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Talking about the gorgeous epic of the World Wide Web: Is Web3.0 a technology gold mine or a tulip bubble?

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Man lives in a world of meaning

Original Source: Prague Lab

On December 9, 2021, a discussion on the future of Web 3.0 The congressional hearing was held, and six encryption companies including FTX, Circle, and Coinbase made strong statements in front of congressmen for new species such as "cryptocurrency" and "Web 3.0" and called for regulation.

Among them, wearing a black suit with a brown frame Brian Brook of Spectacles, the CEO of BitFury, gave a 5-minute explanation of the ins and outs of Web 3.0. Because of his clear and easy-to-understand speech without a word of nonsense, he created the "highlight moment" of the conference and made "Web 3.0 "It was completely popular in the United States. Mutual tearing, disputes, speculation, sudden wealth, and mass movements are all staged in the Web 3.0 world. Some technological disruptors are emerging, some new social models are being explored, and a dangerous large-scale social experiment has also kicked off.

So what exactly is Web 3.0? And before this Web 3.0, what kind of changes have we experienced? This article deciphers the past and present of Web 3.0 for readers with the purpose of tracing back to the source.

01.Web1.0: link information, share the future

In 1989, a British software developer at CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) was frustrated with the way scientists were sharing research within his organization. Because there were many different file formats, programming languages, and computer platforms, how to quickly find electronic records and use them correctly became a lingering problem for the staff at that time. At this time, particle physicist Tim-Berners-Lee (Tim-Berners-Lee) imagined a network system using hypertext - which allows different types of computers to easily share information through a computer network, trying to solve this problem. A pain point. The invention was first documented in 1989. Hard work pays off, on December 20, 1990, Tim-Berners-Lee (Tim-Berners-Lee) released the first website in human history: the home page of CERN.

The opening of history is often only driven by a trivial matter, just like the butterfly in Amazon that just flaps its wings lightly, which can trigger Later hurricanes. The site was flimsy as a baby, and Tim-Berners-Lee took pains to improve its browser and server code based on feedback from others. The world's first public website ensued, a simple yet informative website, primarily a basic introduction to networking concepts for those outside of CERN who might be interested in the technology.

April 30, 1993 CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) officially releases the underlying technology of the WWW into the public domain, paving the way for the web to become a royalty-free standard that anyone can use for free. Web1.0 is slowly entering thousands of households, and it has given wings to dreams for the later commercial Internet to take off.

In 1994, Tim Berners-Lee Berners-Lee founded the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which is almost as important as inventing the web itself. Without the W3C's open guidance, the web would likely have splintered into many incompatible technologies early on, which would hinder rapid adoption of the web on a global scale. However, it was not the homepages of scientific research institutions or professors that built the first decade of the human commercial Internet world, but hundreds of global news media websites and search engine. In 1995, Netscape, the most iconic Internet commercialization wave, was born.

In the same year, Microsoft created a web browser for Windows 95. Yahoo! (Yahoo!) was also born, and soon won the favor of venture capital, and the world's first portal started from here. In 1995, Compuserve, America Online, and Prodigy began providing Internet access. Amazon.com, Craigslist and eBay go live. Match.com, the first online dating site, is launched. A new technological revolution is pursued by capital, and various projects have sprung up one after another, just like the currency circle decades later.

The Internet became the new darling of capital at that time, and it was also the submachine gun for New Money to attack Old Money.

On August 9, 1995, Netscape's IPO directly ignited Internet commerce The breaking point of the cultural boom. Netscape's stock price opened at $28, and within a minute of the opening, the stock price rushed to $70, the highest price of the day reached $75, and the closing price was $56. The "Wall Street Journal" commented that it took 43 years for General Motors to reach a market value of $2.7 billion, while it took only 1 minute for Netscape. The market frenzy is evident.

In the next year, the browser will become a lot of capital competition The track also started the first battle of Internet commercialization. Relying on its strong financial strength, Microsoft has become a trendsetter in the browser track in one fell swoop and made a lot of money.

