Web 3.0 for Dummies, by Dummies.

New technology is scary.

It feels weird saying that, but let’s be honest, this article will be obsolete in 6 months at our current pace of innovation. That creates a bigger issue - often times we might ignore new “trends” because they come and go so often and so fast, until a trend becomes the new normal. People thought the internet was a phase. They were wrong, and now we make fun of them.

As I venture deeper into the world of NFT’s, I feel like I am required to fully understand the technology that I am playing with. This ties back into last week’s article about how my years in tech built a great foundation for this world I am in now.

NFT’s are web 3.0 technology. I get into discussions with people that claim that NFT’s are a scam (ridiculous), a bubble (probably), or that they can simply right click and save an image, meaning they have an item that is the same value as the official NFT. That last one implies you can take a photo of the Mona Lisa and suggest you own it. They are missing the point. If this is you, stop. What is beginning as an interesting way to trade jpegs for ridiculous profits is the foundation for how you will interact with society in a decade.

Beeples Human One - a digital sculpture NFT that sold for $29 million at Christies. It depicts the first human entering the metaverse, and gets updated daily.

The reason I wanted to write about this is simply because I know my direct network is full of today’s innovators, mover and shakers. These are the people who are building the world of today, and I want them to get a jump start on building the world of tomorrow - Atlas Shrugged style.

Web 2.0 moved the world from static desktop web pages where you would just consume information to interactive experiences and user-generated content that brought us Uber, AirBnB, Facebook and Instagram. The rise of Web 2.0 was largely driven by three core layers of innovation: mobile, social and cloud. Web 3.0 is built largely on three new layers of technological innovation: edge computing, decentralised data networks and artificial intelligence.*

The best simplified explanation I have heard as an example of web 3.0 is this:

Imagine you went to a basketball game, and bought a jersey (It's an early nineties Bulls jersey, because... best team ever). However, when you leave the stadium, you have to leave your jersey at the stadium, and you can only wear it at the stadium if and when you return. Its a pretty stupid concept isn’t it? This is social media on web 2.0.

Web 3.0: You buy a jersey, and you take your jersey everywhere you go, because its your jersey.

What’s the difference?

Web 3.0 is different in a few key, and very important ways.

It is “Open”. The software is open source, and accessible. This means that everyone has access to all software. Why does that matter? In today’s world, if a company creates some new idea, and you want to do what they do, but maybe add 10% more value, you build everything from scratch. In web 3.0, you take what was built, fork it, and build on top of it. This will accelerate innovation to a pace we have never seen before.

Web 3.0 is “trustless”. It does not require a third party to allow interaction between users. It does not require an autocratic body to create trust, in exchange for user data. That is right - there is no giant corporation mining your data to provide you a platform for trust. It promotes more transactions and engagement between peers, without the need for middle men.

And finally, web 3.0 is permission-less. There is no governing body deciding who can do what. By eliminating middlemen, like corporations, web 3.0 opens the playing field for entirely new applications that could not exist before..

Web 3.0 enables a future where distributed users and machines are able to interact with data, value and other counterparties via a substrate of peer-to-peer networks without the need for third parties. The result: a composable human-centric & privacy preserving computing fabric for the next wave of the web. - Fabric Ventures

When abstract art meets metaverse - Untitled 9998, Szymon Fugiel

Doubters and haters

You will hear a lot of push back against web 3.0, and there is a reason. Web 2.0 resulted in the creation of an group of tech companies that monopolized the business world, making it extremely hard for new ideas and innovations to break through. They either get crushed out of existence, or purchased. New ideas are a threat to the current way of doing business, and the status quo. As web 3.0 is the one innovation to rule them all, expect a large number of ignorant opinions, and misleading information.

For example, a major adversary to the rise of web 3.0, and cryptocurrency, is the banking system, and companies that act as payment platforms. These new technologies offer a significant threat to these businesses because they provide the infrastructure for frictionless payment solutions - removing delays, and fees, while adding more transparency, and efficiency and keeping verifiable and immutable records. This begins at banking, but will slowly creep into supply chains.

Why is an artist talking about this?

If you told me that life as a full time artist would mean that I spend twice as much time reading about new technology as my previous job as a tech product manager, I would have laughed. The reality is, the same way that the web is transitioning from web 2.0 to web 3.0, I believe there is an equal transition for the art world. However, I will save that for next week.

Here is my advice; start dabbling today. It is much easier to pick up an understanding of the new world slowly, over time, as it unfolds, than to wake up in a world where you have become obsolete and you don’t know why everyone keeps saying GM.

Good luck!

*Reference: Entrepreneurs Should Embrace Web 3.0