Berners-Lee said people too often conflate Web3 with “Web 3.0,” his own proposal for reshaping the internet.
Tim Berners-Lee, the British computer scientist credited with inventing the World Wide Web in 1989, said Friday that he doesn’t view blockchain as a viable solution for building the next iteration of the internet.
He has his own web decentralization project called Solid.
“It’s important to clarify in order to discuss the impacts of new technology,” said Berners-Lee, speaking onstage at the Web Summit event in Lisbon. “You have to understand what the terms mean that we’re discussing actually mean, beyond the buzzwords.”
“It’s a real shame in fact that the actual Web3 name was taken by Ethereum folks for the stuff that they’re doing with blockchain. In fact, Web3 is not the web at all.”
Web3 is a nebulous term in the tech world used to describe a hypothetical future version of the internet that’s more decentralized than it is today and not dominated by a handful of powerful players such as Amazon, Microsoft and Google.
It involves a few technologies, including blockchain, cryptocurrencies and nonfungible tokens.
While breaking our personal data out of Big Tech’s clutches is an ambition shared by Berners-Lee, he’s not convinced blockchain, the distributed ledger technology that underpins cryptocurrencies like bitcoin, will be the solution.
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