Web3.0 — Future of Internet

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Web3 the buzz word that we are hearing now. Web3 is all about decentralization — from platforms like Meta, Alphabet(Google), Amazon, Governments and Traditional Financial systems.

Before talking about Web3 let’s see the history of web

History of Web

Web 1.0 (Web1), the earliest version of the internet, existed roughly between the early 1990s and mid-2000s and was characterised by web pages that were static or read-only. This version of the internet was built by web developers to deliver mostly texts and graphics to participants, who could only consume the content but not interact with it.

Web 1.0 is considered decentralised because it used open-source internet protocols from the 1970s and 1980s, where anyone could build on them without permission from any quarters.

Web2 — the version we have now — which is a product of the Dotcom Bubble burst, where the initial rush of investments in internet-based companies yielded losses.

Quick read about Dotcom Bubble burst

This was historic as it helped filter out shams and highlight the real success stories, which laid the foundation for subsequent successful internet companies. While Web2 can be explained to be when the internet became an interactive and a social web — where everyone with access to it could create content — it is much more than that.

Web 2.0 is characterised by tech companies that build their own platform on the free layer of the internet and lock it in while providing a rich user experience that prevents users from wanting to leave.

Web2 companies build sleek and revolutionary apps that become popular quickly, and as the app’s popularity increases, so does its user base. While users can access these applications for free, they pay by inadvertently offering up their personal data, which Web2 companies sell to advertisers and sometimes political campaigners.

WEB2.0 Applications and Products

All these confer so much power on these companies and make data breaches more dangerous and frequent. Additionally, governments have used centralisation to bully internet companies to censor or shut down the accounts of dissidents. This is usually because the government knows the exact company and centralised servers it is targeting.

Web3 — Return of Privacy

Web3 is supposed to be a more decentralised web that challenges the dominance of the tech giants by concentrating the power and data in the hands of the users, instead of the big tech corporations. This means that data is distributed across networks and no single entity owns the information, though the idea is much harder to execute.

Instead of providing your personal data over and over again on each platform you sign up for, you will instead simply authorise the platforms to use your data. If something changes, like your address or credit card number, you need only change it once on your end, and all your sites will be updated. This will make the Web much more user-friendly.

In Web3, identity also works much differently than what we are used to today. Most of the time in Web3 apps, identities will be tied to the wallet address of the user interacting with the application; wallet addresses are completely anonymous unless the user decides to tie their own identity to it publicly.

Identity

Web3 aims to solve many of these shortcomings by fundamentally rethinking how we architect and interact with applications from the ground up.

Architect and Interaction with applications

Web 3.0 , is an even more fundamental disruption, one that will eventually leave everything hit in its shade. It is a leap forward to open, trustless and permissionless networks.

Open because they are built from open source software by an open community of developers.
Trustless because the network allows participants to interact without a trusted third party.
Permissionless because anyone can participate without authorization from a central authority.

With Web3, the network is decentralized, so no authority controls it, and the decentralized applications (dapps) that are built on top of the network are open. The openness of the decentralized web means that no single party can control data or limit access. Anyone is able to build and connect with different dapps without permission from a central company.

What Web3 means for the world

Web1 and Web2 allowed truly global businesses to form by radically shrinking the latency and cost at which people could trade information. That information is traded via a set of trusted third parties.

With Web3, individuals, businesses and machines will be able to trade information with other parties that they don’t know or trust, without an intermediary. Web3 will allow us to interact with any individual in the world, without having to give up our data to middlemen. This shift will enable a whole new wave of previously unimaginable business models from decentralized autonomous organizations to self-sovereign data marketplaces.

Societies will become more efficient by removing rent-seeking middlemen and returning the value directly to the users and suppliers in an industry. People will share more data with more privacy and security assurances. We will control our own data and digital footprints. Web3 will bust platform monopolies like Google and Facebook giving rise to bottom-up innovation and a new global digital economy.