2025-06-26: Guts, Teams, and Dumb Questions
(If you work at FF/FFDW 🄽 links will send you to a local, editable page in the Filecoin Foundation Notion. If you are in the Filecoin ecosystem, you may be able to join the #monologue-danny Slack channel where I answer questions, take meeting bookings, talk to myself and the other voices in my head. In the glorious decentralized ocap-enabled future, such data-hoardings will be a thing of the past, but we live for now in a fallen ACL world.)
Working on:
My Stomach
“I suffered for my art; now it’s your turn” — Neil Innes. Due to the Gen X And Younger Youth Elixir, I am mostly healthy, except for curse of IBS 🄽 , which is really not something you chat with company over dinner (I think about it quite a lot after dinner, alone.) Anyway, occasionally I’m completely sidelined by its tantrums, and it took me out for many hours this week. I will never speak of this again, but blah blah invisible disabilities, blah blah look after yourself. I’m actually going to take this as a cue to renew looking for a better treatment plan for it. It’ll probably be some gut biome biohacking mysteriousness. Feel free to mail me suggestions.
Talking with Future Tech Holdings (FTH)
OK back to Filecoin. I know this monologue can sound like all I do is have random meetings with people, but they definitely turn up the best stuff. This week John Suykerbuyk 🄽 grabbed me to chat with the team at FTH 🄽. I managed to hand-wave through what FF is thinking at the moment (we published our attempts to be a bit more data-driven in at least monitoring what’s happening on the network) — and they, equally excitedly, talked about how their new superstar team is shaping up.
I think one of the issues we struggle with is that we have lots of little groups — some commercial, some public goods, some SPs, some developer-driven — but it’s not always clear what shape a viable organization should be. What mix of storage, sales, dev, and research should a group be to make some money and have a clear direction? And how do you merge together or disband if it’s not working out, without losing valuable people or duplicating effort. FTH is I think trying to be a new-shaped organization. They are definitely not short of talent, and business chops.
Thinking about:
Publicity vs Privaticity
We have a new ‘dumb questions’ session internally at FF, where people get to ask the questions that it’s hard to ask, either because you think you should know, or because there’s never time to go in deep. One deliciously meta topic we talked about this week is how do you accurately convey the flaws and conditionals about tech in our space, when a lot of communications are between organizations, and therefore lack the intimacy, informality, and confidential feel of more internal, informal, conversations. (The context was: when we promote a new feature in the Filecoiniverse, how do we find out if it is ‘ready for primetime’, experimental, or even about-to-be-imminently-deprecated). I find people in general are bluntly frank in certain contexts, while in others, they will switch into promotional mode. ChatGPT 4o, reassuringly, tells me to read Erving Goffman on this, and *The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life* has been on my reading list since forever. I also have a bunch of index cards on this topic from a few years ago when I was thinking of writing a book called “Public, Private, Secret, Alone” and even longer ago, when I spoke on the same topic at Microsoft Research. I’m either repeating myself, or this is the core challenge with organizing communication between decentralized, undifferentiated, autonomous groups.
Link du jour:
- Ethereum's 'Identity Crisis' Is What Real Decentralization Looks Like - We often use “Solana”, “Bitcoin”, and “Ethereum” as internal shorthand for different approaches to decentralization. This opinion piece by ENS’s Nick Johnson does a good job at describing and defending Ethereum’s approach.