Web 3.0

What is web 3.0?

Web 3.0, also known as Web3 is the next iteration of the world wide web. which incorporates concepts including decentralization and token-based economics.

To better understand web3, we need to understand the evolution of world wide web.

What is Web 1.0?

Web 1.0 was the first iteration of the web. Most participants were consumers of content, and the creators were typically developers who build websites that contained information served up mainly in text or image format. Web 1.0 lasted approximately from 1991 to 2004.

Web 1.0 consisted of sites serving static content instead of dynamic HTML. Data and content were served from a static file system rather than a database, and sites didn't have much interactivity at all.

Think of Web 1.0 as the read-only web.

What is Web 2.0?

The web in its current form, commonly referred to as web2, also known as the interactive and social web.

In the web2 world, users don’t have to be a developer to participate in the creation process. Many apps are built in a way that easily allows anyone to be a creator.

If anyone wants to craft a thought and share it with the world, they can. If anyone want to upload a video and allow millions of people to see it, interact with it, and comment on it, it can be done.

Web2 is simple, really, and because of its simplicity more and more people around the world are becoming creators.

The web in its current form is really great in many ways, but there are some areas where we can do a lot better.

Think of Web 2.0 as the read- write web. ​

Problems with web 2

Web 2 also called the participatory web or social web, refers to websites that emphasize user-generated content, ease of use, participatory culture and interoperability (i.e., compatibility with other products, systems, and devices) for end users.

Today’s internet allows global coordination via a set of intermediaries, providing a digital social trust layer for strangers to interact: from Facebook, whatsapp, Uber, eBay & AirBnB. Today these entities are the kingmakers of the digital world.

Web 2.0 radically shrunk the latency and cost at which people & businesses could trade information & work with geographically distributed counterparties they didn’t necessarily know, via trusted intermediaries. Truly global businesses started to form, as the reach of counterparties expanded by a few orders of magnitude. At its heart, today’s internet allows global coordination via a set of intermediaries, providing a digital social trust layer for strangers to interact: from Facebook, whatsapp, Uber, eBay & AirBnB. Unfortunately we’ve become overly dependent on these platforms, and when they move from “attract” to “extract”, their users (whether individuals or businesses) suffer via higher fees or platform risk (i.e. the platform has the power to destroy your business running on it). While today’s interactions might magically and reliably take place on a global scale, it is predominantly the $200Bn digital advertising business, with ‘we the users’ as the product, which fuels this machine. It is now also broadly understood that these platforms of the ‘post truth’ world have created echo-chambers within which unfiltered and unashamedly populist or indeed fallacious claims reverberate and reinforce — sometimes with chaotic consequences.

Privacy

While web 2.0 is the web we’ve known and loved, there are some real downsides. First and foremost: It’s a nightmare for privacy.

Web 2.0 apps are often “free,” in that there’s no charge for users to use the service. But these companies have to make money somehow. So instead they “monetize” their users: They collect mountains of personal data about users, and profit off it in the form of highly targeted ad space they sell to online advertisers.

Consider the example of online shopping. In web 2.0, if you shop for a pair of shoes online, you’ll be followed by disturbingly accurate ads for those same shoes on other websites, in your newsfeed, or even your email inbox. The data collection that powers this following (or “retargeting”) has led to massive data leaks, where Big Tech gets hacked for millions of user credit cards or social security numbers.

The challenge with web 2.0 is users often have no control over whether their data gets collected, how it’s stored, or what tech companies do with it. Basically, you trade your data to use the app. Since tech companies aren’t making money directly from their products, you (or more specifically, your data) become the product they sell. ​

Centralized Authority

The other major downside of web 2.0 is that it relies on centralized authority. Think governments, Big Tech, and Wall Street. These central authorities verify your identity, authorize online transactions, control who can publish content (and what kind of content), and more. Essentially, web 2.0 companies act like a benevolent dictatorship: They decide who’s allowed in or out, how long they can stay, and what they can do.

Consider the example of online banking. Whatever bank you use for checking and savings holds your assets. They determine how you access it (think debit cards and ATMs, or mobile banking apps). They determine who you can transact with. And, most importantly, they validate your identity—and access—based on the info from other centralized authorities like the government (think of social security numbers or ID cards).

