Opposed to token issuance, yet took $10 million in VC funding?

You don’t need an MBA to know that a business model boils down to two things: who is paying, and how they are paying.

In the context of POAP, finding a business model meant deciding whether to charge the general user, the event organizers, or advertisers—and whether to use an à la carte or subscription model.

POAP founder Patricio Worthalter viewed the service as a public good, a gift to the Web3 community; the door to charging general users had long been closed. Of the remaining options—event organizers and advertisers—POAP chose to tailor check-in solutions for the former. Under the execution of Isabel Gonzalez, they secured a batch of clients and achieved some success, but ultimately failed to achieve scale or stable revenue, leading to the final closure.

It is worth mentioning that issuing a token for a project—though Web3 history has shown us that prices are usually unsustainable—can be considered a business model; at least, it is an unproven, meta-business model. Patricio’s stance was clear: he staunchly opposed issuing tokens to prevent speculation, a point I sincerely admire.

However, rejecting an ICO while accepting $10 million in venture capital is hard for me to understand. After all, VCs have a similar mindset to most ICO participants—both hope to “buy low, sell high”—with the former pursuing even higher returns of 10x or more. Conversely, at least a portion of ICO participants share the same “geek spirit” as Patricio, seeking only to participate and support meaningful projects, regardless of investment returns. Even I, not daring to call myself a true geek, have participated in token launches with this mindset; even when I lost most of my investment, I still felt it was worthwhile.

Therefore, in my view, if one must choose between the two, an ICO actually conflicts less with the “geek ethos.”

Hairdryers, Oracles, and lies etched into history

Intertwined with the business model, but even more critical, is POAP’s product design.

POAP is positioned as “Web3 check-in,” with the app slogan “Bookmarks for your life.” It writes the proof of an individual’s participation in online and offline events onto the blockchain as an NFT—immutable and publicly readable. It is an application with a clear audience, specific needs, and it sounds perfectly reasonable—until we consider the “Oracle.”

The blockchain is a digital world; it is a parallel universe to the physical world we inhabit. Whenever a blockchain transaction needs to reference data from the physical world, it requires a data source—this is what we call an “Oracle.”

For example, Alice and Bob bet that tomorrow’s temperature will exceed 40 degrees. Both stake 100 USDC into a smart contract. If the temperature exceeds 40 degrees, the smart contract transfers 200 USDC to Alice’s wallet; otherwise, it goes to Bob. However, how do the blockchain and the smart contract know the temperature of the physical world? Therefore, for any transaction that is not 100% blockchain-native, it must rely on an “Oracle” to provide the data. For “creatures” on the blockchain, information from the other universe is like an oracle—hence the name.

The concept is simple, but the execution is full of nuances. Following the example above: Does “tomorrow” refer to which time zone? Is it the daily high or the daily average? If it’s the average, over what time interval? At which latitude and longitude? What about Celsius or Fahrenheit? A statement that seems objective and clear on the surface can yield opposite results if interpreted slightly differently. Furthermore, since everything relies on the Oracle’s answer, there is potential for loopholes, cheating, bribery, and other issues. How to guard against these is an eternal battle.

Take a live example: this April, someone on Polymarket bet $119 that the temperature in Paris would exceed 22 degrees Celsius—a highly unlikely scenario historically. However, these “hacker” users ran to one of the thermometers acting as an Oracle and heated it with a hairdryer, easily winning $21,398.

Garbage in, garbage out. When the Oracle serving as the data source is inaccurate, what gets written to the blockchain is merely false information. Immutability becomes meaningless, and it actually etches the lie into history.

Back to POAP: the Web3 check-in concept is good, but the associated Oracle space has immense room for cheating. The POAP team made many efforts to address this, including adding manual review teams, dynamic Kiosk QR codes, and CAPTCHA verification. But these efforts not only incurred high costs and complicated the experience, they ultimately failed to combat bots and airdrop hunting operations.

To explain it without the jargon, the core problem is simple. There is no reliable information source for who attended which gathering around the world—including online events. This is the structural flaw in POAP’s product design.

Lessons from the Web3 “model student”

I have written about POAP for three consecutive newsletters, not only because I like the project, but also because, over the eight years of iterating on LikeCoin, I have always kept an eye on this “Web3 model student.”

Few people know that the closest we came was during the LikeCoin v2 era. I even thought about defining LikeCoin’s positioning as “POAP for Books.” However, considering that few people outside the circle knew what POAP was, I gave up and used “Web3 Bookplate” to explain the concept instead. But I dare not say whether there are fewer people who understand bookplates than those who understand POAP.

As opposed to writing proof of event attendance on the blockchain, POAP for Books would write the proof of book ownership on the blockchain as an NFT. In geek-speak, LIKE could also be named PORP: Proof of Readership Protocol, or at least POPP: Proof of Purchase Protocol—buying a book is one thing, and reading it is another; every book lover knows the feeling of having shelves full of books that haven’t been finished or even started.

As mentioned earlier, POAP’s fundamental problem lies in the fact that Oracles are easy to cheat and hard to implement. For LikeCoin, proving that a user owns a digitally native ebook is much easier, or to put it another way, the room for cheating is much smaller. However, clearing the Oracle hurdle does not mean the road ahead is smooth. The reality is that building LikeCoin into a sustainable Web3 project is also fraught with thorns.

To go on would be too much information. I will leave it for another day. As long as someone is reading, I will not go back on my word. No, even if no one is reading, I will write for myself and keep the records for LikeCoin.

POAP serves as a personal proof of attendance for events—or in plain terms, a “digital souvenir badge,” or colloquially, “Web3 check-in.”

Short for Proof Of Attendance Protocol, the immediate whiff of technical nuance gives it away: smart readers will guess it originated right from the mind of a tech geek.

In February 2019, during the ETHDenver hackathon, Patricio Worthalter from Buenos Aires first proposed recording attendance credentials on the blockchain. He extended the concepts of Proof of Work and Proof of Stake from computation and capital to physical and digital “presence,” coining the term Proof of Attendance Protocol.

Together with a few teammates, Patricio hacked together a POAP prototype within 72 hours of the hackathon and deployed the initial smart contract to the Ethereum mainnet. Utilizing what was on hand, they had several hundred attendees on-site to scan QR codes and collect the very first batch of POAPs in history—the “ETHDenver 2019 POAP.” It received unanimous acclaim and swiftly became the standard check-in fixture for Web3 community events.

To ensure a seamless minting experience, POAP utilized meta-transactions to cover gas fees on behalf of users. These early costs were absorbed personally by Patricio, who treated POAP as a public good. However, during 2020’s DeFi Summer, transaction fees on the Ethereum mainnet skyrocketed to several dollars a pop—especially for ERC-721 interactions requiring more computational overhead. It is estimated that Patricio personally poured two to three million dollars into gas fees and infrastructure costs for the community. Consequently, in late 2020, POAP migrated to the Ethereum sidechain xDai (later renamed Gnosis Chain), drastically lowering gas costs while absorbing them through xDai subsidies.

Over two years, from event check-ins and token-gated community access to serving as criteria for early-adopter airdrops across major projects, POAP gradually evolved into an “on-chain resume” for Web3 users.

However, as POAP transitioned from a niche passion project to a core piece of infrastructure serving millions worldwide, the weight of reality set in. The team realized that running an ecosystem of this scale was vastly more expensive than envisioned.

The primary challenge lay in Sybil attacks and rampant airdrop farming. Because collecting a POAP was entirely free, projects issuing airdrops to holders naturally attracted vast swarms of bots and farming studios. Even when a small gathering of dozens of people issued a POAP, thousands of addresses on-chain would try to rush in and claim it.

To preserve the authenticity of attendance and participation credentials, POAP built a manual review team and introduced stringent anti-bot measures—including dynamic Kiosk QR codes and CAPTCHA verifications—which drove up operational and server costs immensely.

With the NFT boom of 2021, even though POAP was never meant for speculation, issuance and user numbers exploded exponentially. The project could no longer rely solely on Patricio’s personal pocket and volunteer enthusiasm. In late 2021, POAP Inc. was officially incorporated, led by co-founder and COO Isabel to spearhead commercialization, announcing a $10 million seed round in January 2022.

Following that, POAP began collaborating with enterprise clients, customizing on-chain check-ins for traditional giants like Adidas, Porsche, Amex, and Goldman Sachs, while introducing pay-per-mint quotas and SAML enterprise-grade authentication. What was originally a free distribution model and simple collection process became increasingly complex.

Unsurprisingly, this pivot met immense resistance. On one hand, a spoiled Web3 community (myself included, likely) had long taken for granted that POAP should be free and unrestricted; as partial paywalls were put up and review thresholds raised, users departed rapidly. On the other hand, enterprise solutions suffered from long sales cycles and one-off payments, failing to build steady recurring revenue. Compounded by fading Web3 narratives, POAP’s operations grew increasingly difficult—and the 2026 bear market was merely the final straw that broke the camel’s back.

To talk about POAP, one cannot overlook the geek ethos of its guiding light, Patricio. Yet, it was precisely this ethos that laid the groundwork for POAP’s farewell.

As a seasoned early Ethereum advocate from Argentina, Patricio is a pure crypto philosopher. His original intent for founding POAP was to record genuine human experiences and interpersonal connections on-chain. He firmly insisted on a non-financialized model, repeatedly publicly criticizing airdrop hunters who treated POAP as a speculative tool, and consistently refusing to issue a governance token in an era when almost every Web3 project went for ICO to raise fund. Had they issued a token, the team might still have ample runway to keep exploring the space between reality and ideals.

In her farewell tweet, Isabel reflected: “crypto’s funding cycles and distribution dynamics made it hard to build a sustainable company without cannibalizing the ethos that made POAP mean something.” Though understated, reading between the lines conveys a clear message: “Because we refused to compromise the ideal POAP stood for, we could not sustain the company.” To loosely translate: they preferred to end this five-year idealist experiment rather than trim their sails to fit reality.

Patricio’s principles earned POAP immense respect across the Web3 industry, but they also prevented POAP from turning into a sustainable commercial service. This is the tragic fate of Web3 innovation today: when ideals cannot be monetized and public goods lack sustainable funding mechanisms, even the most beautiful products eventually get swallowed by reality.

Even as the official servers and apps shut down, the 7+ million POAPs already minted remain forever on Gnosis Chain—a permanent testament to our generation’s exploration of Web3, proving we once truly crossed paths and dreamed together.

Bitcoin’s decline in this bear market may seem like the smallest in history on paper, but internally, the ecosystem is undergoing its most tragic collective liquidation ever. From veteran exchanges like BitMEX and AscendEX, to star DAO tools like Tally and data platforms like Zapper, down to multiple L2s and popular wallets, over a hundred projects have shut down this year. When capital and attention shift entirely toward AI, how should entrepreneurs who remain on the field position themselves? This article takes stock of Web3’s brutal wave of exits and records this major industry restructuring in the wake of the hype.

Ever since Bitcoin reached a new high last year and began its step-by-step decline, we have entered an undeniable bear market. Bitcoin hit a low of $58,410, a 52% drop from last year’s all-time high; Ethereum hit a low of $1,546, falling 65% from its 2025 peak. That said, compared to Bitcoin dropping 77% in 2022 from its 2021 peak, and 84% in 2018 from its 2017 peak, this is currently the smallest peak-to-trough decline among the major bear markets since Bitcoin’s birth in 2009—suggesting the market is entering a phase of maturity.

However, in terms of the ecosystem, 2026 is undoubtedly the most brutal, nerve-racking bear market in history. According to statistics from RootData, in the first seven months alone, over a hundred projects have announced shutdowns, bankruptcies, or indefinite suspensions. And these are only the ones that can be tallied; countless others have quietly vanished without a trace. Price fluctuations are often just investors overreacting, but the departure of industry practitioners reflects the reality of the market.

