Recently, Simon Morris, a long-time BitTorrent exec, wrote a provocative series of posts on the nature of decentralization, in the wake of BitTorrent Inc’s acquisition by TRON. They are relatively short and a good read:

1. Why BitTorrent Mattered — Bittorrent Lessons for Crypto
2. If you’re not Breaking Rules you’re Doing it Wrong
3. Intent, Complexity and the Governance Paradox
4. Decentralized Disruption — Who Dares Wins?

There are decades’ worth of experience here, which are absolutely relevant for anyone and everyone working in the area of cryptocurrencies, cryptonetworks, and decentralized computing today.

In the second post in the series, Simon makes the argument that the killer feature of decentralized systems is rule-breaking:

“While a decentralized architecture can be effective at routing around a variety of different failures in a network, the type of decentralization that was achieved by Bittorrent (and by Bitcoin for that matter) has enabled routing around rules.”

While there is undoubtedly a strong dose of truth here, I think it is a dangerous place to stop. There is already a narrative that cryptocurrencies and decentralized systems are for pirates and criminals, but if we focus on that alone, we risk missing the more important characteristics and properties of decentralized systems. It’s a little bit like saying the original internet is only good for porn and copyright infringement, and stopping there.

For today, let’s focus on one key aspect of decentralized systems — a characteristic that was fundamental to the creation of the original internet protocols: resilience.

I like this definition of resilience: “an ability to recover from or adjust easily to misfortune or change”.

For example: decentralized mesh networking is resilient to centralized telecommunications going offline in the case of a disaster (as happened in NYC during Superstorm Sandy). USV portfolio company goTenna was founded out of the Sandy experience, and now serves a wide customer base of first responders, law enforcement and military who desperately need communications that are resilient to traditional network failure.

Or, decentralized HTTP/DNS (e.g., IPFS) which is resilient to infrastructure failure and censorship, as demonstrated by IPFS’s republishing of wikipedia in Turkey during internet censorship there. IPFS, generally, is a major improvement to content addressing on the web, adding substantial resilience by detaching physical location from the logical address of content.

Or, a simple example that Joel typically uses: the Bitcoin network has had 100% uptime for 10 years.

These are real, important properties. Remember, the original internet protocols were designed so that the network could withstand nuclear and other major attacks. Many centralized systems trade convenience for fragility, and resilience is a real, valuable property.

Coming up, I’ll look at other important properties of decentralized systems: platform risk, security, and innovation.

I am in Hong Kong this week for Blockstack‘s Decentralizing the World Tour (more on that in a forthcoming post). I arrived yesterday and have been exploring the city a bit.

The first observation is how awful the air quality is. Holy cow. This report from Plume Labs (snapshot from the time when I took this above photo of the skyline) tells the story:

While the air quality has made it a bit difficult to get around (no views, but more importantly, you just start to feel sick after a while), something else here has made it tremendously easy to get around: the Octopus Card.

The Octopus Card is a reusable, contactless smart card used for payments throughout Hong Kong, which most importantly works for nearly all modes of transportation. Yesterday, I traveled by high-speed train, subway, streetcar, bus, tram and ferry, and used my Octopus Card to pay every time (it also works in some, but not all, taxis).

It is hard to overstate how much of a convenience this is, especially to a visitor to a foreign city. I traveled by seven different modes of public transportation yesterday, and had zero cognitive overhead trying to figure out tickets, rates, etc. It is really liberating and makes exploring a new city so easy and so much fun.

Similar systems exist in other cities (Oyster Card in London, UPass in Seoul). It really makes the city so much more accessible, both for residents and for tourists.

Experiencing infrastructure like this makes me realize how broken and unusable most of the US equivalents are. Imagine if you could pay for a train, subway, bike, and ferry in NYC using one system? It is a shame we can’t make investments like that work (by and large) — the closest is perhaps EZPass, which in the American tradition works for cars.

USV’s book club book for this month is Drug Dealer, MD, by Dr. Anna Lembke, Director of Addiction Medicine at Stanford Hospital – so we have spent a bunch of time recently talking about addiction.

It is not a stretch to hypothesize that we, as a society, are at a moment of heightened addiction, generally speaking. Binging on Netflix, checking phones constantly for emails and “likes”, playing Fortnite, vaping, pills, etc. There are a lot of forces pulling us towards a pattern of repeated short-term, immediate “highs”.

I worry about all of these forms of addiction, particularly for my kids, who are just entering the “danger zone” where the combination of access to things and social pressure starts to cause problems — for example, what’s happening with vaping, starting in middle school, is surprisingly powerful and terrifying.

Naomi, who proposed the book, invited Dr. Lembke to join us yesterday for our discussion, which was fantastic. In addition to talking in depth about the causes and treatments for opioid addiction, we spent some time talking about digital addiction — screens, games, etc.

I cannot at all claim that I am good when it comes to managing screen addiction, but we have done a few things around our house that I think are helpful, so I thought I would mention them here.

1/ No devices in the bedroom — no phones, computers, or TV allowed. I charge my phone on a dresser across the room from the bed. This serves double duty of forcing me to get out of bed to turn off the alarm.

2/ Meditation. Meditation seems to me to be the most obvious antidote and counter-force to addictions of all kind. For this reason it doesn’t surprise me at all that it is surging in popularity right now. Meditation not only focuses the mind, helping to shed the the static, but it also helps build that muscle to resist the moment-to-moment impulses that are so common with digital addiction.

