New blog --- contravex.com/2023/06/04/wha… #Contravex #LossPorn #SFYL

🇬🇧 MISSION CREEP 🇬🇧 @lewis_osb x @XCOPYART

🎯 When I went on book tour for How Life Imitates Chess nearly 20 years ago, I enjoyed answering the usual first question, "How does life imitate chess? with "It doesn't! And an aptitude for chess demonstrates only that." It's a gift, & a great lens, but the rest is up to you.

In Ancient Sparta only two kinds of people got tombstones upon their death; men who died in battle, and women who died in childbirth.

Japanese engineers developed a “Sword Tip Visualization System” for the Fencing World Championships, and it makes fencing look absolutely incredible to watch.

The State of Us (blue) sold for 69.69Ξ gondi.xyz/collections/known-…

Read the profile: colossus.com/article/beyond-…

Genes are words. [Morphology] Weights are words. Numbers are words. “In the beginning was the word / sound” is a monistic truism

Fun discovery: with 99% certainty 2 apes and 5 zombies are lost forever - bringing the supply of apes down to 22 out of 24 and zombies to 83 out of 88. Most likely due to lost keys to MEW from 2017 which I experienced myself.

Bitcoin holders after being told “no one uses it” watching governments pay Iran in BTC

Broke: petrodollar Bespoke: petrobitcoin

🇵🇹Portugal in 2021: "Invest EUR 500k, naturalize in 5 years" 🇵🇹 in 2025: "We took 4 years to process your application. We put golden visa investors at the back of the line for ideological reasons. But don't worry, we'll count your wait time toward your naturalization timeline." 🇵🇹 in 2026: "We changed the law, so now you'll only be eligible for naturalization in 2035, and the time spent waiting won't count after all. Oh, and the processing time for naturalization is itself another 3 years. So you can look forward to a Portuguese passport in 2038, 17 years after you invested. Unless, of course, we change something else by then. Anyway, thanks for the half a million euros."

Science fiction remains, despite everyone saying so, underrated as a means of thinking about the future.

Nobody is asking why Bitcoin rallied during a war. The answer is Iran. - Iran mines Bitcoin for $1,300 per coin. The cheapest on earth. - The IRGC runs the operation. Every coin gets sold to fund imports and bypass US sanctions. - They’ve been dumping tens of thousands of BTC on the open market for years. Constant invisible sell pressure. - Then the US bombed their power grid. Mining went offline overnight. The hashrate dropped within hours. - The sell pressure that nobody knew existed just vanished. The US accidentally made Bitcoin more scarce by bombing the world’s cheapest mining operation. And nobody is connecting the dots.

New blog: Rousham House, near Oxford, just down the road from Churchill's shack at Blenheim contravex.com/2026/03/15/sig…

In praise of golden ages by PG If you're into status, watches, branding, etc this is worth a read: paulgraham.com/brandage.html

I’d go further. Ambition is often the result of a wound. If one were to heal that wound via therapy one might be less ambitious. In that sense, conquest is a defense mechanism. “Man would rather go to the moon than therapy.” And that’s not a bad thing.

