Web 3.0 and its potential

There’s new term on internet world that bring back the ideas of decentralization concept to run data. Today’s websites and applications that we use mostly are “owned” by big tech companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc., even banks. They collected our data and can use it for their benefit (and we agreed when you clicked that box).

What is Web 3.0?

The core concept of web 3.0 is to eliminate that, to eliminate those middleman when we chat to our friends, eliminate those middleman when we transfer our money to family so we didn’t have to pay fees to do just that, and most important, we take control with our own data.

Brief history of web technologies

The first web technology was called Web 1.0. It was the most reliable internet in 1990s despite only offering access to limited information with little to no user interaction. Back in the day, creating user pages or even commenting on articles weren’t a thing. Web 1.0 was about open protocols that were decentralized and community-governed. Most of the value accrued to the edges of the network, which are users and builders.

Web 2.0 made the internet a lot more interactive that enable interactive web platforms like Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon exists. Platforms like those emerged to bring order to the Internet by making it easy to connect and transact online. But over time those companies amassed too much power, most of the value accrued to them not the users.

Why now?

There’s a small group of companies that “owned” all of this data on internet, and then there’s us who use it, and despite the fact that we contribute to the success of these platforms, we don’t have anything to show for it, we don’t have control over it.

And so, the answer is an iteration of the internet where new social networks, search engines and marketplaces appears that have no company overlords. Instead, they are decentralized, built upon a system known as the blockchain. It’s operated by users collectively, rather than a corporation.

In a Web3 world, people control their own data and jumping around from social media to email to shopping using a single personalized account, creating a public record on the blockchain of all of that activity. It will combine the decentralized (read this great article about why decentralization matters), community-governed ethos of Web 1.0 with the advanced, modern functionality of Web 2.0.

How it works?

In Web 3.0, ownership and control is decentralized. Users and builders (developers, creators) can own pieces of internet services by owning tokens, both no-fungible or NFTs (read more about NFT on this article), and fungible. Tokens give users property rights, NFTs give users the ability to own objects, which can be art, photos, code, music, text, game objects, credentials, governance rights, access passes, and whatever it can be next.

Tokens align networks participants to work together toward a common goal – the growth of the network and the appreciation of the token. This fixes the core problem of centralized networks, where the value is accumulated by one company, and company ends up fighting its own users and partners.

Is it the future of web?

With all of those concepts and promises that Web 3.0 brought to the surface, the future looks promising if Web 3.0 really applied all over the world. There will be no single company that we rely on their services to do our everyday tasks, to make conversation, or even to do a transaction, all is decentralized, no middleman, all the possibilities unlock.

But some people are skeptical about Web 3.0. A distributed architecture on a centralized infrastructure not suddenly mean a decentralized infrastructure. While web infrastructure is decentralized, in practice much of the internet runs on servers hosted by a handful of companies like Amazon.

What do you think about Web 3.0? Will it really works that good like it promises? Will it solve our major problems we face with current web network and data ownership issues? Let me know in the comment!