Ok so my name is Pranav R and I'm currently doing the 2nd year of my course specializing in artificial intelligence and data science. I can imagine this might sound kind of cliche, but web3 proves what I believe the world can achieve one day.

All of us have this unfathomable phantom dream of creating a "web" where all of us are assured of our privacy and we can be sure to trust the medium we use.

How my craving for blockchains began:

I didn't learn about blockchain by just "learning blockchain". My dad once came by my room and just popped a question about blockchain, and here I was sitting in my chair telling him I have no clue what that is and telling him to give me 5 because I needed time to finish my f1 race on my PC. I forgot about this until about midnight when I saw my dad watching tv and I asked him what was he talking about before and then he humiliated me for not knowing what blockchain was.

My first reaction to my dad telling me that he was humiliated was that at least he's not one of those cliche Indian parents who assume their firstborn to settle for any job they are first offered, let me remind you most of which are from call centers. At least that's not what my dad wanted. He wanted me to go deeper on a topic, study it, and master it.

This was a major driving force for me to focus more on blockchains and web3.

It was a long night because I started with a couple of blockchain articles and then went to another page about the same thing, and then another, and then another. I was up until about 5 a.m. and went about my business until I passed out from exhaustion. I did learn about it more in the coming weeks only because its entire mechanism seemed to catch my interest every single time, I seem to read about it.

The fact that something like this even existed is what fascinated me and dragged me into it making me jump into an ocean of different terms and processes associated with those terms.

I can assume what you might think about web3 right now. You think why would anyone take on something that many have absolutely no idea about. See, that was the factor that attracted me the most about it.

The very fact that I was "Walking a road not taken", excited me, made me realize that my goals for the web3 community in the coming years would create a certain impact that I wish to make and hopefully my ideas would mold web3 into a better world that is shared globally.

Ok, enough about my dreams......let's get back to what I did after reading about blockchain until 5 a.m. and then studying it over the next few weeks.

I kind of stopped reading about it over the coming weeks since my semester exams had begun and had to take some time off for that. After my exams, I then had my next semester with absolutely no gap in between. Then I had to put quite some time into my new semester and then......

You might assume something that I went back into learning about web3 and blockchains after my semesters. You're right there but the way I got back into it is in the weirdest way possible.

I got a random call from one of my friends to who I haven't spoken in over 6 months. He called me for another midlife crisis issue and I was pretty sure it was about a breakup. Anyway, he wanted my help on that and then we got to talking.

Even at this point, he tells me he works on web3 and crypto and NFTs and all that. In all these instances not even once did I bother asking him what the hell all of that was nor did I ask him to explain all this to me. One day I was coming back from college and he decided to meet me at Subway. I was coming back from college and the place was on my way so the plan seemed to be fine to me.

It was not until I went, ordered, and was about to have my first bite was when he told me about how he was working on blockchains. Then I was intrigued and kept on listening to what he was working on.

This is the beginning of my journey into the web3 world…..I know right, not the journey you were expecting. But hey, c'est la vie.

I started with the evolution from web1 to web3. In this course of time, I learned that web2 began with much to offer to all users, but in course of time, companies began to take more information from us than we wanted to have. In a nutshell, it taught me that user privacy is out the window, and with all progress, we see in the web2 world can just end up causing more harm than what good we expect it to do.

I honestly feel we should have stuck with web1 and shouldn't have moved from just reading articles to nothing else.

Like, imagine a world where you didn't fear data breaches at all. The beautiful world right? I tried to understand web3 to be a symphony of web1 with web2.

I READ THE BIBLE:

After I finished learning about web3 and its implications, I learned about crypto and transactions. This is when I came across what I would like to call “The Bible”. It was the bitcoin whitepaper written by Satoshi Nakamoto in 2007. Trust me it's me sitting in my chair AGAIN and going over this 9-page document that changed the world. And yet I just sit there thinking about how this one person could have come up with something so mindblowing at an age where even WhatsApp wasn't a thing. I sat again and read every line which I knew because I read it in other articles but reading it from the master's testament itself was a feeling of its own that one can never put into words.

Me sitting there mesmerized and wanted to go deeper into crypto. That's when my friend (YES, THE VERY SAME ONE WITH THE MIDLIFE CRISIS) called me and told me that he badly wanted me to learn about Ethereum. I figured….ok, gonna be something I can learn about. I went ahead with it and there you go…..” Christmas on a website”.

The first thing I came across is smart contracts. Imagine creating an agreement completely out of code. Like if you thought buying a tesla with bitcoin is crazy imagine a guy sitting in a Starbucks and reading a set of lines of code and being like “Huh, we might need to alter this point in the agreement.”. That's basically what a smart contract is in a nutshell.

Somehow the easiest of the concepts in the crypto world to understand gave me the biggest issues in grasping and I took quite some time in getting. But whatever it is all those experiences have been getting me closer and closer to what I want to achieve and my admiration towards the people working on this in its initial stages have increased exponentially.

With all these words I would like to conclude my blog on my journey so far and it's been a pleasure to work on.

Thank you,

Ramzee