Introduction
Web3, short for web 3.0, is a vision of the future of the Internet in which people operate on decentralized, quasi-anonymous platforms, rather than depend on tech giants like Google, Facebook and Twitter. There is no official definition for Web 3.0.
Before learning about web 3.0 let’s recap what web 1.0 and web 2.0 is.
Web 1.0
- Originated in the year 1991 and lasted till 2004.
- Mainly static web pages.
- No interactions, basically read-only, no signup etc.
- Didn’t support analytics, essentially was one big Wikipedia hyperlinked together
- Users were consumers
Web 2.0
- Originated around 2004 and is still prevalent now.
- The web evolved and the biggest change was interactivity
- Two-way information flow started to take place. Not only we were getting information from web pages, web pages also got information about us.
- Google, Facebook, YouTube etc emerged and started collecting data about users so as to serve us better and in turn, make us stay on their site longer leading to better revenue
- The data collection led to the age of targeted ads and along with it came the privacy issues.
- One interesting story about the targeted ads is the story of a guy knowing he is about to become a father through ads. This might have happened because his girlfriend searched for her symptoms and the machine learning algorithms put all pieces together for them.
Web 3.0
- Next phase of web development uses blockchain and the principles of decentralisation
- In web 2.0 we were the product and our data didn’t belong to us, but in web 3.0 we will be the owner of our content. We decide if it stays online or not.
- Odysee is a blockchain alternative to YouTube. Users are able to post their content and get tokens(a kind of reward similar to bitcoin) when others like it, they download and share with others and the process continues, similar to how a torrent network works.
- This will result in uncensored content on the internet and one potential downfall is a lot of illegal, immoral and hateful stuff being posted. But it would all be allowed.
- Experts say that in the future every company will be run by a decentralised group called DAO (Decentralised Autonomous Organization). What this means is that there won’t any more CEOs and presidents and the people having the most amount tokens will be able to vote on how the company is run.
- Digital Identity is separated from the real identity, this means that we can browse, download and buy from the web without being tracked.
Conclusion
Web 3.0 will be gradual and might take a decade to fully implement. Big centralised organisations like Facebook, Google etc will be having DAOs at their helm. The freedom and power given to individuals can easily be misused.