What is Web 3.0?

It Is the newest buzz word in town that has been taking over the internet. Essentially it is a decentralized online ecosystem based on the blockchain and represents a new philosophy in the internet of things.

Web 1.0

Let us first look at what the first generation of the web was.

It roughly lasted between 1991 through to the middle of the first decade of 2000. The internet at this point consisted of very simple web pages built using raw HTML. Only those who knew coding could create and publish content online.

The internet of things could be viewed as one big Wikipedia all hyper-linked together. The use case was to only consume information for the end user.

Web 2.0

This era started post 2005 and continues till date. This saw the emergence of technologies like Flash, Javascript and HTML 5 and companies like Twitter, Facebook, Youtube just changed the face of the internet. Now anyone could post and publish content online even if they didn't know how to code. Sharing and consumption of information became a two way street. Not only did we receive information but could also post it just as easily.

What is Web 3.0 and how is it different?

It was first coined by one of the creators of the Ethereum blockchain Gavin Wood in a 2014 blog post. As per him web 3.0 should be an open and decentralized version of the internet. What is decentralized? - click here to find out

In theory users would be able to exchange money and info on the web without the use of middlemen like a bank or tech company - read dapps, defi etc. People would have more control over their data and be able to sell it should they choose.

The services offered in this new world would be built on a decentralized distributed ledger technology aka blockchain. What is important to know is that anyone could be the owner of the computers that would do the computation, unlike the Google and Facebook servers that store data currently. Users would be incentivised to participate in this blockchain by giving them tokens aka crypto currencies that would have a monetary value.

What is the vision for Web 3.0

Just like how Orkut changed the way we interact the interweb in the previous generation, web 3.0 intends to completely change and radicalize our interactions on the interweb.

Projects like Decentraland, Sandbox, Enjin and Axie Infinity are on route to change the world as we know it.

Criticisms of Web 3.0

There are still some questions surrounding Web3.0. Some people like Jack Dorsey of twitter call web 3.0 ‘a centralized entity with different label’. After some deeper digging by experts it was found that the underlying infrastructure is not as decentralized as promised and not as secure as we are led to believe it would be.

Also we are unsure if this crowdsourced style web would have enough computing power to bear the weight of the world. Not to mention the potential storage and bandwidth problems we might face.