What is Web3?

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Ah yes, "Web3." That term you've heard thrown around that lets you know we're now one past "Web2." But what does it really mean?

In this Crypto Uncomplicated post, I wanted to explore the various definitions of "Web3" and why a lot of smart people are quitting to build in it (including myself.)

The term Web3 was coined by Ethereum co-founder Gavin Wood when he first used it in 2014 to refer to a new version of the internet that incorporates core tenets of collaboration and decentralized ownership that stem from blockchain technology. Ok, but what does that really mean?

When I was out at the ETH Denver conference in February this year, I ran into another founder who had been around the tech scene long enough to remember the Web1 days (naturally there had to be a 1.) It was the early days of the internet. It was pre-dial up. It was even before Netscape. It was just the idea of the internet.

Back then it was wild just to be able to see computers talking to each other. Eventually, when more came online, users could "read" the data that was sent, but that was about it in terms of functionality. Even after dial up, we might go to a web page like Amazon or Yahoo, but anything you could see on a page was pretty static. It was just the "read" days of the internet.

The ol' early Myspace.com logo brings back a lot of memories (Source: Getty Images)

After that, as different protocols were agreed upon and developers had agreed upon rules for how things on the internet would behave, eventually you got to the possibility of not just "read" but also "write" permissions on the internet. This would eventually give rise to the likes of non-static web pages, or ones that could be edited. Suddenly, an age of interaction in Web2 became the norm. Myspace, Facebook, Twitter all sprouted up in the boom of interactivity unlocked by "write" privileges.

So, if...

Web1: Read

and Web2: Read-Write

then, Web3: Read-Write-Own

The distinction made possible in the era of Web3 is that suddenly ownership privileges on the internet become a thing. That might seem like a relatively minor thing at first, but then again, so did Facebook. There wasn't a lot of appreciation back then either around how big some of the possibilities were. Looking back, that still seems kind of insane.

Right now, I don't blame anyone who doesn't see the same type of thing happening. When the first examples of online ownership are people buying cartoon monkeys, I'll be the first to admit it doesn't seem like much. But when you extend personal ownership on the internet to your own data (the very thing Facebook and other tech giants came to monetize) suddenly you can start to see the value of ownership in a new chapter of the internet.

Web3 makes possible the idea that you could get paid for your data on the internet, or at the very least have a little more say over what happens with your data. More importantly, it also opens the idea that you could more actively collaborate with people on the internet in real-time to co-own something that's bigger than what you alone could achieve.

For example, there are already entities working on creating decentralized ways to share unused space on your computer to host files from the other side of the globe. It might not seem like a lot of space on your computer, but even that unused gigabyte of storage space on your computer combined with 1,000 others, and all of a sudden you've got a terabyte of space to work with. Could you sell that to someone? Probably more easily than just selling the 1 gigabyte of space you had by yourself.

There are other projects working on other centralized fault points as well. Amazon Web Services hosts an alarmingly large number of websites. That's why when they have issues almost a whole chunk of the internet struggles. But what if they didn't need to use AWS? What if they could use spare space from servers all over the globe? That's exactly what Akash Network is working on — to decentralize cloud computing in what they've dubbed an "Airbnb model" for unused server space.

Another project, Livepeer, is working on decentralizing video encoding, a very energy intensive process that centralized providers like Vimeo provide. But, by farming it out to a bunch of individuals, users with their own spare computing power can get compensated for that work in a way that makes it cheaper to do.

I have no doubt the use cases in Web3 are going to get more complex and more interesting, but the progress is coming.

And even if I'm convinced, it's worth pointing out that a lot of smart people take issue with the term "Web3." Twitter founder Jack Dorsey is one of them. Elon Musk is another:

And to be fair, there has been a bit of a bastardization of the term Web3 to be a catchall for anything involving NFTs or crypto. A lot of those projects, which claim to be Web3, don't necessarily pass the sniff test of decentralizing control beyond their venture capital-backed founding teams. They might seem to be co-owned by users or a community, but only in promise and not in practice.

My belief, however, is that eventually, more people will wake up to better models and better experiences. It didn't take too long for people to start to grapple with some of the problems Web2 launched on the world. Web3 creates a new model founded on co-ownership and collaboration.

The question then becomes: What will you Read-Write-Own?

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