A while ago I found my old wallet.dat file. I had it backed up, unencrypted on my old dropbox account. wallet.dat is a file used for Bitcoin that holds your cryptographic keys. After installing a Bitcoin client, plugging in the wallet file, followed by a few days worth of downloading the entirety of the Bitcoin blockchain, I could see that at some point in time (many years ago) I had 9 bitcoin in my wallet.

Let me try to set this up with a few headlines from the last year or so: Buckle Up for Another Facebook Election Twitter’s Permanent suspension of @realDonaldTrump Facebook and Shopify boot Trump following Capitol siege YouTube defends choice to leave up videos with false election claims Youtube’s COVID-19 medical misinformation policy Facebook says it will ban QAnon across its platforms Judge Refuses To Reinstate Parler After Amazon Shut It Down The payments mess that almost scared OnlyFans away from sex work I bet you have an opinion on each of these: good or bad?

“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” — Blaise Pascal When I first moved into a management position, I struggled. I felt everybody was bringing their problems to me now, and I had to solve them. I was still a rookie as you can tell — I still used the term “problem” instead of “challenge.” Those were the days. Ping! A question.

Writing about the detrimental effects of rewards in No More Rewards, one thing kept nagging at me. A few weeks earlier we had held a virtual conference for our company and community called MatterCon. One of the highlights for me was a video prepared by our community team. In the video they interviewed some of the top Mattermost contributors. People not employed by the company, but contributing at a purely volunteer basis.

In 2008 the world went through a severe financial crisis. A large part of our economy collapsed, in large part because financial institutions had created a pretty unsustainable system of mortgage-backed securities. It was pretty bad. Fingers were pointed; new rules put in place; people yelled at. “Oh them financial folk, they’re all the same!” we said. “They only care about the money. Evil, evil people! They will be the ruin of us all!