Over the past year, many people I talk to have expressed worry about two topics: * Various aspects of the way the world is going: government control and surveillance, wars, corporate power and surveillance, tech enshittification / corposlop, social media becoming a memetic warzone, AI and how it interplays with all of the above... * The brute reality that Ethereum seems to be absent from meaningfully improving the lives of people subject to these things, even on the dimensions we deeply care about (eg. freedom, privacy, security of digital life, community self-organization) It is easy to bond over the first, to commiserate over the fact that beauty and good in the world seems to be receding and darkness advancing, and uncaring powerful people in high places are making this happen. But ultimately, it is easy to acknowledge problems, the hard thing is actually shining a light forward, coming up with a concrete plan that makes the situation better. The second has been weighing heavily on my mind, and on the minds of many of our brightest and most idealistic Ethereans. I personally never felt any upset or fear when political memecoins went on Solana, or various zero-sum gambling applications go on whatever 250 millisecond block chain strikes their fancy. But it *does* weigh on me that, through all of the various low-grade online memetic wars, international overreaches of corporate and government power, and other issues of the last few years, Ethereum has been playing a very limited role in making people's lives better. What *are* the liberating technologies? Starlink is the most obvious one. Locally-running open-weights LLMs are another. Signal is a third. Community Notes is a fourth, tackling the problem from a different angle. One response is to say "stop dreaming big, we need to hunker down and accept that finance is our lane and laser-focus on that". But this is ultimately hollow. Financial freedom and security is critical. But it seems obvious that, while adding a perfectly free and open and sovereign and debasement-proof financial system would fix some things, but it would leave the bulk of our deep worries about the world unaddressed. It's okay for individuals to laser-focus on finance, but we need to be part of some greater whole that has things to say about the other problems too. At the same time, Ethereum cannot fix the world. Ethereum is the "wrong-shaped tool" for that: beyond a certain point, "fixing the world" implies a form of power projection that is more like a centralized political entity than like a decentralized technology community. So what can we do? I think that we in Ethereum should conceptualize ourselves as being part of an ecosystem building "sanctuary technologies": free open-source technologies that let people live, work, talk to each other, manage risk and build wealth, and collaborate on shared goals, in a way that optimizes for robustness to outside pressures. The goal is not to remake the world in Ethereum's image, where all finance is disintermediated, all governance happens through DAOs, and everyone gets a blockchain-based UBI delivered straight to their social-recovery wallet. The goal is the opposite: it's de-totalization. It's to reduce the stakes of the war in heaven by preventing the winner from having total victory (ie. total control over other human beings), and preventing the loser from suffering total defeat. To create digital islands of stability in a chaotic era. To enable interdependence that cannot be weaponized. Ethereum's role is to create "digital space" where different entities can cooperate and interact. Communications channels enable interaction, but communication channels are not "space": they do not let you create single unique objects that canonically represent some social arrangement that changes over time. Money is one important example. Multisigs that can change their members, showing persistence exceeding that of any one person or one public key, are another. Various market and governance structures are a third. There are more. I think now is the time to double down, with greater clarity. Do not try to be Apple or Google, seeing crypto as a tech sector that enables efficiency or shininess. Instead, build our part of the sanctuary tech ecosystem - the "shared digital space with no owner" that enables both open finance and much more. More actively build toward a full-stack ecosystem: both upward to the wallet and application layer (incl AI as interface) and downward to the OS, hardware, even physical/bio security levels. Ultimately, tech is worthless without users. But look for users, both individual and institutional, for whom sanctuary tech is exactly the thing they need. Optimize payments, defi, decentralized social, and other applications precisely for those users, and those goals, which centralized tech will not serve. We have many allies, including many outside of "crypto". It's time we work together with an open mind and move forward.

Just got 7 pounds of Ringers interpretations from the Infinite Images show in @ToledoMuseum

New blog: Try not to laugh contravex.com/2026/02/15/try…

lol. lmao even. buddy they have nukes ? the network state is a profoundly unserious idea cryptocurrency enthusiasts have no idea what they're talking about memecoins are the the most profound thing to happen in billions of years. memes outmode genes genecurrency = natural selection memecurrency = artificial selection "transnational protection" ? " ... anyone with an internet connection can— " guess who made the internet? guess who owns it? guess whose territory it lives on? guess who defends and protects that territory? you want to put the nukes on chain? hand em over ot the network state of unserious individuals? do you realize how fragile your access to internet is? do you understand the level of responsibility statecraft demands? you want to put the pentagon on chain? cmon brodie. think through that thought a bit. unserious people will your network state go to war to defend the rights of its people? will the people of your state? more importantly, will they win? "... guarantee free speech and free markets—" buddy that shit doesn't come for free. many genes have gone extinct for even the first vestiges of freedom to manifest. a network state of nerds ain't gonna guarantee shit. "I have never been more bullish on crypto—" crypto has never been more bearish on humanity. nothing human—genetic, biological, geological, philosophical, or otherwise—makes it out of the near future. cryptocurrency is th einstrument of the evolution of evolution, from genecurrency to memecurrency and beyond