Apertamono = Open Money
In it for the technology
Joined November 2014
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The USP of crypto is not financialization, but both simple payments on one side and web3 apps on the other.
DeFi is limited to insiders, while tokens are just gambling.
What makes blockchains useful in the real world is allowing anyone to buy or publish whatever they want.
Blockchains have always been and always will be tech for finance. Their core purpose is financialization.
That’s why architecting a chain to protect unification of liquidity is more important than practically anything else.
I am happy the misadventures around things like gaming in particular are fully dead and over.
More broadly, I felt the “read write own” / web3 articulation was too skeuomorphic and, frankly, intellectually lazy to transpire because new tech is never as simple as putting something on a blockchain and voila. You have to create new markets.
This narrative functioned more as a fig leaf for a reason to put VC dollars into more unnecessary infrastructure to rationalize a desire to create a private asset that could become magical internet money.
The more folks that launched projects to attract price based on selling a narrative to the wild Wild West of internet liquidity, the harder the legitimizing narrative machine worked to ascribe value to all this as the third coming of apps - “all the stuff you do today, but now it pays you”
In reality, the opportunity is immense, and bigger than our most creative minds can imagine, but not as it’s been articulated over the last few years.
This blockchain adventure has always been about finance: open financial rails for anyone and everyone on the internet.
This makes it newly possible for capital formation and internet formation to happen anywhere in the world, and for the ensuing innovation and progress to take hold. Open finance enables greater economic freedom and with it individual sovereignty and agency.
MichelleDB retweeted
Dario Amodei was so worried about Y2K that his high school teacher still remembers it decades later.
He’s been a doomer for much longer than I thought!
Long before they were soon-to-be billionaires, Dario and Daniela Amodei were students at San Francisco’s most elite public high school. sfchronicle.com/tech/article…
It might sound crazy, but I was already expecting money to disappear regardless of AI.
- Subscriptions are replacing property.
- Various social credit scores can be computed.
- Solar energy will be too cheap to meter.
- Crypto taught us that any kind of money is fake.
this is my quarterly AI crashout
if you read my tweets you know im a shitposter and unserious, but im being serious and vulnerable right now. I am very pessimistic about the future of every career because I don't believe there will be a single thing AI isnt faster, cheaper, and better at than me. It is great that AI helps me get so much done, but it is humiliating that it has made a lot of skill acquisition itself completely pointless. I pride myself on being a fast learner, but there seems to be zero value in learning anything anymore. The future is monarchist feudalism and the destruction of the middle class and lower upper class. I don't think social mobility matters anymore because I don't think there will be money in the future. People talk about "the permanent underclass" all the time, but I think the millionaires will be on the side of the proletariat. You have all the money or no money. Money will depreciate so fast because there is nothing you would pay each other for. There will be precisely two types of transactions remaining: the transfer of capital, and petty transactions like buying food or water. Financialization will break down as the cost of skill, expertise, IP, etc goes to zero. I used to believe I have developed a set of skills that would be profitable for a long time. But there are no such thing as hard skills anymore. In the future, if you survive, if you do anything, if you have a position in society at all, it is because the powers that be are humoring your existence for whatever reason. I wish I was two years older, though I don't wish I was five years older, and I'm thankful I'm not two years younger
Why don't we have bars with dynamic prices at crypto conferences? You could even add futures with physical delivery.
Was recently at a bar where drinks were dynamically priced,
i.e. the more people bought a particular drink, the more expensive it became (price would then decayed over time towards a floor).
Fascinating to watch a few market mechanisms play out in a bar:
People ventured outside their usual orders in search of cheaper alternatives, often discovering new favorites in the process.
Others treated rising prices as signals of quality, happily paying premiums to try expensive drinks they’d never had before.
More experienced drinkers behaved like value investors, picking up underpriced drinks they already knew were good while everyone else chased the popular ones.
Price discovery, information leakage, herding, and utility trades all unfolded over rounds of drinks.
More bars should try this.
Changing course now. I have big plans for 2027!
I started assigning all planned tasks to specific days of the week, which makes my planning more realistic. I'll still do only half of what I planned, which means I only need to plan for every other week.
The Network School buys Farcaster and immediately @balajis forces users to sign a loyalty pledge submitting to censorship by AI. Otherwise they'll have to use a different app, which doesn't really exist at the moment.
Several of the few remaining Farcaster users have already been banned for previous critical posts. No room for talking back to our overlords in the techno-optimist utopia.
