What is Web3? A simple explanation

Transcript

it's difficult to simplify complex subjects that's why i'm doing this today but it's even more difficult to explain a new and innovative technology that is going to change the world in so many different web there are so many different ways web3 is so complex and yet still so new so how do you explain it so that your friends and your family can actually understand it i'll tell you one thing if your explanation includes the words decentralization blockchain proof of stake or nodes then they are not going to get it you're going to lose them immediately i've been asking on twitter i've been asking my dis in our discord you know how do you explain web3 simply and i often see people putting those words in there and the moment you do that you're going to lose the mainstream people

so these words just don't make sense to the average person and nor should they need to understand these words to grasp what web3 is now i recently spent uh one month back home in canada visiting friends and family the first time seeing them since launching the web3 academy podcast and newsletter and so naturally many of them asked what i was up to and what the new podcast was about my answer the first few times was absolutely terrible i was losing people right away and you know i guess it's important note that most of my friends and family are not big into tech or into you know the financial world right so like most other people as well so um i started innovating with my explanation on what web 3 was and i think i found a bit of a breakthrough

it's still not short and perfect like i want but it is better and i hope that you will take what i'm about to share with you and kind of iterate on it and maybe even share that back if you do get our newsletter make sure to just reply to that newsletter to that email and let us know how you would change things if you're not signed up for the newsletter make sure to do that just go to w3academy.io or it's also in the show notes below so firstly i wanted to get my simple explanation written down so that i'm confident my own web3 elevator pitch is what i'm calling it but secondly i'm sure i'm not the only person with this problem and so hopefully this will help you next time you're asked the question what is web3 so how to explain web3 to the masses

that's kind of the title and how how we started this so the key to explaining web3 to the the normies i say in quotations is focusing on the results of what the technology enables not the technology itself right most people don't care or will likely never understand how a blockchain works similarly most people don't understand how http or smtp or itp or ip most people don't understand what any of that stuff is right yet we can easily understand that the internet allows us to communicate and share information to anyone around the world in real time right very easy to understand um http by the way smtp all these these are the protocols that allow the internet to work most people don't even realize that so i've explained web3 multiple times

now without the person knowing it's enabled by blockchain or that has anything to do with bitcoin um that one line or explanation above though that i just mentioned about the internet is exactly what we need for web3 however it's not that easy we're all experience we've all experienced the internet right so that one liner is pretty easy to grasp for most people but most people however have yet to use web3 right so what web3 is enabling are features that have never really existed before something that people have never experienced before which makes it very difficult for most people to comprehend even if you do find a simple way to explain it so you gotta ask yourself before you start explaining what is the key result of web3 and that key result is digital

ownership right that is the big unlock here but even just saying digital ownership doesn't mean much for many right um so especially the average kind of normally person who's not tech tech friendly so we need to provide context here and compare it to the world we are in right now so that means that we need them to understand the problem with the existing internet before they can understand the results that web 3 enables right let's remember most people don't think about the risks associated with centralized companies or using custodial companies for our finances or even the issues associated with government-controlled fiat systems now to us maybe listing this podcast if you've been listening for a long time that might come natural to you to most people and remember before you went down

the web through rabbit hole you probably had no idea what any of that stuff even meant right most people just simply use the internet without realizing that there was a problem or that there are features missing from our existing internet so to start my web through elevator pitch i begin with the following line web3 is enabling us to own things on the internet similar to how we can own things in the physical world now i think that this line does a great job of giving people an end state of where this explanation is going right but it's important to provide more context in some comparisons and examples so then i go on to explain the following in the physical world we can hold or custody our belongings without relying on a company or a trusted third party to

do it for us right we can hold cash in our hand we can travel with our own physical passport we could store gold under our bed or even write a on a piece of paper or draw some art and hold on to it this is what we call self-custody self-custody is real ownership true ownership right with true ownership we are free to transact or exchange any of those belongings with anyone we please and no one person or company can stop that right we can also take those belongings from one location to another with us right that's very easy to understand but most people don't realize that this is actually not possible in the digital world right unfortunately the internet we use today was not built with this

functionality instead companies have to fill that void for us by building their own databases and systems to store digital belongings for us okay so some examples you give us banks hold our money facebook store our content our personal data our conversations right twitter stores our followers and our content games store earned assets right so it depends on who you're talking to and what they would understand or what they use the internet for but you can explain it for anything that you do on the internet okay and so then you can go on to just explain that there are two problems with this one we can't take the things that we own with us from one application to another like we can from one city or store to

