The Internet has changed again.
Over the past decades, Internet based services have been developing centralization. Today, a handful of big companies have the platforms we use to search for information, store personal data, manage personal online identities, and communicate openly or secretly.
Meanwhile, some seemingly unrelated edge technologies are developing, from encrypted information to digital money. In a loose community, "Web 3" has become an all-encompassing term describing a new generation of better Internet: an Internet that pays and finances digitally primitive, an Internet where "decentralized" applications compete with centralized applications, and an Internet where users have access to their identity and data. More control over the Internet.
However, it is usually difficult for us to express clearly what all this means.
What is the difference between Web 3 and the Internet age?
What is "de centralization" and why "centralization" is so important? How can these new technologies be applied to practice?
We've spent years building the infrastructure that makes block chains more scalable, but who will actually use them, what will they do with them, and why will anyone use them?
We can not make predictions for the future. The future is not fixed: we must make the right choices to get the world we want. The focus is on describing a possible future, a future that is attractive enough to be worth building, a future that is clear enough to let us know what the first step is.
The Internet has undergone significant changes before, extending the network performance, function and scale. The Web has changed from a plain text site to a streaming video, from a static web page to a full-featured application that provides remote services through browsers, from a few servers to a global social network that promotes modern politics and culture.
As the network matures, we rely more and more on a few large companies. Google has built a fast and convenient search engine, which controls more than 74% of search traffic. Facebook has created a very popular social network and gained 2 billion 200 million people's control over online identity.
Web 3 is different from the previous Internet generation. The core of Web 3 is not speed, performance or convenience. In fact, at least so far, many Web 3 applications are slower and more inconvenient than existing products.
Web 3 is about ownership, about who can control the technologies and applications we use every day. It has broken the dynamic balance of Internet development in the past ten years: the trade-off between convenience and control. We're used to it, and it seems inevitable: of course, going online means being watched, and of course, registering a social network account means selling personal data to advertisers or worse. How else can it be done?
Web 3 rejected this statement. We can surf the Internet without giving control to those big companies. The above dynamic balance is not the iron law of the network, it is only the product of available technology at the time, but also the choice we make in the process of development.
"Web 3" is a reform to build different technologies and make better choices. Instead of trying to replace the current network, we are trying to change the infrastructure while retaining what we like --- reform, not revolution.
The projects inside seem irrelevant, but they all share a common theme. Web 3 is a set of technologies that reorganize Internet control, ranging from financial projects (encrypted currency), to basic communications (end-to-end encrypted messaging), to mass consumer use cases (open social networks and P2P markets), to major Internet infrastructure (decentralized DNS), Web 3 encompasses everything.
Web 3 includes not only encrypted currencies, block chains, and other encrypted economic products, but also any technology that revolutionizes the centralized Internet so that users can regain control of their digital world. But these technologies are the most important contributors to the reform of Web 3 today.