15/10/2021
WHAT IS WEB3?
(The Decentralized Internet of the Future Explained)
If you’re reading this then you are a partaker in the modern web. The web we are undergoing today is much dissimilar than what it was just 10 years ago. How has the web advanced, and more importantly – where is it going next? Also, why do any of these things matter?
Contemplate about how the internet affects your life on a day-to-day basis. Deliberate how society has changed as an upshot of the internet. Social media platforms. Mobile apps. And now the internet is going through another pattern shift as we speak.
THE EVOLUTION OF THE WEB
The web has evolved a lot over the years, and the applications of it today are almost monstrous from its most early days. The evolution of the web is often partitioned into three separate stages: Web 1.0, Web 2.0, and Web 3.0.
WHAT IS WEB 1.0?
Web 1.0 was the first rehearsal of the web. Most partakers were consumers of content, and the inventors were typically developers who build websites that contained information served up primarily in text or image format. Web 1.0 lasted approximately from 1991 to 2004.
Web 1.0 consisted of sites serving motionless content instead of dynamic HTML. Data and content were served from a motionless file system rather than a database, and sites didn't have much interactivity at all.
YOU CAN THINK OF WEB 1.0 AS THE READ-ONLY WEB.
WHAT IS WEB 2.0?
Most of us have primarily experienced the web in its present form, commonly referred to as WEB2. You can think of web2 as the interactive and social web.
In the web2 world, you don’t have to be a developer to partake in the creation process. Many apps are constructed in a way that easily consents anyone to be a creator.
If you want to expertise a thought and share it with the world, you can. If you want to upload a video and allow millions of people to see it, interact with it, and comment on it, you can do that too.
Web2 is simple, really, and because of its simplicity more and more people around the world are becoming inventors.
The web in its current form is really pronounced in many ways, but there are some areas where we can do a lot better.
WHAT IS WEB 3.0?
There are a few ultimate differences between web2 and web3, but subsidiarity is at its core.
Web3 improves the internet as we know it today with a few other added characteristics. Web3 is:
• Verifiable
• Trustless
• Self-governing
• Permissionless
• Distributed and robust
• Stateful
• Native built-in payments
In web3, developers don't frequently build and deploy applications that run on a sole server or that store their data in a single database (usually hosted on and managed by a single cloud provider).
Instead, web3 applications either run on blockchains, decentralized networks of many peer to peer nodes (servers), or a combination of the two that forms a crypto-economic protocol. These apps are often referred to as DAPPS (decentralized apps), and you will see that term used often in the web3 space.
To achieve a stable and secure decentralized network, network participants (developers) are incentivized and compete to provide the highest quality services to anyone using the service.
When you hear about web3, you'll notice that crypto currency is often part of the conversation. This is because crypto currency plays a big role in many of these protocols. It provides a financial incentive (tokens) for anyone who wants to participate in creating, governing, contributing to, or improving one of the projects themselves.
These protocols may often offer a variety of different services like compute, storage, bandwidth, identity, hosting, and other web services commonly provided by cloud providers in the past.
People can make a living by participating in the protocol in various ways, in both technical and non-technical levels.
Consumers of the service usually pay to use the protocol, similarly to how they would pay a cloud provider like AWS today. Except in web3, the money goes directly to the network participants.
