An attempt to comprehend the unfolding economics of the great AI bet, with and without decentralized AGI.

Today I lost my @YouTube account! Well almost! I stopped it just in time. For weeks, these hackers have been trying to probe my account with a password reset and account recovery. Today, they called me to alert me that someone was trying to recover my account and had added a new recovery email. My inbox showed two emails: one with a one-time code that was triggered, and the other was an alert that my recovery email had been updated. A few things stand out here: 1) Google will never call you. Why did they call me? 2) Changing your account recovery email means your account has already been compromised. They will have full access and you will no longer be able to access your account. 3) If your account recovery email was changed, then your previous one would also get a notification. After a few minutes on the phone, the "support assistant" mentioned that he'll send a support email with a link to sites.google.com Sites.google is a free website and page builder that should really be nuked and removed from the internet. Scammers use this to embed a fake sign-in form to obtain your password. You will be directed to the fake sites.google.com website, where you most likely will need to log in, and then it will most likely fail as, they are really simply capturing your password at this point. They will then hold you on the line while they use your password to change account recovery emails and your passwords, fully compromising your account. How to mitigate this? Stop, slow down, don't panic and think. Remember, Google will never call you. They don't have the time and resources for this. Google have an account security centre. Follow all of the account security setup and ensure all checkpoints are followed. Have a super strong password and have it stored somewhere it can't be compromised; for example, memorise the 20+ character password. Use your brain and store it there. It's the safest place. Use the two-factor authentication options and, in the best-case scenario, a secondary hardware device such as a YubiKey. To the hackers trying to social engineer their way into my account, fuck you! Not today!

For almost a year, I have been building a simpler and more dependable way for applications to respond to activity on Cardano. Today, I am incredibly proud to release OgmiosDotnet.BlockchainEvents v1.0.0. BlockchainEvents is an open source transaction filtering, pub sub and event delivery layer for Cardano. It connects to Ogmios, evaluates every transaction against completely customisable rules, and emits only the activity an application has chosen to receive as standard CloudEvents. The rule engine can be shaped around almost any requirement. An application or applications can listen for activity involving a particular address, asset, policy, smart contract, governance action, treasury withdrawal, metadata value or DEX transaction. Builders can also create entirely new rules around their own domain logic. A project can operate one BlockchainEvents instance and allow many different applications to subscribe to the specific Cardano events they care about. A wallet could subscribe to address activity. A governance platform could subscribe to proposals and votes. A DEX service could subscribe to swaps involving selected assets or contracts. The blockchain connection, transaction processing and event infrastructure are shared, while each application receives its own relevant stream of events. This can remove considerable duplication across a project, reduce infrastructure costs and give development teams one dependable event layer to build around. Consumers can be as simple as an HTTP endpoint. When a transaction satisfies a rule, BlockchainEvents transforms it into a CloudEvent and automatically posts it to the subscribed application. Events can also be consumed through gRPC and server sent events. This allows applications to use Cardano data exposed through Ogmios without installing an Ogmios SDK, tracking a particular SDK version, maintaining their own WebSocket connection or implementing the chain sync protocol themselves. Delivery is backed by a durable queue. When a consumer becomes unavailable, its events remain waiting. Once the application returns, delivery resumes automatically. Applications can restart, deploy or experience a temporary outage without immediately losing the Cardano activity produced while they were offline. It is also extremely fast. During a full local Docker stress test, the pipeline processed more than 1,100 transactions per second through the rule engine, CloudEvents transformation, pub sub and durable queue, with approximately one millisecond p99 processing latency and zero failed emissions. The entire stack can be deployed through Docker across cloud providers, infrastructure providers and self hosted environments, while the underlying queue and delivery architecture remains abstracted from the applications using it. This project was funded through Catalyst Fund 14 after receiving 197 million ADA in yes votes across 420 votes cast. I am deeply grateful to everybody who voted for the proposal, followed the development, tested the releases, shared feedback or supported both me and this project over the past year. A great deal of work has gone into reaching this point, and I am genuinely excited to see what Cardano builders create with it. Further technical details, reliability results and the Minswap implementation are included below. Repository: github.com/ItsDaveB/OgmiosDo… Release: github.com/ItsDaveB/OgmiosDo… The possibilities from here are endless, this brings industry standard event driven architecture right to Cardano.

I put my entire life into Cardano. My time, my expertise, my savings. I’ve literally gone all in, and for over 5 years now. No salary for 3 years, along with my co founder, and every payroll was paid on time. This isn’t meant as a guilt trip just context towards my reality. I forced my cofounders to envelope the ‘entrepreneur mindset’ and make sacrifices to make our vision of Anvil work. I thought we were in good company in Cardano. A bunch of scrappy, smart people who are building the future financial rails of the world. Unfortunately, not everyone was living like starving entrepreneurs and looted our community/treasury while keeping cushy salaries. Now the price is in the teens…and we can’t even get contracts on Cardano to sustain our business, with no indication that change is coming, all community business proposals are not passing atm. I gave up my 30s for this. I had a great career trajectory making solid money. I don’t regret the decision I just wish it went different. Believe it or not, we didn’t make many stupid decisions, we were responsible with salaries, and ran very lean operations. Did we fail? Or did Cardano fail to flourish and create real opportunity? I bought Ada, I believed in the token. I dropped my 401k on it. Held it religiously for 5 years, all to sell at .16 so I don’t lose my house? It’s insane lol was I supposed to sell on everyone’s heads? I thought being a believer was the whole point now I just feel like a sheep. I don’t even have the 100k Ada required anymore to go straight to the treasury. The only thing I can think of that hurt worse were my kidney stones. This is the most defeated I have felt in a long time. And now I’m watching 8 months of hard work and relationship building get thrown away. Can’t get a hold of half the DReps otherwise you come off as annoying. Didn’t do a Japan tour? Good luck! I had to waste 6 days explaining to one of our top DReps why the product needs Cardano. He basically said we didn’t need to use blockchain or cardano. Instead of explaining the value we create I gotta convince our top DReps why a project chose to build on Cardano? 🤯 Im not perfect but I damn sure tried to be! Answered everyone promptly, reached out to DReps, and did our best to listen/apply feedback. I show up everyday. Can someone explain to me why I should keep trying to build here? I’ve legit lost everything but my wife who isn’t getting any happier with me. Today is the first day I work towards getting my life back. IDK exactly what that means but I’m done feeling like this for nothing.