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Have you searched for something and in your next search you see advertisements for the product? Did it leave you perplexed? Or were you awed? Let’s take another scenario. You were discussing a song with your friend, then you both thought of listening to it, and just as you type the first letter of the song’s title, your song shows up, and momentarily it creeps you. Congratulations, you too are a victim of the data privacy breach.
We are all victims of data privacy breaches. But someone was creative enough to make the way out. A pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto (could be a person or a group of people) 2009 created the infamous Bitcoin, which was a decentralized digital cryptocurrency, thereby devising the first blockchain database. This sowed the seed of a new revolution of Web3.
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Web 3.0 implies the existence of previous versions. Web 1.0 was the first attempt at the internet and was all about static & non-interactive HTML pages that displayed information, thereby gaining popularity as a Read-Only internet. Communications were limited to emails and one-way messaging. This was popular in the 1990s and the entire humanity was infatuated with this stellar invention.
Web 2.0 started gaining ground in the 2000s and was inundated with functions that made it interactive and engrossing. It is said to have started in 2004 when Facebook made a dash into the market. While doing that it engendered new business models like social networking, user-generated content and cloud computing.
Primordially, it was hyped as the “web as the platform”. Democracy and user-driven content were inculcated as the principles of Web 3.0. Leveraging it, industries turned social networking to their benefit thereby fracturing the very principles to a large extent.
Centralised servers are ancillary to the smooth functioning of the existing internet paradigm. Consequently, there is a creation of concentrated points of failure that may be targeted by hostile actors, which has evidently led to rampant data infringements or across-the-board unbridled economic ruin. With apprehensions clouding online privacy, data portability, and autonomous identification, fierce efforts are being made to expedite the metamorphosis of internet applications.
Furthermore, what started on very promising grounds of interconnecting practically everyone, this utopia quickly turned into a dystopia when a handful of tech conglomerates started to control a significant share of the internet. Privacy lost its way. The Daedalian task of consumer manipulation became normalised with programmatic advertising.
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We have all used Torrent at some point, and the mechanism behind this protocol is simply fascinating. Two pertinent aspects of this multifaceted technology are P2P (peer-to-peer) data sharing, and decentralization. Put simply, downloading any media from a Torrent is like transferring media from your friend’s computer to your computer.
Now, instead of just one computer insert multiple computers (peers; seeders-leechers) and download bits of the whole media from each computer and you have Torrent explained. It often happens that a website fails to load due to a heavy load on the server, which means that many people are unable to access a page because the centralized system that shares data cannot do so rapidly en masse. But Torrent doesn’t fail.
Say, you cannot download data from one computer, other seeders efficiently provide the data, thereby guaranteeing a cinch experience. This is very similar to the structure of innocuous Web 3.0. Once something is online, it stays there forever, and generates lengthy code for a particular data. “Blockchain” has the synergy of blocks (systems where data is stored) and a chain (catenation that joins all these blocks together). It is digital camaraderie.
Since all the blocks have stored the same data if at any point data is deleted, the code changes. And this change in code is reflected in each block that succeeds the altered juncture, making it extricable. Added cherry on top is the decentralization, which is just another way of saying no one really regulates the internet. It will work on sheer trust exhibited across users.
With Web 3.0 being a nebulous concept currently, a lot of hype has been mounted around it. Let’s take the example of blockchain which is the essence of Web 3. The intent behind the invention of blockchain was to resolve the inconvenience that cross-border money transactions entailed, i.e., to eliminate intermediaries and cut down on exchange taxes.
With blockchain, the time surpassed in a transaction has also been hugely reduced. Voter fraud can also be prevented with blockchain–you can upload your verified personal information and the authorities can be certain that only eligible voters vote, and can reinforce the “one person one vote” rule efficiently. Digital identities will also have the advantage of ensuring that beneficiaries receive their share of the subsidy, thereby cutting down on the expensive cost of operations and frauds.
All the tedious paperwork that ensues when one buys a property (e.g., a house) could be slashed down with smart contracts, which are a set of self-executing logical codes laying down the agreement between the parties involved and runs exclusively when premediated conditions are met. Several authors and artists do not own their creations wholly. Bring in Web 3 protecting the masterpieces against piracy while ensuring that the creator gets their worth.
Conclusion
A promising future awaits humanity. But, is Web 3.0 really the colour lacking in la vie en noir? Reduced to a vigilant lens, it is just but a technology. And technology can be exploited. The creators of this promising future are a bunch of technocrats who code. Who decides which codes shall run? There looms a cloud of doubt over the ethical grounds of this upcoming technology. In due course of time, we shall find out whether the ballyhoo is really worth the wait.
Written by: Anushka Singh
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