Web 3.0
Written by Max Hinchman
Introduction
The Web 3.0 is a movement of different technologies that are designed to give users control of their data and make the internet more decentralized, verifiable and secure. The group of technologies and applications are striving to reform the underlying structure and regain control over the internet through the development of new projects built on Web 3.0. These projects include internet infrastructure, cryptoassets, new communication technologies, and mass consumer apps like social networks.
To get a better understanding of Web 3.0 it is helpful to first summarize the different stages of the internet and web of the last 40 years. The first stage came with the launch of the internet, a system of physical wiring and protocols on how to communicate. This launched as a government project and led to a global commercial launch. Shortly afterward, web 1.0 launched and web 1.0 which linked content together across the internet. It was essentially a document and application platform with clickable hyperlinks and basic web pages. Afterwards came web 2.0 in the early 2000’s. Web 2.0 lead to linking programs to content and building rich applications. The dynamic interactive nature of web 2.0, aka the “read write web,” allowed for the development of social networks and data rent seeking.
Now, Web 3.0 is striving to build verifiability into core network, linking content and programs directly to each other, removing intermediaries, and building decentralized protocols. In short, taking what bitcoin did to money and applying to everything.
A core issue of the current system is that the current web is stateless. Cookies were developed as a solution to this but the cookies have created a centralization of state in the hands of a few powerful companies. In addition there is no effective medium to transfer the state that does exist on the current system. Today’s internet has transformed the world through the most efficient method ever developed to transfer information. However, there is still no easy way for businesses to trade value. Which is why the business model of the internet has been advertising. Advertising businesses are the only ones that can efficiently store and transmit the state of the current users of the web.
For the most part, the technologies that are helping build Web 3.0 have existed for quite some time, but the economic model of the new decentralized blockchain is what is new. Peer to peer means always existed but it simply couldn’t compete economically with centralized systems. Peer to peer networks couldn’t afford to pay people to maintain infrastructure whereas centralized systems had a working business model. However, there are still many questions within the Web3 movement that need to be answered before becoming a mainstream technology. Problems such as whether users are willing to trade convenience and speed for control over their data or whether or not the base layer blockchains be able to scale.
Suggested Reading
Web 3.0 Revisited — Part One by Stephen Tual