I've blogged earlier about my idea for a new school. Not just another school like Elon's or even Balaji's, but a school on blockchain, with token-gated access to crowdfunded courses. A progress report.

For a while now, I have been ideating the concept of a decentralized school. I have a sense it will probably be the last venture I have in me and my masterpiece! A decentralized school is also a genuine use case for blockchains which, a decade after smart contracts emerged, remain - according to reports I get from Token49 in Singapore - "98% trading and 2% building". My idea for the school - or at least the physical premises for a school - goes back more than a decade,...

I finally found time to read "The Dawn of Everything", ironically when I was in Peru visiting Machu Picchu.

Reading “founder vs investor”, it is difficult not to like Elizabeth Zalman for her plain outspokenness and radical candor about the inherent tensions between founders and investors.

MIAMI, Florida, March 28, 2024 - I am in Miami, only 90 nautical miles from Havana, Cuba. I don’t have any romanticism about Cuba and no urge to visit. It is a dirt poor country where a repressive authoritarian regime starves its people from the most basic necessities, a Soviet Caribbean with empty shelves in government stores and day-long queues for a piece of protein, which on most days of the week is not available. A friend in London recently sent me a pic of his son entering Eton donned i...

View to the English Clock Tower from the Plaza San Martín, Buenos Aires, on my evening stroll in early November 2023 (Source: own archive).I arrived Buenos Aires from Canada on Wednesday 8 November 2023 via São Paulo, the time of year when the northern hemisphere turns towards winter but the south is in full spring. Buenos Aires is a city I know well and love deeply from a previous live, back in the late '90s when I went to learn Spanish there and visited friends I studied with in London. I'v...

In its June issue, Vanity Fair came out with a painfully detailed account of the recent acrimonies between former Hollywood dream couple Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. This time, he sues her for allegedly having sold her share in Miraval, a prestigious French vineyard which they jointly owned, to an outside bidder without his consent. Anybody who’s ever been part of a shareholder agreement will imm...

Attending DevCon restores one’s faith in humanity: most if not all people I met and spoke with work in earnest and with best intent on stuff they believe will help make the world a better place.

A: Hola Bob, it’s been a while! B: Hi Alice! Sheesh, last time we chatted may have been in Gödel, Escher, Bach? A: I am still smarting that we didn’t feature in GEB! Hofstadter used Achilles and the Tortoise remember, and added Crab and Sloth later in the dialogues. But we go back way further Bob, to 1978 when Rivest, Shamir, and Adleman's cast us for the first time in "A method for obtaining digital signatures and public-key cryptosystems”1 B: You’re right of course! What’s kept you most bus...

Lady Roosevelt apocryphally said that “Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people” but she reportedly relished the occasional good gossip herself.Nothing like some good old gossPresumably, Laura Shin’s recent book The Cryptopians: Idealism, Greed, Lies, and the Making of the First Big Cryptocurrency Craze will have been read by many a great mind who stood at the cradle of Ethereum or who have joined the community since. However it contributes disappoin...