Web3 Dictionary
Web3
Web 3 is the internet owned by the builders and users, orchestrated with tokens.
Web 1: Read-only Companies Create & Companies Profit
Web 2: Read/Write People Create & Companies Profit
Web 3: Read/Write People Create & People Profit
Since the question is trending I'll venture my own rough and imperfect definition of web3.
Web1: content distributed to users
Web2: content produced by users and distributed to users
Web3: content produced by users and distributed to users on user controlled platforms
What is web 3?
Let's compare web 2 to web 3:
Web 2 is the internet today. It's dominated by middlemen that extract value from creators and users by sitting in the middle.
Web 3 is built off a peer-to-peer network of computers that talk to each other without middlemen.
web1: 1990-2005
read
web2: 2005-2020
read + write
web3: 2020-
read + write + own
NFT
NFT 🖼️
What is it?
Stands for non-fungible token, an NFT is a way to make digital assets scarce and unique.
Because of smart contracts & the Ethereum blockchain, NFTs can only have one official owner at a time and no one can modify the record of who owns it.
NFTs give users the ability to own objects, which can be art, photos, code, music, text, game objects, credentials, governance rights, access passes, and whatever else people dream up next.
Non-fungible token. Basically, it’s Bitcoin for art. Which does not explain it but does put it in a social category
DeFi
What is Defi. "It is banking for the Web 3.0 economy"... love that definition
DeFi 🏦
What is it?
A new alternative to the current financial system.
The world of Finance is defined by middlemen.
Banks. Exchanges. Insurance companies.
DeFi is all about taking out the middleman, increasing transparency, and giving users back their data.
Traditional finance is the definition of shadow banking, see the last century for details.
TradFi: opaque, permissioned, inefficient DeFi: transparent, open, permissionless
Smart Contract
A "smart contract" is simply a program that runs on the Ethereum blockchain. It's a collection of code (its functions) and data (its state) that resides at a specific address on the Ethereum blockchain.
Smart contracts are castles made of math, freely trading with each other.
It’s a program that executes code on the blockchain when conditions are met. Parties sign the contract digitally, giving it permission to execute.
This could be anything from sending money to a friend, to fractionalizing an NFT.
Ethereum
"The world's programmable blockchain."
What does that actually mean?
Bitcoin is a digital gold. It's a store of value & a medium of exchange.
Ethereum is the infrastructure of a digital city. It was imagined as a foundation for businesses and applications to be built atop.
Ethereum is powered by a fungible token, ETH, which is used to incentivize the physical computers that underlie the system. ETH is also the system’s native currency for transactions, like NFT purchases.
#Bitcoin is daddy. Ethereum is mommy. 👪
Ethereum is Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and Hollywood combined — and (for some) a quasi-religion.
Hard to bet against that.
Metaverse
The #metaverse is not a single product, it’s not a game, and it’s not being created by one company. Rather, it’s akin to a 3D world wide web, where businesses, information and communication tools are immersive and interoperable.
It is a network of connected experiences which provide fulfilment, develop social relationships or otherwise provide value to a community of users. Including but not limited to entertainment.
The Metaverse is a global network of independent but interoperable and composable digital micro economies (miniverse?), that are not within the control of any single entity or entities, governed by their native tokens
Most people have the wrong definition of the metaverse.
What's the metaverse?
The metaverse is digital property rights.
Everything emerges from this.
That's why Zuck can never build it. Best he can do is build on top of it.
What is your definition of the metaverse? Since Walmart is building theirs…
I say we’re already very much in it.
I use zoom, discord, docs, etc. on a daily basis to speak to people around the world as if they were right next to me. All while collaborating and working together.
My critique is deeper than "Metaverse Wikipedia will beat Metaverse Encyclopedia Britannica". It's that we don't really know the definition of "the metaverse" yet, it's far too early to know what people actually want. So anything Facebook creates now will misfire.
DAO
DAO 👥
What is it?
Decentralized autonomous organization.
A business that is owned and managed by its members versus a CEO or an individual.
DAOs run on smart contracts, where code defines how the business operates and is 100% transparent for anyone to see.
A DAO is a community with a treasury owned by its contributing members.
The simplest way to describe how a DAO works is to compare it to a company.
It's early days for DAOs.
DAO: "an entity that lives on the internet and exists autonomously, but also heavily relies on hiring individuals to perform certain tasks that the automaton itself cannot do."
"Automation at the center, humans at the edges"