I went to a local meeting about noise pollution in the city. The elected representative told people that there is no use to file a complain to the police. They should instead directly send them to him. That’s how our institutions collapse. They become useless, people stop using them and start looking for other ways to get things done. How could we create new institutions based on open source principles? Could we create a GitHub Issues equivalent for the city, based on Nostr? A common space where citizens could report issues in an open way?

On the left people want to talk about inequalities. On the right people want to talk about immigration. Two sides of the same coin: a sense of belonging to the same community.

Gm Brussels

President’s dinner gala ahead of the state of Europe roundtable in Brussels. My yearly reminder that the future won’t be defined by people in suits. Yet, we have to rally some of them to build bridges and make sure they don’t do stupid stuff (e.g. #chatcontrol) I can also recognize the good work of Friends of Europe that is trying hard to create bridges with entrepreneurs, artists and civil society. I respect and support that.

Weekly regen walk

Gm Brussels. #regenwalk

Gm Nivelles. Off we go for the 749th “Tour Sainte Gertrude”. 17km walk around my hometown on the footsteps of Saint Gertrude who established this city back in the 7th century.

Gm Brussels

I want an OS level highlighter. Let me highlight any text anywhere and keep a record of it. Make it easy to keep a private and public feed and annotate. The ultimate curation tool. Storify 2.0.

Everything is much slower on an iPhone 13 Pro after upgrading to iOS26. Beware. Not sure it’s worth the upgrade.

Gm Brussels. #regenwalk

Thanks for your post. We need more voices to get us out of this idea that people should be able to manage a private key and keep it safe. That’s a non starter. Npubs are like IP addresses. Computer readable addresses that can change over time. Your identity is like a domain name. Human readable that can point to various IP addresses. This web of trust sounds complicated to me to implement. I’d love to suggest a simpler approach: consider a Npub like an active session. That way, private keys (nsec) never leave the device / app that created it (reduces the risk of leaks). Then add those sessions to your profile. As long as you still control one device, you can rotate the npubs. The only change required on the protocol would be to index profile events (kind 0) on each of those npubs instead of just on the author npub (and allow to query them based on any of them). It’s not a full proof solution but it feels already like a big improvement. This would effectively decouple identity and npub. The biggest risk would be one of your devices being compromised. But chances are you could rotate that lost key with another device. Wdyt?

Nothing like sharing a common space to build community. 🔅 That’s why every first Wednesday of the month, the crypto community can now enjoy a free coworking day at the @Commons Hub Brussels (just in front of Brussels central station, so easy access from Amsterdam, Paris, London, …) 🎟️ Book your spot:

Crypto Wednesday · Luma

Free coworking day for people working in crypto during the day. Happy hour and meetup in the evening. Come cowork and mingle with fellow crypto ent...

We’ll end the day with a happy hour and the regular Crypto Wednesday meetup.

On fighting doom scrolling. "Your brain loves consuming. it gives you the illusion of progress without the discomfort of action." When you learn something, reflect what it means to you and how you can use it. Daily practice: - what did I learn today? - why does this matter to me? - what will I do differently?

International gathering of local currencies October 27-28 in Bordeaux. If we want ecash to reach beyond the tech bubble, we need to be there. There are more than 5,000 local currencies in Europe alone. Mostly led by citizen initiatives that have little to no tech background. They could use our help (when they have a digital version, they are still stuck with cyclos.org) More info: https://drive.monnaies-locales.org/s/kyeB4fYWEanJDFL/download/Programme%20-%20EMLC.pdf

Gm Yvoir.

Gm Donkeys 🫏

Last evening in Austria 🇦🇹 Waking up with a nice view 👌 And now already in Italy 🇮🇹

Off we go for a two-week trip across France, Switzerland, Austria and Italy to go meet different commons and eco-villages. Curious to learn more about how other communities manage their commons!

Gm Brussels