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)
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.
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.