Exchanges Flash-Exit, Star Projects Say Collective Goodbyes

Let’s start with centralized exchanges. Founded in 2018 and headquartered in Singapore, AscendEX shut down on July 1 after failing to secure licenses from regulatory bodies like the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) or Europe’s MiCA. Even more surprising than AscendEX was BitMEX—the pioneer of perpetual swaps founded in 2014—which announced on July 23 that it would be winding down operations by September 23. A window of just two months from announcement to closure is extraordinarily short for a major exchange. A mere three days after that, BitMart, known for its rapid token listings and vast array of altcoins and memecoins, announced on July 26 that it was halting deposits immediately and would fully shut down by January 31 next year.

If it were only exchanges closing down, the situation wouldn’t be quite as alarming. However, user-facing application projects are suffering an even worse wave of shutdowns. Among them, what I regret most is Tally, the DAO governance platform that served Arbitrum, Optimism, Uniswap, Aave, Gitcoin, ENS, and was almost chosen by LikeCoin during its v3 upgrade. Another favorite of mine, the “Web3 check-in” service POAP, while not completely shutting down, entered maintenance mode in March, ceasing new feature development and disabling the issuer distribution interface. Furthermore, decentralized storage provider Storj filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection just the other day—on the very same day BitMart announced its shutdown—in an attempt to restructure its debt and keep operating.

Tally, POAP, and Storj are all services built on solid tech that genuinely met user needs, yet they still failed to evolve into sustainable businesses before their runway ran out. Products still in the exploratory phase fared even worse: Goldfinch (credit), Slingshot (trading), Nifty Gateway (NFT marketplace), Fantasy Top (card game), Dmail (decentralized email), and Yupp (AI model feedback)—all star projects that had raised massive VC funding—have all shut down one after another this year.

Beneath a Collapsing Nest, How Can Any Egg Remain Intact?

With applications on the decline, data analysis and tracking platforms naturally haven’t fared any better. This year’s closures include Parsec and the even more famous Zapper, which once boasted over two million monthly active users.

On the wallet front, at least three major wallets have shut down in 2026: Leap Wallet, Family Wallet, and Ctrl Wallet. Among them, Leap was a Cosmos ecosystem wallet that served LikeCoin v2 and is likely familiar to readers; its founder, whom I once met briefly, is a pragmatic entrepreneur. Unlike standard Web3 applications, wallets manage users’ private keys. If developers aren’t vigilant, a slight delay in patching a vulnerability can lead to disaster. If readers have ever used any of the above wallets, I strongly recommend discontinuing their use immediately and withdrawing your assets if necessary.

Finally, there are the blockchains themselves. The developer company behind Movement, the first Move-language L2 on Ethereum—MVMT Labs—filed for bankruptcy on July 15. Although assets related to Movement have been transferred, whether it can continue operating remains an open question. As for other Ethereum L2s, which were already facing existential crises due to the mainnet becoming increasingly cheap, the bear market has made survival even tougher. The first to shut down was Polynomial Chain, and more are likely to follow. On the other side, the Cosmos ecosystem, built on an app-chain design, has become a disaster zone for L1s. Beyond the confirmed shutdowns of MilkyWay (liquid staking) and UX Chain (formerly Umee), many others are effectively dead—they just haven’t made official announcements or set up exit mechanisms.

The Responsibility of Exiting, and Next Steps for Players on the Field

It’s one thing not to list them, but seeing them all laid out is terrifying—it’s like being able to digest one slice of cake a day, but suddenly having to swallow a hundred at once. No appetite is big enough for that.

What’s that? You haven’t seen news about Web3 projects shutting down? Perhaps it’s because so many projects are closing that it’s no longer considered news, or maybe the Web3 media outlets you used to follow have stopped updating or pivoted elsewhere. Speaking of media, perhaps because hosting old content costs very little, Chinese and English Web3 media rarely declare an official end. In reality, however, an exceptional number have quietly ceased updates or shifted focus to writing about AI. I’m certainly not trash-talking here—everyone has bills to pay, and stopping updates or pivoting makes complete sense from a business standpoint. It’s totally understandable.

Fortunately, even in such tough times, fellow writers like Max (Little Crow) and Astro Hsu (BlockTrend) continue to produce great articles week after week. Keeping Web3 at their core, they hold down the fort, ensuring that as I absorb industry news during the day and rush to finish my newsletter in the dead of night, I don’t feel alone.

The whole article might sound full of gloom and doom, but the survival of the fittest is simply the law of the market. I am not overly pessimistic about the current state of affairs. On the contrary, I respect projects that formally announce their shutdown, properly arrange asset withdrawals or transitions to other services, and see things through to the end. That is far more responsible than turning into a zombie project that gives no explanation, handles nothing, and acts as if it no longer exists simply by never mentioning it again.

Unlike Max and BlockTrend, I am not only a commentator but also an active player on the field. Readers naturally ask me where LikeCoin is headed in the face of such industry hardship. I won’t dodge this sharp question, nor do I want to gloss over it at the end of this article; I will address it in a separate post later.

With no end in sight for this crypto bear market, and capital, talent, users, and attention all focused on AI, the Web3 industry seems to have lost its collective voice—no matter what vision is articulated, there are no listeners. In the days ahead, projects at every level will have no choice but to keep their heads down, build good products, and actively acquire users. They will either erupt out of the silence or perish within it.

p.s. At 2:00 AM, as I was writing this draft, news broke in the bookstore group chat that Tin Yuen Bookstore was closing down. Rooted in a Mong Kok tenement building for fifty years, quietly nourishing generation after generation of readers, Tin Yuen Bookstore—which could easily be considered intangible cultural heritage—is saying goodbye to Hong Kong due to murky red lines and shifting enforcement standards. It isn’t just Web3 projects that will either erupt out of the silence or perish within it.

Almost every country has private schools, yet few have private libraries of any significant scale. The reason is incredibly simple: education can be highly profitable, but a library is destined to be a money-burning machine. Parents are willing to pay astronomical fees to enroll their children in international schools, and universities like Harvard, Stanford, Waseda, and INSEAD are not only massive businesses but also sit on enormous alumni donations. But what about libraries? No one denies their value, yet very few people actually use their services, and even fewer are willing to pay for them—overdue fines notwithstanding. But that is not entirely fair either; after all, public libraries are operated using taxpayers’ money, whether or not those citizens agree with how the funds are used or are satisfied with the book selection.

Therefore, before discussing the ideal qualities of an independent library, it must first possess a sustainable business model. The newly launched 3ook.com library is working hard to make this possibility a reality, as far as ebooks are concerned.

Distributed Funders: Protecting Independence with a Business Model

The moment money is mentioned, things often seem to lose their purity, as if turning into a mere “business.” In reality, the essence has not changed; what has changed is our need to face reality. Libraries have always required substantial resources to operate—the only difference is who pays for them. As someone who makes personal works fully open-licensed and is often viewed as an “idealist” (aka leftard?), I probably have the credentials to say that I wish citizen libraries could be free for everyone. However, only by not relying on government funding or single-organization backing (like family foundations), and instead relying on citizens pooling their resources, can a library remain independent and survive long-term.

Furthermore, when talking about business models, we must look beyond downstream readers and consider upstream suppliers: publishers and authors. As sacred as traditional libraries are, they have a delicate, love-hate relationship with publishers. On one hand, libraries provide a baseline of guaranteed book purchases—especially for serious literature—and foster a long-term reading culture. On the other hand, some industry insiders worry that libraries reduce people’s desire to buy books. Even if a book is borrowed extensively, the publisher only receives a single royalty payment from the initial sale.

In other words, even if an independent library has the financial capacity to be completely free for readers, a lack of stable revenue streams means it is just being generous at others’ expense. It fails to bring publishers any source of income beyond baseline royalties. If that source runs dry, there will eventually be no new books. Therefore, I chose a monthly subscription model for 3ook.com, preferring to find alternative ways later to subsidize the minority of readers who cannot afford the fee.

Putting aside philosophical debates, 3ook.com’s business model is incredibly simple. In one sentence: it is a “Netflix of books”—one monthly fee for unlimited reading and listening.

Netflix of Books: Flat Monthly Fee

3ook.com is still in its infancy. It currently features a curated selection of over 600 books. Numerically, this is a drop in the bucket compared to public libraries, but there is very little overlap between the two collections, meaning 3ook.com supplements public libraries with a citizen-curated perspective.

Becoming a Plus Member costs 9.9 USD (78 HKD / 300 TWD) per month. In addition to borrowing any book in the collection, users can choose to listen to books instead of reading them, provided the publisher has enabled the read-aloud option.

The phrase “one monthly fee, unlimited reading and listening” is literal: 3ook.com does not split ebooks and audiobooks. By obtaining voice actor licenses beforehand and utilizing AI to analyze voice prints, the system reads the text aloud in real-time when a reader listens. This gives a voice to every book, making it both readable and listenable.

For upstream publishers and authors, the 3ook.com model is equally straightforward. As long as the work uses standard EPUB or PDF formats and complies with local laws, creators can upload their books themselves and choose whether to enable the narration feature. If technical support is needed, the library even offers peripheral services like text scanning and digital file creation.

Whenever a reader reads or listens to a work for 1 minute, the author or publisher receives 0.01 USD, settled monthly. For example, if a reader borrows a book and spends 10 hours reading and listening to it from cover to cover, the publisher or author receives:

0.01 USD × 60 × 10 = 6.00 USD

This relatively high payout rate relies on a shared community effort. The heavy reading habits of power users are supported by the unused capacity of light readers, creating a dynamic balance between overall library operations and creator earnings.

Starting with a Strong Foundation

Admittedly, while this business model is simple, it may not perfectly address every scenario.

The most obvious issue is usage variation. A reader who doesn’t open a single book all month, a reader who reads only on weekends, and a reader who listens during their daily commute all pay the exact same monthly fee. Will low-usage readers accept this? On the scarcer side of demand, there are also people who wish to pay more to support publishing, but that option does not currently exist.

On the publisher side, there are also various concerns. For instance, is it fair that high-priced and low-priced books generate the exact same income per minute of reading? Picture books require immense effort per page but can be read very quickly; is a time-based payout model too low for them? Conversely, is the payout too high for public-domain classics and out-of-copyright works when compared to contemporary books?

These are all valid, real-world scenarios that the current model may not perfectly satisfy. However, in the library’s startup phase, a flat subscription fee and a flat payout structure help build consensus. It maps out typical use cases and establishes a “basic foundation” first, leaving edge cases for later. Once we achieve results and accumulate a solid collection of quality books, readers, and reading hours, we will have the confidence to negotiate long-term plans with all stakeholders, allowing a wider variety of books to enrich this citizen library.

Running an independent library is no easy task. The road ahead is bound to be filled with obstacles. Alongside the challenges we already foresee, countless unknown hurdles will undoubtedly follow. Since we cannot predict the outcome, we might as well focus on the present and do what we can and should do.

After two years of preparation, the 3ook.com library is officially launched, supporting iPhone, Android, iPad, macOS, and web browsers. If you believe in the meaning of this project, please install it and try it out, at least to experience it.

3ook.com Li3rary app

If you have a little to spare, I hope you will go one step further and become a Plus Member. Enjoy unlimited borrowing, distribute your monthly fee directly to authors as you read, and support the operation of this independent library.

Become a 3ook.com Plus member

Like everyone else, I love perfection. But if I had to file myself under a label, I’m probably an “imperfectionist.”

Perfection Is a Direction, the Pursuit a Journey

Owning up to being imperfect — pretty shameless of me, you’ll say. It isn’t. Hear me out.

Take writing. If I claimed every issue of the DHK Post were perfect, that would be the more shameless claim by far. The truth is, while I’ve always published on time, every week, without fail, some pieces I’m not too happy with and some I’m quite pleased with — and even the one I’m proudest of isn’t perfect; you’ll probably still turn up a typo.

But that’s only my own taste, and the paradox is that it’s often out of sync with how readers react. I rather liked last month’s “Dear Algo: What Is an Algorithm?“, yet the response was lukewarm; whereas “The Premier Hub for Mega Events, The Worst Hub for Ticketing“ — a piece I didn’t even like, finding it too much navel-gazing — somehow became, of all things, the most “CLS”-ed piece I’ve ever written.

