A Fitting Coda to a Year Like No Other — Occasionally we seem to bear witness to something important. It's the unsettling feeling of looking into the void of unwritten history and the weight of uncertainty bearing down. It makes life seem interesting. And ominous. I was too young to remember 9/11, only the barely concealed awkwardness of a father…

NFTs have taken the world by storm. Every day, digital art and collectibles are being traded for eye-watering sums, and mainstream media is abuzz with this latest application of blockchain technology. But what exactly are NFTs? …

Our goal is to implement scalable and economically viable technologies to help build the decentralized internet. And we have started moving towards this goal with the deployment of the first 50 of our wireless hotspots. These hotspots are a novel technology developed by Helium, Inc., a Silicon Valley-based company that…

The technology is here, but do we have the will to use it? — Imagine if, once a month, everyone received a baseline amount of money regardless of wealth or income. And this baseline amount was “hardcoded” into everyone’s account, meaning it has no dependence on partisan politics and was very difficult to change without a broad consensus. It would be an automatically executing…

The Helium hotspot shows us one way. — You might be wondering what we mean by the “Decentralized Web” (or D-Web) and how its different than the modern web. The internet as we know it runs on what’s known as a “client-server” model, where internet users request information stored on centralized servers using their computers, smart phones, or…

When the “Fall of Rome” is discussed, it evokes an image of ruthless, pillaging barbarians sacking the Eternal City and completely destroying any traces of Roman government and civilization. But the reality is far less dramatic. There is no clear end of the Roman Empire, just a convention that draws…