I remember the first website I built. The year was 2001, and I was a baby nerd who spent her lunch breaks in the school library. I can’t remember exactly what the point of my website was—I doubt there was a point—but I do remember the hours I spent painstakingly creating my masterpiece using the now-defunct Geocities. The internet had been around for more than a decade by this stage. And although it was still the Web 1.0 era, those of us who wanted to publish content onto the World Wide Web had the tools to do so.

In a world where we can post a tweet in less time than it took for a dial-up modem to connect, it’s easy to forget that participating in the online world wasn’t always so simple. Tech historian, Benj Edwards, writes of his experience building a website in 1995:

“In early 1995, when I was on the cusp of turning 14 years old, I decided I wanted to be part of World Wide Web (the web) on the Information Superhighway (the Internet) by creating my own web page (website). (Even the jargon is old.) To do that, I had to obtain an Internet connection, then I had to rent web space, learn how to write HTML, and actually upload it to that space, then figure out how to view it in a graphical web browser.”

Just six years later, this young girl could create her own website with zero HTML knowledge. I didn’t own a domain, nor did I have the means to buy one. And I had no idea what an FTP client was. It’s not because I didn’t want to learn about how websites worked, but rather that I didn’t need to.

Fast forward another decade or so, and the online publishing process became so simple that both of my over-60s parents started (and gave up on) their own blogs. Blogging had officially reached the laggards.

Being early is a double-edged sword

Being early to any technology typically makes it easier to succeed. You were more likely to be found as one of 31,000 web pages on the internet in 1995 than you are as one of the 25 billion+ pages in 2022. A friend with more than 100,000 TikTok followers credits much of her success to starting on the platform long before it was cool. And we all wish we’d bought $20 worth of Bitcoin back in 2010 or $100 of Eth in 2015.

Being early comes with its challenges however. The barrier to entry for someone creating a website in 2022 is far lower than it was in 1995, as our internet connections are faster and more readily available. We now have tools like Squarespace and Ghost that require close to zero technical knowledge.

Web3, on the other hand, still has barriers to entry for the less technical. We don’t yet have the all tools to make it friendly enough for mainstream adoption. But we’re getting there. Every few days I see a new web3 product launching, solving a problem in a more user-friendly way.

Technical barriers aside, being early is also risky: this might all be a waste of time and/or money. This website I’m building might get zero visitors. This social media platform I’m creating content on might become another MySpace. This obscure digital currency I’m investing in could turn out to be a scam, or worse, a pyramid scheme.

I suspect this is the unspoken barrier to mainstream adoption. When someone tells us that web3 is too difficult to understand, perhaps what they’re really saying is, “I don’t trust this enough to invest time in learning it”. Or that the perceived upside isn’t worth the potential loss and the discomfort of changing. There are enough crypto sceptics out there to plant the seed of doubt in the majority’s minds. Even I occasionally step back and wonder if I’ve been sucked into a cult, brainwashed by the echo chamber of crypto Twitter. (I haven’t).

Knowledge barriers will decrease as adoption increases

The language we use right now in the web3 space isn’t suitable for the majority. How a blockchain operates is a complex concept to grasp. So is fungibility and non-fungibility. But will the majority need to understand these in order to use products built on web3? Probably not. Just like how you don’t need to understand how an FTP client works—or even what one is—to build a website these days, it’s likely that future web3 adopters won’t need more than a surface-level understanding of how the technology works.

And so we'll shift away from using jargon like "NFTs" or "web3". We might adopt more user-friendly terms like "digital collectibles" (as both Reddit and Meta have coined them).

Or this whole web3 thing might just become what we call "the internet".

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