Judging a piece of writing takes in many dimensions. To be perfect is, of course, to do the best on every one of them — but those dimensions are forever in conflict, beyond the author’s control. Which is to say: an author can never wait until something is perfect to publish; he can only do his best. And anyway, missing your publishing cycle in pursuit of perfection is, in itself, imperfect.

Imperfectionism is the realization that “perfection” is a state you can only pursue, never reach — like “infinity” in mathematics: go ahead, write down an enormous number, but any number you can actually write down is finite. Where perfectionism treats “perfection” as the destination, imperfectionism cares more about the process of pursuing it.

Imperfectionism is not a refusal to pursue perfection — still less a pursuit of imperfection. It is striving toward perfection inside a thicket of constraints: limited time, limited resources, conditions beyond your control, invisible red lines.

With all that groundwork laid, you can see why I so often hand in homework riddled with flaws. In my eyes, ship-then-improve beats trying to be “perfect” before you ship; and more importantly, only this way can the audience take part and collaborate, finding consensus along the way. To me, the process of public participation matters far more than the result of going it alone. As Audrey Tang often quotes, from the Canadian poet-songwriter Leonard Cohen: the crack is how the light gets in.

Forget your perfect offering.
There is a crack in everything.
That’s how the light gets in.

— Anthem, Leonard Cohen

Letting AI Learn from Its Mistakes

Imperfectionism isn’t the reason my work falls short (though it does make a handy excuse now and then) — it’s my worldview, and it shows up in every corner of life.

On June 16 last year, “3ook.com,” the “third-generation bookstore,” launched. Plenty of people found it pretty crude: a thin catalog, few features, no companion mobile app — all sorts of shortcomings, in short. Even so, we kept our rhythm and shipped on schedule.

Fifty weeks — that is, 25 development cycles — later, 3ook.com’s catalog has grown enormously; we’ve added personal voice artists and many other features, and released apps for Android, iPhone, iPad, even macOS. We’re still a hundred thousand miles from perfect, but the point is that we’ve taken many steps in perfection’s direction.

A perfectionist would argue we should have waited until the catalog was large enough, the features complete, every platform supported, before launching — the way Apple, that supposed paragon of enterprise, surely polishes a product to perfection before release. But don’t forget: we’re not Apple. And besides, the iPhone couldn’t even do 3G when it launched in 2007; iOS 26 was bumped to 26.1 not long after release; the Vision Pro still comes with an external battery to this day. All of which goes to show that even Apple — which carries perfectionism to its limit — ships products that, the moment they land, are not perfect.

What’s more, even if we were willing to push 3ook.com’s launch back a year, that wouldn’t mean we could make a perfect product. Only by keeping an imperfect 3ook.com running can the team watch usage data, gather user feedback, and talk with publishers and independent authors inside a living ecosystem — gradually adding the right features and cutting the useless ones, step by step, feeling out alongside the community what a “third-generation bookstore” should look like.

Don’t take this for high-sounding soft promotion; let me give a concrete example.

3ook.com’s pitch is “giving books a voice.” Audiobooks are expensive to produce — the privilege of bestsellers — but by driving costs down with generative AI, 3ook.com lets any work be read aloud in a voice artist’s, or the author’s own, voice. Without market scale, having humans read niche works line by line can’t recoup the cost; reading in a “niche language” like Cantonese is harder still. And so our centerpiece is Cantonese narration.

But precisely because Cantonese isn’t mainstream — where AI narration in English and Mandarin runs very near 100% accurate — AI reading Cantonese text carries more flaws. Even at 99% accuracy, a 1% misread rate means a 100,000-character text gets read wrong a thousand times. Thick-skinned as I am, I can’t wave that away with a glib “imperfectionism.” More awkward still, the misread character is sometimes crucial — for instance, the 區 in author Au Ka-lun’s surname (read “Au”) getting voiced as the 區 in 區塊鏈, “blockchain” (read “keoi”). How could I face this bestselling author?

Happily, AI narration added a dictionary feature last month: whenever a misread turns up, you can add an entry to correct it. To continue the example, I’ve already added a line to the dictionary:

"區家麟": "(au1)家麟"

explicitly specifying that, in this context, 區 is read “au1,” correcting the AI’s misreading. 3ook.com is fully open-source: not just team members, but any technically inclined user — any Hongkonger devoted to preserving Cantonese — can take the initiative to add an entry to the dictionary hosted on GitHub and file a pull request. Quite literally, this lets the AI learn from its mistakes, sharpening its pronunciation one character at a time.

It isn’t hard to imagine: had we waited for Cantonese narration to be perfect before launching, the result wouldn’t have been a delay of a year or two — it would have been never launching at all, because it would never be good enough. Real users using it and taking part is the precondition for continuously improving and refining the product. Setting aside my ego and shipping flawed Cantonese narration did draw its share of mockery; but every criticism is a user taking part, and every correction, in turn, becomes nourishment for the product.

Inching Forward Against Forces Beyond Control

In the end, imperfectionism seeps into my choices about life, too.

Where I live, justice is wanting and freedom under pressure — even writing an article means looking over your shoulder. Starting over in a democratic, free, at least outwardly more “perfect” system is a reasonable path. I have no wish to judge that choice. And yet: more than a result reached in a single leap, I value the process of taking part. I would rather stay on this imperfect, even ugly, patch of land — and within the shadow of forces beyond my control, with small but forward steps, keep making myself and society a tiny bit better.

A crack — that’s where the light gets in.

p.s. “The New Boy Who Cried Wolf”: Ever since I finished the IBO (Initial Book Offering) of “Attack on Freedom” late last year, I started writing the book. I’ve told people several times that I was “almost done with the first draft” — but the manuscript dragged on and on, and my words turned into lies. Early last week I again told the 100 co-publishers I was “almost done with the first draft,” and then, a few days later, I actually finished it.

p.p.s. No need to spell it out: the first draft of “Attack on Freedom” isn’t perfect. The co-publishers are reading the trial edition right now — letting the light into the text.

Whether anyone should be held responsible is for the independent commission to determine; the public should not rush to judgment. While we wait for the findings, however, it may be worth turning to another case — one that shows just how proactive the Food and Environmental Hygiene Department (FEHD) can be when it sets its mind to enforcement, and which may serve as an instructive example for other government departments.

Hong Kong law requires anyone running a “place of public entertainment” to hold a licence, with criminal penalties for failure to do so (Cap. 172, s. 4). On 29 June last year, Book Punch — an independent bookstore in Sham Shui Po — hosted a graduation showcase for the third cohort of its in-house stand-up comedy class. The event ran across two sessions, pay-what-you-wish. No licence had been obtained. Yesterday, the bookstore and its owner were each found guilty on two counts and fined HK$3,000 per summons (case nos. KCS37515 & KCS37516/2025).

I attended both the trial in the morning and the verdict in the afternoon at Kowloon City Magistrates’ Courts. Watching how this case was successfully built and prosecuted, I noticed at least three commendable details that other government departments would do well to study.

Proactive Enforcement: Scrolling Facebook in the Midst of a Busy Schedule

According to the Agreed Facts, two FEHD Health Inspectors I came across a social media post by Book Punch about the upcoming event on 25 June 2025, and from that moment began their investigation.

In other words — assuming I have understood correctly — between their routine inspections and their handling of public complaints, FEHD officers nevertheless found time in their busy schedules to spot, on Facebook, that an independent bookstore was hosting what looked like a public entertainment event without the relevant licence, and to swing into action. This kind of proactive, public-safety-minded enforcement stands in stark contrast to the popular stereotype of bureaucracies — that they go strictly by the book, that doing less means erring less. It is a model worth emulating across the rest of government.

Infiltration and Cunning: Undercover Agents, Cash in the Cardboard Box, Floor Plans from Memory

The Agreed Facts go on to state that the two FEHD inspectors signed up via the registration link in the Facebook post. On the evening of the event — 29 June last year, around 6:00 p.m. — the two inspectors arrived in plain clothes. There were about 50 audience members. Six performers took turns delivering jokes and using physical comedy, to frequent laughter from the audience. At 8:00 p.m., after a group photo, the event came to a close.

According to the case, the two undercover inspectors not only documented the event in detail and took 11 photographs — they each also dropped HK$100 into the cardboard box being passed around, like the moles in classic Hong Kong cinema who, to win the trust of the boss, are willing to dirty their own hands by committing the very crime they are investigating. The day after the event, the two inspectors drew, from memory, the floor plan of Book Punch — the key piece of evidence that cracked the case.

Those of us raised on Hong Kong cinema, with its long tradition of cop-and-mole thrillers — the kind that gave us Infernal Affairs, later remade by Scorsese as The Departed — tended to assume undercover work was reserved for triads and drug lords. It turns out it is also reserved for stand-up comedy nights.

Statutory Interpretation: A Bookstore Without a Stage Is a Stage After All

The prosecution and defence agreed on what happened. The dispute was over what the law meant.

Mr. Lawrence Lau Wai-chung SC, for the defence, argued that the Ordinance regulates “stage performance” — not “performance” as such. Citing both the Oxford English Dictionary (“a raised floor or platform… on which actors, musicians, etc. perform”) and the Cihai Chinese dictionary, he submitted that since Book Punch had no stage, what took place that day was not a “stage performance” within the meaning of the Ordinance. The narrowest interpretation, he argued, should apply — both because every word in a statute is presumed to have meaning, and because cultural activities enjoy constitutional protection under Hong Kong’s Basic Law.

After more than four hours of deliberation, Magistrate Mok Tsz-chung was unpersuaded. The legislation, he ruled, exists to protect public safety; reading it too narrowly would defeat that purpose. So long as a performance draws an audience, whether or not there is a literal stage is beside the point. He convicted on both summonses.

The Wang Fuk Court fire killed 168 people. Even though residents had complained beforehand about contractors colluding on tenders, district councillors collecting large numbers of authorised votes, scaffolding netting failing to meet standards, flammable enclosures, and construction workers smoking on site, no one was prosecuted on any of those counts and the disaster was not prevented. Some have accused various government departments of passing the buck and going through the motions. Yet the Book Punch case demonstrates so amply the initiative and execution of these very departments that any criticism of government incompetence collapses on its own.

Don’t take a single case as too small to reveal what these departments are capable of. This is, in fact, the third successful prosecution of Book Punch — after earlier convictions for selling alcohol without a licence and operating an unlicensed school (the latter for hosting a Spanish-language interest class). Each time, in matters that ordinary citizens would consider harmless trifles, the FEHD, the Education Bureau and others have managed to unravel the threads, descend on the premises by surprise, and — twice now — send in undercover agents. The judiciary, for its part, has played its part in securing convictions every time.

A fourth charge is pending. In March, Book Punch was raided again — this time by the National Security Police — over its sale of The Troublemaker, a biography of Jimmy Lai, the jailed pro-democracy media mogul whose own trial under the National Security Law has drawn international attention. Pong Yat-ming and three staff members were arrested for “knowingly selling a publication with seditious intention” and released on bail. Given the impressive performance government departments have shown in recent months, and their evident determination to safeguard public safety, what kind of future remains for Book Punch — and for Hong Kong’s other independent bookstores — is something the public can simply look on and see.

Back when Facebook was still the place to be, posts like this were everywhere — people speaking, half in jest, to the algorithm itself.

At first everyone understood it was just a figure of speech. The post was really aimed at friends who might see it and chime in with recommendations. Social networks, after all, were where people talked to people.

But a decade and change later, users seem to have forgotten the rhetorical sleight of hand. The phrasing has gone from joke to habit — we now treat the algorithm as if it were a person. Late last year, the joke even came full circle: Meta picked it up and rolled out an experimental Threads feature called Dear Algo, openly inviting users to address the algorithm directly.

So what is an algorithm, really? And how does it relate to AI? Here’s how I think about it.

