Is Our Future Depends on WEB 3.0?

Blockchain technology and tools of decentralization

Introduction

Over the years, the human race has evolved in technology and has succeeded in several remarkable discoveries; we have built satellites, landed on the moon, found cures, improved transportation, robotics, and so much more. Apart from all these discoveries, there is a common field that has led to all of these successes, the Internet. The Internet has been evolving since the 1900s and has impacted our lives in many ways. Even in this pandemic, when tons of people were left jobless, they have found means to support their livelihood through online services and businesses. But, the current problem of the world is data privacy.

In today’s world, everyone uses the internet, and it has come to such extreme levels where anyone can hack into each other’s accounts and gain resources or defame them. Experts say that web 3.0 is the solution for this.

Before we dive into web 3.0, let us have a detailed look at how the Web has transitioned to what it is today.

Web 1.0

Web 1.0, was the first generation of web introduced to us in 1991, which consisted of a bunch of static pages. In other words, it means that the users could only read from the internet. The concept of logins, advertisement, or any form of interaction was not possible during these years.

In general, web 1.0 contained information like Wikipedia that everyone had access to, making the users ‘consumers’. This whole concept lasted till 2004 when the dynamic of the web changed.

Web 2.0

Then came the age of web 2.0 in the year 2004, ‘the age of targeted advertisement and lack of privacy’; were during this time, the web evolved a lot. It was also the years when Facebook and youtube got launched. It entirely changed the dynamic of web 1.0. The significant change was that users could now interact with the web. This means, people could now not only get information from web pages, but the web pages also started getting information from us. Well, you might be wondering how did that happen? Let’s see how:

As we started using Google, Facebook, and Youtube, these centralized companies started collecting information about us to serve us better content that would make us stay on their websites for a long time. This way, the revenue of these companies would also increase. But, eventually, these companies started selling our information to advertisers, which led to a lack of privacy.

For example, you and your friend on Facebook will get different news feeds based on each of your interests. This is because the page is dependent on the person who is viewing it. Facebook shows your feed based on the data you intentionally give them. Example: the number of times you watch a video or the likes you give to a post.

But the ads you see on Facebook are the data that you don’t provide them knowingly. For example: when you go to a restaurant or even drop your kids off at school, these centralized companies, collect all of the data and show the ads related to it. This is now extremely scary for the users because the data in the wrong hands can lead to many privacy issues and cause people to be susceptible to cyber-attacks, frauds, etc. This is the overview of Web 2.0 that we all are using to date. But from 2022, this will change.

This is it! We are stepping into a new age of the internet, that focuses on protecting our identity using decentralized networks; also known as Web 3.0!

Web 3.0

Web 3.0 is the next evolution of the internet that uses blockchain technology and tools of decentralization.

First, let’s understand the difference between web 2.0 and web 3.0:

In web 2.0, the users (we people) are considered as the product where centralized companies can make their revenue using us. Whereas in web 3.0, it is said, that we will be able to own our content or anything that we post or publish online, and we will not be under the control of the said centralized companies. In general, web 3.0 allows us to have complete control of our data. This version of the web has already started coming to action. One such example is Odyssey.

Odyssey is a blockchain alternative to YouTube where several contents can be posted, and the creators can earn library tokens which are rewards for enticing people to watch their videos. People can share the posted videos, only by downloading from the source, just like a vast torrent network. But the only drawback is that Odyssey can’t stop a video from being posted or re-posted. For example: If you upload a video to your network, your content is shared only with the people you know. But at the same time, if you take down the post, Odyssey cannot remove them from existence. The people who have already downloaded it can re-post and share. This can get risky because of people posting illegal or hateful content. To reduce such kind of content, the users of this network could probably decide on it.

In the long process, experts say that there will be a time when every single company would be run by a decentralized group called DAO which stands for ‘Decentralized Autonomous Organization.’ The DAOs, are not governed by any CEOs, presidents, or any of the authorities. Only those with the most tokens can vote on any of the company changes and not by a single authorial individual; this also means that there will not be any censorship like Facebook and Twitter.

All of these are just a few ideas circling that may or may not happen in the foreseeable future. But in reality, the primitive concept of web 3.0, as of now, is that, by the next decade, we might be able to buy stuff online using cryptocurrencies.

In conclusion, these are just a series of ideas that grow together with an ultimate goal to disassemble centralized companies like Google and Facebook and replace them with ‘DAOs.’