I think crypto is past the PGP point, where individuals controlled how to communicate with and how, but it’s still at the Bittorrent stage of chaotic yet mostly permissionless exchanges.
Its core tech might end up reaching the markets only as CBDCs, however.
This would mean that the majority of people limit themselves to what organizationally centralized services offer them, while the properly decentralized alternatives get more and more walled off.
In a worst-case scenario, crypto has a value in a closed economy. You use your ZCash to pay for decentralized hosting services, but you have to access it all through a VPN to avoid giving yourself away. You don’t generate these coins through fiat onramps, but through providing services to others, such as shared access or a mesh network relay.
Meanwhile, most of the world welcomes Netflix, where you only have whatever rights the company gives to you, for as long as you continue to pay them.
We are in a skeuomorphic stage of crypto and decentralization, where people try to directly translate the old world into the new medium. Bitcoin has connected with people because it’s digital money, so it’s trivial to understand. That’s why things like dropbox, but decentralized! connect, and why there are all the discussion about if something is a currency or not.
This is like insisting to Bezos that Amazon might not be a pure internet play. We are still at the “interviewer doesn’t get it” part.
I knew the internet was going to be big, back then, but I didn’t see it as clearly as Bowie did. My hope is that I’m making a similar (happy) mistake now, and we’ll move past it quickly.
“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?
David Bowie on an interview with Jeremy Paxman from the BBC said that in the 80s and 90s music started becoming more about the subgroups and the communities than the artists. To him the epitome is the rave, where the crowd is as important as the performer, if not more.
He said in 1999 that the Internet had created a fragmentation of views, and that we weren’t even at the tip of the iceberg of what the Internet would do to society. “It’s not a tool, it’s an alien lifeform.”
Paxman insisted that it was just a different delivery system, Bowie honed in on how the state of content would be beyond anything we imagined. He said that the interplay between the user and the provider would change our ideas of what mediums were all about.
“Do you know how expensive it is to get involved in the internet?”
I knew the Internet was going to be bigger than just a medium, but did not call remix culture, and Patreon, and the creator economy like he did.
We lost Bowie too soon. I can’t imagine the things he would have gotten up to with crypto. Nevermind NFTs, he would have gone nuts with creator tokens - he actually launched Bowie Bonds to securitize his collection back in the 90s.
The man was talking about how the Internet would blur the line between creators and users through sharing and mixing a full year before Metallica whined in court about how Napster was being mean to them.
You can watch the whole interview below.
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:
A talk on conceptual accessibility being fundamental for adoption, while discussing mistakes I’ve made.
Creativity, innovation, mash-ups, and science fiction writers… as a lens on lessons from the software industry.
I delivered this talk at SAP Inside Track Berlin in September 2018. The audience was mostly enterprise developers, almost all of them specifically working with SAP as a platform.
Given how many companies I’ve seen flirting with the idea of distributed ledgers, I thought it would be useful to give people an idea of which cases I see as being a good fit for them, to give them a leg up the next time it enters the discussion.
I delivered Remember The Rubber Hose, a talk on privacy and distributed applications, at DappCon Berlin 2018. Skipping the introduction and going straight to the beef…