And this is just one simple example. Behind the scenes, Big Tech is used to validate your identity and grant you access to thousands of services. Most people have no idea how often Facebook and Google are used as authentication services for other apps.

In web 2.0, the individual has very few individual rights. Things like Europe’s GDPR and California’s CCPA do grant users more rights to disclose what’s collected, how, where it’s stored, and how it’s destroyed. But in the end, the core problem persists: centralized authority. What is Web 3.0?

Web3 is the next iteration of the world wide web and can be understood as the “read/write/own” phase of the Internet. Web3 was originally called the Semantic Web by World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee, and was aimed at being a more autonomous, intelligent, and open internet. There are a few fundamental differences between web2 and web3, but decentralization is at its core. Web 2 was run on the client /server (centralized) model and web 3 will be powered by Peer to Peer (P2P) technologies powered by blockchain.

Web3 will enable ownership; In the context of web3, "Decentralization is the dispersion or distribution of ownership, functions and powers. Theoretically, this could remove the power of platform owners over individual users which will ensure data protection and privacy.

Web3 enhances the internet experience, with a few added characteristics:

• Verifiable
• Trustless
• Self-governing
• Permissionless
• Distributed and robust
• Stateful
• Native built-in payments

The above characteristics, can only achievable with a decentralized, trust-less blockchain protocol at its heart. Where Web 2.0 was driven by the advent of mobile, social and cloud; web3 will be built largely on these six new layers of technological innovations: decentralized protocol blockchains, decentralized internet, decentralized data networks, edge computing, artificial intelligence and

Web 3 will only be feasible with the evolution of blockchains, which can scale to a global audience. Web 3.0 with the Semantic Web, which centers on the capability of machines to read and interact with content in a manner more akin to humans. This will not only enable human to human but also human to machine and machine to machine interactions.

Web 3.0 will fundamentally expand the scale & scope of both human and machine interactions far beyond what we can imagine today. These interactions, ranging from seamless payments to richer information flows, to trusted data transfers, will become possible with a vastly increased range of potential counterparties. Web 3.0 will enable us to interact with any individual or machine in the world, without having to pass through fee-charging middlemen. This shift will enable a whole new wave of previously unimaginable businesses and business models: from global co-operatives to decentralised autonomous organisations and self-sovereign data marketplaces.

DAO's will play a crucial role in the governance of the web3 landscape and this will help with the advancement of the web3 ecosystem at a rapid pace. DAO will be on-chain and all decisions will be voted on by the participants.

AR/VR will give rise to the spatial web and users will be interacting and consuming media not by swiping on their mobile devices but in full 3D. This development has started with facebook launching Meta and a lot of crypto projects launching the metaverse theme. ​ With Web 3.0, women, men, machines & businesses will be able to trade value, information & work with global counterparties they don’t know or yet explicitly trust, without an intermediary. The most important evolution enabled by Web3.0 is the minimisation of the trust required for coordination on a global scale. This marks a move towards trusting all constituents of a network implicitly rather than needing to trust each individual explicitly and/or seeking to achieve trust extrinsically.

Web 3.0 will fundamentally expand the scale & scope of both human and machine interactions far beyond what we can imagine today. These interactions, ranging from seamless payments to richer information flows, to trusted data transfers, will become possible with a vastly increased range of potential counterparties. Web 3.0 will enable us to interact with any individual or machine in the world, without having to pass through fee-charging middlemen. This shift will enable a whole new wave of previously unimaginable businesses and business models: from global co-operatives to decentralised autonomous organisations and self-sovereign data marketplaces. ​

Why Web 3.0?

Web 3 can be understood as the “read/write/own” phase of the Internet. Rather than just using free tech platforms in exchange for our data, users can participate in the governance and operation of the protocols themselves. This means people can become participants and shareholders, not just customers or products.

It is currently still being built, so there is no single, established definition yet of what Web 3 is or will be. In general, however, Web 3 refers to an Internet that is made possible by decentralized networks, such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. The key innovation of these networks is the creation of platforms that no single entity controls, yet everyone can still trust. That’s because every user and operator of these networks must follow the same set of hard-coded rules, known as consensus protocols.

The secondary innovation is that these networks allow value or money to be transferred between accounts. These two things—decentralization and Internet money—are the keys to understanding Web 3.