gwilym

since June 2017, i've written +2,200 articles and ~1.3 million words in crypto honestly i just love writing, always have, and i love explaining interesting overlooked things as if to friends; not a single one of all those words felt like work to me in the traditional sense so if my future self appeared to me the day after i found Ethereum and said: "You will have written many books' worth in this field in 10 years' time," i wouldn't have been surprised but one goal of mine is to start upping my industriousness in my personal creative writings, too i went to school for creative writing, i love reading fiction, and i write fiction routinely in my free time; yet i have faced two problems: 1) i let perfect be the enemy of the good 2) i've been a Gardener (running with an idea and spontaneously seeing where it goes) and not an Architect (plotting out stories meticulously top to bottom) these dynamics have led me to writing lots of great starts to stories that (a) i end up not finishing and that (b) only my eyes have seen so it has felt a little weird to consider myself a creative writer when i have nothing to show for it (to be sure, i know i am, that springs from me firstly, but js) for 2026 i decided, what if i try accepting "good" instead of perfect, and what if i try embracing more of the Architect approach than the Gardener approach i would rather get stuff out there and have some people enjoy it than produce nothing while trying too hard this brings me 'round to The Bell Station two weeks ago i set out to create a minimum viable story to prove to myself that i could actually finish something without stymying myself the challenge was that this story had to be a complete narrative unit from start to finish, with character arcs, no plot holes, etc. it didn't have to be perfect, but the goal was to avoid any major flaws; love it or hate it, it would be a functional story a few things i had in mind out of the gate: 1) i wanted to use a tight economy of language like is seen in fables and folktales (inspired by Calvino's "Quickness" concept); both for smoothness for readers and simpler writing for me 2) i wanted to riff on the "Alice and Bob" cryptography meme somehow, which is an idea i've kicked around before; something about how Alice wants to communicate with Bob but can't do so clearly or etc. 3) i wanted the narrative to be absurd/ambiguous as inspired by the works of Kafka/Samuel Beckett 4) i wanted to use Claude to help me go Architect and plot out all my ideas neatly beforehand to correct for my Gardening ways 5) i wanted to aim for ~7,500 words, the technical range of a novelette, to show myself i could do something longer than a traditional short story the combination of these ideas came together and with the planning and vision all set out beforehand, i was able to finish the story, which i've named The Bell Station, this week the Alice and Bob seed evolved into the characters Auscel and Burnmot, and their communication problem transformed into a matter of memory and metaphysics and the emergent thing that came out of the writing was multiplicity; the story can be read on a sci-fi level, or on a purgatorial allegorical level, or beyond, which i didn't expect beforehand but worked in as i went so now i'm happy to share with you the finished result below, i hope you enjoy is it my best creative work? no, it won't prove to be, but it's my first main longform work i'm putting out there, and so i can only get better from here. it's good maybe, it doesn't have to be perfect, and that's fine i plan to keep the momentum going, and i've already begun work on my next story, which i'm calling "For Magic Eyes Only"; like how The Bell Station stemmed from the Alice and Bob meme, this new one is going to stem from the Byzantine Generals' problem but similarly become this entirely new weird thing thanks for reading, i'll share this second story asap so expect it relatively soon (2-3 weeks optimistically but maybe longer, we'll see) p.s. if you have any questions/feedback/etc. on The Bell Station, don't be shy

meta couldn’t pull the plug on the metaverse because at least ten people are still trapped there and nobody knows how to get them out

Just cracked the source code of two 2015 DAOs by Avsa from the Ethereum Foundation. One held 100,000 MistCoin for 7 years and was attacked in 2022. 👀 The other led innovation and processed 5,467 $ETH in bounties. Both are now reconstructed, byte by byte. 🧵

There's a passage in Gravity's Rainbow where Pynchon talks about how even during wartime all sorts of economic exchanges between waring nations continued because capital had needs that were separate from national agendas.

the slop is coming from inside the house

As someone who worked at Reality Labs: the Metaverse had real legs but was obliterated by middle management completely out of touch with how young people actually use technology. I built a V1 tool that game developers genuinely needed, and the moment it was done, it got shipped to a team in London (to die), and I was reassigned to a "higher-priority project" that zero developers asked for. Multiply that by every team, and you'll understand why this never took off yet cost 80 billion.

It's official: "onchain" not "on-chain" Footnote 1 from SEC guidance yesterday

some of my outputs from this morning's tests

We must fund independent and original thought. Literary magazines have a sustainability problem as old as literary magazines themselves. Writers often don't get paid. Outlets run on volunteer labor. The cultural infrastructure that gave us Modernism, the Beats, and punk zines still can't fund itself. WMP sketches a concrete design for what an Ethereum-native solution could actually look like: - A stablecoin vault adapted from Bread Cooperative's BREAD crowdstaking model. Patrons deposit, only the yield funds operations, underlying deposits are always withdrawable - Writer payments streamed in real-time via Sablier, with lump-sum distributions via Splits - Semi-anonymous payment routing through RAILGUN so writers can receive funds without doxxing their addresses - Quarterly issues deployed as mintable NFTs on Manifold for supplemental revenue The math is modest but real. $100K in deposits at 6% APY = $600/writer/year for a 10-person cohort. More than many lit mags pay today. And it scales linearly with deposits. Connects directly to Vitalik's "sanctuary tech" framing — Ethereum providing sustainability infrastructure for considering ideas that need independence above all else.

[explaining the baghavad gita to a16z] so it’s kind of like a podcast, but they’re on a chariot

The Dao that can be spoken is not the eternal Dao.

🚨BREAKING: onchain collectibles are not securities.

Etherboard (2015) seems to have a bug. setPixelBlock lets you set per-pixel prices but checks msg.value globally, not per pixel. You could send 0.005 ETH with 100 pixels priced at 0. 100 pixels for the cost of one. No upgrade function and not patchable.

ephemeral DAOs are important many people are saying this

Introducing Swapboard. A no-frills, 0% fee, peer-to-peer OTC bulletin board for trading any ERC20 on Ethereum. Audited and immutable. No admin rights. Frontend only. Built the ECF way, with credibly neutral tools for the real Ethereum ecosystem. swap.ethcf.org

it's not a two faced janus, it's a descent into dante's circles of hell. it started with woz in limbo, and jobs brought us to circle 2 (Lust). with thiel we are currently in circle 5 (Anger) but it's not long before we enter circle 6 (Heresy) and i take some small comfort in that

It's really too bad we're ruled now by people with no culture. Just for one example, Cicero wrote an entire book to cope with the grief of losing his daughter. Or read Napoleon's letters. He absolutely stewed over Josephine.

“great men of history had little to no introspection” bro literally what