Project vs. Product, Startup vs. Business
A couple of weeks ago I dropped into a thread by Mosh Lee, about how ATproto has too many projects and too few businesses. <blockquot
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Death of the Killer App
I was telling a friend yesterday about how most of my development time is going to <a href="https://winesky.app/" target="_blank" rel="no
IDE unbundling
Hyeseong Kim , this morning: <blockquote class="blu
ATProto's Application Primacy
The amount of chatter from ATmosphere developers around an “everything app” has me thinking of an article from almost exactly 10 years ag
Cuckoo begets Offshoot
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. Your atproto apps can have a credible exit as well. — Bailey Townsend 🦀 ( @pds.dad ) April 29, 2026 at 6:48 PM Less than nine hours later, Rudy Fraser stood up…
A taxonomy of ATmosphere applications
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 discuss what we call the ATmosphere. The ATmosphere is the group of projects emerging around ATProto, the protocol powering Bluesky. I wouldn’t…
Democracy, Kleptocracy, Dictatorship
I originally wrote this back in 20190719, then posted it as a thread on Twitter. It’s gone now, but Monkchips’ post got me thinking about it again. China smart, America stupid seems to be the story of the century so far — Sid Rini ( @monkchips.com ) March 22, 2026 at 4:23 PM The original text follows.
Does Bluesky hold a monopoly on the ATmosphere?
TL;DR: Betteridge.
Fast Fash
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.
Hate as a signal
A lot of the naysaying nowadays around Bluesky (and indirectly, ATProto) scans as half “all the people that don’t like me are doing i
Vibe investing
I often despair of the crypto space. In a recent Spelunking discussion, Mika mentioned that he had a conversation with a potential
Threat models
Or, what do we talk about when we talk about decentralization? People were up in arms recently in Bluesky about the reported censo
Unstoppability depends on mutual aid
If you want a system to be censorship resistant, it means that it needs to be able to route around attempts to silence you. For th
Passion Plays
I delivered Passion Plays as Monki Gras 2025, an unique and intimate conference on software, craft, and tech culture. This year’s theme was “Sustaining Software Development Craft”. You can find the slides here . Below is the original script.
GPT Cloud Cover
Over on Bluesky, Zerodartz comments on the deluge of LLM-spewed content that’s already happening, and only likely to get worse: <bloc
Parsing existing systems
Conway’s law indicates that a system will follow the same structure as the communication systems that produced it. Its flipside is
Narrative encroachment
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 narrativ
Entrepreneurship in fast forward
People outside the web3 space don’t seem to be able to wrap their head around why there is seemingly so much nonsense happening, particul
RedNote migration
As the TikTok ban approaches, US users have downloaded RedNote en masse - another Chinese video-focused privacy invasion app. <a href="ht
Memecoininess rating
(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.) Let’s face it - most tokens are meme coins. But some are more “meme coinier” than others.
The Looming Stupidity Bubble
In Ep. 36 of The Spelunking Podcast , we
Centralization Is A Fragile Thing
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 .
Approaching jackpot
South Korea and Ukraine are <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/ukraine-skorea-enhance-cooperation-counter-nkorea-zelenskiy-says-2024-
Internet speed
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? The simple answer is that people forget the speed at which the Internet truly developed.
Outside Context Problems
“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. Banks , Excession My last piece on where prediction markets break down made me realize I hadn’t written about outside context problems here yet. Outside Context Problems are the most interesting…
Where Prediction Markets Break Down
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.
Data ownership and layer fungibility
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. In short, data ownership requires layer fungibility . I’ll elaborate below.
Intolerance aggregation
Mary Branscombe comments how the conversation on Bluesky is a lot more enjoyable than that she found on Mastodon: <blockquote class="
Small input tweaks go a long way
While discussing BlueSky’s custom feeds and composable moderation with a friend, he wondered: I will need to pon
The Spelunking Podcast - Episode 31
I’ve been somewhat erratic in posting these, but we have a new Spelunking Podcast episode out! Mika Honkasalo, partner at Equilibr
The nature of a system is what it enables
There’s a discussion going on the Topology discord about what systems c
The Spelunking Podcast - Episode 29
On my latest conversation with Teemu, we warn people off the vaporware of crypto + AI tokens, go over how the market is changing - includ
Libra, Facebook, and greed blindness
Over at BlueSky, Dell Cameron brought up that Facebook’s involvement in crypto, VR, and GenAI aren’t working out because they are only se
Future shock inoculation
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
Avalanche subnet changes
Teemu and I discussed the possibility of Ava
Cleanest unbundling wins
Markets are a series of bundling and unbundling, and whomever does the cleanest job, wins. A clean unbundling makes it easier for
Subversion to capitalization
Back in 1999, David Bowie spoke about how music used to be subversive, but had since become merely an information delivery mechanism - <a
ZKP Bridging
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.
No Layer-2 Bets
I don’t currently see a clear path towards making a bet on undifferentiated Ethereum layer 2s. <a href="#Re
Money is memory
Some thoughts on a 1996 paper by Narayana R. Kocherlakota .
Privacy and memory
Fully private systems, like Aleo, will be mostly memoryless systems (memory will be provided only by an individual’s viewing keys).
BlueSky's federation sandbox
BlueSky is launching a federation developer sandbox . What does that mean?
Backlash technology
Backlash Technology is a term coined by Peter Watts - it’s tech for which one of the key properties is a prominently displayed middle fin
Wormhole hacker hacked
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.
Identity as a Big Iron thing
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 comp
NFTs are typewriters
The NFT market is early. We have a bunch of people experimenting, and even more are merely bandwagoning. Those of us on the inside have f
Bridges, not platforms
( 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.
Replacing existing systems
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 repla
TVL is not for platforms
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
How distributed[C] handles identity
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?