I've been thinking a lot about what is actually happening in these markets since getting to NY.
Some new things have clicked and become really undeniable with being here, it has just been fas...
How do you spot a fake in culture, in tech, and in markets of all kinds?
A great place to start is corporate simpdom and the symptoms of central control.
Before the hea...
Tech Bros suck.
There is just no other way around it. Sorry to be so blunt.
But seriously, it seems that for the past 10-20 years, give or take, complaining about ...
From scavengers to prospectors, is web2 rehab possible?
TLDR; probably not. You can go home now.
But, for those still here, let’s see what the prospects are.
From seed, to crop, to harvest, to market, to plate.
High yield arbitrage is so much cooler and tastier than just swapping seeds for other seeds forever.
If you think seed 2 s...
Exit strategy.
Who benefits most from timing the right moment, right from the start, to race for the exits?
The hint is in the title of this Letters to a Young VC series. Of course, i...
I just watched Rounders for the first time, catching up to the insider linguistic tricks feels long overdue. Like how loan shark copycat financiers saving so much fictional wealth for the s...
…You seem to have confused the value of liquidity in an artificially scarce market with the work founders, creators, engineers and others who take on the majority of the risk do to actua...
What happens to VC when founders and projects have alternative sources of capital that out-scale traditional debt & equity agreements?
With real web3 in full effect, founders no longer ...
Why do VCs do VC?
Get bags, have fun, be savvy.
So, why does being a gardener of CC0 ecosystems give VCs a better path out of VC?
Better bags, mo...
From Vc to Ac.
Amplifying the delta between load and effort for more savvy cash.
At some point on every journey towards the hope of more savvy bags, one has to put aside the theatrics...
The insecurity inherent in the way that we think about securities.
What are we talking about when we talk about security?
A family of four walks alone along what they are told is ...
Is a cow a security because it makes milk which can then be used to make derivative goods like cheese, yoghurt, and butter?
Is pizza a security because it is made from multiple component p...
Money is a self perpetuating social convention.
It's no more than a token that we trust will hold value in future exchanges. If buyers and sellers, ports and authorities accept textil...
This letter zeroes in on cryptography and economics.
It all began as a dream.
In the late 80s to early 90s a group of hacktivists, hobbyists, mathematicians, computer scientists and m...
For 3000 years, up until the 1970s, cryptography had been based on symmetric keys, meaning the same keys were used to both encrypt and decrypt messages.
In order to communicate securely the...
As any good money making adventurer setting off to discover new bags knows, risk is everything.
From how much appetite you have for uncovering unique opportunities that others don’t d...
Imagine an alternative to the data surveillance economy.
It’s actually quite hard to do, given our experiences over the past two decades, where we’ve become conditioned to assum...
We’re now on letter nineteen, and it’s about time that we talked about what actually differentiates assets built for and in web3.
The thing is, we have to be honest with ourse...
Wow. Twenty letters in the bag.
Fresh off all the drama and clearly intentionally engineered gas wastage of the behemoth Otherside drop, continued inflation anxiety, Fed basis point jum...
A different medium for this message. Go to chromadin.xyz....
Dear YC Founders,
This letter is a special edition, just for you.
You may not all be VCs yet, but you are certainly in training— conditioned to look for the exits at all times...
For 3000 years, up until the 1970s, cryptography had been based on symmetric keys, meaning the same keys were used to both encrypt and decrypt messages.
In order to communicate securely the keys needed to be shared by both parties. But, how do you do that without it being intercepted somewhere along the way?
It might seem easier when everyone lived in very short distance, with just a few neighbors, but even then, if a nosey neighbour or sneaky intruder managed to find where you were hiding your key and make a copy of it, whatever encryption method you used lost its power all the same.
Furthermore, this approach also clearly didn’t scale.
Not only did it break down the moment you traveled even small distances, but each time that you wanted to secure something new for yourself or another party, you needed to set up another distinct lock and key. Managing all of the keys and sending potentially hundreds to thousands of messages to ensure reliable channels of trust becomes completely unmanageable very quickly. Any economic activity beyond the most primitive quickly becomes a game racing to discover weaknesses in the illusion of trust.
Now along comes asymmetric encryption and completely changes the game.
Called the greatest advancement in cryptography in 3000 years, it’s a simple but clever concept where no direct secret key handoff needs to take place at all.
Instead, a key and lock mechanism is recognised for what it really is.
A combination of two distinct actions— closing and opening.
By using different keys for each of these actions, containers and mechanisms for the storage and transmission of any kind of message –– from financial to physical access authorisation –– take on new properties. A significant portion of them can be shared publicly, completely unobscured, secure in the knowledge that only the right people can gain access to the secret parts of it hiding in plain sight.
