Hi, everyone. And welcome back to Geek Time, 欢迎回来【Geek时间】. Hi, Brad.

Hi, Lulu. What are we talking about today, Lulu?

Actually, I have been running into this concept online. It's called web3.0 and I was just wondering what that actually means. Can we talk about that web 3.0?

You can kind of think about the internet as being in three main stages. We're in the web2.0 for the most part right now. Web3.0 is gonna be the future of the web if it can be created to the extent that we hope it to be, then the earlier web which was web1.0.

Okay. 所以就是网络的1.0时代, 2.0时代和3.0时代, you said we're currently in web2.0?

Right.

Here web is ‘www’, world wide web. If I remember correctly, this was created, world wide web was created, invented in 1989, I believe?

Correct, yeah.

So what was the idea or what is the idea of web1.0, the original world wide web.

The basic idea is that you can put Information that's accessible to other people who have web devices. If you have a computer or another device to go online and access that data, most of the early web1.0 was just text or some simple pictures that were read only, you went to a website and you could read what was available there. It could be changed and people could update the websites. There were some websites that were bulletin boards where you went there and you did post some information.

But a lot of the early web was things made by individuals, hobbyists, someone had and something interesting and so they would post information about it. They liked movies, they would write about movies. If they did art, they might draw something and put it up on their website. But it was quite basic, right? That was mainly from like, 1991 until the early 2000s.

所以1991-2004年之间, web1.0主要还就是一些只读信息, 就是very few interactions.

Yeah, I mean, like the only interaction people had would be on like a chat server or something like that.

Like a chat box, that kind of thing.

Just a chat box, a chat website or a chat site, but yeah.

Like a chat room, maybe.

Chat room, yeah.

And then we evolved into or it evolved into web2.0, the current version, pretty much the current version.

The current version is websites and apps that people use every day. But the main difference is the websites save people's information. There are IP addresses, it gives them cookies that are stored on their computers if you're not logging in, then it doesn't know who you are based on your login. But it can know who you are based on your IP address and maybe some cookies you have on your computer.

So we leave more of a track online in the age of web2.0.

Like if you go to Bilibili, for example, and you watch a few videos, the website knows what videos you watched. And the next time you go to that website, it's going to suggest, oh hey, there's these videos here that you should watch, based on your viewing preferences, and so who you are is known by the other side as well.

It's all of these algorithms, 算法, big data, 大数据we're talking about. That's in the realm of web2.0.

Correct. And a lot of the internet is used like, it's monetized, advertising, selling products or in the case of maybe like Facebook or like WeiBo, selling your data.

Monetized在这个里面就叫做变现. So every one of us, when we're going online, we are an opportunity for these websites or apps to make money off of us.

That's a great way of putting it.

Data leads to directed advertising or precision marketing, what they call it. 叫精准营销. And you can't control this, can you?

No, not really, I mean, you can delete your cookies like when you go to a website, they download a cookie, but you can delete those. But you also have an IP address and that IP address is registered and on the websites that you go to, and so if you delete the cookies, they may not know what to advertise to you when you go to that website, but they still can find out who you are in some of your preferences based on your IP address.

And also you just you’re viewing history, really. But what would be web3.0 then? What would be the changes, progress, improvement?

The way you can look at web3.0 is if you think about crypto currency and NFTs we've talked about that before. There is something called the block chain.

区块链.

In web2.0, data is stored on a server. Every time you wanna access it, you go to that server to get the information. The idea of web3.0 is that the data is kept by everyone in this block chain. The data is going through the internet on a block chain.

Now you could possibly process some of that information on your own computer and be part of the block chain. You don't necessarily have to do that to be a user and see the web, but you can put your own computers processing power out there to help with this new internet or with the web3.0.

So is that what they call decentralized?

Exactly. Rather than it being centralized in a server run by a company somewhere that information is now something that belongs to, kind of you can say, in a sense, you could say it belongs to everyone.

可能用我这种小白也能听得懂的话来说, 与其说是我们要到服务器去找到信息获取信息, web3.0它的概念就是去中心化, 每个人都是the data belongs to everyone in a way and this is enabled by technology such as block chain.

I'm gonna ask probably a really dumb question. So when you hear decentralization, you sometimes also hear P to P like peer to peer点对点. Is that somewhat related to the idea of decentralization is like every connection in the future is going to be from one computer to another instead of computers to servers?

It is in a sense, but there is going to be a difference. Like when you do peer to peer, it's similar to the current or web2.0 because someone has a file, and rather than going to a server, you're going to another person to get that file. And so you can't really say whether or not it's the real thing.

But it is kind of the same idea when you are using a peer to peer rather than just going to one person, you're going to maybe 10 or 20 different people to download different parts of a file. It's the same kind of idea with a block chain. But instead of people just having this data on their computer and you getting one file or one part from one person, it's all part of a block chain. You might get part of the block chain from another place. But it's slightly different because that's not just sitting on someone's computer. It's being processed by their computer. It's there for a while, but it's not just the whole file is just not sitting there.

I see. I think I somehow, I think I somewhat understand it, kind of understand it.

And about decentralization, does that mean that the whole idea of decentralization is that you are not, then each of us were not controlled by, we're not limited by a certain authoritative third party, right? Like a server can control what we can and cannot access. But with decentralized network, then this allows people to access more information without that limitation.

So, if there is a server, someone could take down the server. A hacker could come in and say, they could do something to kill that server. No one can access the information or someone could say, anyone with this IP range can't access the data on this server. When you put it on a block chain, anyone could access that information anywhere anytime, because it's no longer on one server. It's out there kind of in a sense part of a cloud.

So there will be less control. I guess it has both pros and cons, which I would like to probably get a little bit more into our advanced episode.

And I think we're gonna wrap up here the basics, hopefully that has given you some really simplified idea of what web3.0 is. It is still... I have to remind you it is still a highly controversial topic and it's not here yet.

So obviously we have our own opinions on it. So don't take it and this is not like an expert lesson or lecture, so feel free to share your opinions and the information that about web 3.0 in our comment section with us. And I can't wait for us to have the advanced episode where we kind of where we can get into the topic a bit more and talking, and talk about its pros and cons.

Thank you, Brad, for coming to the show.

No problem. See you in the next episode.

We'll see you next time.