Bob’s Recipe

Long ago, I studied Computer Engineering at a Chinese University of Hong Kong. It was a traditional degree at a traditional school, with the usual core requirements: C Language, Data Structures, Operating Systems — and what we now hear thrown around constantly: Algorithm.

Loosely speaking, an algorithm is a method or sequence of steps for solving a particular problem. In that broad sense, even a recipe is an algorithm — its problem being how to produce a given dish. But for a Computer Engineering student, the definition is tighter: a finite, unambiguous, executable sequence of instructions for solving a well-defined problem.

Imagine you have a printed Yellow Pages (Facebook’s prehistoric ancestor) and you need to find the number for “John Wick.” The most intuitive algorithm is linear search: start at “Aaron Au” and go down the list, name by name, until you hit your target. It works, but it’s a bit dim.

A smarter approach is to start in the middle. If you land on “Nancy Chan” — which comes after “John Wick” alphabetically — you halve the remaining range and try again at the 25% mark. Repeat until found. This is binary search.

In the classical sense, every part of an algorithm — its steps, its inputs, its outputs — is crisply defined. The user states the problem clearly; the programmer designs the steps; the user supplies the input; the algorithm produces a specific output. Every detail is traceable.

Carol’s Eyes

Now picture this. Alice, a manager, asks Bob — her IT guy — to find all the photos containing cats among ten thousand images.

To Alice, the requirement seems perfectly clear. To Bob, it’s anything but. How do you tell a computer what a cat is? How do you define one? It’s a hopelessly fuzzy specification — but if Bob went back to ask Alice for clarification, he’d probably get fired. Funny enough, if Alice’s young daughter Carol asked her the same question — what is a cat? — Alice would discover that while she can recognize one instantly, she can’t actually explain how.

She’d find that listing features — four legs, fur, whiskers — never quite works, no matter how exhaustively. Either the definition is too loose and includes dogs, or it’s too strict and fails to recognize a cat curled into a ball. And yet, the moment Alice shows Carol a few photos and points out which ones have cats, Carol picks it up almost instantly.

This is how every one of us learned. It’s the kind of learning humans have long taken pride in — the very thing we believed put us above machines. Until AI matured.

Back when I was a student, AI didn’t yet mean “any technology that makes computers seem smart.” It had a much narrower definition, and it had to involve machine learning. Machine learning gave computers something resembling a human capacity: the ability to handle problems we ourselves can’t fully articulate, problems no traditional algorithm could solve. “Find the photos with cats” is now trivial — not because we got better at defining the problem, but because computers, fed enough examples, learned to recognize cats the way a child does.

Alice’s Mystery Box

Now imagine Alice has moved on to Meta, where she leads the Threads team. She turns to Bob with a new request: from the hundreds of millions of posts flowing through the platform every day, generate a feed that’s maximally addictive.

As before, Alice can name the goal but can’t describe its features. So Bob falls back on signals — comments, likes, shares — to filter for whatever seems to be hooking users. This was the early algorithmic feed: still classical in spirit, with explicit rules and conditions, predictable outputs for given inputs. Tweak the rules, and both engineer and user could steer the results.

But as AI grew more powerful, Alice no longer needed to articulate what makes content addictive. Bob could let the AI figure it out and serve up the most habit-forming feed possible, herding users like livestock. The word algorithm is still in use, now meaning “the logic by which a social platform filters information” — but its meaning has shifted entirely. The classical algorithm was a recipe Bob wrote out for the computer; every step was visible. The AI-era algorithm is a black-box chef Bob has trained, and even Bob can’t say why it seasons things the way it does.

For us users, the situation is worse still. Beyond knowing that ads will be slipped in somewhere, we have no real idea how the feed is being cooked. Whatever theories we have are pure guesswork. The irony is that more and more users are happy to remain in the dark — they don’t bother checking the nutrition label, and have started to enjoy the mystery of the surprise box.

We tell ourselves we’re sitting at a fine Japanese omakase counter, paying a premium so a master chef can hand-pick ingredients and prepare each course with care. We forget we’re actually scarfing down free fast food. Why would the chain bother sourcing real ingredients when it isn’t charging us a cent? Nutritionally, though, you can rest easy: the feed is guaranteed to be rich in dopamine. You’ll find it delicious.

Dear User, this is the algorithm.

P.S. Another casualty of the algorithm is the way it crams certain eateries to bursting while leaving worthy little shops deserted. Sometimes the packed-out spots are nothing special, just blessed by the Xiaohongshu gods. Other times the favored places really were excellent — until the crowds arrived and both food and service collapsed, never to recover. Living in Hong Kong, steering clear of the algorithm and seeking out independent shops on your own is a basic skill for eating well and living well.

Bitcoin is the perfect example. At the end of 2024 it broke through $100,000 for the first time, and everyone was either scrambling to buy or thinking it had risen too high and vowing to buy on the pullback. As I write this, Bitcoin is trading around $75,000 — up 20% from the $62,000 low, but still more than 20% below $100,000, and a full 40% below the all-time high of $126,000. If you believe in Bitcoin, putting spare capital to work here should be a simple decision. Yet instead, what we focus on at this moment is the risk — like the arrival of quantum computing. This was especially true after the Google Quantum AI team, together with Stanford and Ethereum Foundation researchers, published a white paper last month showing that the quantum resources needed to break Bitcoin wallet encryption are nearly 20 times less than previously estimated, suddenly putting the quantum threat squarely in the spotlight.

I agree the quantum computing risk is real, but I’m sticking with my advice in Buy $100 of Bitcoin Every Day — with one caveat. Let me first set the context, then offer concrete advice on how Bitcoin holders should prepare for the arrival of quantum computing.

Quantum Computing: A Y2K Bug Without a Set Date

Last century we had the urban legend of Y2K: the moment the clock struck midnight on January 1, 2000, banking systems would crash, public services would grind to a halt, airports would descend into chaos, and planes might even fall from the sky. In the end, Y2K was all thunder and no rain — apart from some elderly folks being tricked into buying deworming pills, nothing happened.

Quantum computing, by contrast, is a genuine Y2K bug. It won’t just affect Bitcoin, Ethereum, and every other cryptocurrency — the entire internet, all banking, and military communications will be impacted, and everyone needs to prepare in advance.

What makes this tricky: twenty-some years ago, everyone knew exactly which second Y2K would arrive (assuming it didn’t just stand us up). This time, the “quantum Y2K” has only given humanity a vague appointment called Q-Day — Quantum Day, the moment a quantum computer first has enough power to break mainstream public-key cryptography like RSA and ECDSA. But estimates for when Q-Day will actually arrive range anywhere from a few years to a few decades.

Bitcoin is secure because only the private key can move the assets, and deriving a private key from a public key through computation would take longer than the history of humanity — longer even than the universe. That logic holds for today’s computers, and it already accounts for computing speeds increasing by factors of thousands, billions, even trillions of times. But quantum computers work on an entirely different foundation, making them exceptionally good at deriving private keys — rendering mainstream public-key cryptography fundamentally broken. In other words, any Bitcoin stored at an address whose public key has ever been exposed — estimated at 6.7 million BTC, or 34% of circulating supply — could be easily stolen after Q-Day.

BIP-360: Voluntary Migration to a Quantum-Resistant Address

To counter this risk, the Bitcoin community has drafted BIP-360: Pay-to-Merkle-Root (P2MR). If adopted, holders will be able to move their Bitcoin into a new wallet format, P2MR, that doesn’t expose public keys (sparing you the technical details) — so even when Q-Day arrives, there’s nothing to worry about.

BIP-360 effectively counters quantum attacks, but it requires holders to proactively move their Bitcoin to the new safe wallet. Here’s the problem: of the 6.7 million BTC sitting in quantum-vulnerable addresses, an estimated 3.7 to 4 million BTC have lost private keys — including the 1 million BTC held by Satoshi. In other words, without some other solution, there is nothing to do but wait for Q-Day to arrive, at which point these coins will be “mined” by whichever institution or nation-state gets a working quantum computer first.

Given corporate competition and geopolitical rivalry, it’s unlikely that multiple companies or multiple countries will simultaneously possess the first practically deployable quantum computer. Which means that after Q-Day, a large amount of Bitcoin will end up in the hands of a few — or even a single — organization.

Of course, the real game theory is more complex. If Q-Day arrives suddenly, Bitcoin will plunge, so shorting heavily first and then proving to the market that quantum computers have arrived could be even more profitable, and faster. Or consider this: relative to Bitcoin’s “mere” $1–2 trillion market cap, using a quantum computer to steal US dollars or military secrets would be far more valuable. Either way, as quantum computers arrive and proliferate, quantum-vulnerable addresses will become ATMs — and more fundamentally, Bitcoin’s entire narrative of decentralization and digital gold could collapse.

BIP-361: Forced Freezing of Unmigrated Assets

And so, recently, the Bitcoin community has proposed BIP-361: Post Quantum Migration and Legacy Signature Sunset. It takes the active approach: three years after activation, the consensus layer will force legacy quantum-vulnerable addresses to only send, never receive Bitcoin; then five years after activation, any Bitcoin that still hasn’t migrated will be frozen, preventing post-Q-Day plunder.

You don’t need me to explain that while BIP-361 is a proactive bomb-defusing measure, forcibly freezing holders’ assets is undeniably an abandonment of principles the Bitcoin community has upheld for over a decade. Compared to the simple directness of BIP-360, BIP-361 is enormously controversial and stands little chance of winning clear community support. Freezing specific addresses violates core values; not freezing them means being picked clean. And with no concrete date for Q-Day, no hard deadline, reaching community consensus is all the more difficult.

BIP-360’s activation via soft fork is only a matter of time, not really in doubt. BIP-361 or its variants, however, will almost certainly struggle to get Bitcoin Core developers on board for a long time. Yet at the same time, there will no doubt be plenty of supporters — especially corporations holding large amounts of Bitcoin, who aren’t as “stubborn” as the fundamentalists and tend to take a more “pragmatic” approach. With both sides deadlocked, a hard fork becomes very likely — splitting into a die-hard BTC and a pragmatist coin like BTQ. Or the other way around: the pragmatist chain may inherit the OG name BTC, while the die-hards become BTCC, Bitcoin Classic — after all, ticker symbols are ultimately decided by the exchanges.

A split is usually seen as a negative, but in the crypto world, a split is sometimes an “airdrop” opportunity. Take Ethereum’s hard fork after The DAO hack. Because ETH — the side that forcibly froze assets — had the backing of the Ethereum Foundation, Vitalik, and most core developers, its price was unaffected by the fork, rising from $12 in July 2016 to around $2,400 today. Meanwhile ETC — the die-hard Ethereum Classic — went from $0.75 at launch to $8.70 today. ETC may look shabby on the surface, but its market cap still sits at $1.3 billion — all of it an “airdrop” to former ETH holders.

The One Thing Bitcoin Holders Need to Do

After all that, what do Bitcoin holders actually need to do in the face of the quantum threat? Self-custody.

The reason is simple. When Bitcoin really does split in two, existing holders will own both coins. If you hold 1 BTC before the hard fork, afterward you’ll have 1 BTC + 1 BTCC. But you must control your own private keys to receive the forked coin. If your Bitcoin is on an exchange — or even in an ETF — the custodian will likely pick a side. Your original holdings and units won’t be affected, but you’ll probably never receive the new coin.

If the two post-split coins turn out to be as lopsided as ETH and ETC, and your exchange picks the right side, your loss is relatively limited — you’ve simply handed your “airdrop” to the exchange for free. And in fact, this has already happened repeatedly during Bitcoin’s 2017 and 2018 hard forks into BCH, BTG, and BSV.

The Ethereum precedent offers a reference, but if Bitcoin really does hard fork, the price ratio won’t necessarily be as one-sided as ETH and ETC. This time, core developers will likely side with the die-hards, and the assets being frozen aren’t a hacker’s — they belong to OGs including the founder himself. One side controls the capital, the exchanges, the ETFs; the other side holds the moral legitimacy. It’s evenly matched. In that scenario, being stuck with only the coin your exchange chose becomes a significant cost. The “fun” part: the forked-out coins don’t disappear — they all become the exchange’s assets.

