The open web isn't dying. We're killing it
I just read Anil Dash’s recent piece, Endgame for the Open Web, and I think it is important. He is right to point out that the open web is…
Ouvre Boite
A modest blog where I share some random thoughts and experiences over the years!
Latest posts
Who needs spying when you have mind control?
We’ve been having the wrong conversation about privacy for years now. When people talk about online privacy, they invoke images of shadowy…
The Dollar Auction & Economic Bubbles
Imagine you’re at an auction where a $1 bill is up for bid. Sounds like easy money, right? You could bid $0.10, win the dollar, and pocket…
The Unlock Labs team has joined Relay
For anyone who followed the work of the Unlock Labs team over the years, it should be clear that we always focused heavily on making it…
Machines will desperately pay us to feel alive
Did you know that your Uber driver has 2 jobs? One of them is to drive you to this fancy restaurant, and she’s paid for it. The other…
Blockchain, not Bitcoin
Or rather… stablecoins, not Bitcoin. I have been a long fan of Stable coins: in 2019, I pointed that they were a UX improvement over the…
Bitcoin, not blockchains
About 10 years ago, when Bitcoin started to emerge in the broader tech community, several folks started to think that blockchains themselves…
LLMs as User Interfaces
There are many ways to think about Large Language Models, AI and conversational agents like ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini. I am increasingly…
Decentralize governments
In a highly complex world, where we can only expect complexity to increase, it is dangerous to centralize decision-making, especially if…
OpenAI's latest round is bad news for tech
10 days ago, it was announced that OpenAi raised $6.6 billion in funding, valuing the company at $157 billion. It is the largest venture…
The free-speech clowns 🤡
Over the weekend, France arrested Pavel Durov, the founder of Telegram. Telegram is a messaging platform, and although the reason for the…
Bitcoin is an Artificial Intelligence
The definition of Intelligence is obviously very controversial; measuring it might even be harder and prone to many awful abuses. In the…
Redefining ownership
For centuries, “ownership” has been a legal concept, en**force**d by well, … force, whether legal or arbitrary. It’s also been a central…
A new era for ads
6 years ago, I wrote an article called The End of the Ad-Supported Web (please read it!). A lot of it is still right, and despite an ever…
If I did not sign it, I did not say it!
It is probably evident by now, but the recent AI “generators” are very good at creating content. Let’s make it clear immediately: the “truth…
Why is Bitcoin back?
Over the past three months, the original cryptocurrency returned to the front scene after 18 months of disillusion. This is the consequence…
So, is it really "intelligent"?
I am, of course, referring to the latest wave of “AI” products like ChatGPT, Bard, and others. In the last 18 months, the world has been…
🧅 Layers of (de)centralization
The internet is a big onion 🧅. It’s made of layers slowly but surely stacked at every new iteration. The layers are themselves more or less…
Joining The Graph Council
The Graph is a very ambitious and powerful web3 project. It is an indexing protocol for querying data from networks like EVM blockchains…
The Myth of Immutability
Crypto had a bad rep. There are many reasons why, but I also think it’s misunderstood, both by its critics (haters?) and fans (cultists…
Decentralized memberships
The arrival of Elon Musk as Twitter’s new CEO has been a watershed moment in the history of Twitter. The company became private again, he…
Protocols over Platforms
In the Beginning Were the Protocols Rather than write about web3 again, I want to write about web1: the 90’s. At that time, I used something…
Digital Ownership
The debate around web3 and NFT is raging. Unfortunately, too often, it’s just engagement farming. Still, I see a regular criticism that (and…
What is Web3
Let’s start with a little caveat: web3 is many things to many different people, exactly like web 2.0 was. Web 2.0 is also very different now…
Hyper-follows
The H in HTTP and HTML is for Hypertext. Hypertext is text with “references” to other documents, usually about the same topic. It creates a…
Time matters
Blockchains are forever. Once a transaction gets mined, it’s stored permanently. The NFT that you purchased is in your wallet until you, and…
Organizations of the future
“Organizations of the future” are not the future of organizations! A lot of this thinking has been a rabbit hole around the idea of…
A DeFi Cautionary Tale
Before 2008, I was a banker. I worked for BNP Paribas, one of the largest banks in the world. When the so called “sub-prime” crisis exploded…
My greatest SEO trick
SEO has a bad rep. Yet, it is an incredibly powerful tool that can drive web traffic like no other channel. It is also one of the few areas…
Why Decentralized Autonomous Organizations matter
If you’ve read Yuval Noah Harari, you know Homo Sapiens’ most unique characteristic is their ability to collaborate at scale, through space…
Open Source, what is next?
Or, an attempt at convincing my friends who care about open source software that blockchain and smart contracts are the future of our work…
Printing bibles…
Want more context? read this first (3 minute read): 20 years I wrote how I believe blockchain and distributed ledger technologies may be the…
20 years
Every tech company under the sun (Californian or otherwise) is betting their future on Artificial Intelligence. Google for example, invests…
A token model
In 2017 the Blockchain world bloomed with many token offerings. The general idea behind these is that innovative networks could get some…
Sexual Reproduction on the Blockchain
If you’ve even remotely ever played with open source software you are very familiar with the idea of forking. The base principle is that for…
Oracle-less bets on the Blockchain
The blockchain is a decentralized database whose data can be trusted because it is the sum of other previously recorded transactions. That…
The “indie” fallacy
I won’t travel by plane, because when they crash, a lot of people die. I’d much rather drive my own car. There is absolutely no doubt that…
Forget forgetting
If it happened, it will be remembered and found again. The “right to forget” battle is lost. The next one is the “duty to forgive”. Every…
Medium Acquires Superfeedr
Today’s web is very different from what it was 8 years ago. We’ve said it several times: publishing and consuming content are new frontiers…
I have only ever owned Apple computers
In the late 80’s my dad brought a MacPlus from work. Before that, I think I had played with a Minitel, but without being authorized to…
Habeas Deviceus
The encryption debate is fascinating. The arguments on both ends are sound. I tend to side more with Apple on this because I think that the…
8 years ago, Superfeedr
8 years ago, I started building what is now Superfeedr. It was the early days of Twitter and Facebook, blogs were still in their early…
Searching is for the past
It’s probably obvious to everyone, but when we perform online searches, we’re looking at the past. Published in the past This is probably…
From Space, to time.
This post is the text version of a talk I’ve been giving at several conferences (and I plan to give it a couple more times). I have spent…
The new browsers are probably not what you think
To us, web developers, the web browser is a very complex application which implements countless protocols and specs to display content from…
The new browsers
To us, web developers, the web browser is a very complex application which implements countless protocols and specs to display content from…
Messaging
In the very last couple years, messaging has been one of the eldorados of the web: whether it’s Snapchat, Whatsapp, Kik, or even Twitter…
From Space, to Time
This post is the text version of a talk I’ve been giving at several conferences (and I plan to give it a couple more times). I have spent…
The future of digital identity should not be determined by one company
The future of digital identity should not be determined by one company In a pretty long post my friend Chris Messina shares his…
The Curse
As you probably be know by now I’m a very strong open web advocate. I also believe strongly that software is eating the world and that old…