another in the physical world right if i want to use both instagram and twitter i need to create a new profile an account for each application i also need my followers to follow me on both applications which is odd in the physical world there's only one me in the digital world there are hundreds of me right along with hundreds of passwords and usernames and that's terrible right and this is because everything i create digitally i do not own they are owned by the company of the application i created them in the second issue of this is that we have to trust these large companies with everything we have and do on the internet money content profiles followers etc so banks can restrict our money stripe can block us from transacting with

stores facebook can limit what we say obviously this is not ideal and very different from the physical world where we can say and do whatever we want so now let's tie all this together right because usually people have a decent understanding there but if you want to really allow people to understand you say well why is it called web3 so with all that in mind web3 is simply just the next iteration of the internet which enables digital ownership right there are tens of thousands of developers all around the world currently rebuilding the underlying technology of the internet to enable this digital ownership for every internet user around the world it's called web3 because you can think of this as the third version of the internet web one was the days before google and

facebook where we could only read web pages right we didn't have the ability to interact with pages like we do now so you couldn't comment you couldn't like you couldn't share you couldn't search for anyone that is older than i don't know 20 or so you would know this and you would remember this um so web one was basically read only web 2 was the first big upgrade to the internet that allowed us to interact with the internet this was enabled by big tech companies we know today like google facebook amazon et cetera right so web 2 is what we call read write and then web 3 is the second upgrade to the internet which allows for digital ownership it allows us to self-custody our money our art our equity our content our data and much more without the need

for trusted third parties we can custody these assets directly on our device that we hold in our hand similar to holding paper money or art in our hand right so web three is read write and own and then i like to finish with over the coming decade essentially every application thing we do on the internet will be rebuilt with this web 3 technology enabling new asset classes in new digital economies and then i'd probably stop here and ask if they're still following and have any questions like i said simplifying a complex subject like web 3 is not easy there's no way of making a one liner for web3 not yet anyway this explanation though gives people a framework to understand all the things

being built in web3 next you can start to explain different use cases whether that be bitcoin you know the self-sovereign money or nft's non-fungible ownership or ethereum this global sediment layer and decentralized app store is a nice way to explain it and there's many other ones that you can do you got to kind of think of what makes sense for that person if they're in politics maybe you want to think about talking about dows and governance structures right if they're in music maybe you want to talk about music nfts if they're an artist you can talk about artists and art nfts and so on so my recommendation is to go with the use case that they would be interested in or understand if they don't understand history of money and how the fed balance sheet works probably just

skip the bitcoin explanation right they might not care or they might not get it so if they like collectors items or art go with that okay you got to read the person deliver the info that they care about now i'm working on another article focused on the top 10 use cases in web 3 so keep an eye out for that as that might be a helpful resource to share actual use cases going on uh in this space right now but i'm sure many of you can think of them yourselves which by the way if you want to help me with that article tweet at us at web3 academy with an underscore or again go back to one of the articles in your inbox and uh and hit reply and let me know some of your favorite top use cases in web3

so again tweet at us or find us in the newsletter some of you the newsletter you get might be going to your spam or your promotional make sure you go in and you pull that over to the inbox so that you consistently get them in your inbox and no longer goes to your spam and then hit reply and let me know some of your top use cases and also make sure you let me know other ways that you would explain web3 that maybe are better than mine but thanks friends um again um i appreciate all of you for listening to the web3 academy podcast we hope you enjoy it we hope you will continue to share it with your friends and give it reviews on spotify on apple and on youtube i wish you all the best and i will see

you in the next episode thank you for listening to web3 academy we hope this helps you along your web 3 journey if it does please share this episode and subscribe so you don't miss the next one by the way if you have yet to join the discord community you are missing out this is where all the magic happens this is where we learn where we ask questions where we network uh you want to be in there the link to join is in the description below and finally a quick disclaimer nothing in this podcast was financial advice crypto and web3 can be risky you can literally lose it all in fact if you invest on account of what we say you probably will lose it all so don't do that in all honesty the point of this podcast is to remove the noise of markets and price

and focus on utility and implementation anyway so you should not take any of this as financial advice thank you friends and see you in the next one