On Beyond The Wormhole, Meltem talks about bridges and mentions that < 1% of bridged assets are going through Wormhole (as of 202111).
That raised an interesting idea: How much is being bridged to each platform is likely a more interesting metric of platform financial usage than TVL.
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.
d[c] uses OrbitDB and IPFS under the hood to store its data.
IPFS got something of a bad rap because people who don’t read documentation expected it to be automagic cloud storage that keeps data for free. However, someone needs to pin the file to keep it around.
There are two gigantic issues with social media as we have it now.
Like it or not, we have monkey brains. They did not evolve to deal with the scale of information (and misinformation) that they are being exposed to. The monkey brain sees that something has 15,000 re-tweets, and assumes that one of those 15k other monkeys viewed it and vetted it.
The other is that people are getting a firehose of content into a single mental context.
We do not intend to enforce any sort of identity verification or unique identities in distributed[C]. We do not think encouraging people to doxx themselves is a good idea.
This goes beyond concerns about privacy, though. We believe that having multiple personas, which you can use depending on the context you are in, is healthy.
This raises concerns regarding disinformation. If the platform is uncensorable, and we do not plan to enforce identity, how will this not become a cesspool of fake news?
(This post is about distributed[C], an experimental decentralized publishing platform Haad and myself were running through 2021-2022. It’s currently inactive.)
distributed[C] came about originally as a design experiment, thinking that a completely peer-to-peer Tumblr would be a great testbed for swarm-based design (more on that later).
“And how do you get Euros out of this thing?”
That was my wife. I had been explaining Aave to her. If you’re unfamiliar with it, Aave is one of several platforms where you can deposit an amount of cryptocurrency and gain interest on it as it is lent to other people. Most if it is in the form of stablecoins - tokens whose value is pegged to a particular fiat currency (normally the USD).
It’s easy enough to understand: you add an amount of USD-valued tokens, get a variable interest rate, and can withdraw into the same wallet you deposited from whenever you want.
So far so good. But she wanted to know about the next step: the moving parts involved on how to get from there to a bank account, or to pay rent, or the supermarket. Once I started answering her question, talking about keeping an eye on gas costs, wallet backups, and other things to keep in mind, I saw her eyes roll.
She’s smack down on what I’d expect to be our target when talking about financial inclusion, having grown up with a depreciating currency no other country would accept. She has mental bandwidth to figure out this stuff. She’s demonstrated the required patience to put up with my shit. And still she saw it as annoying busywork.
Do we expect that interest rates and speculation are going to bring regular people in?
We need to talk about this. I don’t think we have built a tool of financial freedom yet that’s simple enough to be wielded by the people who’d need it the most.
Are we giving them something whose value is immediately obvious and the conceptual overhead low enough for them to adopt it before they are forced to?
What would that look like?
Let’s talk about some things that we as open source creators need to get better at, including supporting other developers ourselves.
(A talk I delivered at at the first CodeDAO meet-up during Berlin Blockchain Week in August 2019, about sustainable open source development).
My goals for this talk are to:
