In Spring 2024 I went full-time in crypto with my own company, backed by about 100 veterans who wanted a real answer to centralized digital social layers. The plan was MetaWarrior Army — a platform to replace Google/Facebook/etc. end-to-end, with SSO where users authenticated with their crypto wallets and used FIDO2 keys as MFA. Governable via DAO. I built a custom OAuth solution that put crypto auth below the web and started hunting for a blockchain to launch on.

The deeper I dug, the worse it looked. The industry had been captured, wasn't scalable, or wasn't truly decentralized and uncensorable. My piggy bank was nearly empty and I was on death's door. Consensus was in town — Austin, TX — so I decided to go out with a bang and flyer-drop the conference.

This is that flyer, verbatim.

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Dear Crypto, Fuck You! 🖕

The Dream of Decentralization and Autonomy 🌌

You and I both believe in the power of decentralized technologies and its ability to empower both individuals and communities to own their destiny. A decentralized payment system allows individuals and organizations to conduct trade without the burden of trust or middlemen. A decentralized governance system allows any community large or small to make decisions, move fast, and resist corruption and capture. Smart contracts equals unlimited possibilities.

Empowering the Builders 🛠️

The promise of a new internet places the future into the hands of the builders. Today we live in digital feudalism and cry the chant of a crypto renaissance where individuals are on equal footing with corporations. The rise of the digital merchant guild was imminent. The digital democracy was within our grasp, but you failed us.

The Timing Was Yesterday 😢

The destruction of our public square, co-opted by for-profit social media organizations, influenced by states and institutions behind closed doors, accelerated corruption in the modern world for profit and power. Whole nations entered into civil war and other nations have become radicalized and turned on themselves. This allowed for our so-called "leaders" to blatantly lie to their people knowing there's nothing they can do about it. Now corruption is rampant and economic decline is excellerating. The nations and values that created a prosperous world post WWII no longer exist. The international institutions we depended on to maintain civility have been abandoned by the nations that created them. Collectively we validate the populist opinion against us.

You've Become Perverse 🧌

10 years is 100 years in technology and all you have to offer today to individuals who need this technology is meme coins and DeFi on a fragmented network where every action eats mysteriously at an individual's wealth while they bridge endlessly into the future. The value of the technology caught the eye of private capital who has co-opted the entire ecosystem.

Instead of working for yourselves collectively, negotiating on behalf of labor and your future, you have become distracted by $$ and chase bounties with no promise of continued partnership or even payment. The end result is limitless vaporware built on your back for the profit of the few and the benefit of no-one.

Oh sorry, I forgot about games. Yeah, the world needs more of that. I won't even get into the quality of these "games" which just extract more value from individuals at the end of the day.

You're so bought and sold it took little to no convincing to get you to give up on the real innovation; Proof of Work. Proof of Stake is not as powerful in terms of decentralization as Proof of Work and now we're building layers and layers of less decentralized payment systems continuing to fragment an individual's wealth and create more opportunities for middlemen to eat at that wealth with fees.

A few of you stuck to Proof of Work. I hope you rug pull the entire Ethereum ecosystem. Looking at you Quai.

10 years of getting rich and providing no value to anyone has turned the world against you. Your so called leaders are no better than SBF and have not been held accountable.

You're so blinded by the "gains" that our greatest antagonists are now buying the whole game out from under you while you celebrate it (ETFs are not good for regular people).

You can't even organize yourselves to protect your greatest. There's no fight… There's no outrage… There's just a sad "tisk tisk" and on to more gains (RIP Tornado Cash).

You Use Decentralization as a Crutch 🩼

Y'all are so "smart" and "resourceful" you're capable of building blockchains and making millions of dollars, but you can't even configure a server or support a real sovereign community for yourselves. You talk out the side of your mouth about decentralization and autonomy on Discord. Even if you could, your VC's wouldn't let you because that might cost an extra dollar and you might actually have to contribute to an open source project other than your own.

You're a joke.

You don't exist. Delete your email account, get rid of twitter, discord, telegram; all of which you don't control and are being used against you. Lose that and you lose the entire game. Too late, you've been had.

You Don't Want to do the Hard Work 🧑‍🦼

The entire global south depends on "secret" organizations like Binance to participate. The same organizations who were so "intelligent" and "benevolent" they almost killed themselves selling out to FTX.

Real solutions to our problems exist, but you ignore them because they're not "decentralized" on your shitty blockchain networks.

All your apps suck, they're pump and dump schemes that die a few months after launch because they're terrible and mysterious.

You completely ignore security, disregarding the need for key rotation or onboarding self-custodial "credentials".

You don't care about builders. You constantly release breaking changes with no concern to update documentation. It's clear you're not thinking long-term.

You have no clue how the internet works. Self-proclaimed "full-stack developers" don't understand basic protocols like SMTP or DNS.

Meanwhile VC's are locking you into libraries and infrastructure where they own you. "Decentralized" clouds have no capacity to support fundamental technologies you depend on to exist.

You're Speed Running More Corruption and Slavery ⛓️

Deploy on AWS, Vercel. Prefer Binance and Tether. Pump the next FTX created by the same people that failed you before. Prove out the technology for the rise of CBDC's once Black Rock finishes rugging you and your VC's cozy up to the state.

The Solution is Staring You in the Face 🫣

DAOs, DAOs, DAOs!

Oh I'm sorry… is governance hard? Do you want to be free and autonomous or not?

You're right, let's build another shitty game, get rich, and hope the world doesn't end before we die.

Take the technologies that exist, work, and have 10M+ active users and start governing yourselves. Fail, learn, work hard, run servers and govern them with a DAO.

Mastodon, Postfix, Matrix… These are all amazing open source technologies that can be easily governed by a sovereign community. Some are more decentralized than others, but forget about decentralization. You already have it in governance. Now grow up and join the rest of the open source developers building a real future (Linux, Wireguard, Discourse, etc).

Wake me up when you solve for email and are streaming 4K video over a blockchain. We can exist independently and autonomously if we really want to TODAY!

How the hell do you think Linux got to where it was? Did you forget where we came from?

Is it really that hard? Fine… I built it for you. You'll need some Sepolia ETH 🙄

https://auth.metawarrior.army/mint?invite=consensus2024

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What happened next

One of those flyers got picked up by Dr K, founder of Quai Network. He loved it. That conversation turned into a role at Dominant Strategies — the dev firm behind Quai — and my journey with Quai Network began.

The link at the bottom of the flyer is dead now. MetaWarrior Army the platform never shipped. But the thesis held: Proof of Work is the real innovation, DAOs are the real governance primitive, and the industry needs builders who'll actually run the servers. That's what I'm still building toward — on Quai — with Quai-Vault and DAO-Ships.