Web3: What is it? Here Are Some Approaches For Describing It To A Friend

Since the phrase “Web3” first appeared in 2014 to refer to novel protocols that enable decentralised consensus, it has expanded to encompass a vast ecosystem of open-source applications, public blockchains, and even architectural philosophies. In this blog article, we examine nine concepts that define web3 and provide several examples to help readers comprehend them in action.

1. The decentralised web is now referred to as Web3, a new fashionable term.

People can now access the Ethereum blockchain and many other Ethereum-compatible networks primarily through MetaMask. On your phone or computer, you can use it to generate a public key safely, but what it really does is enable a new way of engaging with the web where only you have access to your accounts and data and decide what to publish and what to keep private. MetaMask can also be referred to as a cryptographic consent manager.

Beyond decentralised money and identification, we also meant the rest of the stack when we spoke about the decentralised web. Other components of the decentralised web, such as decentralised storage (such as IPFS and Arweave), decentralised storage (Golem, W3BCloud, and others), and decentralised data, are only beginning to become crucial components of the stack to persistently store files (Graph Protocol).

Now that “Web3” has become a16z’s and other large venture capital firms’ catchphrase for a whole investment category, it is also the topic of extensive Twitter threads, sarcasm, scorn, and misunderstanding. It was just a matter of time before web3 consulting company started to dominate the public internet conversation and the jesters started attacking the protocol priests.

2. Web1 is read-only, followed by Web2 and Web3, which are both read-write.

My brother is a Web3 developer, and when I asked him to explain Web3, he gave me the succinct response that Web1 was read-only, Web2 was read-write, and Web3 was read-write-own. TCP, IP, SMTP, and of course HTTP were the open source protocols used to build the first iteration of the Web. A protocol is a common way that many computers can agree to communicate with one another.

You don’t need to pay for access to these fundamental protocols, which control how data and messages move across the internet, to create an application or service that adheres to their standards.

3. Web3 is an online financial layer.

The internet’s ability to make knowledge accessible, affordable, replicable, and abundant on a worldwide scale is one of its greatest breakthroughs. These characteristics stand in stark contrast to objects of value, such as money or property, which are by nature limited in supply and challenging to obtain. By resolving the “double spend” issue that had plagued early attempts at digital money, Bitcoin is the first system that brought scarcity to the internet. The concept of using duplicate digital currency and using it simultaneously at two or more locations is known as the “double spend problem.” To reduce the possibility of double-spending, banks, credit card companies, and payment processors validate the transactions themselves in the mainstream financial system. When using a decentralised cryptocurrency, an account’s double spending is prevented by a network of miners or validators. Given that verification is no longer dependent on a centralised, trusted authority, this has significant ramifications. Anyone who has access to the internet can join the peer-to-peer network and look at the ledger. A cabal trying to undo or censor transactions may be prevented by social consensus.

4. Web3 is the internet’s identity layer.

The absence of a public, open-source identification layer is one of the biggest flaws in the early internet protocols. Since then, closed-source Web2 platforms like Facebook and Twitter have dominated that layer. The Web3 philosophy is that you should control your online identity and only expose aspects of it at your discretion. An identity on Ethereum is quite simple in practise. Consider it a container that enables claims to be connected to it. Without discovering anything more about your digital identity that you don’t consent to, a government could attest to your date of birth and place of birth. Financial services could scan your transaction history to determine who you are without knowing where you were born. Additionally, the digital identity you create on one social network might transfer to another.