All Models Are Wrong

Latest Episodes:

Free Market Friends with Naomi Oba Aug 01, 2025

Show notes

About a month ago I spoke at Dappcon about Solidarity Primitives we've been building at Bread Cooperative. Before my talk, Naomi Oba gave her own wonderful presentation titled Crypto Culture and its Discontents that unknowingly set the stage quite well for mine so I had to ask her on the podcast.

We discussed the issues with crypto culture including obsession with quantification and financialization, and how to feel emotions instead. Naomi also helped write the Sapphire Punk manifesto, an exploration of a post-cypherpunk politics that reject the extreme individualism rooted in the original cypherpunk movement.

"All that is solid turns into data points." - Engels probably if he was still around

This is also the first episode that is sponsored by NYM, the world's most private VPN. Unlike traditional VPNs, Nym uses a decentralized mixnet to scramble your internet data — hiding who you're talking to, when, and how often. You can switch between full mixnet mode for maximum anonymity, or a faster VPN mode for everyday use.

Use the code blockchainsocialist when signing up and get an extra month!

If you liked the podcast be sure to give it a review on your preferred podcast platform. If you find content like this important consider donating to my Patreon starting at just $3 per month. It takes quite a lot of my time and resources so any amount helps. Follow me on Twitter (@TBSocialist) or Mastodon (@theblockchainsocialist@social.coop) and join the r/CryptoLeftists subreddit and Discord to join the discussion.

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Holonym: Digital Identity without Scanning your Eyeballs May 24, 2025

Show notes

They say on the internet no one knows you're a dog but this has created a digital space that is dominated by more bots than humans and crypto space that is easily sybil attacked. Worldcoin, a project led by Sam Altman, is purporting to tackle this issue as AI (ironic?) proliferates content by scanning our eyeballs into an orb that they totally aren't taking your data from! Personally I don't trust them.
So I spoke to Shady El Damaty, co-founder and CEO of Holonym Foundation which is building human.tech, a suite of different identity solutions that protect user privacy using zero-knowledge proofs. We spoke about how it all works and the implications of people having control of their identities online.
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Blockchain Governance: North Korea, Tornado Cash, and Trust May 04, 2025

Show notes

How can digital cash truly be “trustless”? What does it mean that blockchain offers a new paradigm of the “rule of code”? How are decisions made when a blockchain system faces an emergency, and who gets to make those decisions?

I spoke to Wessel Reijers and Morshed Mannan, both great thinkers and recent authors of the book Blockchain Governance(by Primavera De Filippi, Wessel Reijers and Morshed Mannan).

We discussed the history of the legal and philosophical implications that blockchains have brought with them. From the Tornado Cash ruling, North Korean mega hacks, and rethinking of property relations, there was a whole lot to talk about.

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What is the REAL value of crypto tokens with Vasily Sumanov Apr 14, 2025

Show notes

How in the world is anyone meant to derive the "real" value of a crypto token? Especially in THIS market??

I spoke to Vasily Sumanov, founder of Valueverse and inventor of the Token Value Capture Mechanism Framework to share how he sees it. Valueverse is a utility-centric token tracker that helps you understand the demand-side pressures for token value. Part of the neoliberal ideological turn which has also continued into crypto token releases is an over-focus on supply side economics (problematic).

We discussed token engineering as a discipline in need of an improvement, the most common mistakes people make when designing tokens, and how the VCM framework helps cut through the noise. While I'm no crypto trader and I suspect some may be surprised by an episode like this from me, I do believe that the framework is incredibly useful.

I was also very impressed by the page published by Valueverse of BREAD, the post-capitalist token for Breadchain Cooperative which I co-founded. The page is super useful for people to understand the tokenomics behind the project.

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How to Stake ETH with your friends with Thomas Heremans (Obol) Apr 06, 2025

Show notes

I spoke to Thomas Heremans, CEO of the Obol Association. Obol is an ecosystem for trust minimized Ethereum staking that enables distributed validators (DVs) across a cluster of nodes in order to improve resilience as compared to running a validator on a single node. Previously I spoke to Osín Kyne, the CTO of Obol Network and they had plenty of updates since last time.

Thomas gave us a refresher on what DVs are and what they can enable, some success stories of how communities have funded themselves with Obol DVs and what the future looks like for Obol. They also announced the Obol Incentives Program where you can earn OBOL tokens for staking on distributed validators.

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How to Run an Election without the State with Vocdoni Mar 26, 2025

Show notes

I spoke to Ferran Reyes and Pau Escrich, co-founders of Vocdoni, a blockchain based voting protocol used by several non-web3 organizations. They were born out of the Catalan independence movement in Spain from which they have designed Vocdoni to be censorship resistant and friendly to your average non-web3 user.

During the episode we discussed some of the elections where Vocdoni was used, the cryptographic primitives that make it all possible and the learnings they have had in their journey so far. We also discussed DAVINCI, their latest evolution of the Vocdoni voting protocol.

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Conviction Voting for 24/7 Democracy with Paul Glavin Mar 12, 2025

Show notes

I spoke with Paul Glavin, contributor to 1Hive and founder of Gardens v2, a platform for communities to manage assets democratically using conviction voting. 1Hive was one of the first projects in the crypto space to explore alternative governance mechanisms on Gnosis Chain which is the chain where we've build Breadchain Cooperative.

We discussed what conviction voting is, how to better fund public goods in crypto with it and the learnings so far. I also wrote about conviction voting and 1Hive in my book Blockchain Radicals if you want to learn more about innovative voting mechanisms in crypto.

Breadchain also has two ongoing conviction voting proposals in the 1Hive Gardens to increase BREAD adoption. If you have HNY we hope you'll consider delegating to our proposals! You can get HNY on any DEX with Gnosis Chain.

BREAD x HNY Liquidity Pool

Add BREAD to 1Hive Treasury

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How to Build Community in Crypto with Beth McCarthy Feb 25, 2025

Show notes

While at Devcon 2024 I spoke to Beth McCarthy, program director of Funding the Commons which I also spoke at in Bangkok about our progress on building on-chain post-capitalism with Breadchain Cooperative. Beth is also my co-author for the Katabasis crypto science fiction series and we spoke together at Devcon about the meme power of capital and why it's bad.

We discussed Beth's suggestions for building community when things are so online, the importance of in-person events, and her experience of being up close and personal with many of the previous phases of crypto.

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All my friends hate Google Docs with Andreas Tsamados Feb 17, 2025

Show notes

While at Devcon 2024 I spoke to Andreas Tsamados, cofounder of Fileverse and anime gif connoisseur. I highly recommend trying out ddocs.new as a decentralized alternative to google docs.

We spoke about the issue of radical communities using google docs, the importance of decentralized and censorship resistance knowledge sharing systems, and how this is all possible on Fileverse.

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Alternatives to VC, Digital Governance and Public AI with Josh Tan Feb 09, 2025

Show notes

While at Devcon 2024 I spoke to Josh Tan, the founder of Metagov, a laboratory for digital governance and lead of DAOstar, a DAO standards body (that I have also been doing some work with as well).

We spoke about making democracy just as available as autocracy in digital systems, making alternatives to venture capital, and AI as collective intelligence. We also spoke a bit about the DAOIP-5 web3 grants metadata standard that I've been helping DAOstar with.

If you want to listen to my review of Devcon 2024, check it out here.

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