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).
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?