3/ Physical activities. As much as I can, I try to engage in completely “analog” physical activities, especially with my kids. Sports (playing, coaching), projects in and around the house. Skiing, while expensive and hard to do a lot, is probably my favorite, as it’s really an extended digital vacation.

4/ Read physical books. Whether I’m reading before bed, or reading in the living room around my family, I try to read in print form. Or, worst case, if I am reading something digital around my family, I prefer to do it on a tablet rather than my phone — this is a subtle difference but I think it really does change the social dynamic (you are more “there” and others can see what you’re doing).

Zach was telling me yesterday that he sometimes does “no social media Saturdays”, which I like. I don’t do that formally, but I definitely do orient my weekends around non-digital activities as much as possible.

One area I would like to work on is not keeping my phone with me when I’m in the house, especially when I am with the family. I often keep the phone plugged in and charging in the kitchen, which helps, but is not 100% the norm.

I am also trying to do this without making a lot of rules for the kids around screen time. I prefer to get them to enjoy non-digital activities, rather than hold out screen time as some sort of prize if they abstain for long enough.

As anyone who has dealt first-hand with addiction knows, it is an awful thing, that can destroy people, relationships and families. So given that there is so much ambient opportunity for it these days, I think it’s really important to try and be proactive around it.

Debt is a complicated subject. On the one hand, it is empowering — it lets you get a quick start on something, and lets you do things that would not be possible otherwise. There are times when it is useful, necessary, and unavoidable.

I think about “debt” in the broadest possible terms: times when you are left “owing somebody” (including yourself) for something. My inbox is in a state of debt right now. The pile of unsubmitted medical bills on my desk is debt. Duct tape & bubble gum holding up v0.1 of an app is debt. Friends or family you haven’t called in a while is debt. Not to mention financial debt, which comes in many flavors.

I am actually a fan of incurring “technical debt”, especially in the early days of a project, when you are iterating quickly and you are not yet sure what the long-term architecture of your product should be. I think a “get something up and running quickly” attitude is often best. So taking on this kind of debt early is a strategic choice that if, done well, can actually save you time and/or money in the long run.

The challenge with debt, of course, is paying it down.

It seems as though one of the characteristics of debt is that you overestimate the short-term benefit and underestimate the long-term cost. The result being that it’s easy for things to get out of control, slowly and then quickly. This article on the nature of a “debt spiral” covers it well.

I always think about paying down debt at the end of the year, as it feels like a time to try and get the house in order and work on a fresh start on the new year. I don’t like “rolling over” debts (at least the kind I can really control in the short-term) into the new year. So I am doing my best to grind through and catch up on things now.

But better than getting in debt, and then getting out of it, is figuring out how to stay ahead of it. And again, I don’t just mean financial but in every way. Replying to an email before someone pings you with a reminder. Checking in on a friend or family member without them asking. Dealing with bills and expenses as they come in. Or even better, building capital: write a blog post, build v2 of that app, publish that presentation, make the budget, contribute to your savings or 401k. Proactively paying ahead.

Easier said than done, like most things.

For the past week or so, I have been experimenting with the Pixel Slate, Google’s new hybrid tablet/laptop. Here is me typing this blog post right now, on the train to NYC.

For a longer, more technical analysis, this review from The Verge is good.

The Pixel Slate is an odd machine, and I am still trying to figure out how to use it, and then, whether I like it or not. The heart of the oddness is that it is really equal parts laptop and tablet — when the keyboard is attached it feels and acts like any other Chromebook. And with the keyboard detached, it feels like an Android tablet — actually running mobile apps from the Google Play store. (I didn’t realize this until now, but apparently this is also true for other new Chromebooks)

It is the back and forth between tablet mode and laptop mode that is odd, and requires a fair amount of cognitive overhead. Like, for reading email should I use Gmail in Chrome or use the Gmail app? Same goes for all other apps — you have to make about which experience you want, when, and then adjust accordingly. Often times this means multiple apps doing the same thing simultaneously (or more specifically, a Chrome web version and a mobile app version).

But to take a step back: what got me interested in the slate was exactly this mix of form factors:

For example, for long-form reading, I like tablet-mode, where I can get full focus on the content, and page through with my finger (like reading a newspaper on my lap). Same goes for short-form emailing. Basically, I like the addition of this “lean back” mode that the tablet form factor gets you.

And then, in “laptop mode”, you want the experience of, well, a laptop. High fidelity interaction with emails, docs and websites. The slate does all of that basically fine, though the major question is the keyboard. I am currently using the Google Pixel Slate Keyboard, which is a floppy, folio-style magnet-attached model. The key and trackpad action are surprisingly good, but the dynamics around folding and holding the keyboard take a little getting used to — the attachment is floppy, and the magnetized folding holder on the back takes up additional space. Another option is the Brydge keyboard, which intends to deliver more of a “laptop feel” when using it in laptop mode — I am curious here about both the key action and the quality of the Bluetooth connectivity.

Another nice feature of the tablet+laptop is fingerprint unlock — this is what you’d expect from a phone or tablet, but don’t normally see on a laptop. It’s a nice convenience.

So, I would say the jury is still out. The real questions are whether “tablet mode” and the fingerprint unlock are worth the overall cognitive load of a device that’s neither entirely here nor there.