Transition to Web 3.o

The 2008 financial crisis was a heart breaking moment in human history. Big banks issued housing loans to people without caring if they could pay back or not. These banks did this with a guarantee that insurance companies would pay for defaults if they ever occured. At some point, the insurances couldn't pay for the excess bad loans these banks has greedily given out, then financial crisis happened.

During the crisis, many banks filed for bankruptcy, thousands of people lost their jobs and many more were rendered homeless. This period caused a great distrust in financial institutions. This distrust fueled the creation of Bitcoin in 2009 by Satoshi Nakamoto.

The creation of Bitcoin birthed the blockchain concept, which is the core technology on which web 3.0 operates.

In this article, we would cover the following:

• What is Web 3.0
• Why Web 3.0
• Becoming a web 3.0 developer

What is Web 3.0

Web 3.0 is also known as the decentralized web. it is the latest generation of internet applications and services powered by blockchain technology.

Bitcoin is the first truly digital currency and the inspiration for web 3.0. Bitcoin is revolutionizing how we exchange value across the internet without any intermediaries like the banks. Decentralization made bitcoin very succesful in the finance ecosystem, now, companies are looking to apply the same concept of decentralization to other fields like NFTs, metaverse, etc.

This inspired the launch of Ethereum, programmable blockchain technology in July 2015. While Bitcoin was mainly used as a digital currency for the exchange of value, Ethereum was built to enable us to build even more advanced blockchain systems.

Why Web3.0

Web3.0 aims to create an internet where ownership and control are decentralized. An internet where you own your data, you decide what to do with it, and where you can exchange value beyond your boundaries directly without third parties.

We have always built new technologies on top of the existing ones, therefore, Web 3.0 is a more trusted and decentralized version of Web 2.0

Web 3.0 has been around for about 12 years now. While it is gradually progressing, it is still very much in its early stages. There are still so much to be done to completely move the world from Web 2.0 to Web 3.0

Becoming a Web 3.0 developer

This requires two things

• Understanding the concept of Blockchain technology
• Learning to write smart contracts using the Solidity programming language

The blockchain concept

The blockchain as a system that can be compared to a country made up of many cities connected together by a network of roads . Each of these cities has border points through which cars move in and out of the city. Each time a car gets into a city, it is sent to a central car park, where together with other cars, are parked temporarily. These cars are later sent to the city's parking garage where they are stored for a long period of time.

In blockchain:

• The cities are equivalent to Nodes.
• The cars can either be Transactions or Blocks of transactions.
• The border points are accounts created on the nodes. They are capable of sending and receiving transactions.
• The network of roads is the Network that allows the transfer of transactions or blocks between the Nodes.
• The ** Central car park** is equivalent to Transaction pool in blockchain, which contains a cluster of transactions that haven't been integrated into the blockchain system i.e pending transactions.
• The Parking garage is equivalent to the distributed ledger where blocks of transactions are immutably stored.

Many nodes come together to form the blockchain decentralized infrastructure. Decentralized because they can be created by anyone, anywhere in the world.

A node can have many accounts ( like your account on Binance or BuyCoins) which are capable of initiating the transfer of Transactions or Blocks.

A blockchain transaction is simply a peer-to-peer transfer of electronic value between two accounts in the same or different nodes. Each account has its unique address.

A node then create a block of transactions from the transaction pool and integrate these block into the existing chain of blocks (blockchain)

Each of these blocks is stored in the hardware of the node and cannot be mutated. The blocks are broadcasted to every other node in the blockchain network ensuring that every node in the network has the same copy of the blockchain.

The immutability of each block in the blockchain is reinforced with the rule that every new block added to the blockchain must be connected to the previous block in the chain.

Conclusion

Every decentralized application runs on this same concept, where we have a network of decentralized nodes, transferring values in form of transactions or blocks of transactions, validating these values, and then recording the values into an immutable distributed ledger.

I will be writing more articles on building Decentralized Applications (DApps) with Smart contracts using Solidity language. You can connect to me on Twitter @drayfocus, and Linkedin Akinola Ayomide

Cheers!