This story is part of the Web3 Writing Contest hosted by The Octopus Network in collaboration with HackerNoon.
The term web3 strikes a lot of imaginations; given that we have good, and perhaps excellent, user experience with web2 today, then what’s web3 offer to us? Stories like https://gavwood.com/web3lt.html offers some imagination, but most of them might or might not be relevant to how we use the web today. Do we even need the technology when it doesn’t affect us anyways?
In one’s perspective, web3 isn’t just “the web” itself. Neither is web3 about cryptocurrency, or blockchain technology. You have an existing app, and you integrate a cryptocurrency feature to it so people could start paying each other in cryptocurrencies (instead of fiat currencies); that’s not web3, that’s just a “crypto feature on top of web2”. Cryptocurrency, Decentralized Finance (DeFi), and the finance world in general isn’t the only stuff in cryptocurrency.
In fact, one think it’s more game changing than “the web” per se. Web3 integrates into our everyday life. The name “web3” represents a subset of what it actually represents. So one defines web3 as: “a technology that let’s us realize the value in things that we do everyday”. Let’s explain more in-depth based on token economics (see the references in the final section for more details):
Let’s talk about work. Someone looking for a job applies to an entity, go through interviews and (potentially useless) aptitude tests, and land on the job if everything goes well. The job is paid a fixed salary per month (to not confuse ourselves, ignore other payment situations). Perhaps you might tell yourself, “the real money earned from a job is not when you’re doing the job well and get paid, but when you don’t do anything and get paid”. With web3 integration, this is no longer true. Potentially, one imagine you don’t need to go through specific interviews, nor try to land on a job. (In fact, one is still trying to look for a job but failed badly, so perhaps you might have a job to offer me?) Web3 allows you to participate in any job via willingness, and you get paid based on your contributions. Let’s talk more specifically:
Someone wants a job to be done. (S)He posted the job on the open job board, where anybody from all around the globe could participate in. Workers make the change and push the change online. Based on the quality and quantity (or other measurements) of the work, the worker is awarded a number of percentage of money from the “prize pool”. The person posting the job happily sells his/her end product, make more money, required some jobs again, take out some parts of the money (s)he made and goes back to the pool for new jobs.
In this situation, “don’t do anything and get paid“ is a miracle. In a book one think it’s called “Remote: Office Not Required” (or another book) by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, they mentioned “when you don’t see the person ‘in-person’, you can only rely on other metrics, which is the quantity and quality of their work, to evaluate whether they’re a good worker or not”. Web3 technology describes this situation as one advantage over traditional working situations.
It’s also better by being distributed. First, you don’t have someone above your hierarchy. That means you can work whenever you want, instead of requiring some experience to work up the ladder, and reach “freelancing bottom line” before you can start having your own time, expertise, and fame to attract people to hire you as a freelancer. Second, you don’t have a boss to beat you. 40-hours work week + beating stick + carrot = 80-hours work week (or even worse). Before you realized, you’re burnt out, produce bad-quality work, then 80-hours work week + bad-quality work + feeling ashamed = 120-hours work week. (God knows whether you can even work that long). In web3, who cares who you are when you can produce good quality work during a time you are comfortable with, working on something that you like/love?
Conclusion
Work is just one of many benefits that web3 has to offer. In conclusion, web3 isn’t just about the technology itself, nor an integration of cryptocurrency into existing applications; though there are many interesting things that gets created as a by-product of web3, like NFTs, they don’t represent everything. Ultimately, end users benefit from web3 when it changes how they could earn some income (and others which we might discuss in the future), and these changes made end-users look forward to web3 integration.
References
- https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLsJWgOB5mIMCMxQVvWAP4xi19EOkHcBNN
- (Remote: office not required?) (if one is correct, then the link is here: https://www.amazon.com/Remote-Office-Required-Jason-Fried/dp/0091954673)