What Is Web 3.0?

What is Web (WWW)?

World Wide Web (WWW) is a collection of hyper text based websites distributed across the globe and connected to each other through hyperlinks. People misunderstand Web for Internet. Technically Web is a service operating over the Internet; similar to Email or VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol)

History of Web 1.0 & 2.0

Websites first emerged in 1991 and is termed to be Web 1.0 era. Those days they were simple static websites with less moving parts. It was then HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) was first created as document format to present information over Web. Over time in 2004 Web 2.0 came into existence with the introduction of HTML5. It was the fifth iteration to HTML since Web 1.0 and it came with modern features such as Audio & Video Tags, Scalable Vector Graphics over web and lot more. It’s been 18 Years since the Web 2.0 era, and we are seeing glimpse of Web 3.0 Technology over the Web and I am excited to see its growth over the time in future.

What is Web 3.0?

Web 3.0 embraces Decentralization, Blockchain Technology and Web 2.0. That’s correct, Web 2.0 is going to be a component in the next generation of World Wide Web. Web 2.0 has revolutionized the website industry like we have never seen before; from software solution to an entire operating system can be interacted with browsers these days. It is hard to let go of these features and hence Web 3.0 incorporates the best features that exist today as a component in it.

What is Decentralization?

In Blockchain, Decentralization is distribution of website data across network of users through ledgers. Data verification and ownership is trusted through ledgers as each user maintains his own copy of cryptographic data. This reduces the worry to trust the source of data. If a single user tries to corrupt or alter the source, the whole community of users notices this change and rejects his change from the network pool. This maintains the integrity of the data.

Traditionally, Websites are centralized and a single organization controls the availability of it over Web. If that organization decides to bring down the website then that information is lost. If a hacker decides to bring down the website it would not be available until restored through backups.

Web 3.0 tries to solve this issue through decentralization and blockchain technology. Here the information is distributed across users as cryptographic blocks of data chained together with keys and digital signatures. In order to read entire data you need to have access to all data blocks. Even if there is a single point of failure in accessing a data block due to the server being down or it being corrupted. It is impossible to read the entire data.

Since every user in the network pool has a copy of the cryptographic information of the website data, It is difficult to bring down the website. This enhances the security and uptime of the websites drastically due to the fact that website is everywhere.

What is Blockchain technology?

Blockchain technology is the technique of converting digital assets into digital tokens (NFT’s) through tokenization. These tokens are blocks of data with digital signatures that points to the original owner of that particular data. All these information is stored as a ledger and the ledger is distributed across internet among its users so that one can verify the originality and ownership of data.

NFT’s (Non Fungible Tokens) are a buzz word these days at the time of writing this post. People are acquiring rights to digital arts and information by purchasing them through cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, Dogecoin Etc.

How is Web 3.0 better than Web 2.0?

Web 3.0 steps in to solve a lot of issues that we currently face in this generation as listed below

• No single organization can control the flow of information through Internet.
• Scalability issue is going to be a thing of the past.
• It is more secure as there is no single point of entry to access data.
• Data is distributed across network of users.
• Data is transferred through Peer to Peer Network.

Disadvantages of Web 3.0

As any new technology, Web 3.0 comes with its own share of caveats.

• It is going to be difficult to regulate information shared across web.
• Fake news is a big issue and it’s getting harder everyday to tackle this. Since Web 3.0 focuses on data distribution and anonymization It is going to be much harder to censor fake news or hate speech.
• Unless a reliable version of cryptocurrency enters the market (which doesn’t involve mining) to process the transactions it is going to be hazardous to the environment due to its carbon foot print.
• Current blockchain technology is slow as the transaction verification is time consuming.

Conclusion

My two cents on Web 3.0 is, I am excited for this technology in its alpha state, Zeronet is an OpenSource project that implements decentralization and blockchain technology to host websites which are anonymous and doesn’t require a server to host websites. However, I noticed few drawbacks such as:

• The website needs to be static in nature
• Rest API’s cannot be decentralized
• A copy of website is downloaded on a user’s system instead of serving the page he is looking at. It is an overhead for large websites with thousands of pages.

Even with all these caveats, It was interesting to test out how to future of web would look like. I am eagerly waiting for W3C to announce the new standards.