"Feels Like Returning to the Era of Web 1"

Previously, a friend asked me what web3 is, and I explained a lot to him. He told me, isn't that just blockchain? So is web3 just a new concept to continue harvesting profits, like the metaverse?

I really wanted to clarify the differences between these three concepts, but I found that my knowledge was insufficient to explain it.

With the explosion of various information, many people have started to understand what blockchain is. Simply put, it is a decentralized ledger, or a decentralized database. As mentioned in the previous article, the entire industry is still in a financial market of issuing assets, lending, and trading, which is still far from ordinary people.

In 2017, due to limitations in transaction capacity, the concept of semi-decentralization was proposed to improve transaction speed, but unfortunately, this project only had applications in gambling.

Later, Ethereum supported the entire industry, achieving decentralized finance and leading a bull market. Eventually, the emergence of Mirror allowed information to be stored in a decentralized manner, and your articles could also be saved as NFTs.

However, what we see in the news is that XX service has crashed, and many people are confused, asking why it crashed if it is decentralized. We have decentralized data storage, but the website itself is not decentralized; it still needs to be deployed in a data center, and there is still a possibility of crashing.

So what we see now is that many products are actually web2 + blockchain, at best web2.5.

Let’s clarify what web1 is: simply put, it is the web, which allows us to share information. For example, we open Baidu, QQ, email, etc.

So what is web2? Simply put, it is the mobile internet, which is easier to understand as mobile apps that allow us to share information anytime and anywhere.

What do I understand web3 to be? My understanding of web3 is that information no longer has an owner.

Many people do not understand what it means to have an owner of information. For example, if I buy something on Taobao, the transaction data belongs to Taobao, not to me. The emergence of blockchain solves this problem; my data is on the chain, it does not belong to anyone, and it cannot be tampered with.

However, this is still not enough. If my website is deployed on Alibaba Cloud, Alibaba Cloud can theoretically shut down my website at any time, meaning that the actual owner of this website is not me.

However, the emergence of Planet makes me feel that the era is getting closer to our ideal state. It allows you to achieve complete decentralization through your ENS (your on-chain domain name) and IPFS (decentralized storage). This means that the article I am writing no longer needs to rely on any centralized service.

Of course, there are still many issues at present, but it represents that web3 is on its way.

Product introduction is in the original link.