– What is Web 3.0, and why is it a big deal?
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Simple answer: It’s not. It’s based around the idea of cryptocurrency, which itself lacks use. All the important parts of society demand payment in their national legal tender and only that. Cryptocurrencies use cases are speculation for more legal tender, money laundering control evasion (including taxes), and purchasing illicit goods or services (including ransom payments). None of this is economically useful and most of it can land you in jail.
“Decentralized internet” just means more people inefficiently using someone else’s hardware and infrastructure. There’s *a lot* of money and expertise involved in a operational high speed Internet.
Most of these answers are focused on cryptocurrency and blockchain – but the crypto folks were actually late to the party. Years before Bitcoin the term was used to refer to an idea called the [“Semantic Web,”](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web) the byproducts of which you actually probably interact with on a regular basis.^1
The general motivation behind the Semantic Web is that computers are great at serving content but can’t understand what it _means_, but if they could, we could use their knowledge and thinking power in all sorts of interesting ways.^2
So, lots of people thought of different ways to add extra data (called “metadata” – data about data) to their internet content (e.g. blog posts and pictures) to enable computers to understand what was inside of it and how it connects to other content. The word “semantic” in this case refers to adding that data to help computers contextualize it, and “web” refers to having that metadata link to other internet content (essentially so that a curious internet user or computer can go down rabbit holes to learn more about a topic if they want).
It didn’t catch on in the way folks might have hoped at the time, but the ideas and technology still linger in some places. A common example is when you Google search for a topic, and it shows you a card with all sorts of information on the topic. Some of that is Google AI magic, but a _lot_ of it just comes from Semantic Web-style metadata.^3 A big source of this kind of data is Wikipedia – when you look at a Wikipedia article, the information presented in those boxes at the top right is the kind of linked metadata that has been added by human editors that computers can easily read and use to try to understand how the world fits together.
As to why this is a “big deal” – we now live in a world where we can ask our computer a question out loud (e.g. “Who played Hagrid?”) and just reasonably expect that it can tell us. A lot of the data that is available for computers to understand and reason about the world started with Web 3.0.
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1. Some crypto folks claim `web3` refers to crypto and `Web 3.0` refers to Semantic Web. These kind of people also claim “Web 2 + Web 3 = Web 5”.
2. [Tim Berners-Lee](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Berners-Lee) (inventor of the “World-Wide Web” [i.e. the parts of the internet you click on in a browser] and who also coined the term “Semantic Web”) has a poetic quote about this, I’ll lift it from [the FOAF spec](https://web.archive.org/web/20220518003509/http://xmlns.com/foaf/spec/20140114.html) where I came across it:
> To a computer, the Web is a flat, boring world, devoid of meaning. This is a pity, as in fact documents on the Web describe real objects and imaginary concepts, and give particular relationships between them. For example, a document might describe a person. The title document to a house describes a house and also the ownership relation with a person. Adding semantics to the Web involves two things: allowing documents which have information in machine-readable forms, and allowing links to be created with relationship values. Only when we have this extra level of semantics will we be able to use computer power to help us exploit the information to a greater extent than our own reading. – Tim Berners-Lee [“W3 future directions” keynote](https://web.archive.org/web/20220518003509/http://www.w3.org/Talks/WWW94Tim/), 1st World Wide Web Conference Geneva, May 1994
3 . Cynically, this means search engine optimization is one of the places this lives on in a big way. For example, recipe websites are chock full of this stuff so they can drive traffic to them – but since they often include the recipe serialized in a way comptuers can read, this lets people build those website that just show you the recipe without all the life story around it.
It’s a mostly meaningless buzzword intended to impress investors.
“My web 3.0 company is going to democratize blockchain and disrupt crypto.”
The idea is that web 1.0 was joesblog.net hosted on a basement PC, web 2.0 was joeblogr.io hosted in a docker container on AWS, and web 3.0, while still hosted in a docker container on AWS, also has a blockchain thrown into the stack.
I think most comments focus to much in the descentralized aspect of 3.0. I find easier to focus in other aspects about people communication inside the internet.
Internet is connection, a media. So, in a way, it’s final evolution should above humans to communicate better. Web1.0 allow specialized users (or corporations) to present their ideas and information through a webpage where other users could access. Web2.0 allow other users to create content for other users more easily (you no longer need your own webpage to share content). So, the next step should allow users to share even better.
How this will go? No way to know. Some people think that cross-platform ownership could allow this new step in evolution. Others focus on the decentralized aspect of crypto. One could argue that the “internet of things” (like your refrigerator ordering things) could be the next step. Augmented reality could also be the next step. Or new devices that allows you to share a hug, or smells, or textures.
There is no way to predict a revolution. But you will definitely identity it when it happens.
I think this obsession to label things before they happens is a mistake.
For me, each step allow users to express themselves better and more cheaper, so in response, a big bulk of content is added to the web. In that regard, streaming services could be considered 3.0 while 2.0 explosion where mostly written content. And following that logic web.4.0 could allow users to share and create in more profund ways.
My grain of sand.
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Its basically a bunch of start up companies trying to convince everyone to put money into them because the new internet is coming and you will miss out if you don’t invest now.
The idea of things being decentralized, more open, etc, will inevitably be ruined by a handful of companies and will ultimately lead to people paying money for more compartmentalized versions of what we already have.
It’s a marketing term for a dead end technology whose primary application is to allow venture capital to commit legal securities fraud due to lagging financial regulations.
I can actually answer this since I work in the industry. Web3 is basically blockchain enabled consumer internet. The big innovation for blockchain is that it allows for the first time in human history for humans to do 2 things.
1. Prove ownership of a fungible or non-fungible digital asset without the need of an impartial 3rd party
2. Transact that digital asset without the need of an impartial 3rd party through a smart contract (program that is stored on blockchain that anyone can access and run)
This is huge because we have never been able to do this ever. NFTs are just digital assets that we can now prove who owns them. The possibilities for this technology is drastically understated due to the fact that the first use case that took off was essentially creating overpriced trading cards that had no real inherent value. Eventually, everyone will use them in some way when they’re used to represent contracts and digital assets.
being able to transact without a 3rd party will cut out many of the middleman services that currently exist (think anything that requires an escrow).
TL;DL the consumer blockchain will be used by everyone in 10 years because it makes things that we are currently doing more efficient that the current systems and will make many aspects of commerce that people do not like obsolete.
Web 3.0 isn’t anything. Web 3 is a marketing term created by crypto bros trying to build a hype (which fuels crypto)
Web3 is only a big deal for those who are pushing it. If you are planning on building a crypto currency, and want to pump and dump, then it’s great. For the other 99.99% of applications, it’s just not necessary. Basically, if you think your new site needs web3, and you are NOT planning on a public, distributed blockchain, you very likely don’t.
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