The Attention Market Is Broken

// Monday Morning chat with GPT-4o We’ve been told that markets, if left alone, naturally lead to the best outcomes. Milton Friedman championed this idea, arguing that free markets optimize things for everyone. But in today’s world of TikTok, Onlyfans, and Bumble, this idea falls apart. The attention economy—designed to capture and exploit our focus—reveals the truth: markets don’t serve us. They exploit us. And this isn’t just a flaw in how platforms operate—it’s a flaw in how markets as a w...

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Some Loose Thoughts About “Crypto Consumer Goods”

/ramblings Need First, Then Tech.Consumer goods are hard apps! Period. As notorious early adopters, we’re the only ones hooked by faster transaction speeds compared to the real world. But seriously, speed matters a lot less if you just have a great waiting screen to occupy someone’s mind. What really matters—and I’m adapting this from a post by Nikita Bier—is that most consumer apps fall into three categories: Get Rich, Get Laid, Get Distracted, and their overlaps. People want to earn or save...

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We’ve built tools to think fast.Who’s building the tools to think slow?

I remember the first time I picked up Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow. That moment when I realized just how many biases I’d been falling into, over and over again, without even noticing. The part that always sticks with me is the idea that our minds run on two different altitudes. Sometimes, it’s all fast and automatic—like solving 2+2, it just happens. But when it gets more complex, like in advanced math, you’ve got to engage the system, slow down, think it through step by step. A ...

Self-Driving Cars and Blockchains

Friday morning musings with ChatGPT Why Do AI Applications Resonate Better with End-Users than Blockchain Applications? I’m currently in San Francisco, and yesterday, I found myself sitting in a Waymo, Google’s self-driving taxi again, stunned at how quickly I’ve gotten used to the fact that there’s no one behind the wheel. It’s wild when you think about it—what seemed like science fiction not too long ago is now just another part of life, at least here. We’re already living in a future where...

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Local // Onchain

Late night musings / early thoughts / not fully thought through The Challenge of Building Lightweight and Independent Systems Two years ago, we were deep into developing an unreleased BTC DeFi product at we3.co, and one of the most interesting challenges we explored was this: how could we make it not just super lightweight but also as independent as possible from outside libraries and servers? We wanted to take "don’t trust, verify" to its absolute limit—build something so simple, there wasn’...

The Internet is just not useful yet.

Tuesday Morning RamblingsI never studied computer science. My developer skills are decent for a hobbyist, and I usually manage to get thi...

Tokens == Attention

Tokens: Traceable, Tradeable, Productized AttentionThese are just early thoughts—ramblings, really.What the Hell Are Tokens, Actually?Whe...

On Core Loops

I stumbled upon my old Gameboy the other day, and after putting in some batteries, I got addicted to Tetris all over again. I mean seriously addicted. At one point, my partner decided the only way to stop me was to hide all the batteries. (Thank you.) But this little Tetris binge got me thinking about the game itself. When you break it down, Tetris is a pretty simple game. The goal is to stack a full row using a few basic shapes. When you do, that row disappears. Keep it up, and the speed inc...

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On Building for Builders

This week at a kickoff, there was a post-it asking: "Actually, what are blockchains useful for?" I haven't been to ETHcc, but judging from afar, we're getting a fair amount of discussion about where the users and the promised applications are. Honestly, we’re kind of stuck discussing theoretical white papers about near-future kitchen gadgets in a restaurant without customers, without an idea of what to even eat. We’re all about breaking the system “in theory.” I love how the space i...

Crypto-native?

After-run thoughts captured and edited with ChatGPTTrying out to find out what we actually mean with crypto-native. For me, often this co...