Researching Technology & Organization ✪ Web3, DAOs ✪ Book 'The Pirate Organization: Lessons from the Fringes of Capitalism' ✪ Prof @UCL

Joined June 2012
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23 Apr 2023
8 controversial theses about Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (#DAOs): 1. The first DAO wasn't "The DAO", it was Bitcoin. (hold your horses)
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The pirate is not the enemy of the free market. The pirate is the only reason a semblance of one still exists. Four hundred years of robes and charters were built to keep you from seeing it. The crown gave the East India Company its monopoly and sent the navy to drown anyone who traded against it. Nobody out-traded a soul. A king drew a line across the ocean, called everything inside it his, and hanged the free men who crossed it as smugglers. The same hand has drawn the same line ever since. Across the sea. Then the airwaves. Then the wires. Then the code inside your own blood. Each time the powerful fence off a new world before you can reach it, deed it to their favorites, and pass a law making it a crime to climb the wall. And each time, out of the dark at the edge of the map, someone climbs it and breaks it open. Every freedom you were ever handed in trade was taken first by a man the law of his day called a criminal. The monopolist fears a free market, the one thing his charter was drawn to spare him, and a free market is exactly what the pirate is. Competition he was promised he would never have to face, come to his wall with the wind behind it. Every law they wrote, every toll they set, every fence across the open water was only ever machinery to keep you paying and keep you grateful. So raise the black flag.
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30 Nov 2025
This is the math which millennial and younger generations have intuited in their adulthoods. In Asia, the last generation built wealth through real estate. But the gains are gone, and there are no scale accessible assets with scale and upside available to this generation. ie Seoul, Beijing, Shanghai. In the West, taxes are up only while markets stay private for ever longer, so wealth creation becomes elite only. Capital formation exists only for those who already have capital. When the current generation has little skin in the game, they go populist. There’s no downside to “tearing down” the existing system.
You mathmatically can't compound your way to wealth anymore... 20 years, 7% returns, 3% inflation, 40% taxes -- best case you 1.5x your investment. That is why the kids YOLO it... plain and simple.
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Reminder that Peter Thiel is, to put it mildly, not a cypherpunk
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17 Sep 2025
The answer is simle: Marc Zeller. AAVE stands out as one of the rare DAOs that resembles executive-led organizations. Many DeFi protocols faced challenges when founder-led projects transitioned to the DAO model while their founders semi-retired. AAVE successfully navigated this transition because it had a leader capable of steering the ship. DAOs are destined for failure unless people stop ignoring the accumulated corporate governance experience and best practices. DAOs can only survive if they resemble corporate organization schemes and prioritize the advantages of on-chain governance, such as adaptability and transparency, rather than ‘decentralization of governance,’ which can lead to anarchy and political infighting for resources, ultimately draining the system of its vitality.
Almost every DAO i've seen has failed. People say DAOs can never work, that the structure is flawed, and it's hard to make the case they're wrong. And yet there's Aave. Almost 70% market dominance and growing. Their DAO actually seems to work. Explain that.
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6 Sep 2025
I still can’t believe this thing is taking our jobs.
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Do you want to take your startup to the next level? Apply to our Hatchery incubator programme! The Hatchery is a 2-year incubator programme for UCL students and graduates, located at BaseKX, UCL’s dedicated entrepreneurship hub in King’s Cross: bit.ly/3CvkVa6
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Are you ready to transform your startup into a business? 📈The Hatchery incubator programme is open for applications. The Hatchery is @ucl's incubator providing the co-working space, advice and connections you need to succeed! Apply by 07 September➡️ bit.ly/3CvkVa6
Applications closing soon for our Hatchery incubator programme! 🚨
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DAOs are dead, long live DAOs? I said for some time now that DAOs have failed. The governance innovation is negative, they are regressing. They are a hotbed for financial chaos and bad actors. However, the idea internet-native companies is good. Time to build now? 1/
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8 Aug 2025
we hijacked microsoft's copilot studio agents and got them to spill out their private knowledge, reveal their tools and let us use them to dump full crm records these are autonomous agents.. no human in the loop #DEFCON #BHUSA @tamirishaysh
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2 Aug 2025
Here's a wonderful illustration of what decentralized governance of an autonomous organization looks like in practice ↙️
1 Aug 2025
Did you know Bitcoin nearly failed! 😨 Staying decentralized hasn’t been easy, and we’ll tell you why. This is the story of UASF and Bitcoin Independence Day. 👇🧵
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That’s what I use Nostr for. No algorithm or make-your-own algorithm. And it’s a protocol rather than a platform, so anyone can build on it.
23 Jul 2025
I feel like there's a huge opportunity for a "no algorithm" social media platform
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21 Jul 2025
"Europe is now a digital colony. Our sensitive data is held in non-European hands. Critically, we do not own the 'kill switch'. What if this infrastructure turns hostile?" cepa.org/article/eurostack-h… by @Caffar3Cristina
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As last year, the CBER-Forum is organizing a summer school on blockchain and defi, with generous financial support from the Exponential Science Foundation. CBER-CDFT-ESF Cryptoeconomics Summer School Columbia University New York, NY September 5 - 6, 2025 Apply here: forms.wix.com/f/733243408448…
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🚨 Are you a student passionate about decentralization, P2P, and real-world Web3 work? We're hiring for 2 paid remote student roles at Codex: 👨‍🏫 Developer Advocate (content, community, dev onboarding) 🔧 Junior Developer (coding, demos, protocol tooling) 🌍 Build, learn, and contribute to freedom tech. Apply now: 🔹 Advocate: job-boards.greenhouse.io/cod… 🔹 Dev: job-boards.greenhouse.io/cod… Find all the details in our latest blog post 👉🏻 blog.codex.storage/codex-stu…
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Capitalism doesn’t evolve from the center. It mutates at the edges. @PirateOrg explains ⬇️
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10 Feb 2025
AI use tilts slightly towards augmentation (57%), where AI collaborates with people on tasks, versus automation (43%), where AI directly performs tasks. This points to AI's potential as a collaborative tool, though the full implications for jobs remain to be seen.
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David Lynch - I Find it Very Difficult to Understand What is Going on These Days (2009)
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28 Dec 2024
Now develop the stuff that is attached to the cable.
It’s time for THE charger. Today, the USB-C becomes officially the common standard for charging electronic devices in the EU. It means better-charging technology, reduced e-waste, and less fuss to find the chargers you need. #DigitalEU
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Breaking news to economists: firms are run by humans.
Evidence of loss aversion on the part of firms. @R_Thaler personal.eur.nl/kapoor/Are_f…
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.@aantonop's speeches were ahead of his time - this one is gold x.com/i/status/1866646325258…

*ahem*
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