Web 3.0 - I'm sorry what?

Welcome to the first in this series of a-curiosity-a-day, inspired by Rohan Rajiv’s blog - A Learning a Day.

In this series, I reflect on / summarise about a new topic I read that day or something I thought about that day. I always look to the readers to add more insights or suggest corrections to what I’ve written. If there’s something you don’t agree with, please comment or email me. This is my best part - understanding a different perspective on things!

Let's begin..

After struggling to pin down what exactly is Web 3, I stumbled upon a module on Salesforce's Trailhead platform.

What are the various Web x.x versions?

• Web 3.0 an unofficial term

• Web 1 = read only

• Think of an online library

• Web 2 = read/write

• Think of Facebook, Instagram - an online whiteboard owned by large corporations

• Web 3 = read/write/own

• Think of an online whiteboard - owned by you

In short, the major difference between Web 2 and Web 3 is ownership.

What technologies make up Web 3?

• Blockchain

• A chain of blocks or a block of chains? Anyway..

• A series of transactions that exist in a distributed ledger

• Distributed?

• No single person / entity has a unique record of this transaction

• There is a network of nodes that each maintain a copy of the ledger

• Ledger?

• A series of transactions maintained chronologically

• Think of your credit card bill

• Cryptocurrency

• Crypto?

• A digital currency that uses cryptographic techniques for security

• Currency?

• An intangible medium that represents value

• NFT (Non-Fungible Token)

• Non-fungible

• Think of fungible as something that can be copied

• Like a US Dollar bill

• Non-fungible in that sense is something that’s unique

• Smart contracts

• Smart?

• Digital

• Formed of lines of code

• Contract?

• Execute when a set of pre-defined conditions are met

• Binding as long as the set of conditions is met

So how do these technologies come together? Let’s look at 1 Web 3 use-case called the DAO. Hopefully, this will help you (and me) understand what this is for.

DAO’s (Decentralised Autonomous Organisations)

Let’s look at an example of a DAO (on steroids) before we unpack the acronym

Think of a democracy where each decision is made based on a majority of citizen votes.

Now let’s unpack the acronym and connect it to what we saw earlier in the post.

Decentralised?

Policy proposals are made by the party in power, but proposals are voted on by all citizens - hence - decentralised.

Autonomous?

As soon as a proposal receives a majority vote, it is brought into power.

Organisations?

This is an example of a government. Think of private entities, large corporations, local municipalities, etc.

How does it connect to the other concepts?

Blockchain

This maintains the history of all transactions - i.e - votes

NFT’s

Each citizen owns NFT’s. The amount of NFT’s they own can depend on - a citizen score, amount of under-representation in society, etc.

Smart contracts

Once a policy proposal receives a majority of votes, it is brought into power.

Fin. Thanks for reading!

Question to reader:

• Does this use-case make sense?

• How do we establish ownership in Web 3?

• How can a new node join a blockchain?

• What benefit do nodes receive by being part of the blockchain?