Solidarity did not only oppose. It built. Churches, underground publications, mutual aid networks, communities of trust outside approved channels. I’ve been thinking about Poland, John Paul II, Bitcoin circular economies, and what “hope centers” might actually look like. New essay:

Solidarity, Hope Centers, and the Dream of Bitcoin Circular Economies

John Paul II, parallel trust, and the human communities money cannot build alone.

An old philosophy thesis on knowledge. An MPA in public finance and nonprofit management. A dead 256MB JumpDrive. Looking back, the questions about trust, institutions, money, testimony, and legitimacy were already there from the beginning. New essay: “What Was Always There.”

What Was Always There

On passing fifty essays published on Substack and finding the thread

A 256MB flash drive from 2003 once held nearly my entire graduate school life. Today, many single smartphone photos exceed its total storage capacity. But this isn’t really a nostalgia post. It’s about digital memory, archives, proof, and the strange conceptual path from 256MB to SHA-256.

From 256MB to SHA-256

What a jump drive and a cryptographic hash function have in common

In 2004, I co-wrote a cost-benefit analysis of Grameen Bank at Indiana University. Re-reading it 22 years later, I realized the core problem wasn’t only access to credit. It was the monetary layer underneath it. The 256MB Archive: Grameen, Yunus, and the Problem We Still Haven’t Solved.

The 256MB Archive: Grameen, Yunus, and the Problem We Still Haven't Solved

A follow-up to "The 256MB Archive (2003–05)

Found a 256MB Lexar JumpDrive from 2003. Probably contains most of my old Indiana University MPA work: papers, datasets, policy memos, regression models. Still haven’t opened it. But the surrounding notebooks reminded me something important: many of the questions underneath my Bitcoin / AI / trust writing today were already there 20 years ago. The technologies changed. The questions didn’t.

The 256MB Archive (2003–05)

Rediscovering the Questions I Never Really Stopped Asking

You notice infrastructure most clearly when it stops fitting your body. Years typing in Turkish taught me something unexpected about QWERTY, language, and the hidden power of standards. The systems we rely on often disappear into the background — until they cross a border. New essay: QWERTY Meets Turkish

QWERTY Meets Turkish

What Turkish Keyboards Reveal About Inherited Systems

The strangest forms of power are often the ones embedded inside standards people stop noticing. Calendars. Currencies. Measurements. Keyboard layouts. Even the definition of large numbers. The ledger is never neutral. New essay: “How calendars, currencies, and AI reveal the hidden power of standards.”

The Ledger Is Never Neutral

How calendars, currencies, and AI reveal the hidden power of standards.

Ran 13.1 miles through downtown Indianapolis and onto the Indianapolis Motor Speedway at sunrise. Still surreal. Thousands of runners moving across a track built for cars going 220 mph. The tunnel. The empty grandstands. The strange seriousness of the asphalt itself. Completely worth it. New Saturday essay: “Running Where the Race Cars Run: My Indy Mini Marathon”

Running Where the Race Cars Run: My Indy Mini Marathon

May 2, 2026 · Indianapolis, Indiana

The people who dismiss Bitcoin as a speculative novelty have not read enough history. The people who embrace Bitcoin purely as a get-rich vehicle have not understood its deeper significance. Bitcoin is the technological restoration of a principle that human civilization has understood, violated, and fought to restore for at least three millennia. Honest weights. Honest measures. Constraints on the ledger itself. “The Oldest Argument for Sound Money”

The Oldest Argument for Sound Money

Part Two of Two: What an 1881 Bible Knows About Fiat and Bitcoin.

Three thousand years before Bitcoin, the Hebrew Bible condemned dishonest weights and measures as a moral crime. Not merely inefficient policy. Not bad accounting. A moral corruption of the standard itself. The technology changed. The mechanism didn’t. My latest essay traces: - biblical weights and measures - debased Roman coinage - fiat currency systems - and Bitcoin as the first technically enforced honest weight. “The Oldest Argument for Sound Money”

The Oldest Argument for Sound Money

Part Two of Two: What an 1881 Bible Knows About Fiat and Bitcoin.

The essay is ultimately about rooms. Rooms built for conversation instead of performance. Objects with weight and permanence. Shared attention instead of parallel consumption. And what kinds of lives those rooms produce. “The Bible on the Table”

The Bible on the Table

Part One of Two: What a 144-Year-Old Book Taught Me About How We Should Live

The Bible condemned dishonest weights and measures thousands of years before modern economics existed. Reading Leviticus alongside The Kybalion and Bitcoin led me to a strange realization: very old traditions often understood monetary corruption more clearly than modern societies do. “Honest Weights & Ancient Wisdom”

Honest Weights & Ancient Wisdom

How a 117-year-old Hermetic text, the laws of Moses, and the Bitcoin protocol converge on the problem of honest money.

Some truths can only be learned by being there. Standing in rooms. Drinking tea. Paying attention. Watching what survives pressure. A reflection on Antakya, earthquakes, trust, and the limits of metrics. “What I Learned Standing in the Rubble of Antakya”

What I Learned Standing in the Rubble of Antakya

What No Metric Can Capture

The cloud was never abstract. AI, data centers, and large-scale computation are forcing the digital world back into physical reality. Water matters. Power matters. Cooling matters. Geography matters. The future may belong to the regions that can sustain computation materially, not just digitally. “How Water, Energy, and Computation Are Quietly Reshaping Where People — and Infrastructure — Move”

How water, energy, and computation are quietly reshaping where people — and infrastructure — move

A personal observation & essay about constraint, scarcity, and the physical limits that money alone cannot dissolve.

When large systems feel unstable, people move toward what they can still touch, verify, repair, and care for. Sometimes the future begins locally. “When Everything Feels Unstable, Start Closer to Home”

When Everything Feels Unstable, Start Closer to Home

On systems, responsibility, and why stability begins closer than we think.

The system wasn’t broken. It was working exactly as designed. Just not for them. Bitcoin didn’t replace it. It made a path through it.

From Bank Accounts to a Building

A Problem That Didn’t Look Like a Bitcoin Problem

I could do the work. I just couldn’t make it count. Not banned. Not blocked. Just outside the system. That’s how exclusion works now. You don’t get stopped. You just don’t exist.

You Can Participate. You Just Can’t Count.

What a push-up challenge—and a SIM swap attack—reveal about where reality actually lives.

Before Bitcoin, there was a real attempt to build digital cash that preserved privacy. It worked—cryptographically. But it still required a trusted issuer. That’s where it failed. The story of David Chaum is still shaping what’s being built today:

The Man Who Invented Digital Cash

Why it took forty years to build what he imagined.

npub1dergggklka99wwrs92yz8wdjs952h2ux2ha2ed598ngwu9w7a6fsh9xzpc You’ve written about Bitcoin’s constraints being the source of its strength. This question came out of that: if we relax constraints under pressure, are we protecting the system—or dissolving what makes it trustworthy?

The Face We Cannot Freeze: Bitcoin, Quantum Computing

The Ethics of Confiscation for a Good Reason

Would love your take.

Most of the week I write about systems. On Saturdays, I pay attention to the people inside them. Flannery O’Connor didn’t explain grace. She staged it. And it rarely looked like comfort. It looked like interruption.

Flannery O’Connor: When Grace Breaks In

Stories that unsettles you are sometimes the best.