 We've talked in previous videos about the workings of the blockchain and the evolution of this technology, but its true potential and significance can only really be understood in the context of broader technological changes brought about in the ongoing evolution of the internet and information technology. People will make big claims about the potential of the blockchain to revolutionise the foundations of social and economic organisation, but the blockchain can only have such potential as part of a broader ecosystem of technologies that are emerging as the next generation of the internet, what may be called Web 3.0 or the decentralised web. Today, powerful technological changes are coalescing to take us into a new technology paradigm. These include the rise of advanced analytics coupled with datification and the internet of things, the blockchain will have to work synergistically with these if its true capacities are to be realised. But to understand this next generation web, we need to understand a bit about the history of the internet. Going back to the early 90s, web 1.0 was the first generation of the worldwide web, it was based primarily on the technology of HTTP, which worked to link documents on different computers and make them accessible over the internet. HTML was then used to display these documents so that any connected computer with a browser could access and read a web page. This first iteration of the web was all about information, as it enabled us to exchange information much more efficiently and had to got the name Information Super Highway. Even though it was a revolution in information exchange, content creators were few with the vast majority of users simply acting as consumers of content, it was really very static and lacked interactivity. Whereas in the web 1.0 era, people were limited to passive viewing of content. With web 2.0, websites allowed users to interact, collaborate and become the creators of content. With web 2.0, people could not only read from the web, but also write to it, and thus it got the nickname the Read Write Web. By the early 2000s, new server-side scripting technologies such as PHP enabled developers to easily build applications where people could write information to a database, with that information then being dynamically updated every time they refreshed a page. Most all of the websites that dominate the web today are based on this server-side scripting technology. It gave us social networking, blogging, video sharing, eBay, YouTube, Facebook and all the other large platforms that most people spend most of their internet time using. The idea of web 3.0 has been around for a while, but it's only very recently with the development of the blockchain that it has actually started to become something real. Web 2.0 has evolved to become highly centralized around very large platforms running out of ever larger data centers, creating many issues surrounding security, privacy, control and concentration of power in the hands of large enterprises. It's only today that these issues are starting to enter into mainstream discourse. Web 3.0 is set to disrupt this whole technology paradigm, as the critical change that is coming about is that we're decentralizing the web. The blockchain provides the protocols and cryptography for a globally distributed network of computers to collaborate on maintaining a public, secure database, and with a virtual machine like Ethereum we can run code on this, creating a new set of distributed applications. These new technologies of the blockchain, IPFS, and the distributed web enable us to reconfigure the internet into a distributed global computer, so that we're no longer dependent upon the web platforms and data centers of Web 2.0 to run the internet, but now can build and run applications on this shared global computing infrastructure. As Mike Leapolt of the Institute for the Future noted, it starts with the realization that the internet that we know today is only one possible interpretation of the original vision of an open, peer-to-peer network independent of any centralized technology, commercial entity, or sovereign government. Think of it as a first curve internet, one that is increasingly vulnerable to abuse and even collapse. To date, we've largely taken the infrastructure of the internet for granted. All of the innovation and action has been focused on the application layer that sits on top of it, on web applications like social networking or e-commerce. With the development of blockchain, and particularly with this third generation, we're starting to innovate on the low-level protocols, asking not if we can build a better web application, but if we can build a better internet. The implications of the decentralized web are indeed radical, in that it enables us to create automated services, disintermediate existing incumbents, and enable people to set up their own secure networks of exchange in powering them in new ways. The blockchain will be a core part of web 3.0, but the next generation internet would also see the convergence of the internet of things and big data analytics. The ongoing, fundamental process of datafication will be a key aspect to this next generation internet. As we increase in the instrument our world, data will flow from all sources about everything. Datafication is the term given to our newly found ability to capture as data many aspects of the world in our lives that have never been quantified before. This process results in what we call big data. Last amounts of unstructured data that can be mined by advanced analytical methods to gain new insight into the world around us. This is important with respect to the blockchain, because firstly it means we'll have a lot of sensitive data that we'll want to store. Secondly we will be quantifying, accounting for and exchanging all sorts of value that we did not or could not in the past. Thirdly, such a diversity of sources of data, combined with advanced analytics which can find cross correlations and patterns within it, can provide a new source to verify the data that is being inputted to the blockchain without depending on a centralized authority for validation. The next generation internet will be much smarter, whereas web 1 was dumb and web 2 was dynamic, Web 3 will incorporate various aspects of machine learning and cognitive computing as a service as it becomes infused into almost all applications, making the web truly adaptive, responsive and personalized. Whereas web 1 and web 2 were largely about people exchanging information. In web 3, machines will come online and the internet will become something much more physical as billions of devices and actuators connect it to all sorts of things, from tractors to watches to factories and drones, enabling them to interact and coordinate machine to machine. The value of the internet of things, IoT, will not be in making one device or system smart, it will be in enabling seamless processes across systems. This will require open networks that can communicate and coordinate components on demand across domains, organizations and systems. The end vision of IoT is not to have our lives populated with thousands of smart things, but instead to change our world from discrete things to service processes. To do this, these technologies will have to communicate securely, peer to peer, dynamically allocating resources and this will require some kind of distributed secure infrastructure like the blockchain and likewise micro economies. This ties in with the broader process of change which comes about as we move into a services economy called serviceization, which is the shift from products and the ownership of things to the access of services on demand. For example, instead of only a car, you simply have access to a car sharing service. This economy of temporary usage via services requires the formation of frictionless markets and automated exchanges that the blockchain is well suited to support, as we'll discuss in a future video. These components of the next generation internet, the blockchain, the internet of things and advanced analytics are each of them very powerful technologies that will have a profound effect on society. They will take us much further into this new world to the information age as power shifts in a radical way from people in hierarchical institutions to automated networks and the algorithms that coordinate them. In the coming decades, more and more of our systems of organization will move to the internet and it will become vastly more complex than today. In web one and web two, we developed the internet from small to large through a client server architecture that worked to centralize the web around large data centers. But the internet after datification and all these IOT devices have come online will not be large, it will be more like infinite. You can get from small to large by centralizing but you get from large to infinity through distributing and that's what the blockchain can do for this next generation internet.