Of course this will revive interest in developing an alternative app for the Farcaster network, but FC's design seems to require paying for hosting without any hope of making money from it.
nitter.gq/cass_on_mars/status/20…
Tomorrow at 5pm PDT on Farcaster Spaces, I'm hosting a community call to discuss this, our ongoing plans and work on Hypersnap, and what our plans are around forming our proposal to run FC.
No idea if they'll accept our proposal, but I am one of the original core FC devs, and have been building Hypersnap with the core purpose of bringing FC to full decentralization and ability to run without a central benefactor sustaining it.
The last thing I want to see is FC end up in the hands of a private equity firm or a holding company of other failed social protocols (you know who I mean). For all those interested, we're happy to see you attend.
farcaster.xyz/~/spaces/01a01…
MichelleDB retweeted
Today @ZKZeroKnowledge we report on the research funding practices that fed current panic about "AI Doom."
We found consistent defunding of dissent, even from within the "extinction risk" field.
"AI Safety" is not a research program. It's propaganda.
🧵
zero-knowledge.com/blog/ai-s…
MichelleDB retweeted
The latest Avalanche upgrade introduced Continuous Execution (CE), a new way to improve the performance of blockchains by taking advantage of parallelism. It’s exciting technical stuff that you should know about so you understand what makes Avalanche so fast, or if you're not using Avalanche, what you're missing out on.
Avalanche has always had an architecture that takes advantage of coarse-grained parallelism. Namely, Avalanche L1s capture parallelism via separate chains, where unrelated groups of activities can execute independently of each other, without having to wait for or congest shared resources.
This was a huge step forward when we introduced it 6 years ago. Compared to older, single-chain systems, this multichain architecture enabled Avalanche to offer infinite capacity. A game doesn't have to compete with DeFi on Avalanche, whereas on single chain systems, even an NFT offering would cause problems by creating congestion and bumping transaction fees.
While this took advantage of the largest source of parallelism and enabled Avalanche to be one of the fastest chains in the first place, there are further opportunities for improvement, and Continuous Execution taps into the next greatest source of parallelism, namely, the overlap between consensus and execution within a single chain.
The two most expensive activities in any blockchain are consensus, that is, the work required to get all of the participants to agree on what happened and when, and execution, the work required to actually process those transactions and update the state of the system.
Traditionally, these two activities have taken turns.
Continuous Execution allows Avalanche to overlap them. While the system is achieving consensus on one set of transactions, it is simultaneously executing previously agreed-upon transactions.
Think of the chain as a jet. Execution is flight, transactions are the fuel, and consensus is refueling.
Before CE, the jet had to land every time it needed to refuel. The chain would execute, stop to perform consensus work, execute again, then stop again.
Continuous Execution changes that. Now the jet can refuel while it is still in the air.
Consensus and execution happen concurrently, so the chain no longer has to constantly switch between the two. The flight becomes continuous, with no unnecessary interruptions or mode switching.
To put this in perspective, before CE, Avalanche validators were spending somewhere between 20 to 60 milliseconds per block on verification, sometimes even as high as 150ms.
CE dropped that down to an average of 2 milliseconds of wall clock time with negligible variance.
And this is especially important because verification happens at each step during gossip dissemination. It isn’t simply 40 milliseconds saved once. That time was being incurred on every hop as a block spread through the network.
There is also a deeper technical point here. The work that previously had to happen in consensus goes from potentially unbounded computation to linear in the number of transactions. We achieve this by taking advantage of the monotonicity of gas prices under maximum load, so the execution thread is never forced to pause due to estimation errors.
We’ve always prided ourselves on bringing the best of science to blockchain technology, on being pragmatic, and on attacking the highest-yield opportunities first.
With Continuous Execution built on top of the multi-threaded Avalanche architecture, Avalanche has taken advantage of the two biggest sources of parallelism: coarse-grained parallelism across separate chains, and the overlap between consensus and execution within a single chain.
For Avalanche, consensus and execution no longer need to operate in bursts, constantly stopping and waiting on each other, it just keeps going with no dead time.
MichelleDB retweeted
Noticing that old people tend to explore their environment like they’re playing some real life version of Skyrim. Just wandering into random buildings and opening a dialogue tree. “What sort of business is this?”
MichelleDB retweeted
A few months ago a collaborator and I built a tool which allows hiding encrypted texts inside of LLM texts to avoid censorship or message scanning and for creative misuse of public platforms for encrypted private communication.
You can try it here: garfieldnaruto.com
MichelleDB retweeted
The day after she made this post, she was found dead
Hsin-Ju was one of the nicest people I met and made this industry feel inclusive
May you rest in peace @hsinju 💜
1/ gm. gm. Name is Hsin-Ju.
