Sindra: Yo.
Kyle: Yo.
Sindra: I’ve been reading up lately on the beginnings of the web. Do you know much about it?
Kyle: Yeah I mean, a little. Why?
Sindra: There was this little pocket of time at the start of it all. It’s super strange and interesting..
Kyle: Like at the beginning beginning of the internet? In the 1980s, 1990s?
Sindra: Nono not then. I’m talking about when humans started plugging stuff into the chain. The real web.
Kyle: Oh, k yeah.
Sindra: So that really got going in like the 2010s, 20s or something. And near the start of it, they got to calling it “web3”.
Kyle: Lol what do you mean?
Sindra: Haha yeah they called it web3, like “Web 3.0”. As if they’d already been through two iterations of the web.
Kyle: That’s hilarious. What was web 1 and web 2?
Sindra: Well, they called the very beginnings of that fake web intranet thing web1. Like, when everything was stored on closed and siloed databases. They called that web 1.0 can you imagine? Anyway, then when you could actually do a few things on the internet — like connect with friends and shit — they called that web2. They also called it “social media”.
Kyle: Lol. Connecting with friends on the internet. What a miracle, what breakthrough. “We are web2”.
Sindra: I know I know it’s incredible. Anyway once things started getting hooked into the chain, they were all like “hoorah. we are web3!” Little did they know they literally, like, just started the web.
Kyle: Yeah fr. That’s like web 0 fam.
Sindra: Yes! Exactly. They were busy like “omg web3 is gonna change the world!”. And it’s like, yo, you are just now hooking into the real web for the first time ever. Chill.
Kyle: Hahaha.
Sindra: Anyway that’s not the craziest shit.
Kyle: Tell me.
Sindra: So when this all got going and people were finally using these open networks for the first time, they got to creating and trading fungible data points.
Kyle: What do you mean?
Sindra: I mean like every single fungible data point was essentially behaving like a currency. And they called them all “tokens”. The main thing people would do is buy and sell them.
Kyle: Get the fuck out of here.
Sindra: No I’m serious. All fungible data was just money to these folks.
Kyle: I’m dying rn.
Sindra: Like they couldn’t figure out anything better to do with this stuff. They had just discovered this, you know, like new thing. And they’re all like “ahhhhh. fungible data that we can both believe in! let’s buy and sell it over and over!”
Kyle: LOL stop. This is too much.
Sindra: K but wait, it gets wilder. So they used all these fungible data points as money right. But then they also used, like, most of it as votes. Like pretty much all of them were considered tokens that you can vote in ecosystems with. So pretty much everything would be like, “hey, here’s what we’re thinking of doing.. here’s how we thought we might spend these funds etc…” and then literally people would just vote with all these “tokens”. The more tokens you got your hands on the more voting power you’d have in the system.
Kyle: That’s… wait what?
Sindra: I know I know. And they started calling literally everything DAO. Everything was a DAO. Literally nothing was decentralized, autonomous or organized. But everything was a DAO.
Kyle: Fuck off. Is this real?
Sindra: Yo I swear, you can look this all up! This is what was going down.
Kyle: Lollllll. This was “web3”.
Sindra: This was web3.
Kyle: Literally amazing.