Over the last couple of months, we have seen terms relating to cryptocurrency such as decentralized autonomous organizations (DAO), non-fungible tokens (NFTs), and lately, web 3.0 being swirled around within the mouths of analysts, enthusiasts, and innovators leading this trend.
I have covered DAOs and NFTs in quite some detail on this website. I never covered web 3.0 yet as the term is a bit ambiguous at the moment and can mean a lot of things.
Depending on where you look, web 3.0 can mean a new era for web developers to adapt to new technologies: smart contracts, blockchain development, protocol architecture, edge computing, algorithmic game theory, etc.
The list of innovations from a technical point of view within this space is truly staggering at the moment. If you are conscious about control, data and privacy, web 3.0 could mean a new paradigm where you are basically in control of your own and it is not owned by one monolith entity.
If you are deep within the crypto sector, Web 3.0 could mean a new generation of applications that will liberate you from the financial misery you were encapsulated in. You can see web 3.0 could mean a lot of things for different people.
In this article, I wish to give you an overarching view of technology and what it means for our society. Before we dive headfirst into web 3.0, let’s step back and peel back the layers to web 1.0 or the beginning of the internet.
The History of the Internet
The internet is probably one of the most innovative technologies over the last couple of decades. So many technologies have spun out of the labs of scientists, engineers, and software engineers because of it.
The strange thing is that we never asked for it, it just happened. If you look at movies such as Star Trek, Terminator, Star Wars, etc. The internet was never present at all, instead, we saw flying cars, space ships, phasers, universal translators, and many other cool kinds of stuff.
Surprisingly, the internet came out decades before even the first Star Trek episode and many other sci-fi movies at the time. Roughly, it started in the 1960s as a way to share information among researchers.
If you should look at the computers at that time, they were large machines that were pretty stationary.
Sharing information was a difficult and logistical nightmare at that time. It was hard for information to be disseminated and shared across different computers with varying architecture. 2 decades later the real vision of the internet starts to take full effect.
On January 1, 1983, a new communication protocol was established which made it easier for computers to communicate with each other.
It was called transfer control protocol or internetwork protocol (TCP/IP). This protocol was officially declared by ARPANET and the Defense Data Network.
The Birth of the World Wide Web
The internet is more than just the world wide web which we all connect to on a daily basis whether we are social media, purchasing an item, or even researching. All the different types of connections that are available are called protocols.
You also have to sometimes use specific software to connect to these protocols. Below is a list of several different protocols which might be of importance to you.
File Transfer Protocol (FTP)
Whenever you are downloading or uploading a file on the internet you are engaging with the FTP protocol. This protocol only serves in the transferring of data to and from a local and remote computer.
File Retrieval Protocol
This type of protocol was used early before File Transfer Protocols. Due to that fact, the features are going to be more primitive. With (FRP) in this case, you can only retrieve information from computers connected to the internet.
You could normally know the names of the files but there isn’t much to it after that. At the time, there weren’t any fancy graphics and often times no description of the file’s content.
Gopher Protocol
The Gopher protocol is a much more sophisticated protocol that offers searching, distributing, and retrieving documents within internet protocol networks.
Due to the searching factor, the user interface is menu-driven where we can search for files within the computers that are connected to the internet.
It is regarded as the predecessor of the HyperText Transfer Protocol which is now today known as the world wide web.
Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP)
HTTP was built on earlier versions of the internet protocol system. It is the foundation that the world wide web today is built upon. Abilities such as clicking a link and being able to go to another page through a series of connecting hyperlinks, shouldn’t be underestimated.
It was an amazing feat at the time and HTTP helped to make this process look like magic. The genius behind was Tim-Berners Lee who is now immortalized as the guy who really triggered this era.
At the time he was working at European Council For Nuclear Research (CERN) and in 1989, he started the initiative to design HTTP. It was a basic document showing the relationship between a client and a server.
Could it have happened without him? Definitely, the underlying architecture was there but life is so complex and fickle that the internet today might’ve looked different if it was someone else.
Tim-Berners Lee even invented the first version of HTML (HyperText Markup Language). It is a programming language that is used to format the text of the browser using tags which allows it to vary in looks.
