Web 3.0 promises a more connected and proactive internet that’s more of a personal assistant than a collection of static web pages. As a result, the companies we interact with and the platforms we use on Web 3.0 will learn more data about us than ever before. Additionally, we’ll come to rely on the internet more than we ever have. For these two reasons, blockchain is vital to Web 3.0. It increases data security and makes the network more reliable.
Security & Privacy
We take for granted how often we read about companies that have breaches of user information. It seems like a monthly, if not weekly, occurrence at this point. 2017 saw the most data breaches of any year on record, with over 1,500 breaches resulting in the exposure of more than 178 million records. With existing Web 2.0 platforms, this is incredibly problematic, as a breach can lead to identity theft or fraudulent credit card charges.
However, under Web 3.0, the effects of a breach of your personal information could be far deeper. If an attacker gained access to the electronic keys that opened the door to your house, turned on your car, or ran your business, an attack could be devastating and dangerous. A bad actor that can tamper with your AI’s recommendations or control your personal devices could concoct all kinds of frightening scenarios to put you through.
There’s a serious need for data privacy now and in the future, and blockchain is the answer. With its cryptography and distributed ledger protocols, blockchain makes it much harder to penetrate your personal records. It also requires bad actors to have massive amounts of computing power before they can tamper with entries on the ledger. These security measures make blockchain a critical component of the future Web.
Reliability
Blockchain ledgers exist on a distributed network of thousands of nodes. Due to the nature of the network, there’s no single point of failure. If one, or even one hundred, nodes go offline or get attacked, the blockchain continues to exist without a problem. This stands in contrast to the centralized systems that run today’s internet. While most centralized data servers do create redundancy in the data they store, a single error with a network router or a major denial-of-service attack can bring down websites and applications.
In the future, we’ll be even more connected and reliant on our web and mobile applications than we already are. Thanks to the Internet of Things and artificial intelligence, our devices will act as our wallet and keys. We need a system that’s reliable, and that operates with no downtime. Distributed networks, and the infrastructure of nodes that power those networks make blockchain more reliable than its centralized counterparts.