This has been my life for about 17 months, chipping away at the house one project at a time. Learning from videos and mistakes. Listening to podcasts and growing my knowledge while I rebuild the house. I kept thinking I should post more of the videos I made while fixing things, but the expletives alone made it unusable. Plus, who had time for editing? That's a big reason I haven't been podcasting lately. ZFi has been in his head about things, I've been in my zone building. No time for writing and editing. I do want to start it back up again but I'd rather do it with a cohost. Conversations are better than someone yakking at the screen. Back to the floors.

Russia and Turkey have banned Discord, Brazil banned X (Twitter), Telegram founder was arrested in Europe for not handing over private chat logs to national authorities, all three founders of Tornado cash were arrested in different countries. There is no world in which governments banning or seizing control of communications platforms is a good thing. There are no arguments to be made for criminalizing people for writing open, permissionless code. The future is coming whether you like it or not. Having tech that is credibly neutral, decentralized, and censorship resistant is the only way we don't end up under authoritarian fascism or totalitarianism.

AI is a powerful tool that, unfortunately, is also a very centralizing force. We won't be able to avoid a future of interacting with hundreds of AI agents daily. Decentralized tech such as cryptography and zero knowledge proofs are the only way we have a chance of being in control of our data. If you have any passwords at all, then you are using cryptography. You're just relying on third parties to protect your data, which has proven a vast misstep as they are all selling it back and forth to each other, the police, and scammers alike. In our version of a free society, your data is just a commodity, so authorities can violate your Fourth Amendment rights with impunity as long as they pay for it. Our institutions can not be trusted to not leak, lose, sell our data, or use it to violate our rights.

Every sociopolitical issue that any of us face hinges on freedom of speech and freedom to transact. If either of those rights are infringed upon, then your movement ends.