I have a dark, kinda tragic personal announcement.
I've decided I'd rather take $0 than accept a settlement that requires me to stay silent about what happened to me. I have since fired my lawyers at @sanfordheisler & will be releasing all the evidence from my time @hack_vc on Wed 8/26.
INTRO: I've been in crypto for 9 years. Most recently I was a partner & head of platform @hack_vc which is a $600-700M crypto VC firm. Many of you may know me from my time as Head of Growth at @StellarOrg in 2017 (worked w/ the Mt. Gox founder), @Solana in 2018 (joined under ~10 ppl, but quit before my cliff), & @Fhenix in 2024. Or have attended one of my @DystopiaLabs ETH events (2019-now).
Last year, I was forced to work through a serious medical emergency while at @Hack_VC due to threats by @alpackaP @dbulaevsky, saying that they would blacklist me from the space if I quit before finishing the hacksummit conference & side events that I was helping with during @kbwofficial. I was working 13-14hr days, 6 days a week, sleeping 0-4 hrs a night, and had documented Graves' disease, hyperthyroidism, and severe insomnia. I repeatedly asked to quit. Hack VC refused. This + other threats and intimidation went on for almost a month.
The conditions got so bad I attempted suicide.
The fucked up part is that, even after the suicide attempt, I told everyone at Hack VC (in writing) that I had no plans to sue. I was scared & extremely sick. I just wanted to leave. I told them that as long as there was no retaliation or badmouthing - I had no plans to sue.
@Hack_VC chose to retaliate.
After just 1 month after my near suicide, Hack VC mishandled my COBRA health insurance, refused to fix things, kept shooing me to customer support (when it's legally Hack VC's responsibility to fix this), and my insurance had issues and was not fixed for almost 4 MONTHS. Hack VC did not fix everything until I hired lawyers and had them force Hack VC to adhere to the law & fix my COBRA insurance issues. The sheer cruelty of an employer harming someone's health insurance almost immediately after they nearly committed suicide is extremely fucked up.
And, even during the legal engagement, Hack VC continued to lie & attempt to harm me through their lawyers and other employees/partners (multi-million dollar carry & clawbacks can make even the nicest ppl willing to turn the other way or lie). @0xRodney @IsTheBaron @roshunpatel @Alex__Botte.
Now. Almost an entire year of engagement & my near suicide anniversary coming up, our lawyers (mine & Hack VC's) have reached the point of preparing for private mediation and settlement. And...I realized that I just can't do it. I don't want money in exchange for silence. I'd rather speak.
I fired my lawyers yesterday.
In case it needs to be said, I did a good job at Hack VC. I was only there full time for 7 months; been part-time since 2021. I got a $50k raise to $300k, $30k bonus, and promises of additional carry that would have been implemented about a week or so after my last day. I was also offered admission into the GP entity (but not sure if admission was actually completed bc it was during my medical emergency). This + my resume, should show that me suing is not a money grab; I was genuinely harmed.
I'm aware that I'm just one person (who is not rich) facing a $600-700M VC institution. I've been told by @alpackaP that he's known most of the managing partners at most VC firms for almost a decade and he could absolutely blacklist me.
I'm also painful aware that the conclusion of this will probably be extremely poor for me or death - but I've accepted it.
Sharing with other web2 & web3 VCs:
@paulg @ycombinator @500STARTUPS @a16zcrypto @PanteraCapital @dragonflyvc @RaceCapital @hosseeb @haunventures @hiFramework @ElectricCapital @blockchaincap @Delphi_Digital @variantfund @1kxnetwork @archetypevc @shimacapital @robotventures, etc.
TLDR; I’m done with continued threats, pressure, and intimidation. I'm not going to take a payout and allow Alex or Hack VC to walk away from harming me. As mentioned, I'll be dropping the evidence from my case on Wed 8/26 (or before) -- privacy be damned.
Support here (or DM) please:
ETH: 0x68c10776C5c05Cbf5B4C2318bE02D61B9f06B875
SOL: B7S8TPcWWJXTsmgG8ShoTmy8sNPuJ3Dbmt7z5gLFAveq
MichelleDB retweeted
This thread is 100% gonna blow up and I am gonna look like a salty c****again but @icobeast pissed me off so now it's gonna get ugly
Kalshi fakes their crypto volume and I can prove it
NOTHING pisses me off more than watching a company treat its own customers like complete fucking idiots
Grab some popcorn cause I dissected every piece of evidence one by one until there’s basically no way for him to respond without making this look even worse
Oh and FYI, I left every source at the end so y’all can check the receipts yourselves 😘
1/x
