NFTs, the Metaverse, and Everything Web 3.0

Chapter 2. What Is Blockchain?

The opportunity of a technology like blockchain isn’t to free us from trust in our institutions; it should be described as an experiment in building new kinds of collective institutions that we can trust. Trust is the currency of civilization.¹

Tim O’Reilly, founder and CEO, O’Reilly Media

Blockchain technology is a powerful tool (but not an essential one) for implementing the Web 3.0 vision for a decentralized internet. But what is blockchain?

Blockchain is the internet of value. If we think of the internet as a platform for sharing information, which over time has become free, scalable, nearly instantaneous, and reasonably trusted, then we can think of blockchain as a platform for sharing value, or things of value (see Figure 2-1).

The first “thing” of value was, of course, bitcoin. This was followed by alternatives to bitcoin, called altcoins, of which Ethereum was the most well-known.

Altcoins: Alternatives to bitcoin; digital assets that can be bought, sold, and traded like stock. Also called cryptocurrencies.

Figure 2-1. The evolution from an internet of information and its most common applications to an internet of value, in which value can now take on many forms.

Note

Although I originally preferred the term altcoin to cryptocurrency because it isn’t necessarily a currency, cryptocurrency is now the widely accepted term, and it has ...