Decent Newsroom

November 30 2025 · Edited Jan 29, 2026

Extraction is rational

Even the sharpest critics of extraction stop at monopoly power and regulatory capture. They ask how platforms become extractive, but not why extraction becomes the rational choice across every industry, every decade. Break up a monopoly and you get smaller companies running the same playbook. "This time is different" is the oldest delusion in financial history.

by Shawn

October 27 2025 · Edited Jan 29, 2026

Product first, partnerships second

What works for products in Bitcoin works for partnerships: win on the basics first. Make Bitcoin's advantages the bonus, not the trade-off. Partners won't sacrifice reliability, product design, or economics for Bitcoin's native properties. They'll choose Bitcoin when it comes with better products, not instead of better products.

by Shawn

January 28 2026 · Edited Jan 29, 2026

Revenue isn't a sales problem

You can't close deals if buyers can't explain what you do. You can't position if you don't know who actually buys. The sequence: market clarity, positioning, sales motion. Break a link upstream and everything downstream fails.

by Shawn

December 17 2025 · Edited Jan 29, 2026

Soldiers, scouts, and the limits of persuasion

At any given time, most people aren't ready to hear what you're saying. Not because they're stupid—because nothing in their world has broken yet. They're not evaluating alternatives because they don't need alternatives. People start looking when something in their world shifts. For Bitcoin, that shift is usually painful.

by Shawn

October 31 2025 · Edited Jan 29, 2026

Sovereignty without sacrifice

We can't win by being better at one thing (self-sovereignty) while being worse at everything else (speed, cost, UX, features). We have to be better at everything—or at minimum, comparable on the basics while being superior on self-sovereignty. The best protocol in the world accomplishes nothing if nobody uses it. We have to win commercially to win ideologically.

by Shawn

October 15 2025 · Edited Jan 29, 2026

Why Bitcoin sales is different from SaaS

The company that helps prospects navigate internal politics and stakeholder complexity wins the deal. The one that just explains why Bitcoin is technically superior doesn't. Those wins accumulate into expertise. They reveal which objections actually matter and which are smoke screens. They expose what moves deals forward versus what sounds good in theory.

by Shawn

November 19 2025 · Edited Jan 12, 2026

Cloudflare went down again. Time to reframe resilience.

Recurring infrastructure failures create an opening: reframe decentralization as risk management, not ideology

by Shawn

December 13 2025 · Edited Jan 12, 2026

Engagement is inventory

Extractive platforms profit from degrading discourse. Nostr + Bitcoin fix the incentives.

by Shawn

November 8 2025 · Edited Jan 12, 2026

Launched: Nostr UX pattern library

Launching nostr-ux.com—evidence-based UX patterns for building Nostr apps that don't lose users

by Shawn

September 14 2025 · Edited Jan 12, 2026

Trust paradox in decentralized systems

Bitcoin is designed to minimize trust. But selling Bitcoin solutions requires building enormous amounts of trust.

by Shawn

September 9 2025 · Edited Jan 12, 2026

Why partnership frameworks fail for Bitcoin companies

Most partnership frameworks assume established categories and known business models. Bitcoin breaks these assumptions.

by Shawn

October 21 2025 · Edited Jan 12, 2026

AWS is the Achilles' heel of Silicon Valley surveillance tech

AWS outages highlight centralization risks. Meanwhile, Bitcoin and Nostr carry on unimpeded.

by Shawn

January 9 2026 · Edited Jan 12, 2026

Be unreasonably good at one job

Find the one job. Nail it. Let the numbers make the case.

by Shawn

July 18 2024 · Edited Jul 18, 2024

Bitcoin & Lightning unified – one API, zero infrastructure ⚡

Personal update: I’m on to new adventures, including starting up with a talented team of developers, product designers, and cypherpunks (ask me who when you see me).