Web 3.0 may turn out to be the biggest technological shift we would ever experience in our lifetime. So let's talk about it. To understand what Web 3 is, we first have to understand the previous versions of the Internet. As we go through them we’ll think of the web as the internet throughout the period of time.
Web 1.0
The first iteration of the web represents web 1.0 and is known to be the read-only web. The majority of users during this phase were passive consumers of content. This is said to have begun around the early ’90s. A lot has changed.
Web 2.0
In this phase, users create most of their content, which goes from putting this article out, YouTubers, and also what we all post on platforms like Twitter, and Facebook. You guys reacting and sharing this article also counts 😉. Web 2.0 is the most common internet known to us today. An internet that companies exchanges their services for users' personal data. In the case of Nigeria, an internet the government prevents users from using Twitter because the president’s tweet was deleted for threatening citizens. Web 3.0 to the rescue 🦸♂️.
Web 3.0
Web 3.0 is the decentralized web, where the power that was once held by companies and the government is being distributed to everyone. Web 3.0 is a permissionless, instant, and global internet. unlike web 2.0 where developers deploy applications that store data in a single database or run on a single server, web 3.0 runs on decentralized networks of many peer-to-peer nodes. These applications are known as Decentralized Applications (DApps). These are apps that allow anyone to participate permissionless and without monetizing their personal data. In web 3.0 the government is replaced by a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) is an entity with no central leadership. Decisions get made from the bottom-up, governed by a community organized around a specific set of rules enforced on a blockchain. DAOs are internet-native organizations collectively owned and managed by their members. Banks are replaced with wallets like metamask and trustwallet, and cash is replaced by cryptocurrencies.
Benefits of web3
- Decentralization: The core role of web 3.0 is to bring power back to the people and we are able to use the internet without any intrusion from uncle Bob.
- Trustless: In web3, you can use decentralized applications without needing to trust anyone or an organization. Trust isn’t needed because of the consensus protocols that exist in the blockchain, which are all hardcoded and cannot be altered.
- Verifiable: web3 is verifiable yet anonymous. Blockchain is public and distributed to nodes. It is verifiable which means that anyone can check all the transactions but anonymous in the sense no one can really know who performed these transactions.
Limitations
- Scalability – transactions are slower on web3 because they're decentralized. Changes to state, like a payment, need to be processed by a miner and propagated throughout the network.
- UX – interacting with web3 applications can require extra steps, software, and education. This can be a hurdle to adoption.
- Cost – most successful DApps put very small portions of their code on the blockchain as it's expensive
You can read more about decentralization and web3 from the links below. Decentralization and web 3.0.