What is Web3, and why does it matter?

It’s especially funny to watch how Web2 companies are now clamoring for Web3 and promoting fancy NFTs without changing the foundation. Although the basis of Web2 companies has always been profit in the first place. But first things first.

Web1 was:

1. Decentralized. We all hosted our web pages on a server at home. We sat on our local networks, which then merged to form the Internet.

2. Protocol-based. Since the network had no center, any interaction between its members was through protocols: by HTTP people looked in the browser, and by RSS received newsletters.

3. Free. Everyone could run their own site by learning the markup language and a couple of protocols. No sites, no laws, no regulators, and even no centralized places to issue SSL certificates like now.

Web2 is:

1. Centralized. For the average person, the Internet is now limited to 4–5 social sites such as Instagram and YouTube, etc, on which he/she spends all day, and it is very hard to drag him somewhere else because all the social history and experience are accumulated in a particular platform. Even physically most of the clouds are owned by three corporations (Amazon, Microsoft, and Google), which becomes apparent to everyone when one AWS server goes down, followed by half of the Internet…