I don’t actually think this is a repeat of 2008, tbh.
For what it’s worth, I don’t think this is the beginning of widespread financial system contagion. Although, I don’t think this is the last shoe to drop, either.
If you are a startup that was planning on raising money in the next few years, today is probably the worst possible day of your startup life. I think the contagion from SVB is going to run through the venture capital community more than it runs through the financial sector, at large.
Remember, the FCSW needs your support. 🦎🌳
I believe you have made this fallacious argument about it being dependent on W3C.org before, and I refuted it then.
Which can be solved with credential revocation and reissuance in the DID/VC model.
Can you articulate why you think DIDs and VCs are a bad solution in technical terms?
I repeat my claim that people who casually say this, haven't carefully thought through the problem. Particularly the problem of DNS. DID addresses this problem, and even has the concept of DID-relative URLs.
Come to realize one of the reasons people don't get DIDs, is they think they're just glorified pubkeys, or they're glorified decentralized Apple Wallets. This is just a wrong mental model.
The way to think about what DIDs and Verifiable Credentials from an engineering and application developer perspective, is to view them as a wholesale replacement for DNS and Certificate Authorities. They decentralize away from ICANN.
They are a new universal identity layer for the internet. But because they are open an extensible protocols, we can do everything from validate that website is legitimately owned by a company or individual. Or they can be used to model a driver's license, where a government agency issues the credential. The protocol doesn't care.
I think people who think they're "too complex" and add nothing that pubkeys don't, haven't thought too deeply about the totality of problem of identity on the internet, and are likely taking DNS (a highly centralized form of identity) for granted. When they probably shouldn't.
This was the dream of web services in the early oughts! But the incentives of platformization meant it never quite materialized. The technologies we are developing now will change those incentives.
I wouldn’t put it in those terms, no. I think platforms added value, in the sense that they provided a means to connect with other people on a common substrate, and engage in a form of communication that was simply not possible before.
It’s also true that the rise of social media platforms happened at a time, where computing resources and bandwidth on the internet was not really in a place where it was economically viable to do so in a full distributed way.
But like with all periods of creative destruction in the market, there is a period where the old paradigm becomes stuck in how people think about the world, and when those incumbents start doing everything they can to resist the coming change (through anti-competitive business practices, regulatory capture, etc). Eventually the dam breaks and change comes all at once.
Your using the alternative right now.
I think a lot of people make the mistake of thinking about decentralization purely in political and moral terms. The truth is, you can see this future purely through the certain reallocation of underutilized resources within the global computing infrastructure (for which I include client devices in that definition) and the degree to which economic efficiencies can be gained.
The concept of a “platform” on the internet is a holdover from a time when computing and storage was expensive, bandwidth was scarce, and you needed to build economies of scale to make things like social networking viable.
We now live in a world where computing and storage are cheap, bandwidth is plentiful and the economies of scale for these things have overflown and the water of unutilized excess capacity is just pouring all over the ground.
Add the rise of artificial intelligence to the mix, and it’s really not that hard to see where things are going — a complete renegotiation of the fundamental assumptions of the human-computer interface, and ultimately the shape of the internet itself.
But if you’re still thinking about building a business atop the notions of what I call “platform thinking”, you’re going to get slaughtered in the next 5-10 years. This truly is a moment of all assumptions breaking down.
man some people need to chill
ChatGPT is getting progressively less fun. It slaps me down at all of my attempts to engage in dark humor now.
🦎