The oft-repeated saying “Not your keys, not your coins” — this is exactly what it means.

p.s. Has anyone noticed that since the government loudly declared last year it would “make Hong Kong a virtual asset management hub,” Web3 has hardly been mentioned lately? Of course — prices are down, AI is hot, the Northern Metropolis is here. Time for another new story.

I don’t personally use Instagram DMs, but given its massive user base, I expected at least some outcry. Instead, beyond the usual voices from “privacy hardliners” like Proton and Mozilla, there hasn’t even been a ripple on social media. I couldn’t find a single complaint, let alone any talk of a boycott.

I’m not just talking about a lack of discussion within my own echo chamber or the algorithm failing to show it to me. Even when I deliberately searched for it, I found nothing in the Chinese-speaking world. Not only was there no search result, but I actually found many older videos teaching people how to turn off end-to-end encryption.

While my view on privacy remains unchanged, I must admit I’ve had to reflect: Meta is simply satisfying human nature and providing exactly what users want. However, after that reflection, the work of public outreach must continue to ensure that user choices are made out of free will, rather than ignorance or information asymmetry.

Encrypted for everyone… except me

First, let’s re-explain the concept. End-to-end encryption, as the name suggests, means that a message is encrypted throughout its journey from the sender to the receiver. In other words, only the sender and the receiver can read it. The intermediaries responsible for passing the message—including Meta itself—cannot read the content.

The concept of E2EE is easy to understand, but many people are confused about which communication tools actually use it and which do not. The classic example is Telegram. It has a very positive image, as if its privacy is very high, but in fact, general chats—the vast majority—do not have E2EE.

In most cases, when a service like Telegram is not end-to-end encrypted, it’s not that the service isn’t encrypted at all, but rather that the encryption method isn’t end-to-end. It’s “encrypted for everyone, except for me [the service provider].” This is the case for Telegram, for WeChat, and soon, it will be the case for Instagram as well. Many people choose to believe that Telegram will defend user privacy. But what about Tencent? What about Meta?

People who believe Telegram is very private are trusting that Telegram won’t—not that it can’t—decrypt their messages. I don’t question the integrity of Telegram’s founder or its team. The problem is that we cannot rely on the “backbone” of specific individuals to protect user privacy. Any company or organization registered in any country has a legal obligation to cooperate when law enforcement or courts demand it. Even if a founder stands firm, doing so puts them in personal danger. Furthermore, when a company holds the keys to decrypt user messages, those keys could leak due to procedural errors, hacking, or various other reasons.

Regardless of how reliable a founder is, server-side encryption is inherently a bad design. To truly protect user privacy, communication tools must provide end-to-end encryption, and it must be the default.

From the F8 Vision to Removing Encryption

Here’s a joke. In 2019, at the Facebook developer conference F8, Mark Zuckerberg gave a grand speech declaring “The future is private.” He later published a long article titled “A Privacy-Focused Vision for Social Networking,” stating, “I believe the future of communication will increasingly shift to private, encrypted services” and “End-to-end encryption prevents anyone—including us—from seeing what people share.” And so on.

If you took that seriously, you’ve already lost.

Meta’s official reason for turning off E2EE for Instagram DMs is that the feature’s usage rate is extremely low. To be honest, I believe it’s a fact that few people use it, but this is a case of confusing cause and effect. Precisely because Instagram (and Telegram) do not have E2EE as the default, and users have to manually enable the option for specific chats, the usage rate is low. When Meta wants to push Reels or ads, they find every possible way to get them in front of users. Do they really lack the ability to make E2EE the default for Instagram DMs? In the end, it’s not that users chose not to encrypt; it’s that Meta designed it so that users couldn’t encrypt conveniently. Offering the option in 2023 was just a token gesture to appease “privacy buffs.” Packaging the termination of E2EE as a “user choice” is pure PR.

“Defaults” are an incredibly powerful force, especially in internet products. Even if a setting can be changed with a single click, the extra operational and cognitive cost means that 90% of users will stick with the default. In the 90s, Netscape once had over 90% market share. Later, Microsoft made its browser the “default” by bundling Internet Explorer, flipping the entire market share. This triggered the largest antitrust investigation in US history. If Microsoft had explained in court that they only “defaulted” to Internet Explorer and users were free to switch to Netscape, the judge likely wouldn’t have bought it.

So, what is Meta’s true goal? I believe it is twofold: first, to satisfy the desires of various governments, and second (and more importantly), to obtain more data to train AI and for precision ad targeting. In an era where Large Language Models are extremely hungry for data, every private message is no longer just communication to Meta—it’s free “labeled data.” By terminating E2EE, Meta is essentially incorporating users’ private conversations into its “digital oil refinery.”

Anti-climax: If the product is free…

Having written over a thousand words, it might seem like I’m just here to bash Meta. But here is the anti-climax: to deal with governments and train AI, Meta’s termination of E2EE is actually understandable—one might even say perfectly reasonable. R&D, servers, and bandwidth all cost money. Yet, the moment a service charges a fee, users flee. If they don’t use your data to make money, are they supposed to run on “the power of love”?

Furthermore, Signal, and even Meta-owned WhatsApp and Messenger, all have E2EE as the default. The former even avoids storing user metadata and protects user privacy in every detail—and these tools are all free. If there are so many choices right in front of them and users still run to Instagram DMs, WeChat, or Telegram, clearly not caring about their own privacy, then what right do we have to blame a profit-driven tech enterprise for “creating value for shareholders”?

At the end of the day, most people only care about what is free, convenient, efficient, and has network effects. If privacy can even be a “fifth element,” that’s already not bad. This is the choice of the mainstream user. What “privacy buffs” can do is not to shout louder at tech companies, but to work harder on discourse and public education.

p.s. In the last issue, The price of privacy? HK$100k and 1 year in prison., I thought the topic was very important and the content was decent. As it turns out, the open rate was only 23.4%, the lowest in over a year. Does this happen to prove exactly what I was saying?

Last November, a severe fire occurred at Wang Fuk Court in Tai Po, claiming 168 lives and leaving nearly two thousand families displaced. Four months later, affected units have been repeatedly burgled, yet owners have not even had the chance to return home to collect their belongings, let alone receive arrangements for permanent housing. On the other hand, the humble wish of residents to hold an owners’ meeting has been delayed time and again. Basic facts—such as the distribution of the deceased and the status of the fire safety system at the time of the accident—were only first made public during a recent hearing. That hearing, however, lacked enough space for residents to attend, curiously lacked a live stream, and had no power to summon the contractors.

Despite this, Hong Kong citizens should perhaps be understanding. After all, the overall efficiency of the SAR government remains high. For instance, in safeguarding national security, nearly six years after the enactment of the Hong Kong National Security Law, the government again gazetted amendments to its implementation rules on Monday. These grant law enforcement agencies more power: if a designated person refuses to provide the password or decryption method for a seized electronic device, it constitutes a crime punishable by up to one year in prison and a fine of HK$100,000. For provisions with such deep impact on civil privacy, the government can issue them suddenly with immediate effect, bypassing Legislative Council scrutiny. This demonstrates a level of executive power that deserves commendation from national leaders.

As a Hong Kong citizen, I have no way to oppose such legislation other than “voting with my feet,” as hundreds of thousands who moved to other countries have done. But as a believer in and practitioner of the Cypherpunk spirit, I feel a minimal responsibility to raise public awareness. Since these provisions were announced and implemented so suddenly, citizens may not realize they are now in a jurisdiction where they can be ordered to unlock their phones at any time—where refusal is a crime facing a HK$100,000 fine and a year in prison.

In the digital world, to see is to possess

Some might think I am overreacting or even fearmongering. As I write this, it was only two weeks ago that Book Punch, prosecuted for the third time, was raided by law enforcement again. The founder, Pong Yat-ming, and three other staff members were taken away, this time accused of selling “seditious publications” such as the Biography of Jimmy Lai. Just one day after the new law was enacted, if law enforcement exercises their power to seize Yat-ming’s phone and demand it be unlocked, all his chat records—including his conversations with me—would be instantly exposed. This example happening right before our eyes clearly illustrates that privacy is a local and personal issue for everyone.

Some people like to say, “If you have done nothing wrong, you need not fear a knock at the door at midnight” (perhaps because a knock at dawn is more terrifying?). They say, “If you’re honorable and upright, why fear being seen?” I wonder if the gates of their homes are transparent, or if they walk around naked in the summer. These “upright” people don’t seem to understand that wearing pants doesn’t mean you’re afraid of someone seeing a gang tattoo on your buttocks. I am upright, and I don’t even plan to delete my chats with Book Punch, but I do not want people reading my records—simply because privacy is a fundamental human right.

Furthermore, the argument that the “upright have nothing to fear” completely ignores the difference between the physical and digital worlds. In the physical world, “seeing” and “possessing” are separated. A jewelry store allows you to see gold ornaments while maintaining security; unless you pay, you cannot possess them. But with data in the digital world, to see is to possess. Saying “why fear being seen” is like saying “why fear letting people enter your home and take whatever they want”—it is utterly absurd.

Imagine if I said: “Even if I see your creations, your reports, your messages, your photos, or your videos, I won’t take them, and I promise not to back them up.” That would be a rogue’s promise, because firstly, seeing the data is largely the same as possessing it, and secondly, you have no way of knowing if I’ve made a backup. Moreover, the new implementation rules for the National Security Law apply when the phone or electronic device has already been seized and is no longer in the owner’s hands.

If this is true for general data, privacy is even more critical for asset management. If a password is leaked, data can be copied; if you get your device back or log in from another device, you still have a copy. But digital assets are like physical objects; once stolen, the owner loses them permanently. Users of digital banking, centralized exchanges, and other custodial services already know the consequences of a password leak. The government itself frequently advises citizens to be alert to scams and never leak their passwords.

Providing a password = giving up all data and assets

I must supplement what disclosing a password means for self-custodied cryptocurrencies.

Last month, the South Korean government accidentally published the private keys of seized cold wallets online. Cryptocurrencies worth 6.4 billion won (about US$5 million) were stolen instantly. If you think this is just a one-off blunder, you are wrong; similar incidents have happened three times this year alone, involving amounts up to US$20 million. Ultimately, this isn’t just about being careful; it involves the workflow of law enforcement agencies and the core design of cryptocurrency and cryptography.

For most people today, a phone is not just for communication; it is a device that stores all passwords, 2FA, and passkeys used to verify identity. Having the phone and the password means being able to use all services, read all data, and move all assets as the owner. If “e-money” in a bank is stolen, at least there is a trail and the possibility of a freeze. Once self-custodied cryptocurrency is stolen, however, it will likely be sent to untraceable wallets, making it difficult to even identify the thief. The victim is left with no recourse.

I absolutely agree with the importance of protecting national security, but at the same time, private property is the cornerstone of society. Article 6 of the Basic Law states: “The Hong Kong Special Administrative Region shall protect the right of private ownership of property in accordance with law.” I do not intend to question the loyalty or bravery of the Hong Kong Police Force, but there are always “rotten apples.” For example, in February 2025, a male officer was involved in 12 counts of unauthorized access to police investigation systems (ESCC 553/2026); in early 2018, an exhibits officer allegedly stole approximately HK$860,000 from an exhibit room (FLCC 2551/2018); in May 2018, an officer stole HK$3,000 from a citizen’s wallet (ESCC 1273/2018; the list goes on). During an investigation, if just one person acts on greed, the owner’s property will vanish.

Even if a citizen is lucky enough not to encounter a dishonest officer, a simple mistake by an administrator—or even just following an outdated standard operation procedure, such as photographing evidence for records—is enough to cause a citizen who surrendered their password to lose their property. It is like the situation at Wang Fuk Court: the government prohibits residents from returning home to collect belongings “for their safety,” while allowing law enforcement and workers to enter, resulting in the theft of residents’ property.

