building tools for sovereighty

Everyone has a reason for building.

For some people, it’s to solve a problem they’ve experienced.

For others, it’s to earn a sustainable income or “make it big”.

Some build just because they love building.

I build tools for sovereignty.

Building Tools for Sovereighty My most core belief is that humans deserve the right to sovereignty. Having an ultimate and un-confiscatable authority over our lives. The ability to make decisions for ourselves, free of coercion.

Sovereignty can be broken down into three pillars: financial sovereignty, work sovereignty, and geographic sovereignty.

Financial sovereignty is having control over your own savings and investments, free of centralized intermediaries. Cryptocurrency and decentralized finance are the tools that have allowed for the realization of financial sovereignty.

Without sovereignty of finances, centralized intermediaries such as banks, nation-states, and corporations can confiscate wealth for any reason.

Work sovereignty is having control over how you make income to the extent that your earning ability is resilient amidst outside forces. This is made possible when one’s reputation, built over time, is trusted by enough people to make finding new work easy. Unfortunately, reputation is hard to scale; it’s only been possible to scale reputation beyond Dunbar’s Number through “trusted” (centralized) intermediaries.

Without sovereignty of work, the ability to acquire new work whenever you please, nation-states, employers, and job platforms can coerce you by rescinding work permits, firing or threatening to fire you, or banning you from job platforms (preventing access to your reputation in the process).

Geographic sovereignty is having the ability to easily change your physical location. Moving jurisdictions allows you to evade war, censorship, and coercion and go where you are treated best.

Geographic sovereignty is enabled by work sovereignty and financial sovereignty. Having sufficient savings and ease of making more income lowers the switching costs associated with moving jurisdictions. In the direst situations, people will free their geographic area with nothing in order to stay alive — but the lower the switching cost between jurisdictions the less coercion and negative situations people will put up with.

With the ability to assuredly generate income (work sovereignty), store wealth (financial sovereignty), and physically move to optimal places (geographic sovereignty), true freedom can be recognized. Coercion and manipulation of people with all three becomes extremely difficult.

A Freer World The cypherpunks of yore built towards this vision. It was what blockchain technology was invented to enable.

Unstoppable technology takes an unstoppable vision; one shared across continents, cultures, teams, and minds. One shared passionatley and never forgotten.

Sometimes we can get distracted by shiny objects and short-term goals. In these times more than ever, we should remember why we’re building.

Only then will we be able to see a freer world.