This is the end of The Blockchain Socialist. Hi, everyone. Hi, everyone. I'm Josh. You're listening to the you're listening to The Blockchain Socialist. The Blockchain Socialist. The Blockchain You're listening to The Blockchain Socialist Podcast. After more than six years, I'm retiring The Blockchain Socialist. This isn't the end, but what I believe to be a new beginning that better fits the current moment. I started The Blockchain Socialist in 2019 as a blog, then a podcast, then a YouTube channel, then whatever else it needed to become to keep up with the conversation. The bet was simple. Blockchains were going to become increasingly important, and the left had no real framework for engaging beyond dismissal. And someone who actually understands the technology needed to make the argument that it was worth taking seriously as more than just an object of critique. I believe this ended up being true with the spread of stablecoins, prediction markets, increasing use of debanking by states, and acceptance by Wall Street. I started from my bedroom anonymously so that my managers and bosses at my very corporate job at the time wouldn't ask me about it. I had never in a million years imagined myself as someone that would have started a media outlet, let alone to have other people give a single care about what I had to say. Taking this risk allowed me to travel around the world, to speak countless times at this point, meet some of the leading thinkers in the blockchain space, and even write a book. And so here are some of the numbers in review. I published 204 podcast episodes, over 250,000 plays. I published 53 blog articles and one published book all over almost seven years. Not bad for something as niche as this and all without feeling like I had to go against my own principles or morals to grow. I I think one of the things I'm most proud of to come out of this is to go beyond just being a channel for commentary, but also creating a space for people who want to build alternatives through Bread Cooperative. One of my pet peeves over the years has been channels that criticize without a proper call to action or attempt alternatives when it's possible. So please, if you still believe in the mission of this channel, please check out what we've been building and bake some bread. We've been making some great progress lately on solidarity finance applications built on crypto rails. So why is it ending? Over my time in this space, blockchain and crypto went from novel to very loaded thought ending terms. In 2019, there wasn't much history yet in the space while already leaning to the right, hadn't calcified into the reputation it has now. Six years of scams, extraction, and bad actors later, anything adjacent to crypto causes a visceral reaction by a large segment of people.

Now anyone that isn't already steeped in it defaults to distrust until proven otherwise, if it is even possible for them to think otherwise given the amount of negative media crypto has received. The negative perceptions are clearly beyond my control as the incentives to ruin it for everyone else are too strong. The well has been thoroughly poisoned well beyond what I can fix with the micro budget that I have available to me. But big thank you to my paying subscribers on Patreon over the years. Many of the things that also drew me to the crypto space, like DAOs, are dead or dormant. While I've always been critical of the actual reality of DAOs during the peak in 2021 and 2022, it was still truly a generative space at its best. But new technology itself was never the point. It's always been about the politics around technology ownership. Blockchain was just a vessel for being able to make the argument in public at length with technical fluency that ownership of technology matters. The name instead locked me into defending a category in many people's eyes instead of pursuing the original argument I wanted to make. A few other things that have happened pushing me to make the switch. One, crypto has become the most blocked word on social media. Two, public goods funding in crypto has depleted dramatically. Three, my reach seemed to depend in large part on market sentiment of crypto, which is very ironic for what is meant to be a socialist channel. Four, I have written and wanted to produce a lot of content that I felt was forced to make about crypto whenever I didn't think it was useful to do so. Five, with assumptions based on the name, many people think I believe many things that I don't, and it's been really annoying to say the least. So I'm not retreating from crypto. I'm still building a bread cooperative and more recently at a new venture called Gas Killer. I just now think that given this new media ecosystem we're in, a new strategy is needed. One that gets people to understand the importance of this technology based on first principles. So what's next? First and foremost, I'm going to be taking a break for the next month or so. I have been putting out content every week for nearly seven years, and I was also recently in an accident. I am physically fine, but it reminded me that sometimes I need to take a break so I can refresh and come back in a more creative spirit. This has also helped give me time in preparation for the rebranded platform. I will potentially still be publishing some short form content on my YouTube channel during this break, so be sure to subscribe there. And so what will the new direction be? The idea is same format range as before, interviews, writing, view essays, whatever the argument calls for, and a broader scope. A return to something closer to my actual background in neuroscience. Some of the topics that I have in mind include AI, simply because it's impossible not to talk about it, synthetic biology, peptides, governance, cooperatives, energy, and cognitive warfare. I think a lot of what's potentially coming will be breaking a lot of the traditional political lines, and cryptography is likely gonna end up being a foundation to any real defense against potential negative effects. My politics have also not changed. I'll still be arguing that the left needs to engage with these systems directly instead of only critiquing them from the outside. The same case that I've been making since 2019, just with a name that can actually hold everything the argument now requires. So if you're curious about the name, be sure to stay tuned. Thank you for following me along for the ride so far, and I hope you'll continue sticking around with me through this journey. More coming soon.