After a few comments on an earlier Article that urged me to cover it, someone in our Article comment section mentioned it; I conducted a fast Google search for “What is Web 3.0,” and I didn’t receive an answer. In reality, I received a couple of responses that didn’t quite line up, so if you’re reading this article, prepare to learn everything there is to know about Web 3.0 and what it implies for cryptocurrencies.
What is Web 1.0?
Let’s start with version 1.0, an introduction to the Internet.
Between 1991 and 2004, the Internet was primarily made up of static sites, which meant that when you loaded them, they merely displayed some information. It was dubbed read-only’ by some. There was no way to log in, engage with postings, or see stats. Ads didn’t even make up the majority of the early Internet. It was mainly simply a giant Wikipedia with all of the articles connected. Of course, we gradually improved over time, and technologies like Flash and Javascript brought a slew of additional functionality. However, users of the Internet at the time were consumers; they went to the Internet to consume information.
What is Web 2.0?
Then there’s Web 2.0, which dates from roughly 2004 until the present. The web changed dramatically throughout this time, but one of the most significant developments was the Internet’s interactivity. This meant that we were no longer the only ones receiving information from the pages; the pages were also receiving information from us. As we used Facebook and YouTube and searched on Google, these centralized firms began gathering information about us to provide better content and keep us on their websites longer.
This meant more money for them, but they later discovered they could bundle all of our data and sell it to advertising. Web 2.0 ushers in a new era of targeted advertising and a lack of customer privacy. We traded up to our privacy for fun applications like Facebook and Twitter.
Because the page relies on who is seeing it in web 2.0, I and you may both browse https://facebook.com and see two entirely different news feeds, which is crucial to notice for a distinction in web three we shall discuss in a minute. They’re categorizing data based on the information you know you provided. If you look at the advertisements they display you, you’ll notice that they’re sorting data based on the information you didn’t realize you offered them.
For example, they knew when you went out to eat tacos last night. They know this because you drop them off for school every day at 8 a.m. except Fridays. And according to one study, machine learning began sending a man parenting adverts since they knew he would be a father before he did.
If it wasn’t machine learning, it was probably because his partner searched for her symptoms using their public IP, and the machine learning system already knew when she was ovulating. In any event, having a single centralized organization handle our data, whether we want it or not, is concerning.
What is Web 3?
Web 3.0 is the next step in the Internet’s growth, and it will most likely include blockchain technology and decentralization tools. You were the product in Web 3 as you browsed social networks, but others predict that in Web 3.0, you will be the proprietor of your content, the things you publish online. This is accurate mainly; if you want a post to stay up, it will, but they claim you have power over it… But not, since, as we all know, once anything is on the Internet, it is on the Internet forever.
Here’s an example from the real world. Odyssee is a blockchain-based YouTube alternative where producers may publish videos and receive LBRY tokens to attract visitors. Odyssee, on the other hand, is powerless to prevent any video from being shared. If someone shares it and someone else in the network wants to share it, they download it and then let others view and download it, similar to how an extensive torrent network works.
To clarify, your post could not be taken down since it would not be hosted on just one of Facebook’s servers… Instead, it would potentially be installed on tens of thousands of computers worldwide, guaranteeing that the blockchain social network you’re using isn’t attacked or banned. Theoretically, this implies that many illegal or terrible things would be uploaded. Still, it would be in the name of freedom, and members of the networks could probably develop a way to limit that content.
Experts predict that by Web 3.0, every firm on the Internet will be run by a decentralized organization known as a DAO, which stands for Decentralized Autonomous Organization. If you want to understand more about what those significant terms mean, we have an entire movie on that issue and what they’re used for.
However, with DAOs, there are no CEOs or Presidents to impress; instead, there are simply shareholders and those whom the owners choose to work for the firm in which they own tokens. Those with the most tokens have a say in how the firm evolves, with no restrictions imposed by the government or a family tradition. This implies that social media sites like Facebook and Twitter will not be censored.
Finally, one of the most significant aspects of web 3.0 is that your digital identity is not completely separate from your real-world identity. This means I may browse the Internet, download files, make purchases, and engage in other activities without being identified as the actual me. Of course, there are numerous methods to remain anonymous online.
So, while these may be long-term aspirations for individuals who think about web 3.0, in actuality, what web 3.0 means for us in this decade is that you can purchase Amazon gift cards with metamask and pay with ethereum, or that you may anonymously like your friends’ posts using one of your secret wallets, nothing life-changing all at once. Instead, it’ll very certainly be a sequence of concepts that evolve together until centralized firms like Facebook and Google are dismantled by legislators and replaced with decentralized, uncontrolled DAOs.
