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You come home and the kitchen isn't right. Cleaner, maybe. Your mug sits exactly where you left it, but the light through the window is off. You stand there holding the cup, turning slowly. Everything is where it should be and none of it is yours. You take a sip, trying to figure out what isn't right, and realise you don't know what you're drinking. It's warm, but it isn't tea. That's a domain…
The best place to start is Brewster Kahle's feedback to me when I was in Berlin: "This isn't just a cryptography toy for tech events. Activists need this. If they see it, they'll use it for real. You have to get it right." Then he asked really good questions about the security model — how the ZK proofs worked, where trust assumptions lived, what happened if the server was compromised, what…
The standard session model: user logs in, server stores state, server decides what you're allowed to do. Structurally incompatible with privacy. I've been working on something better, called HDK Sessions. Cookies were the original sin. Once you have a persistent identifier for each browser, building a profile behind it costs nothing. We hoarded data, built profiles, and found ourselves in the…
My first Ethereum conference was 20,000 people, sprawled across Amsterdam. I had a game plan. Find the venues where someone was putting in effort for a great experience — not big-name speakers or swag, but comforts like good food, and communal spaces away from the megaphones. Because when an event works, it's because the people in it are at their best. Learning, conversation, connections. All of…
Everyone's focused on what ZK proofs hide. We're missing what they can usefully reveal. Reputation, attendance, commitment, these used to require surveillance infrastructure. We're rightly moving away from that. But those signals served real purposes. Communities need legibility to coordinate: is this restaurant safe to eat at, is this contractor reliable, did people actually show up, is this…
Most meditation apps are content apps with calming aesthetics. They want you coming back daily, consuming more. It's a business model thing. A good meditation teacher does the opposite — they teach you to sit comfortably, in silence, with yourself. The goal is your independence, not your retention. I started with that goal. Around that time, I was learning about different schools of meditation,…
I applied to the Community Privacy Residency , and the past projects reminded me of a cryptographic exploration I come back to every once in a while, just for fun. What if people walking the same path through content on the internet could find each other, without profiles, sign-ups, or any server watching? Visit the same pages in the same sequence, and you're in a chatroom together. Like…
ethBerlin is full of rooms you have to find yourself. At the back of the third floor there's a big, quiet room with good light and big windows. You can really focus here. The food's a long way off, so people bring back fruit and water to share. I'm there with SDP — Social Dist0rtion Protocol — making one of their treasure hunt games for the hackathon. Ronan's beside me. He made hardhat-deploy. He…
It might seem strange that St. Johns University is evicting the 2600 's conference after years of collaboration. I met Mitch Altman at a small soldering workshop I randomly found at my co-working space. I didn't know he was kind of a hacker celebrity. We spent that afternoon walking around the city. He told me about CCC , encouraged me to share my work as a talk. We talked about getting bullied at…
Ploum wrote about PixelFed sawing off the branch that the Fediverse is sitting on . He describes a kind of misuse of the protocol: PixelFed only delivers posts with images to followers. This is arguably a response to Instagram, but he makes a good point: In the Fediverse, if a poster publishes text, they expect followers to receive that message. Followers likewise expect to receive posts, but they…