Image NFTs were web3's porn moment - the "low culture" thing that actually drove adoption and got normies using self-custody wallets for first time in their life. massive opportunity we completely wasted. View quoted note →

I'm not a fan of more and more browsers - but I'm bullish on this one. It's time to make p2p and distributed storage first-class citizen in the browser. Brave tried it maybe too early, and then got enshitified. The source code is not even released yet, it's early days, but team and roadmap sounds very promising and I really hope they make it work

Freedom

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It's interesting how the creators of the *multi-platform* social client @Openvibe disappeared from Nostr. The last activity I see from the team is in August.. I am more and more convinced that bridging and connecting different protocols in the social sphere doesn't work very well. Why? Maintenance becomes exponential - Every protocol has its own update cycles and breaking changes. You're not building one client - you're building several. When one protocol changes, everything breaks. Lowest common denominator - To work everywhere, bridges strip out what makes each protocol unique. Nostr's zaps, Mastodon's content warnings, Bluesky's feeds - all lost in translation. Users get a watered-down experience. Identity doesn't translate - Nostr keypairs, ActivityPub domains, and AT Protocol DIDs are fundamentally incompatible. Bridges create confusing mapping layers instead of real unification. Culture clash - Each protocol has its own norms and expectations. Bridges create an awkward middle ground where nobody feels at home.

a new browser built specifically for the decentralized web, with local nodes for IPFS and Swarm. Very nice! 👏

Freedom Browser

Introducing Freedom

Freedom is a minimalist browser for the decentralized web, connecting directly to Swarm and IPFS without centralized gateways.

"What begins as progress can quietly become dependency"

"In the end, replicating human perception is hard, and it’s made harder when constrained to the limitations of display technology or printed images. There’s nothing wrong with tweaking the image when the automated algorithms make the wrong call."

What an unprocessed photo looks like: (Maurycy's blog)

I'm curious to see how OpenGrowBox project will improve during 2026, roadmap looks very nice. Home Assistant is an ideal platform for building a smart growbox, I use it myself, playing with sensors is quite fun.

OpenGrowBox

Smart Grow Automation for Home Assistant – Free & Open Source | OpenGrowBox

Automate your indoor grow with OpenGrowBox – free Home Assistant integration for climate, lighting & VPD control. No subscription. Start free.

I've read 1/3 of "Farewell to Westphalia" so far, but I like it... It seems like the book defines something that I've always missed in crypto discourse (and especially in the bitcoin discourse), and that is the emphasis on how blockchain can transform human governance, and how to make nation states obsolete. Compared to Network State, this sounds more anarchistic and questions the essence of the state itself (even the "network" one). But as I say, I haven't finished reading yet... But sounds very promising

Also, while I'm talking about privacy and blockchain data, it's also worth mentioning https://rotki.com, open-source tool for portfolio tracking which supports DeFi protocols (alternative for Zerion, Zapper, Debank etc.)

One of my favorite Ethereum projects is https://trueblocks.io/, which provides a user-friendly and private way to access transactions and data, especially useful if you have your own node. It's a big disappointment to me how almost no one in the eth ecosystem cares about the dependency on etherscan.io and other centralized data providers.

“Time is a drug. Too much of it kills you.” ― Terry Pratchett, Small Gods

Happy NYE