[Ads-l] Term: Web3 / Web 3.0

[ADSGarson O'Toole]

The Wikipedia article on Web3 credits Gavin Wood with introducing the
term Web3 in 2014.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web3

[Begin excerpt]
The term "Web3" was coined by Polkadot founder and Ethereum co-founder
Gavin Wood in 2014, referring to a "decentralized online ecosystem
based on blockchain."
[End excerpt]

To support this claim of coinage, Wikipedia points to a 2021 article
at Wired. The Wired article does contain this claim, but I did not see
a supporting citation.

Date: November 29, 2021
Website: Wired
Article: The Father of Web3 Wants You to Trust Less
Author: Gilad Edelman
https://www.wired.com/story/web3-gavin-wood-interview/

[Begin excerpt]
Gavin Wood coined the term Web3 (originally Web 3.0) in 2014. At the
time, he was fresh off of helping develop Ethereum, the cryptocurrency
that is second only to Bitcoin in prominence and market size. Today he
runs the Web3 Foundation, which supports decentralized technology
projects, as well as Parity Technologies, a company focused on
building blockchain infrastructure for Web3.
[End excerpt]

The website of Gavin Wood does contain some support for the claim that
he came up with the term Web3 although he originally called it "Web
3.0". Here is a link to a webpage on his website that uses and
explains the term "Web 3.0". Wood's article begins with a claim that
this crucial article was posted to another website in 2014.

http://gavwood.com/dappsweb3.html

[Begin excerpt]
Note: originally posted Wednesday, 17 April 2014 on gavofyork's blog
Insights into a Modern World.
[End excerpt]

It is possible to verify that a snapshot of this webpage was stored in
the Wayback Machine on August 16, 2015. (Perhaps there is a verifiably
older version of the article somewhere.)

https://web.archive.org/web/20150816021358/http://gavwood.com/dappsweb3.htm

Here is some text from Wood's article which attempts to explicate "Web 3.0".

[Begin excerpt]
Web 3.0, or as might be termed the "post-Snowden" web, is a
reimagination of the sorts of things that we already use the Web for,
but with a fundamentally different model for the interactions between
parties. Information that we assume to be public, we publish.
Information that we assume to be agreed, we place on a
consensus-ledger. Information that we assume to be private, we keep
secret and never reveal. Communication always takes place over
encrypted channels and only with pseudonymous identities as endpoints;
never with anything traceable (such as IP addresses). In short, we
engineer the system to mathematically enforce our prior assumptions,
since no government or organisation can reasonably be trusted.
[End excerpt]

Currently, I do not see the copy of the article that was posted to the
blog "Insights Into a Modern World" and I am not sure where that blog
is located. Perhaps that blog is no longer accessible.

Garson

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