Web3 is a popular word and there are many people working in this area.
Web3 means all applications of blockchain.
What is blockchain?
Blockchain is a big table (like excel) shared by everyone in the world.
The “share” here means 2 things:
- Everyone can view it.
- Everyone can append a new line to it, but no one can edit its previous lines.
What is the usage of it?
One usage is to create a ledger which cannot be tampered by bad people, to record people’s money.
So how to implement such a thing? I think it is quite simple, you just need to provide these needed APIs (viewing and appending), and try your best to disallow others to tamper its history.
Yes, and we’ve never had such a thing before, if you want to know how blockchain disallows others to tamper its history, you can read my another post.
Can you tell me more applications of blockchain?
Bitcoin is the first application of blockchain.
I’ve heard of it, it is a type of currency that is not issued by a country, we’ve already have our currency, like USD or CNY, what is the value of creating such a thing?
A difference between bitcoin and fiat currency 💴 is the total amount of bitcoin is fixed, while fiat currency can always be printed more.
So one value of bitcoin is as a store of value, like gold, whose number is also fixed. And bitcoin is actually a better gold because we know the exact amount of bitcoin but we can only estimate the amount of gold.
If you want to know more values of bitcoin, you can read my another post.
How can bitcoin’s total amount be fixed?
Because this is written in the blockchain, which is anti-tampered.
Acknowledgement
Thanks for Jianshuo Wang’s posts related to blockchain, I’ve learned a lot from them.
If you understand Chinese, you can read them on substack, or searching 王建硕 in WeChat, where you can get all its posts.