World is full of smart and inspired people. Internet enables them to reach ever growing audiences and impact the world in new ways. They certainly have impacted my life and worldview.
My thanks to Marc Andreessen, Steve Blank, Andrew Chen, Sangeet Paul Choudary, Jason Cohen, Neil Davidson, Seth Godin, Ben Horowitz, Babak Nivi, Naval Ravikant, Joel Spolsky, Mark Suster, Chris Vargas and so many others.
In my very first blog post I mentioned that there are other people attempting to build something similar to UTU. I was not very worried as these competitors were not gaining much traction and my plans were to build something quite different.
Now more serious competition has arrived. They have connections, succesfull people, investment money and publicity. They took the classic Ripple, mixed it with Bitcoin and created new Ripple.
I was quite worried for a while. After more detailed study it seems things are not so bad after all. The guys running new Ripple are eminently clever and their overall philosophy matches my thinking very well. Their focus and approach is however quite different from what I am thinking and implementing.
It’s nice to have some pressure driving me forward again. Let’s see how well UTU shall compare against reforged Ripple approach. 🙂
This book is about role of luck and judgement in decision making. There are quite interesting nuggets within, especially regarding studies on human psychology and risk. Still I felt the book to be 95% boring 🙂
Ten years ago I started working with World in a Box, a small software development practice based in Southern Finland. This company makes software for engineers and scientists. Over the years I have worked with WIAB in various roles and capacity.
One software we created is called TreeCreeper. This software was designed with Carlo Ricotta and is used to study certain theories in plant ecology. Annali di Botanica has now published a research paper on TreeCreeper. I am proud to be listed as an author.
There has been a rather long delay with UTU. Late last year was asked to do some high-priority work on other tracks. My UTU plans and value proposition also seemed stuck somehow, and I felt unable to continue meaningfully onward.
Thus I have been concentrating on other tracks for the past few months.
After this long hiatus my inspriration seems to be returning. The UTU track is now officially restarted and continuing onwards.
Our current troubles with banks and economy are nothing new. It’s the same cycle happening again and again. We just do not realize this as the cycle takes so long.
Some visionary men have seen past the limitations of present and envisioned a different future. Abraham Lincoln was such a man.
The privilege of creating and issuing money is not only the supreme prerogative of government, but it is the governments’s greatest creative opportunity. The people can and will be furnished with a currency as safe as their own government. Money will cease to be the master and become the servant of humanity. Democracy will rise superior to the money power.
Senate document 23, Page 91. 1865
This resonates with me strongly. I believe Lincoln was fundamentally right, but my take on this is somewhat different. I believe people have the right to enjoy these privileges directly. My key take-away from Lincoln and his quote is this:
Remaking money is our greatest creative opportunity
I have been discussing the UTU idea with several persons. One such person is David F. Heathfield, an academic economist and author. David recommended me to read a book called Grip of Death.
This book is difficult. Very difficult. Many of the basic premises and facts feel strange & wrong. I believe some of them actually are wrong or somewhat miss the mark. But many do not.
One can gain much better understanding of modern economy, our money supply and historical context by reading this book. Some chapters of the book are absolutely fabulous. I especially liked chapters on Abraham Lincoln and C.H Douglas. But some aspects of this book still feel incorrect and quite mistaken to me.
Read this book if you want to understand how strange a creature our money actually is.
Now I know how Valve designed the “incident room” in the original Half-Life game. This is Z Machine at Sandia National Laboratories.
Eighteen million amperes. Two billion degrees. Components moving and colliding at orbital velocities.Enough said.
Standford has excellent online presentations for enterpreneurs. One of the presenters is Olivia Cabane Fox. Her presentation was good and I decided to buy her book.
This book is excellent. One of best books of this type I have ever seen. Some might think that book teaches manipulation skills, but that is not true. This book enables you to better understand yourself and make yourself understood by others.
I still feel really novice on all communication and charisma aspects. Hopefully I am slowly getting better. Let’s see how far this can go.
All posts in this site have header images. There do I get them? Who knows, but I certainly am not always properly attributing the artists and copyright owners.
If you have copyright to any of these images and want me to either properly refer you or remove the art, please drop me an email. I will remove any offending content on request. Honest.