Web 3.0 again, but again in a different way. Chains to set us free
Immediately after the concept of Web 2.0 came into circulation, in the second half of the first decade of the 1st century, the concept of the third version of the Internet (3.0), understood at that time as a "semantic web", appeared. immediately. Years later, the troika is back in vogue like crap, but this time Web XNUMX is understood a little differently.
The new meaning of this concept is offered by the founder of the Polkadot blockchain infrastructure and co-author cryptocurrency Ethereum, Gavin Wood. As it is easy to guess who is the initiator of the new version Web 3.0 this time it should have something to do with blockchain and cryptocurrencies. Wood himself describes the new network as more open and secure. Web 3.0 it will not be run centrally by a handful of governments and, as is increasingly being done in practice, by Big Tech monopolies, but rather by a democratic and self-governing Internet community.
“Today, the Internet is increasingly about user-generated data,” Wood says in a podcast. The Third Web was recorded in 2019. Today, he says, Silicon Valley startups are funded by their ability to collect data effectively. On some platforms, almost every user action is logged. “This can only be used for targeted advertising, but the data can be used for other purposes as well,” warns Wood.
"To predict the views and behavior of the people, including the results of elections." Ultimately, this leads to total totalitarian control, Wood concludes.
2. Gavin Wood and the Polkadot logo
Instead, it offers an open, automatic, free, and democratic internet where the netizens decide, not the big corporations.
The crowning achievement of the Web3 Foundation Wood-supported project is Polkadot (2), a non-profit organization based in Switzerland. Polkadot is a decentralized protocol based on blockchain technology (3) which makes it possible to link the blockchain with other solutions for the exchange of information and transactions in a completely secure way. It connects blockchains, both public and private, and other technologies. It is designed on four layers: the main blockchain called Relay Chain, which connects different blockchains and facilitates the exchange between them, parachains (simple blockchains) that make up the Polkadot network, para-streams or pay-per-use parachains, and finally “bridges”. , i.e. connectors of independent blockchains.
Polkadot network aims to improve interoperability, increase scalability, and enhance the security of hosted blockchains. In less than a year, Polkadot launched over 350 applications.
3. Presentation of the blockchain technology model
Polkadot main blockchain relay circuit. It connects various parachains and facilitates the exchange of data, assets, and transactions. Direct chains of parachains run parallel to the main Polkadot blockchain or relay chain. They can be very different from each other in structure, governance system, tokens, etc. Parachains also allow for parallel transactions and make Polkadot a scalable and secure system.
According to Wood, this system can be transferred to a network that is understood more broadly than just managing a cryptocurrency. The Internet is emerging, in which users individually and collectively have complete control over everything that happens on the system.
From simple page reading to "tokenomics"
Web 1.0 was the first web implementation. As expected, it lasted from 1989 to 2005. This version can be defined as an information communication network. According to the creator of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, it was read-only at the time.
This provided very little interaction, where information can be exchanged togetherbut it wasn't real. In the information space, objects of interest were called Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI; URI). Everything was static. You could read nothing more. It was a library model.
The second generation Internet, known as Web 2.0, was first defined by Dale Dougherty in 2004 as read-write network. Web 2.0 pages allowed the gathering and management of global interest groups, and the medium offered social interaction.
Web 2.0 it is a business revolution in the computer industry brought about by the shift to the Internet as a platform. At this stage, users began to create content on platforms such as YouTube, Facebook, etc. This version of the Internet was social and collaborative, but usually you had to pay for it. The disadvantage of this interactive internet, which was implemented with some delay, was that while creating content, users also shared information and personal information with the companies that control these platforms.
At the same time that Web 2.0 was taking shape, predictions for Web 3.0. A few years ago it was believed that this would be the so-called. . The descriptions, published around 2008, suggested the emergence of intuitive and intelligent software that would search for information tailored to us, much better than already known personalization mechanisms suggested.
Web 3.0 was supposed to be the third generation of Internet services, pages and apps focused on usage machine learning i data understanding. The ultimate goal of Web 3.0, as envisioned in the second half of the XNUMXs, was to create more intelligent, connected and open websites. Years later, it seems that these goals were and are being realized, although the term "semantic web" has fallen out of common use.
Today's definition of a third version of the Internet based on Ethereum does not necessarily contradict the old predictions of the semantic Internet, but emphasizes something else, privacy, security and democracy.
The key innovation of the last decade is the creation of platforms that are not controlled by any one organization, but that everyone can trust. This is because each user and operator of these networks must adhere to the same set of hard-coded rules known as consensus protocols. The second innovation is that these networks allow transfer of value or money between accounts. These two things - decentralization and internet money - are the keys to the modern understanding of Web 3.0.
Creators of cryptocurrency networksmaybe not all, but characters like Gavin Woodthey knew what their work was about. One of the most popular programming libraries used to write Ethereum code is web3.js.
In addition to focusing on data protection, the new Web 3.0 trend has a financial aspect, the economics of the new Internet. Money in the new networkInstead of relying on traditional financial platforms tied to governments and limited by borders, they are freely controlled by owners, globally and uncontrolled. This also means that tokens i kryptowaluty they can be used to develop entirely new business models and the internet economy.
Increasingly, this direction is called tokenomics. An early and yet relatively modest example is an ad network on the decentralized web that does not necessarily rely on the sale of user data to advertisers, but does rely on rewarding users with a token for viewing ads. This type of Web 3.0 application is developed in the Brave browser environment and the Basic Attention Token (BAT) financial ecosystem.
For Web 3.0 to become a reality for these applications and any other applications derived from it, many more people need to use them. For this to happen, these applications need to be much more readable, understandable to people outside of programming circles. At the moment, it cannot be said that tokenomics is understandable from the point of view of the masses.
The avidly quoted "father of the WWW" Tim Berners-Lee, once noted that Web 3.0 is a kind of return to Web 1.0. Because in order to publish, post, do something, you don’t need any permission from the “central authority”, there is no control node, there is no single point of observation and ... there is no switch.
There is only one problem with this new democratic, free, uncontrolled Web 3.0. At the moment, only limited circles use it and want to use it. Most users seem to be happy with the user-friendly and easy-to-use Web 2.0 as it has now been brought to a high level of technical sophistication.
