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.
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.
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.
A talk on conceptual accessibility being fundamental for adoption, while discussing mistakes I’ve made.
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…