. Actors are intended to be born, accumulate history, participate in events, own assets and eventually die. Their identities therefore carry persistent consequences rather than being freely disposable blockchain addresses.

The proposed system would consequently bring identity, property, relationships, organizations, governance, laws, taxes and other social institutions into the synchronized state. In Society Protocol's terminology, its "Timeline" would record these interactions as a continuously synchronized history.

How Web4 is intended to solve the security problems

The proposed solution follows directly from the diagnosis.

First, it addresses fake assets by making the ownership set visible. If assets belong to persistent, sybil-resistant Actors rather than anonymous addresses, users can in principle determine whether an apparently decentralized ownership structure actually represents many independent people.

Second, it addresses fake security by making the human and organizational relationships behind validators and other security mechanisms visible. The important change is therefore not simply adding more validators, but making it harder for one actor to disguise itself as many independent participants.

Third, it addresses fake governance by making governance potentially based on persistent human Actors rather than freely created blockchain identities or token balances. The aim is to make something closer to "one person, one persistent identity" technically enforceable.

Fourth, it addresses fake state by explicitly putting the social layer into the synchronized state. Instead of pretending that consensus among computers is the whole of social consensus, Society Protocol attempts to model the people, organizations and relationships that actually determine whether a state is accepted.

The intended result is therefore a system in which the distinction between technical state and social state becomes much smaller. Society Protocol's Synchronized States article similarly describes the protocol as bringing the social layer on-chain and using sybil resistance to create a Synchronized State capable of performing functions normally associated with a state.

The deeper theoretical move

The most important conceptual move is therefore not "Web3 but more secure."

It is:

Web3: make the ledger decentralized.
Web4: make the participants decentralized and identifiable as persistent social actors.

Society Protocol believes that decentralizing the ledger while leaving the human layer opaque merely produces a distributed system that can still be controlled by a concentrated social group. Its proposed solution is to make the social actors themselves part of the state that the protocol synchronizes.

This also explains why Society Protocol places such emphasis on sybil resistance. In its model, sybil resistance is not merely an anti-spam mechanism. It is the foundation upon which meaningful decentralization, governance, valuation and security can be built.

The resulting conception of Web4 is consequently much more ambitious than a new blockchain architecture. It is an attempt to create a computational representation of society itself: persistent people, relationships, property, organizations, rules and history, all maintained as one synchronized state. Society Protocol explicitly describes this as a "reimagining of societal coordination from first principles."