Posts on degen storyteller

Disclaimer About Jumping to Conclusions

Thu, 27 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I mainly write here with the goal of sharing something useful.
Things I learned along the way, things I thought about, again and again, in fleeting moments of clarity.

I need to warn you about something though. People have been consistently jumping to wrong conclusions about what I think or how I think, after reading some of my texts and stories.

If you have a question or want to know my POV about some specific topics, the easiest way is to just ask me directly. I will try to deliver a useful answer. Just keep in mind that any communication is across the filters of language, background and perception.

Books

Sun, 26 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

A list of random books I found interesting, in no particular order.
When the book is part of a series, the rest of the series is also included.
These are just the ones on top of my mind now, more coming soon.

Fiction

Reverend Insanity - 蛊真人 (Gǔ Zhēnrén)
The Fifth Season - N. K. Jemisin
Who Fears Death - Nnedi Okorafor
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
The Three-Body Problem - 刘慈欣 (Liú Cíxīn)
The Final Empire - Brandon Sanderson

Non-fiction

Ainsi on a assassiné tous les Mosé - Tintinga Frédéric Pacéré
Guns, Germs, and Steel - Jared Diamond
The Purple Cow - Seth Godin
Atomic Habits - James Clear
Emotional First Aid - Guy Winch

Divinations of Monerokon - The supernodes are singing

Sat, 28 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Did you know that there are 14 supernodes that form the beating heart of Monero’s network?
Listen closely and you will hear their tune.
Can you hear it?
As soon as you get your node online, they are never very far away.
Look at your friends, look at the friends of your friends. You have already found a few of them!

Watch! They sing sweet, and most importantly, they open their ears and listen to the songs of so many of their friends.
Without tiring, time and time again, they meet new friends and let those new friends start singing, joining the chorale.

Monero Is for Communists

Fri, 30 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Monero is for capitalists,

Monero is for the oppressed,

Monero is for the oppressors,

Monero is for the little people,

Monero is for the kings,

…

Monero is peer-to-peer digital cash.

Monero Means Money

Context: post by @BawdyAnarchist_ and Anti Moonboy’s summary

I used to think that the BTC security model is in trouble, I was so wrong! /s

Fri, 04 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

An overview of how it works first. On BTC, miners work to create blocks using a proof of work. The miners keep each other in check so that if some tiny miner decides to produce bad blocks, the rest of the network will just ignore the rogue miner.

The trouble is that when the majority of the network becomes rogue, and you can have a 51% attack.

What could a 51% attack look like?

The beast of the coffers

Tue, 06 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Once upon a time, there was a beautiful island called Degendaland. On the island lived little people ruled by a king, and the king had a formidable magician. Every time the king desired, he would ask the magician to make him pieces of money to spend, and the magician would immediately make them for the king.
The king really liked the power of the magician. With this power, he could pay for everything he wanted, without even having to make people give their pieces of money to be put in his coffers as tax.
Every time he felt like it, he could give pieces of money to the biscuit sellers in exchange for his favorite biscuits. The biscuit sellers from all the islands liked exchanging their biscuits for the king’s pieces of money. They would later exchange the money for the fish or the great houses of the island.
Every time he felt like it, the king could also play and practice his gambling skills. Sometimes he would play and win, that would make him quite happy, and he would talk about it all day long. Sometimes he would play and lose, he did not like that, but it wasn’t too big an issue, the magician would make up the missing pieces of money in his coffers.

The ships of spice-money are empty

Sat, 14 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Once upon a time, there was a beautiful island called Degendaland. On the island lived little people ruled by a mighty king, and the king had a terrific magician.
The magician was able to create any amount of pieces of money that the king desired.

Some years the king would make the magician create very few new pieces of money, just a few to replace the ones lost at sea or that children had dropped in the wells of the island.
Other years, the king would make the magician create way too many new pieces of money, and he would spend them. The new pieces of money would slowly travel the island, from the king’s personal shoppers to the shoppers’ suppliers, from the suppliers to the suppliers’ providers, etc. Slowly, from hand to hand and from shop to shop, everyone would have more pieces of money to buy the same houses and other stuff, so everyone could bid more pieces of money to buy the same thing, and in the end everyone needed to spend more pieces of money to buy things than before. This side effect had the tendency to upset the little people, and the king wanted a way out of that.

Little Degen and Mister Fiat

Sat, 12 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Once upon a time, there was a beautiful island called Degendaland. On Degendaland there were little people living their little people lives in their 1000 great houses, and the 1000 great houses were all the greatest treasure of the little people.

Degen play, amateur mode

Little Degen was one of them. He sometimes liked to play with some of his pieces of money, trading up or trading down, depending on his intuition. He wasn’t too bad at it, he even knew the ancient magic: “Buy low, sell high”.
Sometimes he played and won. He was happy to party with his friends to celebrate when that happened. Sometimes he played and lost, there was no party with friends those times.
One day he went in with a 100x leverage on his game. He wasn’t careful and started loosing his bet. He was pretty sure of his bet though, he tried adding some money to his bet by borrowing from a few friends. Unfortunately it just wasn’t his day, he lost the bet and went back to work after that.

The killer app of crypto

Fri, 04 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The first time I heard of crypto and bitcoin was in 2016. It was all the hype in the local tech community, people were excited about it, talking about peer-to-peer payments without a bank, a new form of money, something that will change the world, etc

I got curious and decided to really research the topic, understand what bitcoin is, how it works and find out if this was just another ponzi-style scam based on hype and new people buying it or if there really was something behind it.