Friends told me that they had a little trouble understanding what "web3" is. I tried to explain in a few lines what it is.
First thing first: “web3” is a marketing term for “crypto/blockchain”.
Web3 is to the exchange of VALUE what the internet is to the exchange of INFORMATION.
Internet has made it possible to smooth the exchange of information by passing through fewer/no intermediaries, and to anyone to innovate in this field.
The web3 is a way to exchange value without an intermediary, which has several advantages:
- No geographical limits (addressable market = the world)
- Code, data and processes transparency
- Composability
About transparency, imagine a bank where
- The code is open source
- The database is open data
- Governance is "open process"
- APIs are all documented and accessible by default
- Your repositories are open access, you can access them whenever you want
Is it difficult to secure? Yes. Is it possible to do cool stuff with it? Also yes.
About composability, one example.
@Instadapp was created by students in India, who built an app that plugs into financial apps developed by someone else, and offers a useful service on top of that.
Without asking permission. Without special infrastructure. Without being asked where they come from. And their users can see all the code they've written, so they know where they're going.
Imagine a similar situation in the legacy world. How much time, permissions, and people to make an app that lets you move your money from bank A to bank B? It's just not actually possible.
It's hard to know exactly where you're going. A bit like the internet in the 90s: difficult to predict the arrival of Google or Wikipedia. But it is this potential, and this unknown, which makes it an interesting sector.
Today, the exchange of value (money, shares, goods) is in the same situation as the exchange of information before the Internet. There are lots of intermediaries It's opaque It's slow It's expensive It's very geographically constrained.
To explore deeper:
