What is Web 3.0?
Before we talk about Web 3.0 let’s first talk about Web 1.0 and Web 2.0.
Web 1.0: Read-only Static Websites
Web 1.0 was an initial overview of what the internet was between the years 1991 and 2004, the internet was mostly a bunch of static pages meaning that whenever you loaded them they just showed some stuff and that was it, people called it read-only as there wasn’t any login or interacting with posts or viewing analytics. Most of the early internet wasn’t even profitable by ads, it was mostly just like one big Wikipedia all hyperlinked together. With time we started slowly making improvements and things like flash and javascript added many new different features however during this time the users of the internet were consumers who went to the internet to consume information.
Web 2.0: Read-Write Dynamic & interactive websites
Web 2.0 started in 2004 and until now, during this time web evolved a lot but one of the biggest changes was the interactivity of the internet this meant that not only did we get information from pages but webpages started getting information from us as we viewed Facebook, YouTube and performed google searches these centralized companies started collecting data about us so that they could serve us better content which in turn would make us stay on their website longer this meant more money for them but eventually they realized they could package up all the data they had collected on us and sell it to advertisers Web 2.0 is the age of targeted advertising and lack of privacy for its users now to be fair we willingly gave up this privacy too for cool apps like Facebook and Twitter. In Web 2.0 you and I could both view Facebook.com and see two very different news feeds because the page depended on who was viewing which is important for a difference in Web 3.0 that I will write about next the content on your feed is the company sorting data by information that you know you gave them like likes and how much you watched a video but if you look at the ads that they show you that is them sorting data by the information you didn’t know you give them directly using machine learning.
Web 3.0: Read-Write-Trust Decentralized Web
Web 3.0 is the next evolution of the internet utilizing blockchain technology and tools of decentralization. The term Web3 was coined by Ethereum co-founder Gavin Wood in 2014. With Web3 we get trust as well, so Web3.0 is read-write and trust. So what 3.0 is turning centralized apps into decentralized ones.
The goals of Web 3.0 includes
- trustless infrastructure
- removing intermediaries
- giving users power and ownership over their data, identity, security, and transactions.
In Web 2.0 you were the product as you were browsing social networks but in web 3.0 you will be eventually the owner of the post that you post online. No one takes down the post unless you decide it. One example of it is Odysee which aims to build a more freewheeling independent video platform based on blockchain technology. Odysee is powered by the LBRY blockchain. The interface of Odysee is similar to YouTube. Users can upload videos on their channels, viewers can like or leave comments. While YouTube stores video uploads onto its centralized servers, Odysee works like a peer-to-peer data exchange distributed over a network in order to avoid centralized servers.
Web 3.0 eliminates the middle man, there is no centralized database that stores the application stat and there is no centralized web server where the backend logic resides. Instead, you can leverage blockchain to build apps on a decentralized state machine that is maintained by anonymous notes on the internet. In Web 3.0 you can write smart contracts that define the logic of your applications and deploy them onto the decentralized state machine.
In Web 3.0 eventually, every company will be run by DAO which stands for Decentralized Autonomous Organization.
Let’s also talk about the Web 3.0 Foundation that supports projects for increasing decentralization on the internet where users own their own data, not corporations, global digital transactions are secure and online exchanges of information and values are decentralized.
Polkadot is Web3 Foundation’s flagship protocol. Polkadot is a scalable sharded chain and the first protocol that provides a secure environment for cross-chain composability.
The Web3 Foundation “Blockchain for Beginners” MOOC teaches blockchain from the very basics all the way up to building your own blockchain.