I hate Web3...and I love Web3.<p>Let me explain.<p>Web3 is akin to SOA. The concept of service-orientation was great. We could think of systems as discrete services, each single responsibility, and each working with other services to accomplish a system. Awesome. And so it became popular. Then training courses, certifications, consultants all started to appear in order to cash in on this new thing. It took little time to get to the point where you could ask 10 people what SOA really meant and get 15 different answers, some of them completely incompatible with each other.<p>A similar thing happened with REST. A similar thing happens to many ground-breaking technologies that get popular, or make good sound-bites.<p>So..Web3. Web3 started as a bunch of other things:<p>* VRM - Vendor Relationship Management, the inverse of Customer Relationship Management, where the power and data control is shifted to the customer<p>* Decentralized Identifiers - IDs that aren't controlled by some third party organization like Google, your company, or the government. This has come in different versions, including info:, XRIs, SOLID, DIDs.<p>* DApps - Applications that run within the browser and communicate among themselves (and possibly other services) to accomplish tasks and save state. Everyone ties DApps to blockchain smart contracts, but that is just one implementation of the DApp concept.<p>* DAO - Distributed Autonomous Organizations. This is nothing more than a set of cooperating software agents that execute control over assets based on a provided policy. Policy could be if/else rules, a smart contract, a machine learning CN, or other things. So again, not necessarily blockchain. Charles Stross's Accelerando has a great example of a DAO.<p>* Distributed Ledgers - This is where the blockchain comes in. However, you don't need to use a cryptocurrency to do a distributed ledger, it's just a common way of doing it right now that is perpetuated in part because it makes people money. Check out the Apache Hyperledger project for more info on distributed ledgers.<p>* Decentralized Web - Am early term that combined some of the above. Which of the above depends on who you are talking to, but often it included VRM, DApps, Decentralized Identifiers and possibly Distributed Ledgers.<p>Now add hype (lot's of hype) and a hunger for cash (an insatiable hunger, think
Ghnomb, the troll god of eat from David Edding's Elenium series). Both of those things latched onto cryptocurrencies and stirred them into the Decentralized Web mix of concepts. This amalgam birthed the abomination we know as Web3.<p>But don't worry, Web4 is just around the corner. It'll arrive as soon as a new innovative technology arrives that is deemed a sufficiently hype-worthy and plump-enough cash cow. My bet is that you will start seeing VR/AR as Web4 within the next few years.<p>Barnhill's First Law: Any technology movement with a number in it's name is hyper - either ignore it or seek to understand the possibly 20% gems within it and throw away the 80% dross (e.g., Web3 and 5G).