In 1997, Netflix was officially established, but its main business was to sell DVDs to users by mail. That's 21 years before it became the world's No. 1 online video giant. And another search engine giant, Google, was born in 1998, but it is still very weak. 1999 became the craziest year in the history of the Internet, and more than 70% of venture capital in the United States poured into the Internet. In this year alone, more than $100 billion was invested in the Internet in the United States, more than in the previous 15 years combined. The good times didn't last long, and the Year 2000 Problem became a major event at the turn of the century. Although the Year 2000 Problem (Year 2000 Problem), which made the world feel like an enemy and cost a lot of money, did not explode in the end, the last madness at the end of the 20th century created by the Internet bubble brought a catastrophic collapse to the 21st century !

The Internet once became an abandoned child of capital, but The technological dividends brought about by Web1.0 have injected fresh blood into traditional industries and laid the foundation for Web2.0.

02.Web2.0: Information Interaction, Openness and Inclusion

Web2.0 is a new concept relative to web1.0, and it was a hot word in 2003/4. However, in terms of "readable and writable" broadly defined by Web2.0, it has already begun to take shape in the 1990s.

In 1997, JornBarger established a blog site called robotwisdom.com, and officially used the term "weblog" . This seems to be the earliest form of web2.0. On August 23, 1999, Evan Williams (Evan Williams) released Blogger, which was the first platform that allowed people to build personal blogs, and allowed users to comment and interact with bloggers. The beginning of .0.

The sprouts of Web2.0 are eagerly absorbing nutrients from the market, but they are also precarious under the Internet bubble. With the bursting of the dot-com bubble, the Nasdaq continued to fall to an all-time low of 825.8. It was not until April 2015 that the Nasdaq returned to its highest point of the year. Fortunately, under the perfect integration of technology and ecology, there is the motivation for Web2.0 to move forward.

In 2003, Myspace, Skype, and the Safari web browser arrived. MySpace, in particular, became the most popular social network in 2003, ushering in the mainstreaming of Web 2.0. In 2004, Chris Sharpley first coined the term "social media". In the same year, Tim O'Reilly, founder of the concept of open source software and CEO of Reilly Media Company, proposed "Web 2.0", which finally named this new wave of the Internet consisting of blogs, podcasts, SNS, Wiki, etc. It quickly became a recognized mainstream concept in the world.

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Single fire , can start a prairie fire. In 2004, service providers like Wikipedia and Google had already become the mainstay of the Internet. In China, websites such as Blog Bus and Blog China are already very popular. In 2007, Williams co-founded Twitter, together with Zuckerberg of Facebook and his Chinese colleagues on the other side of the Pacific Ocean, opened the door to a new world of social networking, video tools, personalized e-commerce and Internet life services . In the same year, Apple CEO Steve Jobs released the first-generation iPhone, which was officially released on June 29, triggering a sales frenzy, and was hailed by some media as the "God Mobile Phone", which marked the official opening of the mobile Internet era.

It is also the mobile Internet that pushes Web2.0 to its peak, from typing to voice to short video to live broadcast, from QQ to Weibo to WeChat to Douyin, every form is the result of Internet upgrades to fight monsters. If the content acceptance method of Web1.0 is equivalent to watching TV, then the important feature of Web2.0 is the application of smart phones. From television dictating what we receive to smartphones choosing content and enabling communication. In short, Web 2.0 allows users to be both consumers and content creators, and in the age of Web2, the individual user is the product.

However, when Web 2.0 brings convenience to people's life, it also exposes problems. We all know that in the era of Web 1.0, we were the ones who absorbed a lot of information from the Internet, but in Web 2.0, the Internet started to collect information from us. Tech giants like Meta and Google collect data from users to serve targeted ads and content, making more money from their consumer base, and some companies even secretly sell data to third parties without user consent. Three parties.

Privacy leak cases have made it difficult to reconcile the conflict between the platform and users, the Prism incident, Meta leaked user privacy, Google was accused of quietly tracking users, etc. All kinds of pain points have become the lingering haze in the Web 2.0 sky. The root of the scandal is that users provide content and contribute data on the platform, but it does not belong to them. Because of this, the dawn of Web3.0 is gradually approaching, bringing a new dawn to "value exchange".

03.Web3.0: Value Interaction, Contract Spirit

The term "Web3" was coined by Ethereum co-founder Gavin Wood in 2014. But to get to the root of it, we have to start with the first application of the blockchain—Bitcoin.

