Web3 is widely heralded as the future of the Internet. Those who support the democratisation of the Internet believe that Web3 has the potential to run a genuinely decentralised web infrastructure capable of supporting cryptocurrencies, NFT, DAO, decentralised finance, and more.
In simple terms, Web3 is the Internet made more inclusive and interactive to allow users to read/write/own their versions of the Web, where they can earn and retain financial interest and gain greater control over Web communities.
Web3, or Web 3.0, is characterised by the decentralisation of the Internet. However, what is a decentralised internet?
A decentralised Internet resists attempts to exercise central control over its architecture, services, or protocols and allows no individual, government, or corporation to exert significant influence over its use. It leads us to understand that a decentralised internet is a type that has a centralised authority. But who has the real power if there is no centralised authority? As a matter of fact, the people interacting with and participating on the internet have the authority to control it. It sounds like democracy, but remember, there is no head or chief in this democracy.
Web3 relies heavily on machine learning, artificial intelligence (AI), and blockchain technology. Furthermore, the origin of the term Web3 comes from the world of cryptocurrencies. In 2014, one of the co-founders of the Ethereum (ETH) platform, Gavin Wood, coined the term "Web3".
To better understand Web3, consider the following fundamentals.
● Decentralisation: As mentioned above, Web3 is decentralised, and instead of centralised companies controlling and owning significant swaths of the Internet, ownership is distributed among its creators and users on Web3.
● Open and permissionless: In Web3, everyone has the same opportunity to engage, and no one is excluded.
● Native payment infrastructure: Instead of depending on the outmoded infrastructure of banks and payment processors, Web3 uses cryptocurrencies to spend and send money online.
● Trustless: Web3 runs through incentives and economic systems instead of relying on trusted third parties.
What is the Centralised Web and the problem associated with it?
When the journey of the Internet began on Web1, people could read the content but not interact with it. Web 1 was characterised by inter-connected static web pages, meaning users could view them but not produce content without knowing how to code them.
The theory of evolution continued, and Web1 led to the development of Web2 or today's Web. In Web2, end users with developers also create tons of data or content on various social media platforms like YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter. For example, our tweets, Instagram aesthetic, and Facebook campaigns are a gift from Web2. This article is another example of content creation powered by Web2.
However, Web 2 became a more controlled internet where words like transparency and security had question marks. Users are mainly at the mercy of corporate giants and data sharks. Such companies constantly track and save user data without users' knowledge or consent.
Another significant issue with Web2 is censorship. Due to the concentration of internet power, big companies behave in a monopolistic way where they can restrict and allow sharing of any data according to their whims and fancies. Unfortunately, centralisation has often misled the world. Hence users are now looking toward Web3.
What are the advantages of Web3?
It is time for us to throw some light on a few crucial advantages that Web3 can provide us:
● Ownership: Web3 gives everyone the power of ownership, and no one can take that power away. For example, if you play an online game, whatever you win or buy there will always stay yours until you decide to sell or give it away.
● Privacy: A decentralised identity system allows us to control our online identity and personal information. In Web3, everyone gets more fine-tuned control over what information is available about us online and who can access it.
● Opportunity: Most Web3 projects are open source, allowing anyone to develop on top of them. Like how Lego blocks work, every portion of Web 3 can be interconnected and reused. It is known as "composability." It provides a way for existing initiatives to be leveraged to build something new, making it simple to develop inventive new projects that can add more value.
● Better information interconnectivity: Larger data sets offer algorithms with more information to study as more products connect to the Internet. It can accurate information tailored to each user's needs.
What are the disadvantages of Web3?
Despite the many advantages of Web3 in its current form, the ecosystem still has a lot of limitations that it needs to overcome, for example:
● Complexity: Currently, the technological entry barriers for using Web3 are too high. Users must be aware of security risks, decipher extensive technical documents, and maneuver through unintuitive user interfaces.
● Require more advanced gadgets: Web3 will be incompatible with less advanced devices, and Web3 will demand faster CPUs. As a result, to use the future version of the internet device, it will be necessary to have higher-than-average specifications.
● Centralised infrastructure: Web3 is still in its infancy, so it mainly relies on centralised infrastructure (GitHub, Twitter, Discord, etc.). Many Web3 firms are trying to fill these gaps, but it takes time to establish a high-quality, dependable infrastructure.
Conclusion
With the massive explosion of available data, websites and applications are transitioning to a more immersive web experience. The world has seen tons of issues, just as the prohibition of Twitter handles, corruption, a monopoly in each sector, misuse of users' data, economic crisis, possession problems with the content, and so forth. The basis reason for such issues lies somewhere in centralisation. Therefore, the start of solutions begins by making the network decentralised.
Decentralisation snatches the power from the hands of centralised authorities and passes it to the end-users. Hence it can be concluded that Web3 is seeking to unravel the present problems of Web1 and Web2.
Web 3 has given us a glimpse of a new generation of the Internet and the futureInternetll us what it can bring. Web3 promises to change the online experience as dramatically as PCs and smartphones did.