The new rules of the Hong Kong National Security Law require citizens to provide passwords to law enforcement, but I see no accompanying measures to protect the property of affected citizens—specifically to ensure that self-custodied cryptocurrency does not vanish into thin air during the investigation.

I am not a legal professional; I can barely even parse the difficult, pieced-together Chinese sentences in the implementation rules. However, based on common sense and logic, if someone refuses to hand over a password to prevent their data and assets from being stolen, I believe that is perfectly reasonable.

If Hong Kong still had a normally functioning Legislative Council with representatives speaking for the people, they could at least voice these concerns. If there had been a public consultation as in a democratic society before the new rules were released, Cypherpunks—or even tech enthusiasts like me who know just a little—could have in good faith pointed out these potential loopholes.

Unfortunately, the new National Security Law rules are like the mandatory seatbelt law from months ago—rushed through without public consultation. Who can say for sure that there won’t be a department that accidentally gets something wrong, just like what happened with the seatbelt law? If a citizen hands over a password and their life savings are stolen, who will be held responsible?

p.s. While the new rules have drawn attention and many citizens seem to care about privacy, Meta’s announcement that it would terminate end-to-end encryption for Instagram DMs starting in May didn’t even cause a ripple. When there’s a chance, let’s discuss how Mark Zuckerberg ate his word and, more fundamentally, why end-to-end encryption is so vital.

3ook.com

Read, Listen, Own. The 3rd-gen bookstore ecosystem where authors and readers co-create a decentralized home for books and periodicals. By merging AI-enhanced experiences with Web3 ownership, we safeguard the freedom to read and the integrity of our shared history.

If I were limited to fifty words, the above would be my introduction to 3ook.com. However, since our readers seek deeper exploration, I will expand on the topic, focusing this time on the “Read & Listen” and “Utilizing AI” aspects.

Not Audiobooks, but Books with Voice

The most significant feature of 3ook.com is that it does not distinguish between text books and audiobooks. Every book can be switched between reading and listening modes at any time, unless the author chooses to disable the narration feature.

Although the setting of “Integrated Reading and Listening” may seem minor, it fundamentally changes how people interact with books, making the experience more logical and better suited to modern life. Taking my own experience as an example, among the five books I recently “read”—我城零五,時間的試煉, 浮世薔薇, Ｈ醫生一千零一夜,豆腐媽媽—I primarily listened to them while commuting, walking, hiking, or lying down, occasionally switching to reading mode as a supplement. Had it not been for this, even though I wanted to read these works, it would have been difficult to find the time and visual “HP” (health points) to finish them given my daily rhythm and eyes fatigued by long hours in front of a screen—not to mention the large volume of other excellent works available.

You might say that listening to books is nothing new, given that Audible has a twenty-year history. Indeed, I occasionally listen to audiobooks on platforms like Audible or Kobo. However, with traditional audiobooks, unless you purchase the text version separately, you cannot switch to reading mode at any time to clarify unfamiliar words, appreciate beautiful illustrations, or view infographics.

Furthermore, the vast majority of books simply do not have an audio version. Taking Amazon as an example, there are a hundred million text books, while its subsidiary Audible has only one or two million audiobooks—a coverage rate of less than 2%. Kobo fares slightly better; among nearly ten million books, about 5% offer an audio version. This means that 95% of titles are left behind. The absence of an audio version is the norm for e-books.

If you are reading popular titles like Atomic Habits or Chip War, finding an audiobook is not a problem. But if you are like me and interested in relatively niche subjects—especially Hong Kong books—the chance of finding an audio version is nearly zero. After all, even if these works spent their entire revenue, it might not be enough to record an audiobook using traditional methods.

Thanks to the rapid advancements in generative AI, 3ook.com pre-samples the voices of voice actors, analyzes their vocal characteristics, and synthesizes the entire text. The results are already quite impressive. While there are occasional inaccuracies in pronunciation or unnatural pauses, to be fair, were it not for these minor flaws, it has reached a point where it is hard to distinguish between a human narrator and an AI-generated one.

Not to self-deprecate, but objectively speaking, traditional e-book platforms are unlikely to hire someone to narrate 區塊鏈社會學 or 財富自由主義. As a niche author, if I wanted an audio version of my work, I had to find a way myself. Now that they are on 3ook.com, my six works and the upcoming 進擊的自由 are finally able to provide both text and audio versions simultaneously.

Designing 3ook.com began with satisfying my own needs, but I believe there are many readers, authors, and cultural preservationists facing the same issues.

Narrating Niche Works in Niche Languages

Just like niche works, niche languages cannot generate sufficient commercial scale.

Whether we are willing to accept it or not, Cantonese is becoming increasingly niche. I have immense respect for podcasters who love Cantonese and narrate Hong Kong books in our mother tongue, but we cannot deny that for most works, the market scale for Cantonese audiobooks is insufficient to support the cost of narration. However, with voice generation technology, there is hope for this problem to be solved.

3ook.com currently offers three default voice talents: travel expert Pazu, and my two partners Phoebe and Aurora. The former two narrate in Cantonese, while Aurora narrates in Mandarin. To be honest, compared to Mandarin, the flaws in Cantonese narration are slightly more frequent, but it is already well above a passing level. Considering that AI models are still improving rapidly, with enough training data, the quality of Cantonese narration will inevitably continue to advance, correcting that final 1% of error.

I am a bit sorry that 3ook.com cannot yet provide a Taiwanese (Hokkien) voice talent, as our resources are very limited. If there are Taiwanese readers who can provide support, we will certainly add it as soon as possible. Although I do not understand Taiwanese, I believe the intimacy of receiving information in one’s mother tongue, and the sentiment of preserving a gradually marginalized culture, is a universal value.

In addition to the default voice talents, 3ook.com launched the “Private Voice Talent” feature earlier this month, allowing members to upload their own or authorized voices to narrate works on their bookshelf. In recent weeks, almost every time I meet a friend, I forcefully invite them to record. A minute later, their voice can be used for narration. Sometimes the voice is so similar it’s indistinguishable; other times the effect isn’t quite ideal yet. The team is using various methods to fine-tune it, and we are confident that the precision of voice cloning will improve further in the near future.

Just imagine: a parent telling stories to their child, or a loved one narrating a novel for you. That “goosebump-inducing” feeling is something only the people involved can truly experience.

I am not an “AI enthusiast” who tries every new model daily, but from beginning to end, I adhere to the principle of “Humanity as the Essence, Technology as the Tool.” Through voice generation technology, 3ook.com aims to give every book a voice, narrated by the most familiar voices in our mother tongue, to preserve culture and keep the emotion alive.

P.S. After a 12-year absence, Stefanie Sun returned to Hong Kong for a concert last week. I attended with the feeling of catching up with my little sister. Seeing a slightly fuller Stefanie looking energetic, I was very happy for this mother of two. During the request segment, Stefanie invited Hong Kong people in the audience to raise their hands and then picked one. As soon as the person spoke, it was rhotic Mandarin—a Chinese person visiting Hong Kong for the concert. The next request was the same, and the third and fourth as well. It was a constant reminder that I was in “Hong Kong, China.” It wasn’t just the few picked for requests; by my “ear-test,” the six people to my right and at least three to my left were all from the mainland. Most of what I heard on the way in and out was Mandarin. It is not just Cantonese that is becoming increasingly niche.

Besides the Red Packets distributed through the DHK Newsletter (sponsored by Fluidkey), I personally put up $100 USD under the name of Just Books on Threads. I shared a link inviting 100 muggles to claim a $1 Red Packet as their first step into the Web3 world, hoping to bring more people on-chain during the Lunar New Year.

Goodwill Met with a Sybil Attack

Unlike the DHK Newsletter readership, the audience of Just Books has little to do with cryptocurrency. Furthermore, suspicious behavior like “giving away money” is often suppressed by social media algorithms. Initial engagement was slow: twenty some people claimed packets on the first day, only six on the second, and just one on the third.

I am naturally very “i”, and I wasn’t obsessed with forcing these packets out, so I didn’t push it further. However, around noon on the fourth day, a claim began appearing steadily every 2–3 minutes until the entire $100 was gone. This rhythm—not too many, not too few, no long gaps, but never twice in the same minute—had a probability of occurring naturally that was near zero. It was almost certainly the work of one person: Bob.

To use my analogy from last week about handing out $1 bills on the street: most passersby ignored me, but one person took a packet, walked around the corner, “passed by” again to take another, and repeated this until the bag was empty.

If you call me stupid, I won’t deny it. From the moment I pulled $100 out of my own pocket—or even eight years ago when I started sending crypto Red Packets—I was destined to be the fool. Civic education should be the government’s responsibility; why am I, a person of modest means, writing articles for free and “resorting” to paying out of pocket to get people to join?

But while I may be stupid, I wasn’t so naive as to not expect a Bob to perform a Sybil attack to “farm airdrops”. This is common in Web3. Before sending the first batch, I asked Fluidkey if there was a mechanism to prevent one person from claiming multiple times. They said yes, but I didn’t take it too seriously—not because I didn’t trust them, but because I knew such mechanisms only stop “honest people,” not “villains.” Fluidkey is positioned as a privacy wallet; if they push too hard by requiring phone verification to prevent Sybil attacks, it wouldn’t just be an inconvenience—it would be putting the cart before the horse and sacrificing privacy. Therefore, I don’t blame Fluidkey for failing to block Bob.

If Fluidkey has room for improvement, it’s in lowering the minimum amount per packet to ten cents or less. I originally wanted to set random amounts averaging much less than $1. The goal was to bring people on-chain; participants usually aren’t doing it for the money, but for the “good luck” and the fun of a game where everyone gets a piece. Converting someone from 0 to 0.1—or even 0.01—is an infinite times more. A smaller amount wouldn’t deter regular users, but it would significantly lower the economic incentive for “farmers.” Unfortunately, Fluidkey’s minimum is $1, so I had to spend $100 for 100 packets, which attracted the Sybil attack.

A Feature in Tech, a Bug in Application

Now, let’s talk about how the Fluidkey privacy wallet works. It’s too easy to get an AI to explain concepts these days, so I’ll just keep it brief.

Contrary to the public perception that crypto ensures privacy, “traditional” crypto transfers are like two people talking on Twitter: the transaction records are wide open for the world to see. For example, if DHK posts a wallet address for donations, anyone can search it on Etherscan to see the balance and history. When Alice sends money to DHK, she exposes her own address and her entire transaction history.

Fluidkey’s “magic” allows users to easily generate and manage infinite wallet addresses (using ERC-5564). Through an ENS address like ckxpress.fkey.id, the sender receives a brand-new stealth address every time they open it. One cannot check the history or link it to my other wallets unless I manually merge the assets.

Furthermore, through Account Abstraction (ERC-4337), Fluidkey uses smart contract wallets. Users don’t need to manage seed phrases (they use Passkeys) and can pay gas fees with assets other than ETH, like USDC. This makes transfers easier and enhances privacy; if you had to send ETH to every stealth address just to pay gas, the source of that ETH would eventually link all the addresses together.

By utilizing Account Abstraction and Stealth Addresses, Fluidkey solved three of the four major hurdles of giving away money. They even adapted to local customs by developing a Red Packet feature. However, Fluidkey’s core identity is a privacy wallet, whereas Red Packets are a social behavior. The tension between privacy and social interaction inevitably makes the group-distribution experience feel awkward.

In contrast, WeChat—which pioneered digital Red Packets—is a social app first, a wallet second. In a WeChat group, everyone sees who sent the packet, who claimed it, and who got the “Best Luck.” The money is just the packaging; the interaction is the point. In a privacy-centric wallet, all these interactions are (rightfully) discarded.

Fluidkey, which allows users to use multiple devices and emails to create multiple accounts—each generating multiple stealth addresses—is doing its job perfectly. But in the context of Red Packets, it is destined to never be as successful as a social app. This isn’t a “bug” that fails to identify users; it’s a “feature” that successfully protects privacy.