On October 31, 2008, a mysterious figure claiming to be "Satoshi Nakamoto" invented Bitcoin and applied blockchain network design for the first time. People quickly realized that blockchain could be used to carry out all kinds of criminally thrilling financial adventures. In 2013, ETH was born as the native cryptocurrency blockchain platform Ethereum, and thousands of "alternative coins" emerged on it, setting off a gold rush even crazier than the "gold rush" on the West Coast of the United States in the 1850s hot.

If Web2.0 is compared to "Identity Internet", then Web3 .0 is the "Internet of Contracts", and the nature of the contract is "credible", "fair" and "decentralized". Does this coincide with the blockchain idea?

When it comes to the definition of Web3.0, there are many kinds in the market. Currently, the most recognized statement version of this kind of web3.0 comes from researcher Eshita. In her opinion: the feature of Web1.0 is "readable" (read); the feature of Web2.0 is "readable + writable" (read+write); the feature of Web3.0 is "readable + writeable". Write + own" (read+write+own). This perfect and advanced expression makes Web3.0, Web1.0, and Web2.0 seem to be an organic whole.

But in the author's opinion, this kind of expression is ultimately explained on a technical level. To use a popular metaphor, Web1.0 is like a slave without land and production tools, who can only survive by working for the landlord; Web2.0 is a farmer without land but with production tools. Tools and landowners obtain income; Web3.0 refers to landowners who have both land and production tools, and what they get is what they get.

However, how to build Web3.0, the market has not given Answer. In other words, so far there is no clear and effective way to quickly bring human beings into the Web3.0 era, but it also means that there are countless possibilities to enter the Web3.0 world.

It is undeniable that many applications initiated by Web 3.0 have been burdened with " "experiment" means. DAO, Decentralized Autonomous Organization, is the most basic organizational method of Web 3.0. It is formed spontaneously by the people, each organization has a common goal or values, and any decision needs to be completed through democratic votes of members. DeFi, or Decentralized Finance, is a financial market in the Web 3.0 world. It can provide services such as financing, payment, issuance, listing, and circulation for Web 3.0 applications, including infrastructure for mortgage lending. The essence of "everything can be NFTized" belongs to the non-homogeneous token assets on the decentralized architecture of Web 3.0. Games, finance, entertainment, search, e-commerce, social networking... Almost every application you can think of has the emergence of Web 3.0 entrepreneurial projects. There is no doubt that a whole new world is opening up. To understand the rules, there is a fundamental problem:

Where is the foundation of Web 3.0?

The answer is the public chain. If blockchain technology is the core technology to realize the decentralization of Web3, the direct carrier that can reflect its core value is the public chain infrastructure.

Fortunately, in recent years, the infrastructure layer has surrounded the core technology area Blockchain, decentralized storage, computing, network nodes, payment and other technologies are booming, and a large-scale ecological public chain has appeared on the track, or a master of certain technologies.

At present, Ethereum is still the most powerful and successful The public chain, whose pioneering "smart contract" has pushed its ecology to the pinnacle of prosperity, also played the happy song of "DeFi Summer" in 2020. Polkadot, which has better on-chain governance and cross-chain design Substrate chain building functions, and Cosmos, which has a completely open IBC communication protocol, also once became the cross-chain duo. ChainLink, which focuses on the interaction between the encrypted world and the real world, brings off-chain data to the chain, turning the oracle into the most indispensable middleware in the encrypted world. Last year's dark horse new public chain Solana also took the lead in the ecological explosion of the public chain with its strong TPS.

In a word, as the infrastructure that triggers revolutions in various fields, the public chain Catalyzing the development of Dapp, the DeFi boom and the Web3 revolution have always played the mainstay role, and the public chain is understandably a necessary condition for the development and operation of various Web3 constructions.

Obviously, Web 3.0 will give people The change is that, through decentralized technologies such as blockchain, the value relationship returns to "who creates, who owns." The content created by the user is owned and controlled by the user, and the value created by it can also be distributed according to the agreement signed by the user and others. The premise of distribution is a fair, fair, and credible "contract". Behind the contract is undoubtedly the "decentralized" technological flame-blockchain.