Browser
In order to create mass appeal for the internet. Similar to graphical operating systems which made computers appealing for the average man at the time.
There needed to be a way to make the internet appealing and not just become another pet project for researchers and computer scientists. Browsers came along to help solve this issue.
Browsers are applications that allow us to view files on the internet. You have graphics-based browsers which come with amazing features that make it easier for us users to navigate the world wide web.
Examples are Microsoft Edge, Google Chrome, Firefox, etc. You also have terminal-based browsers such as Lynx that just allow you to view text only. One of the earliest browsers was Netscape, a company that was founded by Marc Andreesen and James H. Clark.
They basically made it easier for the common men to access the internet at times. Microsoft quickly captured the notice of this trend, followed suit, and went onto a ruthless battle with Netscape.
In the late 90s two MIT computer scientists Sergey Brin and Larry Page hit upon a great idea for a search engine that would make it easier to show relevant information which was difficult to achieve at the time.
After they developed the algorithm, tested it in the public, the rest was history. Netscape lost the browser battle to Microsoft, but Microsoft lost the war to Google owns 67.56 percent of the global desktop internet market share as of September 2021.
Over the years the web has gone through different versions. Each version brings about a different way of looking and interacting with the internet. As internet speed increased, so does the quality of content and the different media available.
Users can engage in live streams, play connected online video games, send instant messages, etc. Now we have web 3.0 that is touted to disrupt the space yet again. Before we head to Web 3.0, let’s take a brief look at the prior two versions.
Web 1.0
This is the first generation of the world wide web. It was pretty basic compared with today’s architecture and interface. The pages were static and built with the first versions of HTML and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) which gave it a graphical look.
It was mostly content serving, meaning that I only could view the content and click on links to go to other pages. There isn’t much you could do as a user at the time.
Web 2.0
The rise of social media applications and new tools that gave software developers the ability to develop complex applications helped to create web 2.0. It really started to take off during the era of Facebook’s initial introduction and rise. Web 2.0 introduced new ways for users to interact with the internet.
Users are not just looking at information, but they are also creating information. It was the birth of the platform economy where we users can be creators and creators can be users building up their ecosystem.
Forums were also popular during this era, if there was to be a period that defined this era, it would’ve been the mid-2000s.
That was just one part of the entire subject at the time, another important innovation was APIs (Application Program Interface). APIs allow websites to talk to each other by sharing information, this information mainly comes in the form of user data.
For example, have you ever used an application that can be integrated with your Facebook data, such as an analytical tool? If that is the case, it is probably an API.
Facebook at the time, was less restrictive with the data it allowed developers to tinker with and developers could develop amazing applications using users’ data.
In the late 2000s, the internet was growing at a rapid rate and data was being collected at a massive rate as well. Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, etc. all collected our data to create give targeted results.
Google basically had an idea of who we all are based on the data they collected. As a result, they were able to do targeted advertising which advertisers benefited from.
Facebook also knew a lot about us and on a much personal level, they were also able to do super-targeted advertising. Many of the Tech platforms collected our information, mined them, and used them for profit.
We are basically both the user and the product for these internet companies. Data was and still is their king.
An Era of Scandals and Pressure
During the 2010s up until today, tech companies are coming under immense pressure from countries and local government officials due to malpractices and monopolistic tendencies.
One of the main catalysts is data and the exploitation of data from these tech companies without the user’s consent. It’s a widely accepted fact that privacy is now dead due to the amount of data is being collected by these companies.
There were moments within the 2010s that defined this era, the earliest was Edward Snowden’s whistleblower moment, he was as an employee and subcontractor at National Security Agency (NSA).
In 2013, he leaked highly classified information which was the tipping point for the overall tech industry.
The rise of Wikileaks, a non-profit organization focused on publishing news leaks and classified documents by anonymous sources.
The initiative is spearheaded by Julian Assange who is currently facing extradition to the USA from London.
As for Snowden, he is now living in Russia.
The aftermath of Trump becoming the 45th president really pushed the needle for the discussion of privacy which led Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s CEO to be grilled by congress.
In short, trump hired a political marketing company called Cambridge Analytica to do the marketing for his campaign. The company used complex algorithms and collected large amounts of data from Facebook to create a system that allowed them to create targeted advertising for Trump’s campaign at the time.
