The original Web at first had hardly any commerce on it (people would order pizza delivery and pay in person), yet it disrupted institutions worldwide when it came to publishing information. There was now an alternative to Radio, TV, Newspapers, Magazines, Cable channels and other gatekeepers when it came to getting the word out. Wordpress powers 40% of all Web 1.0 websites in the world.
Web 2.0 took this further, allowing communication between the members of the websites. No longer did they only have to listen to the approved authors, but could share user-generated content. We also got Voice Over IP (VOIP), which disrupted all telecommunications companies - making the costs go from $3 a minute to essentially zero.
The commercial model of Web 2.0 led to extreme centralization, because the back end software was complex to build and the large companies didn’t want to give it to the users. That is why we started Qbix to bring Web 2.0 from digital feudalism to a free market, and we hope it will power 40% of all social community sites in the world:
Now we get to “Web 3.0”, which is disrupting financial institutions and middlemen, yet it is driven by commercial interests of a different kind. Early projects like Bitcoin build artificial scarcity into their tokens, to make the price go up. This attracts people to prefer 10-year-old technology to innovation, and prices actually go up with time, instead of down.
Most of the Web 3.0 industry has painted itself into a corner with proof-of-work blockchains, preventing mainstream adoption by hard limitations on throughput. And the tokens cannot be used in everyday transactions also because they are designed to become more scarce over time — the opposite of encouraging spending and usage.
Yet it does share many of the open-source approaches of Web 1.0. What do you think of the following article?