I don't fully understand what's Web3 yet. I have read a few posts about it, but they didn't make complete sense to me. All I know is there is blockchain involved in some way. So here I am digging a bit more and captured my thoughts as I learned along.
Web 1.0 was decentralised, with individual ownership and control over their internet entities, mostly static webpages. You visited those when you found them. Web 2.0 was an era of centralisation ruled by closed platforms. Web3 intends to bring us back to the decentralised, based on blockchain.
Was Web 2.0 all about centralisation and failure of regulatory bodies to regulate these central entities? That view feels confined by the assumptions that centralisation is what we were after in Web 2.0. I am not convinced that is the case.
Gavin Wood coined the term Web3 in 2014. But his pitch for the existence of this iteration is philosophical. Definition and enforcing of trust through technology as complicated as blockchain is not going to be easy. I am still not convinced of how the tech makes things simpler for the common users of the internet.
Web3 needs all users to understand programming? That doesn't sound right. What it might mean is possibly whoever wants freedom is expected to own the relevant aspects via a bit programming. But then how's that different from hosting your own website today?
A dating app through which you can send someone virtual flower shouldn't be the showcase of Web3. That's such a limited view again. What's powerful about it? It doesn't get me all excited for this future.
A key idea that gets lost in all the philosophical pitch is peer-to-peer nature. Each node in the Internet decides what it hosts and serves that. The reference image below from Cloudflare denotes this well.
A Decentralised Identifier (DID), an individual public key, that establishes one's identity online is a powerful concept. Proving you are registered to a college by sharing the DID the college provided is a lot more valuable use case than the online dating that Grant Wood narrates.
Ethereum and IPFS are the open protocols that Web3 aims to build upon. Both are pretty core to the blockchain and cryptography.
I believe the below condensed summarization captures the why of Web3 pretty well.
The early Web was static. Then Web 2.0 came to provide interactiveness and service we use daily at the cost of centralisation. Web3 is a trend that tries to challenge this. With distributed networks built on open protocols, users of the web are empowered to participate.
Even though I have a better understanding now of what we are targeting with Web3, the how part is still an unknown to me. As Robin Sloan notes, we have seen the promise of Web 2.0 - "the exchange of data in modular, permissive ways between platforms" - was unattained.
Being "an era of centralisation" was never a goal of Web 2.0. But the necessity to make the dream of interactions across nodes more approachable, accessible and fathomable for the non-technical users on the Internet birthed the centralised platforms. Without them, the growth we see wouldn't have been the reality. How do we make sure Web3 doesn't follow a similar path?
I don't fully understand what's Web3 yet. I have read a few posts about it, but they didn't make complete sense to me. All I know is there is blockchain involved in some way. So here I am digging a bit more and captured my thoughts as I learned along.
Web 1.0 was decentralised, with individual ownership and control over their internet entities, mostly static webpages. You visited those when you found them. Web 2.0 was an era of centralisation ruled by closed platforms. Web3 intends to bring us back to the decentralised, based on blockchain.
Was Web 2.0 all about centralisation and failure of regulatory bodies to regulate these central entities? That view feels confined by the assumptions that centralisation is what we were after in Web 2.0. I am not convinced that is the case.
Gavin Wood coined the term Web3 in 2014. But his pitch for the existence of this iteration is philosophical. Definition and enforcing of trust through technology as complicated as blockchain is not going to be easy. I am still not convinced of how the tech makes things simpler for the common users of the internet.
Web3 needs all users to understand programming? That doesn't sound right. What it might mean is possibly whoever wants freedom is expected to own the relevant aspects via a bit programming. But then how's that different from hosting your own website today?
A dating app through which you can send someone virtual flower shouldn't be the showcase of Web3. That's such a limited view again. What's powerful about it? It doesn't get me all excited for this future.
A key idea that gets lost in all the philosophical pitch is peer-to-peer nature. Each node in the Internet decides what it hosts and serves that. The reference image below from Cloudflare denotes this well.
A Decentralised Identifier (DID), an individual public key, that establishes one's identity online is a powerful concept. Proving you are registered to a college by sharing the DID the college provided is a lot more valuable use case than the online dating that Grant Wood narrates.
Ethereum and IPFS are the open protocols that Web3 aims to build upon. Both are pretty core to the blockchain and cryptography.
I believe the below condensed summarization captures the why of Web3 pretty well.
The early Web was static. Then Web 2.0 came to provide interactiveness and service we use daily at the cost of centralisation. Web3 is a trend that tries to challenge this. With distributed networks built on open protocols, users of the web are empowered to participate.
Even though I have a better understanding now of what we are targeting with Web3, the how part is still an unknown to me. As Robin Sloan notes, we have seen the promise of Web 2.0 - "the exchange of data in modular, permissive ways between platforms" - was unattained.
Being "an era of centralisation" was never a goal of Web 2.0. But the necessity to make the dream of interactions across nodes more approachable, accessible and fathomable for the non-technical users on the Internet birthed the centralised platforms. Without them, the growth we see wouldn't have been the reality. How do we make sure Web3 doesn't follow a similar path?