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What is Web3, To Me
I've read my fair share of "let me tell you about this web 3 thing everybody's talking about" articles over the last couple of weeks and I have to say that I rather enjoyed them. People seem to have quite a vivid imagination and they can create really nice stories, even though pretty much all of them got it pretty much all wrong.
I had conflicting feelings about writing this because, the truth might be much less exciting than all these other stories. Even though, I really feel like letting this out and I think it would be a great way to set the baseline for this whole project. So, here we go!
Well, in the beginning there was the internet. And on that internet, there were these websites written in HTML and… well… that it. Just HTML.
HTML is a very simple language. So simple it’s not really even a programing language. It’s called a markup language because it doesn’t really do any logic and other cool stuff like that. With HTML you can just describe entities, sizes, colors, and locations on the page.
The first websites used that and only that. The first generation of websites were static – they were something like an electronic newspaper. You’d type an address in your browsed and then (after a minute or two) you’d see a page. Everyone would see the exact same page. There were no logins, not personalization and no user data. Nothing like that.
Web 1.0 was an electronic newspaper.
Somewhere along the line, someone (I’m sorry I don’t know exactly who it was. I was still in high school back then) found a way to get the server to send different responses for the same request. That means that now, instead of making each and every page manually, we could add some real code – add some logic to the process – and use that to generate different pages. Then, instead of making multiple HTML pages by hand, we could use a server-side programming language (PHP is the one I used back then) to generate pages on the fly and inject them with custom data.
These servers could connect to databases, and use that data to create customized user experience. So when you log into a website you’d see your data, and when I log-in I see my data.
In their second generation, websites became more like interactive service providers. From search services to personalized banking services. The web had become interactive and now there were so many new cool things we could do that we couldn’t do before (as developers). So, we named it web 2.0
At some point a hacker/developer persona under the name of Satoshi Nakamoto came up with this new technology that uses cryptographic algorithms to maintain the integrity of a distributed ledger database. Cryptography already existed; he didn’t create that. Blockchains and ledger databases also already existed. But he managed to put things together into something new that never existed before. Like peanut butter and jelly.
Now, for the first time ever, there was a way to open up databases to the general public and let people use them directly. Anyone could just read and write to them without even needing to identify themselves, as long as they follow a certain set of rules. Aka "The Protocol". But that wasn’t quite web3 yet.
Web 3.0 really started with Ethereum, or more accurately, a guy name Vitalik Buterin who came up with the idea of taking that distributed cryptographic ledger technology, known as bitcoin (which is actually the name of the network, not actual coins) and use the miners (they don’t really mine anything, it’s just how they call bitcoin network’s servers) to run smart contracts (small programs that live on the blockchain and manage data, not real contracts). That allowed Ethereum (and other smart-contract enabled blockchains) to store any type of data and even run computation on that data.
You might want to read this again, because this is where things start getting real confusing. For the average dude in 2022 this is probably little more than complete of gibberish. I know. Even for me it took some serious time to wrap my head around this.
However, once I did manage to wrap my head around that, I had that feeling again of “wow, there are so many new things we can do now that we could never do before!” And we know that once this feeling comes along, and once we can do things that we couldn’t do before, we must come up with a new name. That’s web 3.
In the beginning websites were like digital newspapers, where the owner can write and the public can read.
In their second generation, anyone could read and anyone could write, as long as the owner allows it.
In this incarnation, web apps are independent of the data. You can own your stuff, and you can take your data with you.
It might sound corny, but if someone tells you they know where this is going, then they're lying. Though, that's exactly what makes this new thing so amazing, and it's also what makes people love it and hate it so much. No one really understands what it is. No one can even imagine all the things it can do.
It's up to us, the web3 buidlers, to make things up as we go along and nobody knows what we're about to come up with!