It was an interesting strategy and it worked pretty well for Trump given the fact that he won the campaign. It’s hard to assess how much of Trump’s success could be attributed to Cambridge Analytica.
Due to the pressure from the media at the time, Cambridge Analytica had to shut down in 2018 due to pressure from the government a mere 2 years after Trump’s success.
This led Facebook to change its laws as to how it handles user data. It also leads a chain of changes from other tech companies at the time.
Data is still being discussed today as a focal point as to why large tech companies need to be properly regulated in handling users’ information. It’s still a broken model, but will the new generation of the web help to solve it.
Web 3.0
Web 3.0 is celebrated to be the next generation of the web that will help to solve the current model of how the use the web. Web 2.0 wasn’t really that different from web 1.0.
The user interface was much cleaner, accessing the web across different devices was better through applications and the data harvesting and analysis became sophisticated and profitable for large tech companies. Users were often looked upon as just data points on a spreadsheet and they still are.
Each individual doesn’t control his or her own data and everything is centralized. Every tech company has its ecosystem and if you enter into their little walled garden, they want you to continue their and setup shop their too. It’s frustrating and stifles innovation.
The concept of web 3.0 has been brewing over the last couple of years and it came out of necessity. Technological innovations such as blockchains and the entire decentralization ecosystem are helping to solve the problem of privacy and ownership.
If we should look at the entire architecture of what a blockchain is, it’s basically a decentralized database. Everyone is connected within this system by nodes and each node can also be viewed on a public database. Each node will have meta-data such as an address, amount, time sent, etc.
Depending on the use case the information presented on the meta-data may be different but the main thing is that it’s public. The information is no longer centralized which helps to cut out the middle man. The process is now being run by deterministic rules in the form of smart contracts.
This is a much better system than being reliant on large tech companies to do decision-making. For example, Facebook can collect all your information and use them without your consent.
Yes, they can say it was in the user agreement but that’s a stupid excuse because, in our short attention span era, most of the population doesn’t have time for that.
Web 3.0 Platforms
Now we have platforms such as Brave, which is a web 3.0 browser tackling the browsing space. It is trying to weed out the inefficiencies Google had.
For example, with Brave, the data is stored on our local device and doesn’t leave. Additionally, both the user and publisher are both being rewarded for using the platform in BAT (Basic Attention Tokens) tokens.
If Brave is to achieve its ultimate vision, it will have a large impact on the web 3.0 space and spawn many other companies looking for inspiration. Web 3 will be more than just having a crypto wallet. Cryptocurrencies at the moment are basically proof of work for when the applications will start to roll out.
Another interesting company is Odysee, which is aiming to tackle YouTube’s power in the arena of video search. It is an ambitious project, but given that it is early in the web 3.0 space, it will be interesting to see how it plays out while the space evolves.
Odysee was created by the team that created the Lbry blockchain protocol. Lbry is pronounced “library”. The creators will own the data and have rights to that data which in this case are videos on the Odysee platform.
On the website, they stated that no entity can control a publisher from not publishing a video. “For the same reasons that nobody can prevent a Bitcoin transaction from taking place, nobody can prevent a transaction (like a publication or a tip) from appearing on the LBRY blockchain.”
Despite that, interestingly enough, to keep the platform somewhat clean, there will be rules to restrict content such as pornography, violence, and terrorism. It’s only fair in order to maintain platform consistency.
Another factor of web 3.0 platforms is data safety. If most of our data is being stored on Amazon web servers for example and Amazon faces a blackout, more than likely we are going to get a taste of that fate as well.
To prevent this from happening, in a web 3.0 ecosystem, due to the redundancy of data shared across each node. It will be easy to recover data because the data will be stored across distributed nodes.
The benefits for Web 3.0 are there but is the concept of decentralization just a dream?
New Mask Over Familiar Face
The promises of web 3.0 technology might seem revolutionary or a breath of fresh air for the internet. But is it really all it made up to be? Cryptocurrencies are controlled by whales, similarly, within the stock market, the majority of the stocks are owned by large institutions.
