US Congress ended a more special hearing, where important players in cryptocurrency world talked about Web 3.0 with congressmen in Capitol Hill. Coinbase, FTX were among the six cryptocurrency companies and organizations that were eager to testify on the growing importance of the market and industry of the regulation.
The hearing lasted for five hours. The meeting was held by the Financial Services Committee of the US House of Representatives. Members of both parties, including Republicans and Democrats, participated. The crypto companies in attendance were from FTX, Circle, Coinbase, Bitfury, Paxos and Stellar Development Foundation.
Cryptocurrency is a highly controversial area, and most of the previous hearings held in the US Congress revolved around the questioning of it by lawmakers. The most typical one is Meta (formerly Facebook) whose CEO Mark Zuckerberg attended the Washington Congress event for the cryptocurrency, Libra.
On October 24, 2019, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg attended a congressional hearing in Washington and accepted questions from congressmen. Although he repeatedly explained and promised that Libra would represent the interests of the United States, he faced criticism from many congressmen where he was called a robot and his expression was extremely embarrassing.
But two years later, this hearing on cryptocurrency was called as the friendliest to cryptocurrency in history, although some lawmakers still expressed concerns about cryptocurrency’s carbon emissions, anti-money laundering, and impact on the U.S. dollar., But more content is about understanding the technology of cryptocurrency and its current functions, in order to better supervise it.
It is worth noting that at this hearing, Brian Brook, the CEO of crypto mining company BitFury, also introduced the concept of Web3.0 to members of Congress. Web3.0 is a derivative of the current Internet’s underlying protocol World Wide Web. Within this concept, the Internet has experienced the Web1.0 era and is currently in the Web2.0 era. Web3.0 is what people expect for the next generation of the Internet. It means that machines can read any information (that is, the semantic web). Websites can provide smart selection and better information based on information (artificial intelligence). The Internet is ubiquitous (Internet of Things). More importantly, the ownership of Internet data will be decentralized.
In 1989, a team led by Tim Berners-Lee in CERN (European Institute of Particle Physics) submitted a new protocol for the Internet and a document system using the protocol. The team named this new system World Wide Web, or for short WWW (World Wide Web), its purpose is to enable scientists around the world to use the Internet to exchange their work documents. Later, this new system was designed to allow any user on the Internet to search and obtain documents from the databases of many document service computers, and gradually developed into the Internet as we know it today.
Brian Brook, former acting administrator of the U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) and current CEO of BitFury, said in response to congressmen: In the Web1.0 era, Internet content is only readable, similar to magazines, which can only be read but not interactive. Web2.0 The innovation of the times is that Internet content has become readable + writable. Internet users can not only receive content, but also create content, but these data have been commercialized by a few companies, including Facebook and Google. Differences in Web3.0 It is that users can own the ownership of Internet content. You cannot own the current Internet (that is Google and other companies), but you can own Ethereum. Web3 allows users to become the owners of the Internet, not just a monopoly.
By the way, Brian Brook explained that the essence of cryptocurrency is to allow users to own the underlying network. This was responded by Ms. Waters, Chairman of the Financial Services Committee of the US House of Representatives, and asked him to explain how cryptocurrency has integrated into the Internet revolution. Brian Brook used Bitcoin and Ethereum as examples, and pointed out that when users own these cryptocurrencies themselves, they also have partial ownership of the blockchain. Taking Ethereum as an example, users can directly use these Tokens that can represent the network to vote on its future development.