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).
I got reminded of the term by a discussion regarding Bluesky vis-a-vis Mastodon, the Fediverse, and ActivityPub. It seems that something being Backlash Tech can also provide a certain stickiness, since it a lot of the reactions could be summed up as “I’ve already lashed back, what else does this add?”
Here’s the link, if you are curious. The conversation is biased towards skepticism - expected, given the participants and where it’s taking place - but there are some good points in there.
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.
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.