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#Decentralization

5 tagged essays
ai/2026-05-25
Nehemiah Had a WhitepaperFILE 00118K

Nehemiah Had a Whitepaper

On May 15, 2026, Pope Leo XIV published Magnifica Humanitas, a 38,000-word encyclical on artificial intelligence. Buried inside the Catholic Social Doctrine is a framework for decentralization that predates Bitcoin by 130 years, arrives at the same structural conclusions, and goes further than most crypto whitepapers in diagnosing what concentrated digital power actually does to people.

01 / 18K / 6 minread
politics/2026-01-28
The Philosophy of the RuptureFILE 00322K

The Philosophy of the Rupture

In 1989, Francis Fukuyama declared that liberal democracy had won, that history, understood as ideological struggle, was over. Thirty-seven years later, Jonathan Rauch argues in The Atlantic that America has a fascist president, while Mark Carney tells Davos that the rules-based international order is finished. Both are describing the same phenomenon from different angles: the collapse of an endpoint that was never as stable as advertised.

03 / 22K / 8 minread
privacy/2025-12-03
The Second Crypto War: A Private EthereumFILE 00416K

The Second Crypto War: A Private Ethereum

In 1988, Tim May predicted encrypted systems would 'alter completely the nature of government regulation.' In 1993, Eric Hughes declared 'Cypherpunks write code.' Thirty years later, developers are going to prison for doing exactly that. But something is shifting. Vitalik is building privacy wallets, Naval is calling Zcash 'insurance against Bitcoin,' and a team of physicists just launched the first fully decentralized private blockchain. The cypherpunks are fighting back.

04 / 16K / 6 minread