Yes. Web3 is smart contracts.

Why don’t a lot more people get this … the promise of smart contracts isn’t so much about “number go up” crap. It is rather that:

FOR THE FIRST TIME IN HUMAN HISTORY, YOU CAN WRITE A PROGRAM THAT EVERYONE CAN TRUST TO DO WHAT THE CODE SAYS.

Before Web1, you had gatekeeper institutions. Web1 disrupted newspapers, radio, cable channels etc. It also dropped geographic boundaries. Anyone could write some code and via the HTTP protocol anyone in the world could access it via the Internet. Publishing and eCommerce became a thing.

With Web2, and VOIP people were able to generate increasing amounts of content, communicate and collaborate with each other. But you had to trust Facebook, Google or whatever giant company wrote its closed source backend software and ran it on giant server farms and extracted rents. Privacy settings? Your very identity, relationships and brand? All MANAGED and CONTROLLED by others. You just had to trust them. As a young Mark Z put it: “I guess they just ‘trust me’, dumbf&cks”.

Mark Z wanted to make wirehog. We also had BitTorrent and many other decentralized platforms. Blockchain ISNT the only thing.

But anyway… with Web2 you had landlords. You trusted your Fintech company to not screw around. You trusted Google to not lose your documents. You trusted Facebook to enforce your privacy settings, and not to post as you. You trusted email providers for email. And so on. (Australia’s hacking bill and the Five Eyes undermines that trust btw.)

I started Qbix years ago to give you a choice of landlord… to move people from feudalism to a free market on the Web:
https://qbix.com/blog/2021/01/15/open-source-communities/

Or to drive home my point in video form: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZ1O_gmPneI

But in capitalism there is still a landlord. That would be the domain after the @symbol in your email, or before your username on the Web. DNS and the Web enforces this model and leads to feudalism.

Now finally… let’s get to Web3.

It does to financial institutions and many others, what Web1 did to publishing. Namely… smashes geographic boundaries and lets anyone deploy some code for others to interact with rather than jjst consume (as a smart contract rather than a Web 1.0 site).

All the stuff I had to trust some instution or landlord to enforce FOR me, I can now have the code do. And again, here is the kicker: All the participants can place absolute trust in the code to do what it says*. That was not true of Web2.

In Web2, some internal employee could use their access to the database to change all the votes in an election. Or to change balances in accounts. Or to change roles and permissions.

With smart contracts, we KNOW (after verifying correctness) that there is NO WAY to circumvent the rules. Each participant has only the access that the rules give their private key. They might read the whole database but they can only take action as themselves.

And that also means we can start to trust the RESULTS and OUTCOMES that emerge from these programs. Voting can be done via byzantine fault tolerant netsorks, and you can verify via merkle trees that your vote was counted. We can use the results of the vote on-chain to adjust the amount of, say, universal basic income to give out, on a daily basis.

I want to emphasize that BLOCKCHAIN is NOT the only (or even best) base layer for smart contracts. Look at Hashgraph, Holochain, and Maidsafe. Look at IPFS, BitTorrent and Dat (now called hypercore). Actually the best stuff is usually based around Distributed Hash Tables and Merkle Trees. But I digress…

The point of Web3 is to serve entire communities. People will eventually get that. For more info on actual applications of Web3, you can see this:

https://intercoin.org/applications

Or glance through this presentation:

https://intercoin.org/presentation.pdf

Yes, I don’t just talk about it. I have already raised around $1M and BUILT these applications as open source on GitHub (ses in the links above). Now we are auditing them and will be releasing them to the world.

This SHOULD be a revolution in society and power dynamics, but people are stuck on peer to peer number goes up crap for a decade (because artificial scarcity attracts lots of money). If you were inspired by what I said and want to help the Intercoin project, btw, reach out to me (greg) at intercoin dotorg.