Startup Battlefield Retrospective

Some time has passed since I got myself riled up and did a very brash thing with the Startup Battlefield 2021 Application. I wanted to put some thoughts here around it as I have found writing helps get me out of my design/development funk. Not that I am in a funk right now, but I’d like things to be a bit crisper than they are. So my feelings on the entire ordeal are a bit conflicted. Continue reading

June 2021 Status Update

Well, alright. After all the commotion of last month, I’ve been finding it quite difficult to settle down and get back into the development groove. What I find interesting is that my life is quite perfect right now for development (ala no emails, etc.), and even then it takes several days if not a full week to get me back in the zone for the 10-12 hour day slog. Naturally, such a long time-to-focus process gives me a lot of concern for when things get “busy” (ala the email train) again. Continue reading

Your Private Key Can Be Guessed

One final thought here and I’ll finish. I promise. 😁 In addition to some of the risks I outlined earlier in this article with regards to cryptocurrency, there’s one in particular that I feel needs extra mention. Namely, the private key that keeps your value safe is simply a number: a very very very large number. That conceivably means that if someone guesses that number, they have access to your wallet. Continue reading

Decentralization Is a Foreign Land

Continuing my spontaneous series here. 😁 I have been studying the decentralized space since late June 2017, so nearly four years now. If I was attending college then you could say that I am a graduate in such matters (assuming I acquired all my credits, something I failed to do in real live BUT I DIGRESS). There’s a certain quality or metric that has seemed elusive to decentralization during that time, and that is adoption. Continue reading

Startup Battlefield 2021 Application

On our last check-in, I mentioned working on some finishing features and then moving onto videos. WELLLLLLLLL as it turns out, during that time a nifty article popped up across my RSS feed that I could not archive: Deadline extended: Apply to Startup Battlefield at TC Disrupt 2021 Extended?! Not by one but by TWO weeks? I started to look at the dates and schedule, and a butterflies-in-the-belly notion started to take hold: could I possibly conceive submitting an application to the tippy-top of all tech events and jump for the improbable if not impossible? Continue reading

Publishing vs Gallery

Everyone is trying to get rich off of NFTs. To me, this is a natural extension of the blockchain culture, which emphasizes money and a get-rich (quick) mentality. I am not against this (much 😁), but it does warrant some caution. To be sure, there’s no such thing as a quick buck in life. You might get lucky, sure, but can you replicate this luck at scale? Good luck with that. Continue reading

The Blockchain is Just an Application

The blockchain is just an application. Everyone is going nuts over blockchain now that they see it can be used for commerce, despite its awkwardness and efficiency concerns. In the hysteria, the whole premise of the blockchain has taken on a bigger concept than it actually is. But let’s keep in mind that a blockchain is basically an application. It’s an application that runs on one or more computers (nodes) that comprise a network. Continue reading