1/11

On New Years:

One of my goals for 2024 is to shift more of my writing to Farcaster and get away from Twitter.

But more broadly a return to my roots.

In a recent post by @vitalik.eth he encouraged the community to “be more cypherpunk”

2/11

I joined this industry over a decade ago, working at a Bitcoin exchange in Canada. A nerd with an IT background, I spent my days trying to even teach people what Bitcoin was.

It wasn’t about the money; it was about the message.

4/11

But there is only so much you can do behind the investing desk.

It’s not the same as building. It’s not the same as shipping new code, and trying new ideas.

5/11

So I’m (mostly) hanging up my investor hat and putting my family office fund on hold to dive back into the trenches again and make a difference.

To try new things, in hopes I push forward this space in a meaningful way, and not necessarily a profitable one.

6/11

While this has been in the works for a while, @vitalik.eth’s post really inspired me to set a coherent approach to this return, via a set of self prescribed goals:

7/11

1) Build robust, cypherpunk systems, that fairly exist outside the scope of the system to help preserve privacy, freedom and autonomy.

2) Build robust systems within the letter of the law, that preserve access to privacy, freedom and autonomy and to those exterior systems.

8/11

3) Build things that others think are too ambitious or outlandish.

4) Build at least one cool piece of open source tech that ignores best practices in favor of trying something new  in hope of moving the space forward by even one step.

9/11

Defi and investing is great.

But if we want robust systems of fair coordination both at the technical and social level, then we need to continue to push forward on aligning incentives towards network good over individual good.

10/11

That means those of us who don’t have to worry about our financial position, need to take the biggest risks in trying novel approaches to push this space forward.

11/11

Happy 2024. And I’ll see you in the trenches! (And your repos!) 🫡 


(Ps - we really need a good thread writing tool on Warpcaster because this was painful!!)

3/11

Over the years I’ve tried to keep true to that in my investing, believing that the best way to make money is to do things that are good.