WEB 3.0
Web 3.0 is the third generation of the Internet—a global network that permits intelligent interactions between all its users and devices.
Web 1.0 was the early Internet that persisted until about 2000. At first, websites were just places you could read the information posted on servers and interact with such servers in simple ways. There were search engines, and there were e-commerce sites like Amazon and eBay.
Web 2.0 arose following the turn of the century. It was far more interactive, far more collaborative, and far more capable. There were technical reasons why, not least of which was the rapidly improved bandwidth available to users, and servers. It is this generation of the web that gave us smartphones and mobile computing. Web 2.0 could support near real-time interactions and thus collaborative activity was feasible. Social networks like Facebook and Twitter were part of this, but so were graphical multiplayer games. It also included the birth of Big Data and the machine learning algorithms that sifted through it.
Web 3.0 is defined by intelligence. This intelligence is not just in interactions between people and websites, but between software and software. And, there’s more than that. The difference between Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 has multiple aspects.
The Underlying File System
Web 1.0 and web 2.0 are defined by the HTTP protocol and the simple file systems it provides access to. The protocol enables resources to be accessed (via a URL) and also files, particularly HTML documents.
It is a client-server protocol that currently provides the foundation of all data exchanges over the Internet. The term client-server means that there is a requesting side (a client – usually a web browser) that calls for information from a server (a computer that serves up information – usually web pages or parts of web pages).
The protocol works by virtue of Domain Name Servers (DNS) servers. There is a large network of these which includes thirteen root servers.
You can think of the DNS servers as a postal service for the request you make from your browser via the HTTP protocol. They deliver that request to the address you specify, which will be something of the form:
http://www.thewebsite.com/the-page-I-want
When thewebsite.com receives this message, it sends you a message back, the page you want, using the same postal service.
It may be more complicated than that. In reality, it may involve multiple messages, including ads that you don’t want to see. Nevertheless, it all happens through a kind of postal service.
With Web 3.0 that mechanism will change. Indeed, we might be inclined to call it Internet 3.0.
The technology that will most likely replace the current DNS system goes by the name of the InterPlanetary File System, IPFS for short.
Why wasn’t it called the InterStellar Files System or even the InterGalactic File System? Perhaps its designers lacked ambition.
The IPFS is also a postal system, but it is not centralized around a group of root servers like the HTTP protocol. The goal in the design of IPFS, which is a child of blockchain technology, was to create a peer-to-peer file system that worked after the fashion of BitTorrent, the file streaming service that is frequently used to download and share videos and music.
IPFS separates the act of seeking information from the act of retrieving it. It does so through the magic of content addressing.
Content addressing is a math trick where you apply a hashing algorithm to some content (such as a web page) and it generates a unique key that acts as its address. To cut a long story short, you provide the network with that address, and a server that holds the information sends it to you.
IPFS has lots of advantages over HTTP. Here’s a list:
It is more secure (and SSL is no longer required).
It keeps all the versions of a file, as well as the file.
The data can be distributed in many places. For example, a website does not reside on a particular server and may not even have a specific origin server, but it’s there somewhere in the file system.
Because the address relates to the content, the address never needs to be updated when the content is moved.
There’s no real distinction between client and server. Remember it’s like BitTorrent where there are multiple servers both holding and requesting data, including your own device).
It is significantly faster than HTTP.
It is transport-layer agnostic, which means it can work over any transport layer (from TCP to Bluetooth)
Assuming IPFS is successful, all of these advantages become Web 3.0 advantages.
Sources
https://permission.io/blog/web-3-0/
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