Web 3 is a natural evolution of the Internet and so is Blockchain and Crypto

Many of the current generation of blockchain and crypto enthusiasts were not even born when the internet came to life in the early 1990s, yet they face very similar detractors as did their online forefathers. The big difference this time is that the third generation of internet technology stands to threaten the established norms of the world’s financial systems and even more so, the political establishment.

When the internet came out, it was seen by many as an unstable, unreliable and untested new system, unable to provide the performance and outcomes that it promised — and with good reason, because it was in many respects — unstable, unreliable and untested in the beginning.

Gradually however, more people took to using internet as the very obvious benefits of an email compared to fax and letters became obvious. There were benefits in speed, reliability, traceability, storage, there were no disadvantages to using the new internet-based system. As long as systems were backed up and secure then there was no way the old system should be justified.

But it was, then and now, defended by an old-minded collection of people and institutions who refused to evolve fully or at all. The legal profession is one such example of awful and pathetic technological inertia, able to hide behind weak artificial excuses such as laws and procedures, or in the worst case, by tradition.

The real reason why was — and still is — that it threatened their established norms and the power which they desperately cling to and which they are too inflexible to adjust from into a new world. Even today the legal profession still tries to justify massive fees in part owing to the immense cost and waste created by using and storing printed paper files. But internet technology continued to eat away at their weak justifications for existing.

The internet gave life to new retail companies such as Amazon and Google opened up searching and buying products on this new computer-based system. New concepts of communication like IC Chat, AOL and Yahoo messengers. Fledgling businesses such as MicroStrategy would bring predictive systems to the forefront of business decision making. The industry was flooded with a plethora of websites, most often providing information whether to purely inform, or to influence, or most importantly to conduct business. The old school industries could, for the time being, hide behind the picketed fences that were the establishment.

Then only about 10 years later, an evolution occurred as internet 2.0 took to the stage. New companies like Facebook gained the traction that Myspace before it had failed to properly garner. Companies such as Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, lead the charge of the new Internet 2.0’s social media revolution. Add to that the rise of cloud computing, which involved the storage of data on servers which to the user would appear to be like putting the data in the “cloud” and not on their own computer hard drives. Companies from Dropbox to Xero arose, whilst old stalwarts such as Microsoft also ventured into the cloud-based storage world.

But in Internet 2.0, it was not only in the presentation of businesses where the change was occurring, the real changes were happening behind each and every website. The coding had evolved, from HTML, Java and Flash, into newer, better programming languages built off them. These were natural evolutions but they provided greater speed, reliability, functionality and lowered costs. They also allowed for new things to be done.

As was the case with Internet 1.0 allowing for mail to become electronic mail, for shopfronts to be online, in Internet 2.0 personal profiles were able to be put online, for professional or non-professional purposes, and information was able to be stored on remote servers.

The demands of the economy dictated the evolution of the technology: the programming language, as much as the technology continued to experiment and evolve in a self-propelling and self-effecting manner. To appropriate the chicken and the egg analogy — the chicken made the egg as much as the egg made the chicken, possibly at the same time and in tandem.

Then in early 2009, in the wake of the US Treasury Secretary Hank Paulsen’s announcement that the failing US banks would be bailed out during the midst of the Global Financial Crisis, in a quiet and lonely corner of the internet, an unknown individual by the name of Satoshi Nakamoto created the first successful incarnation of a blockchain. With it came the first working cryptocurrency: Bitcoin. It is easy to discuss Bitcoin as the first of its kind, and indeed it was, but there were attempts prior to it, but none of them achieved what Bitcoin did.

The achievement was the concept of executing code to create a protocol, which meant that code was written in a way that it formed a unique contract, and that contract could be executed and within that contract was information that could be used to send, receive, and store data from anything ranging from stock records, medical records, logistical records, anything really, but most notably of all — financial systems.

This has shown to be seemingly limitless, ranging across currency markets, credit markets, futures and other derivatives markets, deposit services, amongst others. And the traditional banking system has started to experiment and adopt blockchain technology as well. Whether it is Goldman Sachs or UBS trading desks, or Westpac Bank integrating with Ripple (XRP), or the multitude of intermediaries either hold Bitcoin or using cryptocurrencies to transact, there is continuing growth in the adoption and use of blockchain technology and within that cryptocurrency.

The programming language reflects the advancement of the technology, and new application of some old principles and the evolution of the internet and programming languages over time. Internet 3.0 which is also called Web3 now uses React.js which is itself an evolution of javascript more commonly known as java, and this has given rise to Solidity, Ruby, Json, all of which have adapted and appropriated predecessor forms of coding to be applied for creating smart contracts, executing them, and undertaking the functions that consumers understand as blockchain and cryptocurrencies.

Just as the average user of an email does not venture into the programming language used to activate the email account, or execute the sending of an email, or retracting of it, nor does the cryptocurrency owner fully know the internal coding of a smart contract. The point here is, over time, more and more people started using email, and more and more email services evolved to be more user friendly, to the point that using an email now is very easy, very common and very normalized as human interaction. This was not the case 30 years ago. Just as the coding behind a cloud data server or a social media platform would melt the mind of a consumer of these platforms, the same consumer uses those platforms with ease and comfort. Those systems have had ten years or in some cases twenty years to evolve.

The challenge for the nascent Blockchain industry is to gain the level of acceptance by the general public while at the same time win over the political elite and the bureaucrats that, like always, stand in the way of both technological evolution, as much as finding equality. And crypto has already shown it has the power to bring equality and economic freedom to more people than ever in human history.

Blockchain and Cryptocurrency as both industries and technologies, are still in their infancy, and unlike their predecessors, Internet 3.0 has both technical and social challenges, but perhaps also political ones to overcome as part of its cultural revolution and natural evolution.

Change doesn’t happen quickly, but when it does, it looks like it.