Money may be changing faster than banking—and that changes the questions worth asking.

Pegged: The Lifecycle of a Radical Idea

Beyond Banking

This new scene continues the story of a radical idea and the people willing to risk everything for it. Feedback and beta readers are warmly welcome...

#peggedsaga #lottery #literature #thriller #suspense #novel #money #writing #stablecoin

🐝 What's the buzz?

🪑 Save my seat

Some of the strongest opponents of surveillance are also the strongest defenders of property and security. The unresolved question is how property can be protected without making everyone permanently observable. #flock

The backbone of a culture is formed by those who refuse to stop thinking after thinking has become unfashionable—or ineffective.

A Nostr dilemma. I enjoy seeing what people think. I'm less interested in seeing their Wordle score. Why shouldn't someone have one Nostr identity for ideas and another for games? Decentralization gives us many keys. Perhaps we should use them more deliberately.

🪑 Save my seat

BARBARIC TERMS I've become increasingly interested in what I call barbaric terms. Words like permissionlessness, trustlessness, self-sovereignty, and censorship resistance are often criticized for being awkward or inelegant. They are. But maybe that's precisely the point. Every major transformation seems to produce words that sound barbaric before they sound natural. The old vocabulary no longer maps onto a changing reality, so language is forced into unfamiliar shapes. The question is whether these words are naming phenomena for which our inherited political, economic, and philosophical vocabulary has no adequate terms. If so, they are more than crypto jargon. They are early attempts to describe a world organized less by institutions than by protocols, networks, and irreversible processes. I'm beginning a project to explore whether these barbaric terms are merely transitional jargon—or the first elements of a new semantic and metaphysical landscape. Has anyone else encountered this phenomenon, in crypto or elsewhere? If so, I'd be interested in reading your examples.

Liberty and self-sovereignty are often described as states. They may be better understood as a #conatus of disintermediation: a persistent tendency to reduce unnecessary dependence on intermediaries while accepting that complete disintermediation is neither possible nor desirable. #Spinoza

A question. We spend a great deal of time discussing decentralized consensus. Much less time discussing decentralized accounting. Who counts the users? Who measures adoption? Who estimates economic activity? Who produces trustworthy statistics? In centralized systems, accounting is almost free. In decentralized systems, accounting becomes a distributed problem in its own right. Decentralized accounting deserves to become a field of study alongside decentralized consensus.

🪑 Save my seat

Is the separation of money issuance and the state a SMART objective for #Bitcoin? It is certainly relevant. It is arguably specific. But is it measurable? Is it achievable? Within what timeframe? Strategic thinking begins by asking whether our objectives are actionable before debating how to achieve them. If the separation of money issuance and the state is a long-term vision rather than a SMART objective that #BTC can realistically achieve, then a more interesting question emerges: What is Bitcoin's strategic objective? Becoming the preferred savings asset? A censorship-resistant settlement layer? A global reserve asset? Something else? A vision provides direction. A strategy requires milestones. The two are related, but they are not the same.

🪑 Save my seat

Writing a novel is, unsurprisingly, darned messy. One is dealing with human brains, after all.

🐝 What's the buzz?