Get ready for the new frontier! Web 3.0
Welcome to the Wild West. You waltz into a saloon, slinging a gun. You tip your hat, order a drink over the counter. You are an individual, strong, working for yourself, in a new frontier where everyone acts for themselves.
Web 3.0, the latest avatar of the World Wide Web, is far more like the Wild West than the jungle. This is yet to happen; we are heading into this future in a matter of years. Yet the foundations for Web 3.0 have been laid with blockchain technology. This has blossomed into a household term with the advent of cryptocurrencies and non-fungible tokens.
What is the difference between Web 2.0 and Web 3.0? Today, we trust third parties, like Meta, to pass our data onto others. The bitter truth is that these platforms which “centralise” data can be hacked by strangers. History is full of examples that show this continues to threaten your privacy. In Web 3.0, data like your personal medical record can be stored in a “blockchain”. The blockchain is not so vulnerable to a single point of weakness because every block contains a hash of the block before it. Tampering with a block will invalidate all the blocks after it. It is almost impossible to tamper with them all fast enough to threaten the data, because to form a new block, you need to decrypt a hexadecimal number, which takes even our strongest computers long enough to be noticed. Experts claim the blockchain is “immutable”.
In the Wild West, YOU walk around with your records, and YOU choose who to share them with- without having to go through one of these platforms that ravage your data. This makes it possible to “decentralise” your medical record. What if YOU held the key to let your government or your doctor see your personal records? And what if you could be confident your story would not be altered unless you wanted?
More broadly, Web 3.0 may provide you with the opportunity to explore your voice- to talk to others, and to express yourself- without making yourself vulnerable in a jungle of tigers. If we can share our conversations and memories with those we choose to, and rest at night knowing they will not go further than the people we really cherish, what could we be? How much better might we be at handling the universe? You will learn to share your voice as you become older. And you will have learnt in a mature and secure land.
... read Part 3 of the story: How to keep law and order in the Wild West - Web 3.0?
For sure, there’s a lot more to think about and talk about, so let’s share and create a Voix Guide together, and find out what’s important for YOU.