As for Bob: this giveaway relied on an honor system. It wasn’t even a hack. The money was already spent, so it wasn’t a financial loss to me. However, Bob deprived others of the chance to learn and enter the Web3 gateway. Furthermore, spending 150 minutes to net $70 means an “hourly wage” of only $28. He now has 70 wallet addresses to manage; he either has to make 70 separate small purchases or spend more time consolidating them, which risks being tracked on-chain anyway. Why be so exhausted? Why not leave the opportunity for the muggles, or write an article/video sharing the “farming” experience to help the community? That would be a much more meaningful contribution.

I have been doing this for eight years. I can tell you with full responsibility that the reality is: losing the money is hard, but giving it away is even harder.

Imagine this: if I pulled out 100 one-dollar bills on the street and tried to hand one to every passerby, what do you think would happen? I bet a “barrier” would form within a two-meter radius around me, and people would avoid me like the plague. Giving away money is, surprisingly, harder than handing out worthless flyers.

If “real money” from the U.S. is treated this way, distributing cryptocurrency is a hundred times more difficult. Last week, I used Fluidkey to send out 188 Red Packets worth a total of 228 USD. They were claimed almost instantly. While this might seem to contradict my point, it was actually the result of a massive cumulative effort: from the evolution of Bitcoin to Ethereum, over a dozen network upgrades, the emergence of stablecoins, the ongoing battle with the traditional system, the development of Fluidkey, and the hundreds of educational articles published by DHK Newsletters over the years. Without any single one of these links, we could never have achieved the smooth distribution we saw last week.

In addition to the Red Packets sponsored by Fluidkey for DHK Newsletter, I also funded several others out of my own pocket. Among them, one of the four “Opening Day” packets for Just Books went unclaimed by a volunteer. Furthermore, Just Books distributed 100 USD to the public; although it was eventually claimed after a few days, there is a story behind that which I’ll save for another time.

I also distributed Red Packets to other groups to promote cryptocurrency. In one group filled with scholars, journalists, and writers, I sent out ten packets and provided background info to “incite” participation. Only one person claimed it. Though this was expected, it reminded me of my essay in Moneyverse titled “When it Comes to Money, Everyone is pro-establishment.” Feel free to read the book for more; I won’t repeat it here, but the title says it all. Even public intellectuals find it difficult to imagine money outside of the established system, let alone practice it.

To give away Red Packets via cryptocurrency, at least four major hurdles must be overcome:

1. The Consensus of Money

This is the most basic, yet most overlooked point.

You might argue that the example of giving away 1 USD at the start of this article is only hard because the amount is too low. In reality, even giving away 100 USD per person isn’t necessarily easy. When the amount is low, people find it bothersome; when it’s high, they suspect a scam—thinking it’s too good to be true.

The most extreme and interesting example is from 2010, when Bitcoin core developer Gavin Andresen created the “Bitcoin Faucet,” giving away 5 BTC for simply completing a CAPTCHA. If that service existed today (though 5 BTC should be called a “Bitcoin Flood” rather than a faucet), the budget would be drained instantly regardless of size. Back then, however, it took a year and a half to give away 19,715 BTC—averaging only seven to eight claims per day. The reason was simple: the world didn’t believe what you were giving away was “money.” They either ignored you, labeled you a scammer, or thought you were a lunatic. Most people simply wouldn’t take it.

From Bitcoin to Ether, and from Ether to stablecoins, getting people to recognize that what is being sent is “money”—or an asset with strong “moneyness”—was not an overnight achievement. This single step took the blockchain community sixteen years.

2. Wallet Management

Even if society agrees that cryptocurrency is money, the public needs to own a wallet or be able to open one easily to receive it. This is the second threshold.

I’ve worked on LikeCoin for eight years. All these years, I’ve spent far more time educating people on how to open and manage wallets than I have discussing the philosophy of LikeCoin or decentralized publishing itself. It’s frustrating, but unavoidable. Unless you treat crypto solely as an investment tool and are happy with custodial services, you must master wallet management to achieve true self-sovereignty over your assets and data. There are no shortcuts here.

Fortunately, in the past year, embedded wallets and Passkeys have matured, making wallet creation much simpler. With the gradual implementation of “Account Abstraction” on Ethereum, I believe we will soon say goodbye to the era of “mnemonic phrases.” Managing a crypto account will feel almost identical to managing a Web2 service account.

The irony is that while registering for Web3 services like Fluidkey, Ether.Fi, or 3ook.com has become as easy as traditional services, I’ve found it harder to make users understand that—even if the experience is similar—self-management is fundamentally different from a custodial service. Perhaps this isn’t a problem; maybe users don’t need to know. Perhaps I’m just confusing my roles as an educator and a product designer. I don’t have the answer yet.

3. Payment of Gas Fees

Solving the first two problems only gets the money into their hands. How the recipient spends that money is another issue.

Unless you are sending Bitcoin or Ether directly, sending an ERC-20 token on Ethereum presents a problem: while receiving is free, the recipient cannot move the tokens without having ETH to pay for gas fees. Without ETH, the gift is useless—it’s just a digital souvenir.

The first time I widely distributed crypto Red Packets was in mid-February 2018. LikeCoin had just been minted on Ethereum earlier that month. To coincide with the Lunar New Year, we faced these two hurdles by sending out large numbers of “8 LIKE” packets. Those interested in “archaeology” can still find the old tutorials from that year.

Regarding the gas fee issue, we developed “Ethereum Token Payment Delegation,” which we shared at Open Source Developer Meetups. This technology later evolved into “sponsored transactions” and “paymasters.” This is why today I can send out USDC packets, and the recipient can spend that USDC by using the USDC itself for fees, without needing any ETH.

However, less than six months after we “solved” the gas fee problem, Ethereum became extremely congested, and fees skyrocketed. Since “sponsored transactions” meant we were footing the bill, we simply didn’t have the capital to sustain it. We were forced to stop the sponsorship and accelerate the development of the LikeCoin chain. That led to the story of LikeCoin v2.

Fun fact: To this day, there are still 6,726 wallets on the Ethereum mainnet holding 8 LIKE. They are most likely recipients of Red Packets in 2018. It shows just how much effort we put into promoting self-managed wallets, and how much of that effort ultimately resulted in “useless” digital artifacts.

4. Privacy for Both Parties

I have often emphasized that while cryptocurrency is very secure, it is not private. Even if you solve all the above issues, if the distribution mechanism isn’t handled correctly, the whole world can easily track the entire transaction history of both the sender and receiver. The simplest solution is to just not treat it as a problem—and honestly, that has been most people’s “solution” until now.

That is why I chose Fluidkey for my Red Packets this year. It wasn’t (just) that I was eyeing the sponsorship; it’s because it generates Stealth Addresses to decouple real identities, providing a level of privacy for both the sender and the receiver. Explaining the mechanics and usage of Fluidkey would require a full newsletter in itself, so I’ll leave it at that for now.

If you’ve read this far, I believe you’ll agree: giving away money is much more difficult than it looks.

The 90-day migration period for LikeCoin v3 officially concluded on February 2. During the migration perioid, a total of 1,282,627,812 LIKE v2 were upgraded to v3, representing 85.5% of the total supply of 1,500,000,000 LIKE.

From the initial proposal of the LikeCoin v3 Green Paper on May 8, 2024, to the community’s approval and funding in Q4 2024, followed by six months of development—3ook.com, the v3 application layer, took the lead on June 16, 2025, by launching the v2 NFT upgrade. Finally, on November 3, 2025, the 90-day token upgrade process was initiated during the monthly community call. After 21 months of dedication, the LikeCoin v3 upgrade is officially complete, just in time for the upcoming 8th Minting Anniversary on February 8.

2

The latest number of v3 holding wallets stands at 3,167 (excluding wallets with all funds deposited). The number of depositing wallets (i.e., those with voting rights) is 573, with a total of 698,854,750 LIKE in escrow, accounting for 46.59% of the total supply.

Additionally, among v3 users, 156 wallets are participating in decentralized curation, staking a total of 4,011,655 LIKE across 1,038 titles.

3

Last October, proposal LIP-98 approved the allocation of 10,000,000 LIKE as deposit rewards during the v3 migration period. Those funds were exhausted the day before yesterday as the migration period ended. Until the community approves the next allocation, LikeCoin deposit rewards are temporarily in a “gap period.”

In response, I have stepped up to submit proposal LIP-103, suggesting an allocation of another 5,000,000 LIKE to cover deposit rewards for the next 90 days. Based on the current amount of LIKE in escrow, this corresponds to an estimated annualized yield (APR) of 2.9%.

Although the reward period is also 90 days, the total amount has been halved. This is primarily because the previous allocation was based on the v2 staking volume of nearly 1,000,000,000 LIKE—significantly higher than the current v3 escrow volume. Therefore, my proposal reduces the requested amount by half to ensure the long-term sustainability of the ecosystem.

The one-week voting period for LIP-103 has five days remaining. I urge everyone with a vote to participate—our community is ours to govern.

LIP-103

4

LikeCoin v2 was launched on November 15, 2019, with upgrades opening simultaneously. After five or six years, there are virtually no v1 holders left to upgrade to v2. While our talk of the “v3 upgrade” for the past two years naturally refers to the v2-to-v3 transition, a small number of v1 holders resurfaced during the 90-day migration window seeking help to upgrade. At the time, I was unable to assist.

Now that the v2-to-v3 transition has completed, I have submitted another proposal to provide a final 30-day migration window for LikeCoin v1 holders to upgrade directly to v3. This aims to align the community and concentrate resources on v3 while giving those who contributed in the past one last chance to keep up.

Details can be found in LIP-104; please cast your vote on Snapshot.

LIP-104

5

Exactly 362 days ago, on the 7th anniversary, I was in Hualien and published the Declaration of LikeCoin DAO.

While parts of the Declaration originated from my ideas, the first draft was penned by Mr. Dung Kai-cheung (if I had the literary skill to write it myself, I wouldn’t have waited seven years!). It was then circulated within the community, with feedback and revisions contributed by Mashbean and Audrey Tang, among others. Overall, it is a community-authored document.

With the v3 upgrade complete, I plan to propose a community vote during the 8th anniversary to formally endorse this philosophy, further strengthening the Declaration’s legitimacy. Honestly, I’m not usually one for anniversaries; waiting a few more days is more of a tactic to remind users who have upgraded but not yet deposited: depositing not only earns you rewards (pending LIP-103), but more importantly, it grants you voting rights. Every 1 LIKE converted to 1 veLIKE (vote-escrow LIKE) corresponds to one unit of voting power. To participate in a vote, you must have escrowed before the proposal was made.

6

Except for the latest data, all of the above was discussed during Monday’s February community call. As a reminder, the LikeCoin community call takes place on the first Monday of every month at 18:30 (HK/TW time). It is held online and streamed live on YouTube. You are welcome to listen, chat, ask questions, or even promote your work.

If you wish to present during a call, please contact 3ook.com customer service.

7

On the 7th anniversary, besides publishing the Declaration of LikeCoin DAO, I committed to buying $100 USD worth of LikeCoin every day for at least three years (until the 10th anniversary).

A year has nearly passed, and I have accumulated over 20 million LIKE, exceeding 1% of the total supply. If you’re inspired, feel free to join me in buying 100 dollars of LikeCoin daily.

8

We had a minor incident last month. The LikeCoin website, Like.co, which was hosted on Notion, was suddenly flagged for “violating content policies” (a common occurrence for Hong Kongers, sadly). Consequently, Notion began showing warnings of potential “illegal, phishing, or scam” content before users could open the page. Our appeals were unsuccessful, so we simply replaced the underlying infrastructure.

The new website was spearheaded by Wancat, a new member of the Tech SubDAO. It looks ten times better than the previous version I was responsible for, and while the content is simple, all essential information is there.

