Cryptography

Back in the 1990s, we were dialing up and waiting on snail mail to avoid paying for every minute of access to the world wide web. This early version of the internet was built by developers and primarily delivered content in one direction. Websites were static and really only available for people to read. This read-only experience can be thought of as web1.

By 2005, most business owners had computers and had started to see the value of having a website. The ability to read content on the internet remained, but an option to write into cyberspace introduced dynamic websites where content could be updated. Bulletin boards, e-commerce, and social media also emerged. With the expanding capability to read and write online, anyone could share content without knowing how to code. This stage of the internet with read+write can be thought of as web2.

Within web2, supercomputers landed in our hands. This social integration with machines accelerated access worldwide and ushered in our connected era.

While such affinity allows us all to do more with less, immense power (and liability) was earned by big tech companies that controlled the world’s data. A dependency on convenience fed these web2 giants, which offered free access in exchange for more data. Big tech boomed through 2020, but trust wilted as humans became the product.

Investors demanding profit from big tech shifted ideals away from attraction and more toward extraction.

Tech giants became gatekeepers and left a stalling world of users feeling dispensable and disenfranchised. The internet had linked our planet, but power had become centralized.

Web3 is an umbrella term that describes the future of how we will continue to connect, communicate, and collaborate online. Guided by principles that suggest the internet is best when it’s decentralized, web3 technologies strive to be transparent, distributed, permissionless, proportionate, and verifiable. If web1 was read-only and web2 was read+write, web3 can be thought of as read+write+own.

What does it mean to own your online experience? Instead of another profile controlled by an individual company, we now traverse cyberspace with our own digital backpacks. Your digital assets are personalized, verified, and shared within any online environment, but privacy, content, and audience remain contained. As we move throughout the internet, our digital presence sticks with us instead of being lost on yet another centralized server. Enhanced cyber hygiene is needed when we own more of the experience online, but this paradigm shift returns ownership to the people who make cyberspace special.

As with anything new, this frontier brought fear, confusion, bad actors, and strange projects that felt like a prank. The challenges of building into the unknown suppressed mainstream growth, but this is how adoption curves work. Onboarding remained wonky, good ideas failed, AI burst back onto the scene, and the world had gotten comfortable with web2. Considerable progress came from traditional tools, and the growing pains of web3 led to an intermediate stage. Web2.5 was needed to move people through new layers of understanding. It took time, but winners made the experience feel like web2, with sufficiently decentralized technologies under the hood.

Over time, experimentation has led to more platforms that allow users to retain ownership as they move throughout cyberspace. Whether this is the first time you’ve heard of web3 or you’re a crusader leading the charge, pour another cup of curiosity and let’s introduce a few common terms that will make this nerdy narrative more approachable.

Decentralization – Sufficiently transitioning from single authorities to proportionately deliver verifiable ownership, access, control, transparency, communication, and governance to many stakeholders.

Blockchains – Decentralized immutable systems that record transactions with transparent logs on a dynamic ledger. There are private and public blockchains with different interfacing layers. Transaction fees cover the costs of the computing, electricity, and verification required to interact onchain.

DeFi – Acronym for decentralized finance, which weaves cryptocurrency into the existing financial industry.

Cryptology – The study of code. Within this context, cryptology supports security through cryptography. A theoretical debate is how this form of digital security will hold as quantum computing continues to mature.

Cryptocurrency – Mechanized money. Fungible assets used to support economies and immutable transactions between stakeholders online. In 2026, there are countless cryptocurrencies that total ~$4T in market capitalization, with Bitcoin maintaining the largest market cap (~$2T).

Smart Contract – Code-based agreement that establishes terms for how a transaction is executed for stakeholders involved. Like a bridge from a blockchain to digital assets, smart contracts also frame automated governance, arbitration procedures, and more.

Dapp – Acronym for decentralized application. Like other apps, but a Dapp lives on a decentralized network that uses wallets (versus profiles on a corporate network) to combine the user interface with an individual smart contract, which connects to dynamic data onchain.

NFT – Acronym for non-fungible tokens. NFTs are digital assets that represent ownership. Each NFT has a smart contract that then connects it to a blockchain. These smart contracts apply, transfer, and track digital signatures and verifiable ownership. Non-fungible means something is unique and cannot be replaced. In contrast, cryptocurrencies are fungible, as they are mutually interchangeable.

Extra Shot

The Roasted Reflections NFT Collection will always represent a neat technological experiment from 2020. It resulted in the creation of creative tokens owned by savvy/supportive true fans, who then unlocked front row seats and networked ownership with others. Studious, but fun stuff!

Minting – The process of locking a cryptographic asset (such as an NFT) into a blockchain. Transaction fees may be required, and blockchain hashing tracks the provenance for everything onchain. Lazy minting is when a digital asset is not fully minted until a transaction occurs.

Digital Wallet – A software tool to access the web3 world. Wallets store digital assets (ex: NFTs), interact with dapps, and host public/private keys. The wallet’s unique address is a hexadecimal string that refers to locations on a network, which are generated from the wallet’s private keys. This secures data transfers, cryptocurrency transactions, and digital signatures. A wallet address can be shared like a public email address, while private keys and seed phrases should always remain private.

Airdrop – Giveaways sent to digital wallets. Airdrops provide a creative way for people to share assets with each other, with senders paying the transaction fees. Be skeptical of an airdrop from unknown sources. Like clicking links or opening attachments in emailed spam, there are poisonous airdrops that can force access to your digital wallet when a malicious item is transferred. To be safe, if an unrecognized airdrop lands in your digital wallet, leave it alone.

Rugged – When digital property is lost or stolen, often malicious but not always deliberate. Being rugged is a bad thing, but it’s wild in experimental environments. Have fun in the rabbit holes, but exploration is done at your own risk. Be diligent with digital hygiene and tread lightly to stay safe in any digital realm.

DAO – Acronym for decentralized autonomous organization. These member-owned groups operate through code with less hierarchy. DAOs often share treasuries and governance, with projects defined by a collective goal.

Metaverse – Interoperable environments where users can interact from anywhere, with augmented and virtual reality ushering in more immersive experiences.

Protocol Networks – Open systems, like email, the web, and RSS that are funded and controlled but not owned by software developers or network stakeholders. In contrast, corporate networks are owned and controlled by companies instead of communities.

Zero-Knowledge Proof – In cryptography, a zero-knowledge proof is a protocol in which one party (the prover) can convince another party (the verifier) that a given statement is true—without conveying to the verifier any information beyond the mere fact of that statement’s truth. The logic in zero-knowledge proofs is that it becomes trivial to prove possession of the relevant information simply by revealing it; the hard part is to prove this possession without revealing this information (or any aspect of it whatsoever).

Tokenomics – The study of how digital assets create incentivized value within social economic frameworks.

As jargon alarms sound, remember, prevailing concepts are still being built. There are fewer industry standards, terms are not fully authenticated, and regulation is far from perfect. As web3 concepts move through different adoption life cycles, early adopters will continue to bake terms that help translate the ways in which different technologies work together.

Amid such efflorescent activity, it’s helpful to remember that much of the new jargon describes existing ideas that are being enhanced with advancing technology.

Money, for instance, is the oldest story humans have used to exchange value, yet this form of currency has evolved and will continue to do so. Secure access to a shared database is old hat for web2 wizards. We lived in Sim City long before the metaverse; everyone has flight and concert tickets landing in their phone’s digital wallet; and communities always thrive when they are sufficiently decentralized and still brewed from within. This does not thwart the magic of web3. It makes emerging technologies easier to adopt.

Brewed From Within
#76 📖 Technology

V2.0 – 100% HUMAN