By KIM BELLARD

I recently watched some of the recent Congressional hearings on cryptocurrency, and, boy, if there’s anything funnier than watching experts try to educate most members of Congress on anything crypto-related, it’s probably me trying to explain it.  I don’t own any digital assets, still don’t see the point of NFTs, and am not going to buy any real estate in the metaverse.  

All that being said, there’s something about Web3 that fascinates me.  Knowledgeable people are talking about Web3 “reinventing the internet,” “democratizing” it, giving people more ownership of/control over what they do on it.  It’s a counterbalance to how the internet – both the traffic and the infrastructure — has grown increasingly dominated by a few very large firms, such as Google, Facebook, or Amazon.

As the Web3 Foundation declares, Web3 is an internet where:

• Users own their own data, not corporations
• Global digital transactions are secure
• Online exchanges of information and value are decentralized

All that sounds very intriguing to me, especially as someone who has dim views of how healthcare likes to silo information, has placed too little value on patient ownership of their own data, and is rushing to centralize.