The evolution of the internet is like an ever-expanding universe. From its initial stage as a simple platform for displaying information, it has gradually transformed into today’s digital world full of interaction and multimedia. If we liken the development of the Web to an expansion of spatial dimensions, then Web1 can be seen as a two-dimensional textual world, where information flows unidirectionally and interaction is limited. With the integration of rich media such as images and videos, Web2 leaps into three-dimensional space, allowing users to consume and create content more richly, with social networks flourishing.

Today, we are standing at the gateway to a new dimension—Web3. Some believe that Web3 represents a “four-dimensional adaptive world,” whose core lies in a fundamental transformation in how trust is generated. The trust products of Web3 are no longer static information endorsed by centralized institutions, but “living, real, and dynamic products” that operate and evolve autonomously through decentralized mechanisms. And it is Bitcoin that has opened this door.

The Foundation of an Adaptive World: Complexity Emergent from Asymmetric Interactions

The underlying logic of the Web3 adaptive world can be summarized as “nonlinear adaptive complexity emerging from asymmetric interactions under the assumption that P ≠ NP.” This means that the operation of the system relies on the asymmetry between easy verification and hard problem-solving, with complex behaviors and values emerging through participant interactions.

Take Bitcoin as an example: its value does not come from any centralized authority but emerges through asymmetric interactions among three formal systems:

• The UTXO Formal System for Distributed Transaction Construction: UTXO (Unspent Transaction Output) is a decentralized identity system built on asymmetric cryptographic algorithms. Each UTXO is associated with a public key, and only users with the corresponding private key can control it. This forms the decentralized foundation for ownership and identity authentication.
• The Distributed POW Miner Module: Miners compete for the right to record new blocks by performing computationally difficult Proof of Work (POW). This distributed problem-solving process requires enormous computational power.
• The Unified and Centralized Distributed Ledger: Blockchain: The blockchain is a public, transparent, and tamper-proof distributed ledger that records all transaction history and the state of UTXOs, providing a consistent data foundation for the entire system.

The brilliance of Bitcoin lies in the asymmetric interactions between the UTXO account system and the blockchain structure, as well as between the POW miner’s problem-solving process and the blockchain. Constructing a valid transaction (spending a UTXO) is a distributed parallel-solving process, but verifying its validity on the blockchain is efficient and feasible. Similarly, the process of miners finding a valid block hash is extremely difficult, while verifying the validity of a new block is relatively simple.

Distributed UTXOs interact with the centralized blockchain through the carrier of Transactions, while distributed miners interact with the blockchain through the carrier of Blocks. This asymmetric interaction ensures the security of the system and the continuous emergence of value.

The Future of Web3: An Adaptive World Based on UTXO

Based on this kind of adaptive complex system, Web3 is expected to reconstruct various aspects of the Web2 world. One imaginative perspective is that Bitcoin’s UTXO account system could potentially replace traditional centralized account systems, such as Google’s email account system.

If UTXO can become a universal decentralized account system, future Web3 applications will no longer need to rely on centralized account systems managed by institutions but can directly reuse the UTXO system to build various applications. Since account systems are the foundational base of all human applications, once we have a universal decentralized UTXO account system, we can draw on Satoshi Nakamoto’s method of constructing Bitcoin payments (BTC transfers) through asymmetric interactions to design new products that solve a variety of real-world problems.

This suggests that we are building a decentralized adaptive internet atop the current human-operated internet infrastructure, which is the core vision of Web3. In this new internet, trust no longer depends on centralized authority but is autonomously generated and verified through decentralized protocols and mechanisms, ultimately giving rise to a range of “living, real, and dynamic products” that will profoundly reshape our digital lives and even the real world.

Of course, using the UTXO account system to build general-purpose Web3 applications still faces many technical challenges, such as complex user data management, permission control, and compatibility with existing internet infrastructure. However, this does not prevent us from envisioning the promising future of Web3. As the pioneer of Web3, Bitcoin has already demonstrated the power of asymmetric interaction and decentralized trust. The future Web3 world will blossom even more brilliantly upon this foundation.