What is Web 3.0 and why should you care?
In the wake of the financial crisis of 2008, the world was introduced to Bitcoin, a revolutionary digital currency that is free from any central control or the oversight of banks and governments. In the past decade primarily due the success of Bitcoin, people tend to associate Blockchain to money and finance but the application of Blockchains go way beyond that.
So, what is blockchain anyway?
Basically, blockchain is a digital ledger that has three nice properties, it is:
1.Timestamped
2. Immutable
3. Auditable
Over the course of history, society has found great value in storing information in ledgers. These ledgers hold information such as, when, and why I transferred some amount of money, diseases I have suffered in the past, piece of land that I own, etc. It is important that these ledgers remain consistent, truthful, and accessible. Due to its importance such ledgers are maintained by Governments or a group of regulated entities. But these ledgers have been susceptible to political manipulation and corruption such as the financial crisis in 2008.
Enter blockchains. The real power of the blockchain lies in the fact that the information recorded in blockchains cannot be changed. When something goes inside a blockchain ledger you know for sure it is going to be there, you know when it went in there and can easily track different states.
Next this type of ledger is not privy to some elite individuals or government to audit but accessible to everyone on the blockchain. This type of structure that Blockchains provide, are of significant importance to the future of the world and the future of Web 3.0.
But wait what is Web 3.0?
Before we answer that that it is important to know where we come from, because if we do not know where we come from, then we don’t know where we are, and if you don’t know where we are, we don’t know where we’re going.
It all started with Web 1.0; it was the idea that anyone with the right software skills could publish information to the web for others to consume. But the problem was that it lacked user experience and the use of Web 1.0 was constrained to a select few: programmers.
With the popularity of JavaScript, the landscape changed quickly we now had programmable web pages. Corporations introduced us to Web 2.0. They enabled for user generated content by providing services which empowered everyone to use the internet with no coding prerequisites.
Only problem, they made the internet centralised. Unlike the open internet we had during the Web 1.0 era we now have an internet today that is controlled by a few corporations. While the users remain the heart and soul of content created on the internet the corresponding ledgers of these transactions (when a user posts something on the internet it is stored as a transaction) are maintained and used as per the discretion of an elite group of decision makers without any accountability or transparency. You can be banned, censored erased off the internet in a jiffy.
Web 3.0 is decentralisation of the internet. It is a vision where nobody owns the internet and all the information on the internet has a verified owner. What can and cannot be done with this information is as is solely at the owner’s discretion . Information instead of being stored in a centralised ledger of corporations would be stored on a blockchain based immutable ledger, a copy of which is available with every node on the network to verify.
To put it simply web 3.0 is a decentralised internet which unlike web 2.0 who runs on the multiple centralised servers, runs on blockchains driven by peer-to-peer networks.
The kind of information stored on the blockchain ledger can vary, it can be used to keep track of money exchanged between accounts or it can be used to keep a store of health records, it could be used to track the ownership of land so on and so forth but at its core, it is a vision where you can establish trust without the need for a third party. It is the underlying layer of the internet where trust is inherent.
