Before You Invest, Please Realise That 'Web 3' Is Not The Same As 'Web 3.0'

Tech hypsters are colliding in cyperspace over rival claims to being the latest version of 'the Internet'. And the media aren't helping by failing to spot critical distinctions, as in CNN's recent mistake in interviewing a Web 3/'blockchain expert' about the Web 3.0 data privacy business started by Tim Berners-Lee (who has already warned us to ignore Web 3).

Perhaps the confusion stems from that fact that 'decentralisation' is a common theme for both: 

• the "Web 3" world of distributed ledger technology, blockchains, crypto-tokens, cryptocurrencies, cryptoassets and non-fungible tokens (NFTs), in which the community of more zealous participants are referred to as "Crypto"; and

• the evolution of the World Wide Web from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 to "Web 3.0" under the W3C banner - the space on the Internet (a network of networks, defined by the TPC/IP standards) in which the items of interest ("resources"), are identified by global Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI), the first three specifications of which were URLs, HTTP, and HTML.

While the Ethereum blockchain co-founder Gavin Wood suggests he "coined" the term Web 3.0 in 2014, it was certainly in use before then, as even my own post from January 2013 demonstrates - and I definitely didn't coin it. In fact, the Wikipedia entry for 'semantic web' cites a New York Times quote from 2006 that suggests 'Web 3.0' began being used in connection with linking data resources somewhat earlier than that:

People keep asking what Web 3.0 is. I think maybe when you've got an overlay of scalable vector graphics – everything rippling and folding and looking misty – on Web 2.0 and access to a semantic Web integrated across a huge space of data, you'll have access to an unbelievable data resource … 

— Tim Berners-Lee, 2006

The goal of the Web 3.0 community is to enable you to take control over 'your own data' (all data generated by your activity, not just personal data), enabling you to permit who can access and use it from wherever it is stored, by means of 'application programming interfaces' (APIs). This is encompassed in the concept of "linked data" and "linked datasets", often also referred to as "the semantic web". Midata is a related regulatory trend toward enabling consumers to control their own data, of which Open Banking and Open Finance generally are examples.

On the other hand, the goal of the Web 3/Crypto community is a broader, libertarian utopia that (according to Ethereum) guarantees 'personal sovereignty' in a 'permissionless', 'trustless' cryptographic environment with its own 'native' means of peer-to-peer payment. 

Unfortunately, in my view, the absence of trust in this would-be Crypto idyll is merely an externality that others are yet to satisfactorily address, as demonstrated by the collapse of many crypto exchanges and other 'decentralised finance' (DeFi) participants, the most recent being FTX group... 

All the more reason not to confuse 'crypto' Web 3 with 'semantic' Web 3.0!