– What is Web 3.0, and why is it a big deal?
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A bunch of people have invested much of their money into cryptocurrencies. Cryptocurrencies are a pretty classic pyramid scheme: your investment becomes worth more if you can get others to buy in; then (if you’re smart) you can sell your cryptocoins, make a profit, and the suckers you pulled in are left holding the bag.
The problem is that *it’s not enough*. Too many people are skeptical of obvious scams and so you need something *else* to make cryptocurrencies more valuable.
So they’ve come up with the idea that “what if literally everything was monetizable, based on cryptocurrencies”? What if you paid cryptocurrency to do literally anything on the internet, and what if you earned cryptocurrency when others, say, upvoted your reddit post? That would make cryptocurrencies much more useful, and thus more valuable. And that would allow more of the people who got suckered into the cryptocurrency scam to make money off of it.
So it’s only really a big deal if you’re a scammer or if you’ve been scammed.
“Web 3.0” is a term for enterprises that range from confidence schemes to money-laundering to state-sponsored organized crime. Nobody who is engaged in honest business that actually produces products & services that benefit other people describes their activity as “Web 3.0.” This is useful, because it means that whenever someone says it, you can be assured that entrusting them with your money or business will cause you significant financial and reputational losses.
It doesnt exist, it is smoke and mirrors being talked up by people who are trying to maximize their own filthy greedy investments in said smoke and mirrors.
Anyone using that term should NOT be taken seriously and you should expect they are peddling some type of scam.
I’m seeing posts here that are primarily about how it’s a cryptocurrency scam. However, there is also a discussion of a decentralized web that does not rely on existing financing systems like credit cards and banking. Instead all transactions would be made through cryptocurrency.
While this approach does increase the value of cryptocurrency, it also removes the control of traditional finance from the Internet. An internet based on this process is apparently somehow better, I can’t explain that logic myself.
Additionally, web 3.0 is also sometimes used to refer to a web that is based on virtual reality (and also augmented reality). In the virtual world, with cryptocurrency being the method of finance, there seems to be some feeling of freedom that is absent in the modern world.
Again, I can’t explain why this is so exciting, but those are the concepts.
Web 1.0 is a centralized limited internet, Web 2.0 is an expansive internet run by tech giants, Web 3.0 aims to be an expansive internet but gives ownership back to the people away from the tech giants
Imagine you have a video you wish to upload, or an update about your life you want the world to see.
In the current day and age, you would go to YouTube or Facebook and post this content, and that would be that.
Web3 is trying to get away from these centralised platforms, and instead allow you on merely post it without the need to rely on any centralised body. It can be thought of as decentralised internet.
It’s like the difference between gen X and gen X. Both are human beings, but one generation is known for different things and having different values than the other. Same thing with the new web3
As for why it’s exciting, well the possibilities are endless as to what can be done.
So, the big thing to understand is it’s not some update that’s gonna be released the same way you’d release an update for a video game or piece of software. The name “Web 3.0” is purely marketing. When the web first launched, it was mostly individuals creating small websites and storefronts.
Around the early 2000’s when the web became more accessible and corporations realized how much money-making potential the web had, there was a huge shift in web culture and we started to see things like targeted advertising, massive and complicated websites like Amazon, smoother interfaces, and that change was so vast that some people called it “Web 2.0”
Now, some people believe we are on the cusp of another shift in web culture as big as the last one, mainly because of two emerging technologies: cryptocurrencies and virtual reality. Both of these technologies might arguably have the potential to cause drastic changes to the web, although imo virtual reality is a much bigger contender. Imagine being a few years in the future, and when somebody says the word, “website,” you think of a 3d virtual space that you visit in your VR headset, rather than a flat interface you view on your flat screen.
I’m personally not a big fan of the terms, “Web 3.0” or “Web 2.0,” I think it’s much more accurate to describe these as different eras of the web rather than different versions. They’re all the same thing, just in different stages of development and evolution, and there is no hard line where one ends and the other begins. Just know that when someone says “Web 3.0,” they’re basically either talking about crypto, VR, or both.
