Numergent

I used to say nothing ever dies in crypto.

A couple of weeks ago I dropped into a thread by Mosh Lee, about how ATproto has too many projects and too few businesses.

I was telling a friend yesterday about how most of my development time is going to Winesky, but a non-insignificant amount of mental bandwidth is going to exploring other side projects, ideas, and small applications that mostly have personal use.

Hyeseong Kim, this morning: Disaggregated IDE: As prompt-based coding agents become more popular, most other features of IDE rather than editing are also gradually being broken down into small purpose-built tool sets.

The amount of chatter from ATmosphere developers around an “everything app” has me thinking of an article from almost exactly 10 years ago.

Early on April 29, 2026, Bailey Townsend posted a skeet that turned out to be prophetic for what would happen later in the day: I think people forget sometimes that the "credible exit" part of atproto is not just for user accounts.

Last week I spent an energizing, educational, occasionally infuriating week in Vancouver around the ATmosphereConf, a community event gathering developers, investors, data scientists, the odd academic, and a large contingent from Bluesky PBC themselves to…

I originally wrote this back in 20190719, then posted it as a thread on Twitter.

TL;DR: Betteridge.

It’s dawned on me that we are well into the Fast Fashion era of Fascism, and there is no putting the genie back in the bottle.

A lot of the naysaying nowadays around Bluesky (and indirectly, ATProto) scans as half “all the people that don’t like me are doing it” discourse of the early crypto years, half as “stop liking things I don’t like!”.

I often despair of the crypto space.

Or, what do we talk about when we talk about decentralization?

If you want a system to be censorship resistant, it means that it needs to be able to route around attempts to silence you.

I delivered Passion Plays as Monki Gras 2025, an unique and intimate conference on software, craft, and tech culture.

Over on Bluesky, Zerodartz comments on the deluge of LLM-spewed content that’s already happening, and only likely to get worse: AI will be 99.9% of content in internet in a few years nobody is ready for it and no u wont even be able to detect if its AI or…

Conway’s law indicates that a system will follow the same structure as the communication systems that produced it.

It’s fine to latch onto a narrative as a way to describe yourself - it helps people mentally bucket you - but you can’t expect a narrative to be your key differentiation factor, because it leaves you open to narrative encroachment.

People outside the web3 space don’t seem to be able to wrap their head around why there is seemingly so much nonsense happening, particularly when they haven’t been on the VC investor side.

As the TikTok ban approaches, US users have downloaded RedNote en masse - another Chinese video-focused privacy invasion app.

‌(I wrote this some time back as a way to help friends figure out of projects they were considering had any stickiness potential, but never posted it here at the time - adding for future reference.)

In Ep. 36 of The Spelunking Podcast, we discussed how AI agents trading shitcoins with a lot of capital, and capturing retail’s imagination, might be what ends up causing the next crypto bubble and brings this cycle down.

This is the original text of a talk I wrote for the Tallinn Digital Summit 2024, which was built around the theme of Securing the Digital Tomorrow.

South Korea and Ukraine are “enhancing cooperation” after North Korea deployed 3,000 troops to Russian training grounds, and will exchange intelligence and expertise.

Teemu brought up on Ep. 33 of The Spelunking Podcast a gripe against crypto that I’ve often heard myself: if crypto is so great, then why hasn’t it achieved more penetration in a decade?

“An Outside Context Problem was the sort of thing most civilisations encountered just once, and which they tended to encounter rather in the same way a sentence encountered a full stop.” – Iain M.

TL;DR: if you expect an embryonic prediction market to tell you the result of a highly-politicized event when there are perverse incentives at play, and a significant disparity between amount-at-risk and expected outcome, you are going to have a bad time.

Recently got into the topic of data ownership on a conversation with Carey Lening which helped catalyze a few ideas I’ve been kicking around for a while.

Mary Branscombe comments how the conversation on Bluesky is a lot more enjoyable than that she found on Mastodon: Mastodon has a bunch of people I want to talk to but Bluesky has the culture to make talking to people enjoyable [image or embed] — Mary Bran…

While discussing BlueSky’s custom feeds and composable moderation with a friend, he wondered: I will need to ponder whether it is viable at scale for millions of users to put in the effort to customize their feeds in a thoughtful way […] They don’t have to

I’ve been somewhat erratic in posting these, but we have a new Spelunking Podcast episode out!

There’s a discussion going on the Topology discord about what systems can be described as peer-to-peer.

On my latest conversation with Teemu, we warn people off the vaporware of crypto + AI tokens, go over how the market is changing - including how ETFs may provide a path to something that scans like IPOs - and discuss the Eigenlayer grants to prominent cri…

Over at BlueSky, Dell Cameron brought up that Facebook’s involvement in crypto, VR, and GenAI aren’t working out because they are only secondary to their main business purpose: surveillance.

Over breakfast in Costa Brava, back in May 2023, the CEO and founder of an AI startup I know told me that he was worried because for the first time things were progressing too quickly, and he couldn’t tell where they were going.

Teemu and I discussed the possibility of Avalanche no longer requiring subnets to validate the main network.

Markets are a series of bundling and unbundling, and whomever does the cleanest job, wins.

Back in 1999, David Bowie spoke about how music used to be subversive, but had since become merely an information delivery mechanism - it was the Internet that was subversive.

TL;DR: I don’t see any practical path forward for decentralized stuff other than abandon the pretense of cross-chain value transfer and embrace balkanization, while letting the centralized stuff handle the cross-chain value transfer.

I don’t currently see a clear path towards making a bet on undifferentiated Ethereum layer 2s.

Some thoughts on a 1996 paper by Narayana R.

Fully private systems, like Aleo, will be mostly memoryless systems (memory will be provided only by an individual’s viewing keys).

BlueSky is launching a federation developer sandbox.

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.

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.

I’ve said for a while that, unlike DeFi, Data and Identity are likely to follow a much more traditional path to adoption - closer to computers, in fact, which were first adopted by businesses then individuals gradually came around as cost and usability im…

The NFT market is early.

(Update: This is an older view on the potentials for bridges for crypto.

When people say that we cannot replace existing systems like banking, I only agree if the meaning is that we will fail if we try to replace them wholesale.

I’m starting to get pretty annoyed with people using TVL to compare the value or activity in a platform.