Keys can be transmitted across conduits between far flung parts of the world without fear of being snatched by the wrong parties.
When you find yourself scratching your head a bit at the value of better locks and keys, it really isn’t all that complicated. When you think about securing your home, the need for security that can actually be relied on is so obvious that it gets taken for granted. And, if it’s really good it becomes basically invisible.
Where it gets more interesting is if you think about traveling with anything of value.
Imagine that you had a secret formula for creating gold bars or anything else that other people strongly want. If you just walked down the street announcing to everyone visibly how much value that you are carrying with you, you would become a target pretty quick. If instead you had a perfectly common—in fantasy RPG genres yet still just a fantastical idea IRL— dimensional pouch, you could simply store all of that gold or whatever it is of value that you are making in your pouch without having to be concerned about how much back breaking weight it added to your journey or who else would see what you had with you along the way.
Public-private key encryption is that dimensional pouch in an informational systems context— which means in any context relevant to modern life.
And it doesn’t stop there, as for the next letter, Zero Knowledge Proofs bring your cryptographic knowledge to the next level.
There’s three days left until the end of the year, 30 blocks left in this walk, and I’m still getting these damn messages.
![](https://images.mirror-media.xyz/publica...</p></div><div class="hover:underline cursor-pointer"><div class="text-md text-red-400 font-bold">Sub-Thread Weekly: #2</div><div class="text-xs font-bold text-[#400000]">January 6th, 2022</div><p class="text-white"><h3>Galleries, galleries and more galleries… but so much empty space?</h3><p>When did one of the most scarce things ever in this global capital become so abundant?</p><p>All of you have to do i...</p></div><div class="hover:underline cursor-pointer"><div class="text-md text-red-400 font-bold">Sub-Thread Weekly: #3</div><div class="text-xs font-bold text-[#400000]">January 12th, 2022</div><p class="text-white"><h3>There isn)
I moved around a lot, I’m used to rame...
Pressure.
Pushing down on me. Pressing down on me.
Prospecting drilling between the liquidity and lack of substance for some life giving thing— liquid gold, fresh water, magic...
And I can’t tell you what I’ll write. They’re words without the paper.
There’s no kind of right way to do what I do. Feeling out of place, like a live in outer ...
He comes to town every Tuesday. Are you free Tuesday?
Intellectual curiosity for this midtown magic.
The liminal watercolor of magic that happens between those two. They are showing t...
How's this for an intro? Have you done this before?
I can’t be sure.
Sitting down, sitting up.
![](https://images.mirror-media.xyz/publication-images/tv1YkxPx...</p></div><div class="hover:underline cursor-pointer"><div class="text-md text-red-400 font-bold">Sub-Thread Weekly: #8</div><div class="text-xs font-bold text-[#400000]">February 18th, 2022</div><p class="text-white"><h2>Standing by the phone.</h2><p>Picking through these illusions and sets to my soggy shoes, if all ends up I’m moving through.</p><p>Sunday to sunday, to the morning light. Wear long sleeves, ...</p></div><div class="hover:underline cursor-pointer"><div class="text-md text-red-400 font-bold">Sub-Thread Weekly: #9</div><div class="text-xs font-bold text-[#400000]">February 27th, 2022</div><p class="text-white"><h3>Red and black they glow. Under attack.</h3><p>One way through the flames. Burning cities. Napalm clouds. Hate it when they play both sides.</p><p>Tearing into pieces.</p><h2>It’s Our Right t...</p></div><div class="hover:underline cursor-pointer"><div class="text-md text-red-400 font-bold">Sub-Thread Weekly: #10</div><div class="text-xs font-bold text-[#400000]">March 6th, 2022</div><p class="text-white"><h2>Walk with me across the bridge.</h2><div><p>Their movements almost completely mechanical. Repetitive and precise. The factory stretches on for miles. 100 ft industrial ceilings with horizontal joi...</p></div><div class="hover:underline cursor-pointer"><div class="text-md text-red-400 font-bold">Sub-Thread Weekly: #11</div><div class="text-xs font-bold text-[#400000]">May 22nd, 2022</div><p class="text-white"><h3>The emergence of this self sovereign individual.</h3><p><em>I no longer have brain damage.</em></p><p>So she said.</p><p>Escape the shackles and transform the character of the governments, civilis...</p></div><div class="hover:underline cursor-pointer"><div class="text-md text-red-400 font-bold">Sub-Thread Weekly: #12</div><div class="text-xs font-bold text-[#400000]">March 20th, 2022</div><p class="text-white"><h2>Dezinformatsiya Et Cetera.