(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.
I’m starting to get pretty annoyed with people using TVL to compare the value or activity in a platform.
I personally think TVL is a flawed metric for platforms as a whole. It works only when you’re comparing domains like DeFi. If a particular platform is very DeFi-focused, it could have a higher TVL than one that gets more active use but does not require value locking (eg. Arweave).
It also seems that high chain fees would skew users to locking, since active use chews up your stack. With low fees you can be liquid and productive. Instead of keeping your $VOTE tokens locked in a system, why not move them in just when you need to cast a vote, and then out when you’re done?
(See also: Bridged volume as a metric)
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?
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.
I recently re-read William Gibson’s Neuromancer, after a good couple decades away. The thing that struck me the most was the description of cyberspace as a “consensual hallucination”.
That’s what narratives are.
It doesn’t even matter what Zuck’s gang actually ends up developing.
If they manage to convince people by sheer force of branding that whatever sales front they come up with is the metaverse, then the consensual hallucination will make it so.
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).