At the beginning of initial coin offerings (ICO), the community was the first to access the tokens of a cryptocurrency for example. Similar to stocks, venture capitalists are being the first to access tokens at pre-ICO prices for pennies on the dollar.
The infiltration of money and venture capitalists within the space is good for growth: Hiring programmers, getting proper office spaces, marketing, etc. The downside is control, developers within the crypto space are now faced with a dilemma.
Should they give up most of the ownership of the tokens for huge sums of money? Or should they remain small and steadily grow their audience within their community?
Even though the answer might seem straightforward on paper, it’s not so easy to answer at all. It’s contextual, it depends on the space and time of where the developers are within their journey and how far they want to go.
Peasant’s Dream
At the moment, the crypto-space seems like a money grab, newcomers are being flocked to help continue the gravy train and are promised exorbitant returns. It’s delusional, similar to the dot-com bubble of the late 90s, everyone is looking for a piece of the pie.
Developers are now taking advantage of newcomers who don’t even know what Bitcoin is but they just know that if they buy and “HODL”, they’ll be rich.
As the old adage goes, “A sucker is born every minute”. Schemes like these will never stop as they are triggering the greed mechanism which is innate in our psyche.
Who Owns Web 3?
Jack Dorsey, CEO of Block and former CEO of Twitter tweeted about his distaste for web 3.0 and he sees it as a money grab by rich venture capitalists and not an idealistic dream being fulfilled by internet nerds.
Elon musk entered the debate by asking his followers who owned web 3.0. Jack Dorsey commented on the tweet singling out a specific venture capital firm. This seemed to have rubbed Marc Andreesen the wrong way and he later blocked Jack Dorsey on Twitter. Jack Dorsey confirmed it by sharing a screenshot with his Twitter followers.
I talked about Marc Andreesen being one of the founders of Netscape earlier, he currently runs a very successful venture capital fund with Ben Horowitz called “Andreesen Horowitz”.
At the moment, they are investing heavily into the crypto space and are targeting the web 3 space as well. It’s hard to assess what their true motives are, time will tell, but there has always been a spat between venture capitalists and purists.
From the looks of it, Web 3.0 will probably be owned by venture capitalists who will enjoy the perks of having early tokens and have control over the operations of businesses.
It’s a natural trait of VCs operate, “love em or hate em”. Despite that, there are innovations down the line that even though are within their early stages are showing lots of promise.
One that has been popular is Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs). These are decentralized organizations that are run automatically through deterministic or rule-based algorithms.
They are aiming to provide equality in decision-making and remove the middlemen from the organizations. Most of the functionalities are not run by a single decision-maker who can make major changes within an instant.
It is run by algorithms that are deemed to be “safer” than having owners at the helm making irrational decisions. Ownership of a DAO is token-based, so if I was to own a piece of a DAO, I can have a vote on how the operation is run. If there were to change, we all will have a say, and based on the algorithm, the decisions can then be carried out.
At the moment, DAOs are niche-based and are being used to raise funds that can be invested in projects. These projects can be a myriad of things such as new protocols, cryptocurrencies, developers, etc. If the dream is to be fully actualized, it will change the way how businesses are run.
This will take away a lot of the concentrated control we see in large organizations or most organizations for that matter. It will instead be disperse among the token holders of the DAO.
Summary
At the moment a lot of money is being funneled into the web 3.0 space. Most of the top tech companies in the web 1.0 and 2.0 space, now have an alternative in the web 3.0 space.
This could all just be a marketing play, another scam to squeeze every little drop of cash from the layman’s pocket. It could even be revolutionary and can take us back to the original vision of the internet, where privacy, discovery, and ownership of data were important.
It remains to be seen what will truly become of this space, time will tell how history will remember this period.
References:
https://lbry.com/faq/what-is-lbry
https://ssaurel.medium.com/6-reasons-why-you-must-switch-to-brave-browser-now-d48e528d3ac4
https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/web-1-0-web-2-0-and-web-3-0-with-their-difference/
https://home.cern/science/computing/birth-web/short-history-web
https://medium.com/@essentia1/why-the-web-3-0-matters-and-you-should-know-about-it-a5851d63c949
https://www.usg.edu/galileo/skills/unit07/internet07_03.phtml
Very interesting article
I totally agree