Surfing the Web3, New Generation of Internet Involves Crypto World

Web3 is the internet that moves with a decentralized system and implements democracy. Transactions on Web3 mostly use cryptocurrencies.

The development of the internet has touched the third generation, namely Web 3.0 or abbreviated as Web3. Initially the internet was created in the 1990s under the name Web1.0, with an open and decentralized nature.

Since the 2000s until now, the internet that we use is Web2.0, where big technology companies have great influence and infrastructure in a site. On the Web3, all data will be interconnected by a decentralized system. This is what distinguishes it from Web2.0 which stores data in a centralized repository.

The term has been around for a long time, but the term Web3 has re-emerged in the last year. The NY Times noted, the re-emergence of the term Web3, partly due to several things, such as hype, part of marketing, and the tendency to fear missing out on new things or fear of missing out (FOMO).

The Beginning of Web 3.0

Web 3.0 was created by the co-founder of Ethereum, Gavin Wood, in 2014 as reported by CNBC International. Often abbreviated as Web3, the term arose from Wood's vision of the future of the Internet as a successor to Web 1.0 and Web 2.0.

Wood believes that if something goes wrong, it will have an impact on many people. He also highlighted the trust of internet users in those behind the service, including the owner of the company that runs the service. 

According to Semrush data, the amount of user traffic on the sites Google, Amazon, Youtube, and Facebook exceeds all sites ranked five to 20 combined. This proves that the monopoly of internet services, makes users only access the same site, instead of other available sites. on the Internet.

According to him, Web3 is an internet that operates with a decentralized system and implements democracy. That way, big players in cyberspace such as Amazon, Microsoft, and even Google, do not dominate. The current dominance of Web 2.0 allows for a monopoly on internet services.

For this reason, The existence of a centralized system used by the internet giant prompted Wood to highlight the trustworthiness of internet users. According to him, users like it or not have to believe that the service will keep their personal data held unilaterally.

"So we kind of designed ourselves into a dystopian version of this world," Wood said in a webcast called Beyond the Valley. For information, Web 1.0 or Web1 was originally a United States government project called the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) which appeared in 1968. ARPANET operates as a small network that connects the government and scientists from several universities there. The concept of the new world wide web emerged from a computer scientist, Tim Berners-Lee.

only. That way, Web1 users in that era could only use the internet to read and search for information. The next generation of internet is Web 2.0 which developed from 2004 until now, along with the birth of the social media era. In the beginning, Myspace and Facebook were the pioneers of social media, which enabled social interaction between its users.

Then, Google and YouTube appeared which brought the concept of sharing, giving, and finding information in one platform. In contrast to Web1 which offers only read-only interaction, in the Web2 generation, internet users can already interact read and write.

In addition, internet users can also read and share information on social media platforms. From these developments, new internet-based job categories and industries were born. One of them is the influencer profession whose job is to create daily content on social media platforms.

Links Web3.0 with Crypto

The development of Web3 cannot be separated from cryptocurrencies, especially Bitcoin. Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of Bitcoin, was the originator of the blue map or blue map of alternative payment systems in 2008. The payments use cryptographic codes and a technology called blockchain, which gave birth to a decentralized payment system.

This development was responded by the founders of Ethereum, by creating smart contracts that would later become the foundation of Web3. The technology connects a decentralized network that has been developed previously. Therefore, transactions on Web3 will mostly use cryptocurrencies. In comparison, in the Web2 generation, internet users can buy any digital item on a site.

However, these items can disappear if the site creator closes the service or even deletes user data. On the other hand, on the build of Web3 this possibility will not be found. That's because, ownership of items on Web3 is direct via non-exchangeable tokens or NFTs. As a result, if users want to stop using the service and the items in it, internet users can sell their items on the open source market.

Characteristics of Web3.0

there are four characteristics of Web3, namely trustless, permissionless, self-governance, and data ownership. Trustless means that user interaction in Web3 will rely on computer algorithms without the need for a third party intermediary. This interaction also does not need certain permissions (permissionless), so user data is maintained.

Then, this self-governance characteristic is manifested in a decentralized autonomous organization or DAO system, which is used by various applications and platforms. With this system, users can determine the direction of platform policies, so they can move away from the centralized concept used in Web2.0.

Data ownership characteristics allow users to control personal data, in contrast to Web2 services which hold users' personal data without any protection.