What is Web3? Why is so importart?

Web3 (also known as Web 3.0) is a marketing term for uses of the World Wide Web which incorporate concepts such as decentralization, blockchain technologies, and token-based economics, all of which existed on the web prior to the term being created. Some technologists and journalists have contrasted it with Web 2.0, wherein they say data and content are centralized in a small group of companies sometimes referred to as “Big Tech”.The term “Web3” was coined in 2014 by Ethereum co-founder Gavin Wood, and the idea gained interest in 2021 from cryptocurrency enthusiasts, large technology companies, and venture capital firms. The concepts of Web3 were first represented in 2013.

Critics have expressed concerns over the centralization of wealth to a small group of investors and individuals, or a loss of privacy due to more expansive data collection. Billionaires such as Elon Musk and Jack Dorsey have argued that Web3 only serves as a buzzword or marketing term.

Terminology of Web3

The term “Web3” was coined by Polkadot founder and Ethereum co-founder Gavin Wood in 2014, referring to a “decentralized online ecosystem based on blockchain.” In 2021, the idea of Web3 gained popularity. Particular interest spiked toward the end of 2021, largely due to interest from cryptocurrency enthusiasts and investments from high-profile technologists and companies. Executives from venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz traveled to Washington, DC, in October 2021 to lobby for the idea as a potential solution to questions about regulation of the web, with which policymakers have been grappling.

History of Web3

The first generation, referred to as Web 1.0, was invented in 1989 by Tim Berners-Lee, a British computer scientist who applied the hypertext concepts for linking digital text proposed in 1963 by Ted Nelson, an American information technology pioneer. Besides programming the first browser, Berners-Lee wrote the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), which tells browsers how to display content, as well as the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) specifying how web servers transfer files to browsers. He also started designing software for a “Semantic Web” that would link data across web pages, but hardware constraints prevented its implementation.

The public was not much aware of the web until 1993 with the release of Mosaic, the first popular browser, later renamed Netscape Navigator. Similar user-friendly graphical browsers followed, including Microsoft Internet Explorer and, much later, Apple Safari. The first popular search engines — familiar names like Yahoo! Search, Lycos and AltaVista — arrived on the scene, but by 2004 Google had put many of them out of business.

Around the turn of the millennium, experts began promoting the idea of an upgraded web that would be more interactive, calling it Web 2.0. They started referring to the existing web of basic connectivity to mostly static websites as Web 1.0. Berners-Lee fleshed out his Semantic Web concept by co-authoring an article in Scientific American. Publisher Tim O’Reilly helped promote Web 2.0 by starting a conference dedicated to it.

The dream of an interactive web came to fruition several years later with the skyrocketing popularity of social networks like Facebook. The World Wide Web Consortium, the web’s standards body, released a Semantic Web standard. Around the same time, two essential Web 3.0 technologies were born: cryptocurrency and blockchain. Prominent journalists and technologists, including Gavin Wood, co-founder of Ethereum, a prominent blockchain platform, began to popularize the terms Web 3.0 and Web 3 to signify a decentralized, semantically aware version of the web.

Key Web3 features and technologies

Decentralized. Unlike the first two generations of the web, where governance and applications were largely centralized, Web 3.0 will deliver applications and services through a distributed approach that doesn’t depend on a central authority.

Blockchain-based. Blockchain decentralization is the enabler for Web 3.0’s distributed applications and services. With blockchain, data is managed and validated on a broadly distributed, peer-to-peer network. Blockchain also employs a theoretically immutable ledger of transactions and activity, which helps to verify authenticity and build trust among blockchain participants.

Cryptocurrency-enabled. Cryptocurrency is a key feature of Web 3.0 that is expected to largely replace the “fiat currency” issued by government central banks.

Semantically organized. The idea behind the Semantic Web is to categorize and store information in a way that helps “teach” an AI-based system what data means. Websites will be able to understand the words in search queries the same way a human would, enabling them to generate and share better content.

Autonomous and artificially intelligent. More overall automation is a critical feature of Web 3.0, and it will largely be powered by AI. Websites equipped with AI will filter through and provide the data individual users need.

Source : Wikipedia