whatever web3 is, it’s so big and so random and changing so fast than any person who looks at it will come back with incomplete information and therefor form an incomplete view

as such, this document is my view, i’m @mikeal

as such, this document will continue to change as web3 changes and as i continue to change

the current web is a network of inter-linked location addresses, web3 is a network of linkable content addresses

so, what is web3?

there’s a bunch of protocols

<aside> 📖 “protocol” is just a standardized way of doing something, typically documented sufficiently that others can interoperate with it

</aside>

sometimes people call their protocols “crypto.” sometimes different people call the same thing crypto or not crypto and may even argue about who is correct

perhaps we should widen our view beyond what we see in the comments

we’re talking about cryptographic networks, not just coins and tokens but all future protocols that use cryptography in novel ways that allow them to be decentralized

so it’s bitcoin and ethereum and solana, but it’s also ipfs and bittorrent and webtorrent and even git

whatever conceptual dimension you’re considering these in, if they’re protocols or standards or networks or digital tulips, they all use hashes to link bits of data together

<aside> 📖 a hash is the result of a cryptographically secure function.

these are securely randomized identifiers that can only be recomputed by inputting the source data into the same function

</aside>

hashes have many interesting second and third order properties, especially as you start linking them, but the only one you need to know now is that anyone can verify them

this is what allows for trustless protocols to be built

if i ask you for a hash, you give to me the data that will compute that same hash. i don’t have to trust that you gave me the right thing, i can run that data through the hash function and know that i got the right data

this is called content addressing, using the content itself as the identifier so that i don’t need to ask an authority for it to know it is correct

there’s a bunch of transport protocols to move data around, many blockchains build their own and we end up bridging them over https all the time to make it easier on developers

but the transport protocols don’t really matter because they all send data using content addresses