</h2><p>Through a door and into a dim corridor, these digital machines are the only check between you and the trigger buried in the syncopated rhythm.</p><p>Slide the key...</p></div><div class="hover:underline cursor-pointer"><div class="text-md text-red-400 font-bold">Sub-Thread Weekly: #13</div><div class="text-xs font-bold text-[#400000]">March 26th, 2022</div><p class="text-white"><h3>A key cypher pair for practical fashion revolutionaries.</h3><p>Can you help me discover what this means?</p><p>Fasten your seatbelts.</p><p>He committed his first crime shortly after 3:00 in the ...</p></div><div class="hover:underline cursor-pointer"><div class="text-md text-red-400 font-bold">Sub-Thread Weekly: #14</div><div class="text-xs font-bold text-[#400000]">April 4th, 2022</div><p class="text-white"><h3>How can you reach escape velocity?</h3><div><p>To overcome the horseless carriage problem is one thing. But, to be durable, portable and visible enough as to carve out space and time is another.</...</p></div><div class="hover:underline cursor-pointer"><div class="text-md text-red-400 font-bold">Sub-Thread Weekly: #15</div><div class="text-xs font-bold text-[#400000]">April 10th, 2022</div><p class="text-white"><h2>The desire to know and embrace everything around you. Can you forbid a man from that?</h2><p>A worldly otherness. A belief in elsewheres. Scattered uncertainties falling away. A lost sailor handed...</p></div><div class="hover:underline cursor-pointer"><div class="text-md text-red-400 font-bold">Sub-Thread Weekly: #16</div><div class="text-xs font-bold text-[#400000]">April 17th, 2022</div><p class="text-white"><h2>It’s all about as tedious as supernatural forces can be.</h2><p><em>Experts predict that in the next 10 to 100 years scientists will succeed in creating human-level Artificial General Intell...</p></div><div class="hover:underline cursor-pointer"><div class="text-md text-red-400 font-bold">Sub-Thread Weekly: #17</div><div class="text-xs font-bold text-[#400000]">May 22nd, 2022</div><p class="text-white"><h3>A few more AI renditions to go, and many more after that.</h3><p>It’s not as hard as it might look- if you just figure it out to your own satisfaction.</p><p>A fully realised main character....</p></div><div class="hover:underline cursor-pointer"><div class="text-md text-red-400 font-bold">Sub-Thread Weekly: #18</div><div class="text-xs font-bold text-[#400000]">May 3rd, 2022</div><p class="text-white"><h3>An early attraction to the edge.</h3><p>Wordly pursuits and precision engineering.</p><h2>Some kind of love letter to the golden era of web3.</h2><div><h2>Where)
AI generated text is supercharging fake news. Yet, this was my results. A pretty decent text generator in some contexts, in others, a whole bunch of hogwash.
Thank you?
Input: Goin...
Mastering the discipline to the point where it literally flows through you.
Freestyle is an art form. Beyond coming prepared and spitting pre-written verses.
No ...
A written appropriation of videos, visual insights and anchors for how to make it in web3, not lose your shoes, your shirt, your soul.
How to survive an IRL dungeon crawler game.
...
- DIGITALAX: Emancipatory Lifestyle Tech.
- F3Manifesto: Transcendent nostalgia. Machine & human made. In with gen. AI, web3 fashion & cc0 before it was cool.
- Highlaŋu: The Highland-Yolŋu alliance. Maximum resistance experience. Maximum knowledge preservation. Wearing and building erasure-resistant transmission systems.
- Coin Op: We know it's a lot to keep up with. How can you know if this is the blend of instant convenience and purchasing power you've been waiting for?
- Chromadin: There are whispers of new apps that can't be taken away from you. Stirrings of resistance decentralized in code. Where users own the network, direct messages are reliably private, and the channels we see the world through can be counted on to stay fully independent. Engagement and influence flow back to you. Like it was always meant to be.
- Kinora: On-Chain Video Social Quests.
- MONA: ERC20 protocol token. Unclaimed Value in Agency.
Synthetic Futures
Time to help others with the outbreak. Not out of danger yet.
Emancipa
And there’s no point raising problems with people who don't learn how to understand them, in a system that wasn’t built for you, and still isn’t..
Dhäwu
A fragment of languages that shouldn’t have survived— but did.
Cuntism
Strayan Social Disease: Whinging, Advanced Wankerism, Cuntishness and some good old Terminal Tall Poppy.
- Triple A: Everyone wins in this agent-to-earn story.
- NPC Studio: Equip your AI workforce. Train for less idle time. Try to survive in style.
- Lucidity: Agentic ComfyStream Search.