Web 3.0 is an attempt to introduce hard user ownership and artificial scarcity. Right now, you have systems that can treat data as unique within themselves, but they can’t transfer out to other systems by default. You have things like skins/pets in games, movies/music collections on iTunes, or kindle ebooks which cant really leave their services. It’s like how if Steam just closed up shop tomorrow you could just lose access to everything you have on there.
Web 3.0 would be an attempt to make all that ownership portable between systems and under your control. That’s why crypto is kind of the posterchild of web 3.0 right now, because the blockchain represents a way for users to own and trade digital objects.
Web 3 is an idea for a new iteration of the World Wide Web which incorporates concepts such as decentralization, blockchain technologies, and token-based economics. This is the definition according to [Wikipedia.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web3)
Let’s break it down:
* **Decentralization** – this basically means they want to transition to a model of the internet where big companies aren’t the main providers of online services. E.g. Google provides email, maps, search services, chat apps, etc. Along with provision of those services most of them free, they profit from monetizing your aggregated data to provide advertising. Web3 proponents imagine a reality where these services aren’t controlled by one entity like Google on their servers but distributed along individual nodes instead perhaps computers like you and I are on.
* **Blockchain** – this one is the basis of cryptocurrencies. The idea behind the blockchain is that data is written to it, it’s accessible to all, is immutable (can’t be changed) and permanent. The blockchain was first used to produce cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. In exchange for computers performing the complex work to produce a coin, they are awarded that coin.
* **Token based economics** – the crypto coins produced by the blockchain had no initial value besides being traded as a “currency” so some folks had the idea to use those tokens as currency for NFTs. Why NFTs? Because you could use regular currencies like dollars and euros for pretty much anything else in life. So instead they made something that specifically needed these new crypto coins (tokens) to purchase and sell.
**Why is this a big deal?** So far it hasn’t been.
The decentralized aspect hasn’t taken off except in the production of cryptocurrency which is by nature decentralized since it is a bunch of individual computers solving an equation to produce them.
The blockchain doesn’t have a real purpose except to produce cryptocurrency. There just isn’t much data that should be publicly accessible to all, immutable and permanent. In addition the process to write things to the blockchain is slow.
Finally token based economics is probably the most public failure. NFT’s had a short surge in the initial frenzy but have since plummeted in activity. It has literally [plummeted 99%.](https://nftnewstoday.com/2022/09/15/opensea-nft-trading-plummets-99/) Most people realized the pictures they were paying for had no real value except to others who thought they could sell it for more.
Edit: a lot of other explanations lumping in VR into Web 3, which is not accurate for several reasons.
VR was invented in [1968](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_Sutherland) long before even Web 1. VR as a concept (immersive simulation) has nothing to do with decentralization, blockchain or token based economics. The Metaverse (that Meta is building) is basically a rehashing of Second Life which was built in 2003. Ironically, the Metaverse if it is built out and takes off wouldn’t count as Web3 since it would be owned, managed and run by one of Web2’s largest centralized entities i.e. the company formerly known as FB.
Edit2: explaining decentralization to someone else, I realized there is one semi-successful decentralized tech that has taken off which is Bittorrent. However this is far from mainstream and I’d posit that if you stopped a random person on the street and asked them what BT was, they would have no idea what you’re talking about and speaks to it’s limited adoption given that it was invented over 20 years ago in 2001.
First, let’s be clear – the web doesn’t really have versions. Web 1, 2 and 3 are just terms intended to describe shifting trends in how the web is used.
So Web 1 refers to when the web was basically just a big library of linked documents on pages that you could read. If you knew HTML and CSS and how to run a server, you could put up your own web page other people could read.
Web 2 refers to the era which started around the turn of the millennium where better server and consumer hardware and software technology meant what we did with the web and how we used it shifted in to an *interactive* platform – social media, user-generated content, applications which ran in your browser.
Web 3 is largely undefined at the moment and is really just a broad term for the “next era” of the web, whatever that may be. As a term, it’s mostly used in the blockchain and crypto space, since the advocates of those systems believe the future of the web will be based around them. In particular they point to decentralization as a contrast to the web 2 trend whereby a lot of data and a lot of the things people used are controlled by a very small number of big, international businesses like Google, Amazon and Meta (Facebook).
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