Featured: RISE 2018 - Joseph Lubin
A recap of the speech from Consensys:
The internet is a profound and revolutionary technology — but it is broken. The first iteration of the Internet — Web 1.0 — was the internet of information. It was simple, entailing the transfer of images, texts, and hyperlinks from one user to another. Web 2.0 — where we are now — is the Internet of mobile and social. Web 2.0 has become somewhat abusive and unhealthy. There was no identity construct built into the core infrastructure of the Internet, meaning we’ve arrived at a state where people’s data and identity is fractured, monetized, and unregulated. That is dangerous for the user, and we’ve seen the consequences time and time again when people’s lives are negatively affected due to a central entity’s failure to protect.
We are on the horizon of Web 3.0 — the decentralized future powered by blockchain technology such as Ethereum. Web 3.0 will be the Internet of transactions. As we tokenize everything — physical assets, digital assets, reputation, identity — deep liquid markets will emerge, allowing for the sort of comprehensive world economy that provides equity and privacy control on individual users. Web 3.0 will be an actual sharing economy, radically more equitable than current “sharing economy” models such as car services. We will see N-sided markets emerge on open platforms in contrast to markets today such as the 3-sided social media market (the intermediary, the advertiser as customer, and you as the product). Importantly, Web 3.0 will be anchored in a persistent portable identity, where different personal data aspects can be granularly designated to specific parties.
If we look beyond Web 3.0, Web 4.0 is recognized as the Internet of (IoT) sensors and machines. We begin integrating the hardware of the world around us into our daily lives. A world wide platform like Ethereum allows the same underlying software to be implemented across this Internet of Things, leading to radical interoperability not seen in today’s proprietary hardware market.
