TL;DR: I don’t see any practical path forward for decentralized stuff other than abandon the pretense of cross-chain value transfer and embrace balkanization, while letting the centralized stuff handle the cross-chain value transfer.
Some thoughts on a 1996 paper by Narayana R. Kocherlakota.
Fully private systems, like Aleo, will be mostly memoryless systems (memory will be provided only by an individual’s viewing keys).
These systems will allow for a class of application we haven’t seen online before - UTXO/records as rai stones that just happened to materialize along with a zkp.
Given that fully private systems will be memoryless black boxes with zero-knowledge proofs, one cannot verify that a contract path got executed in the exact same way that you would have wanted. Therefore, it makes no sense to cling to the notion of traditional execution, and one should focus on the result that one wanted to achieve.
This would seem to indicate that private systems lend themselves to intent-based approaches.
BlueSky is launching a federation developer sandbox. What does that mean?
Backlash Technology is a term coined by Peter Watts - it’s tech for which one of the key properties is a prominently displayed middle finger at something else. Think Signal and Telegram adoption spikes whenever WhatsApp screws something up, or crypto as a reaction to the financial system (particularly in places plagued with hyperinflation).
Upgradeable smart contracts are like guns: they have their uses, but you need to make sure you trust the one holding them, and pray that they’re never used against you.
(Update: This is an older view on the potentials for bridges for crypto. For an updated perspective, check my thoughts on The Spelunking Podcast Ep. 21 about how we are moving to a “zero-knowledge everything” world, or this piece on ZKP Bridging.)
Cosmos and Polkadot, which were both born to ensure interoperability among different chains, are in a race to maintain their relevance.
As we had mentioned on Designing for Personas, we want people to feel comfortable creating multiple pseudonymous identities on distributed[C].
How do we manage identity, then?
Facebook’s rebranding is the smartest, landgrabbier case of cultural capture I’ve seen. I agree with Teemu - the decentralization community should fight and adopt the term metaverse for everything, because most people have no idea what the hell web3 is supposed to be.
Last year, after seeing this Washington Post chart, I became convinced that we were likely headed into a Global Latin America.
