On today's episode:
We define Web 3 and decentralization and why they’re important for humanity. Coinbase makes some poor hiring choices, and there’s 3D printed ears made from human cells? Let’s get into it!
For the full transcript, please check out https://farezv.substack.com/p/farez-for-me-podcast-ep-2-web-3-decentralization?s=w.
What is Web 3?
But first we need to understand Web 1 and 2.
Web 1: The first form of the internet, called Web 1.0 was mostly static pages. Content that was informational, and meant to be read. Only serious organizations like governments and universities had websites. Its early life coincides with mine, roughly from 1991 to 2004. People only READ Web 1.
Web 2 started around 2004-5 to well now(ish). People not only read but helped create Web 2.0 with social media networks and content creation platforms such as YouTube, Twitter and Twitch.tv for instance. People are now reading and WRITING to aka creating the internet in the Web2 space. But there’s a catch, they don’t own their content. The platforms do, if you read their terms and conditions carefully before you hastily register your account under some pseudonym you think is cool, you will realize they the website you’re posting your cat videos and ice bucket challenges on owns that content.
Let’s think real quick about how we own anything. We require a medium of exchange to trade for goods, usually the currency of the country or continent we reside in. But how do we own things on the internet? Using fiat currencies, such as dollars or rupees results in confusing exchange rate scenarios and these aren’t accepted worldwide. Granted there’s credit cards, but they’re incredibly inefficient. Why they’re inefficient requires a separate episode.
So we need more than just a read and write layer for the internet. We need an ownership layer. A financial layer.
Web 3: Enter the blockchain. This is the underlying infrastructure where you can cryptographically own things on the internet via monetary mediums like cryptocurrencies. Because ownership requires a secure barter system, the un-hackability of blockchains comes in handy via cryptography.
How are blockchains un-hackable?
There’s a lot more to it than we have time for in this episode, but think of a game of telephone. If you whisper something to person A, who then whispers the same to the person next to them, call them B and so on, all the way to the last person in the chain, you expect the last person to hear the same thing person A told person B in the first conversation.
In a real human game of telephone, people often mishear and mis-transcribe down the line.
In blockchains, cryptography ensures this message is always the same as it goes down the chain. This is because, in order for the last person to get the wrong message, the person before it has to, and the one before it and so on. This makes the data on the block-chain (the whispered message in this analogy) IMMUTABLE aka unchangeable.
We’ll go over how blockchains work later but regarding the un-hackability of blockchains, let us dispel myth about crypto scams.
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