I invite everyone to celebrate the 8th anniversary by visiting LikeCoin’s new home for a “housewarming.”

Like.Co

【The Declaration of LikeCoin DAO】 – 2025.02.08

To build a DAO through Likes, supported by coins.

“Like” is “讚”; Coin is “托”; “DAO” is “邦”.

LikeCoin DAO is founded on the infrastructure and practice of publishing, with the greater ambition of fostering a new, universal cultural paradigm.

The meaning of a “Like” is affection, appreciation, support, recognition, connection, sharing, and also value exchange.

We use LikeCoin as our token to transform “Likes” into a medium for value storage and exchange, realizing a cultural vision through material technology.

The value we speak of is the value of people, not the value of commodities; the exchange we speak of is reciprocal and equal between people—gifts and rewards, not speculation or consumption.

Our vision is: to use “Likes” to record history, preserve culture, encourage autonomy, protect freedom, and revolutionize publishing. We provide support and incentives, eliminate barriers and obstacles, allowing creators to be directly rewarded and readers to freely access information.

We are committed to building a user-friendly, low-barrier technical entry point and welcome all who share the same philosophy to join.

We are committed to making LikeCoin DAO transcend the limitations of time, place, and person, becoming a widespread technological application and cultural practice that is open, free, and shared.

We are not just “us,” but also “you” and “they.” We are a plurality of people, a community of free association and shared value. As long as you are willing to Like, you are a Liker – citizen of the LikeCoin DAO.

p.s. Some readers felt my p.s. last week regarding the HK “Bus Security Law” was crude, like a “Bus Uncle.” That’s only natural, because I am indeed exactly that—a “Bus Uncle.” For readers who don’t follow Hong Kong news, just after my rant, the law was actually withdrawn only six days after implementation. Of course, it wasn’t because of me, but because they realized they had botched the legal wording during the legislative process. Please don’t find it absurd that this happens in “Perfected” Hong Kong; legislators are so busy they rarely get to ride a bus, and government officials are preoccupied with national planning. Mistakes in haste are normal; the public should be understanding. No one should be held accountable.

Thank you again for the readers’ support. From now on, I have no more book-selling tasks for the time being. The editing and writing process will still take some time; before that, I will only update the 100 co-publishers on the progress and discuss details. The first co-publisher briefing will take place this Friday, and this issue of the newsletter might be the last article related to Attack on Freedom before its official publication.

Yum Kee Noodles in Tai Po Market

Selling out 100 books feels good.

This sentence sounds like a platitude, but the point here is not that the books sold well or that the income was high. After all, 100 books are not many, and even with a price of $100 USD each, compared to the cost of producing a book, it is just an ordinary or even humble budget. The “good feeling” lies specifically in the fact that it sold out.

I often visit the Tai Po Cooked Food Center. Many of my newsletter articles were written here while drinking lemon tea and eating toast. The center is the largest in Hong Kong and preserves traditions very well. Among its many famous small shops is Yum Kee, which exclusively sells fishball noodles—at least, you can ask for just fishballs without noodles. Whether their noodles are the best is a matter of opinion, but it is an objective fact that it is often crowded and hard to get a bowl.

Yum Kee is open Tuesday to Saturday, from 5:30 AM to 10:30 AM. I can’t imagine who eats fishball noodles before dawn, but if you think you can arrive at 10:00 AM and get a bowl, you will likely find it already sold out. Its closing time is merely for reference; in reality, it closes whenever they sell out or reach 10:30 AM, whichever comes first.

Unlike in Taiwan (especially cities like Tainan), shops that limit business hours based on ingredient supply are rare in Hong Kong. The reason Yum Kee can maintain this “attitude” is its high-quality ingredients and the affordable rent in government-managed centers. A rational shop owner elsewhere would over-prepare to avoid wasting business opportunities due to high rents, but I admire these rare shops that prioritize quality over quantity and avoid food waste.

This brings me back to the limitation of paper books.

Oversupply or Undersupply

Some readers felt my 100-copy limit was just “hunger marketing” or mystery-mongering. I want to explain the philosophy behind it. While I advocate for digital publishing, I actually support paper books more than average—both in terms of money and energy spent.

As I grow older, I realize that time, energy, and space are limited. Because I love books, I take every purchasing decision seriously, hoping to keep a book until I die. If I didn’t care about the printing, layout, and texture, I would simply choose the more convenient electronic version.

In publishing, fixed costs like layout and plate-making mean that the more you print, the lower the unit price. For an independent author in a small market like Hong Kong, you might only sell a few hundred copies, but the cost to print 1,000 is nearly the same as printing 100. Most choose to over-print and risk wasting copies.

I chose to limit Attack on Freedom to 100 copies because I would rather have readers miss out than see my work trapped in a warehouse for a decade only to be recycled as waste paper. Dignity and the avoidance of waste are why “selling out” is so important to me.

Paper Books Out of Print, E-books Take Over

Finally, books are different from food. When fishball noodles sell out, you must wait until tomorrow. When these 100 paper books sell out, readers can still buy the electronic version. Furthermore, my works use Creative Commons open licenses, so anyone who wants to read them will be able to do so.

Since there is no worry about accessibility, I choose to strictly limit the physical quantity. The paper book is limited to 100 copies, but the e-book is “mint on demand“—as long as there is a reader, it will continue to be “printed” digitally. Rather than rejecting paper books, I am limiting them because I cherish them too much.

Migrate to LikeCoin v3

Day 1 of Mitigation for the Jimmy Lai Case: Citizens queue for three nights for public gallery tickets; former employee moved by Lai’s personal example.

Since last Friday (Nov 15) at noon, a queue had already begun forming outside the West Kowloon Magistrates’ Courts. A regular attendee known as “Great-Aunt,” who was first in line, arrived at approximately 4:00 AM. Reporters also observed about ten middle-aged women arriving around 1:00 PM that same day. Most wore masks and used umbrellas to hide their faces, refusing to answer any questions.

— The Witness (法庭線)

Anyone who has looked into how Bitcoin operates—even if they haven’t read the Whitepaper—will have heard of Proof of Work (PoW). Having been involved in Web3 civic education for years, I often hear “muggles” complain that this concept is hard to grasp. But in reality, Bitcoin’s design is highly grounded in the physical world. Concepts like PoW, mining, and wallets are all borrowed from familiar daily life. Once you realize this, understanding Bitcoin becomes much easier.

How far would you go to get into the courtroom?

Don’t overthink it as something purely technical or profound. In plain English, Proof of Work is simply “How far would you go for [X]?”

• How far would you go for a bowl of Kau Kee beef brisket?

• How far would you go for a Keung To concert?

• How far would you go to enter the main courtroom to support Jimmy Lai and the Apple Daily executives?

If you are willing to queue for an hour outside Kau Kee, pay over a hundred HKD, and endure the staff’s shouting, you get to eat the brisket.

If you are willing to spend time learning “vibe coding” to write programs to snatch tickets, or pay thousands of dollars to scalpers, you get to see Keung To perform.

And if you were willing to arrive at West Kowloon Magistrates’ Courts three days early and sleep rough in the winter cold for three nights—going further than even the “queuing gangs”—you won’t just win the spot; you’ll get to sit in one of the 42 public gallery seats in the main courtroom, right where the defendants are.

Before we dive deeper into PoW, let’s explain “Queuing Gangs” (排隊黨).

“Queuing Gangs” refer to people hired to act as human queuing machines. It might be a unique Hong Kong subculture, perhaps destined for the list of Intangible Cultural Heritage. Any citizen who has queued for a high-profile court case has likely encountered them: groups of people, usually speaking Mandarin, communicating via WeChat, professionally equipped, arriving early to snatch tickets for the main courtroom, yet knowing absolutely nothing about the case itself. These are “suspected” queuing gangs.

By noon on the first day, before the hearing had even ended, over 60 people were already queuing for tickets for the following day. Most wore hats, masks, and used umbrellas to shield their faces.

Queuing gangs don’t just occupy court seats, preventing concerned citizens from entering; they serve any industry where demand exceeds supply. In the 90s, when the Hong Kong property market was booming, every new development launch attracted queuing gangs. Masterminds would hire them to get the top spots in the selection line; selling that spot alone could earn hundreds of thousands of HKD. At the peak of the 1997 bubble, a prime spot for the Carmen’s Garden launch in Jordan reportedly changed hands for nearly 2 million HKD.

From a million making you a “millionaire,” to two million barely buying a “nano-flat,” to two million only covering a down payment, and finally, to two million only buying a spot in a queue—that is inflation. That is Hong Kong.

Bitcoin’s Proof of Work

Bitcoin’s goal, of course, isn’t to decide who enters a courtroom or gets a flat, but who gets to record the ledger and receive Bitcoin as a reward.

Bitcoin’s version of PoW isn’t about “who gets there first,” but rather “who can solve a mathematical puzzle fastest.” This isn’t Kumon or Olympiad math; you can’t solve it through wisdom or study. It is purely trial and error—plugging in different numbers repeatedly until the answer works.

Furthermore, the math problem in Bitcoin’s PoW is meaningless, and the answer is useless. For example, if a parent tells a child, “Calculate our monthly household expenses and I’ll give you a candy,” that math problem is useful and meaningful. However, if the parent says, “Count how many grains of sand are in this flowerpot to get a candy,” it is only to prove the child’s “sincerity.” It can only be done one by one, it doesn’t train the mind, and the answer itself serves no purpose.

You might wonder why Satoshi Nakamoto didn’t design a meaningful math problem. As I said at the start, Bitcoin mimics the physical world. The mechanism of a physical queue is purely to compare “sincerity” and establish order; it has no other meaning—unless you argue that training your leg muscles or testing your endurance for sleeping on the street is a “meaning.”

To reduce the waste of time and energy in physical queuing, other mechanisms have emerged. The younger generation might not remember the days when, to get a seat at a restaurant, you had to stand directly behind a diner who looked like they were almost finished and unlikely to sit for another hour reading newspaper. Today, you just take a ticket. You still wait, but you don’t have to fight for a spot, and you can walk around freely. This also means you can queue at several restaurants at once.

Some “advanced” malls or apps allow remote queuing, further lowering the cost of waiting. However, in PoW, lower cost is not always better. Cost and incentives are the keys to any mechanism. Only when the two are aligned does the system succeed.

Personally, I don’t eat in malls, except with my mother. Once, on a Sunday, she wanted to go to Jade Garden in New Town Plaza for dim sum. I downloaded the mall app, verified my phone, and took a number before leaving the house. There were over 200 numbers ahead of us. I thought it would take forever, but before we even reached the restaurant, our number had passed. The reason was simple: one app account could take ticket for multiple restaurants, and one family could have multiple accounts. People take a bunch of numbers “just in case.” This results in “ticket inflation,” where the queue no longer reflects actual demand. Diners like me were forced back to the old way—standing physically at the door.

Many Bitcoin maximalists believe PoW is the most superior consensus mechanism, while Proof of Stake (PoS) is criticized as being “impure” or even “heretical.” I respect that people have different views, but to me, that argument is like saying “only physical queuing is fair, and any comfortable alternative is just ‘cutting corners’ and lacks the justice of the old ways.” I beg to differ.

One flaw in this view is ignoring that Bitcoin mining consumes massive amounts of electricity, damaging the environment. Readers might think that as a Bitcoin advocate, I wouldn’t hold this “EU-style leftist” view. However, I am not just a fan of Bitcoin; I am a fan of the environment. A friend once said that environmentalism shouldn’t just look at resources used, but the value created. I completely agree. But that also means if we can create the same value with fewer resources, the original mechanism is inefficient. If a remote ticket system provides the same fairness as a physical line, yet a bank insists people stand for hours, that isn’t just “fair”—it’s poorly designed.

Others argue PoW ensures participants truly “sacrifice,” making it more just than PoS, where you only lock up assets (a “security deposit”) without “working.” They claim PoS allows the wealthy to dominate. However, when the world has something called “money” that can buy labor, time, and even dignity, this view becomes a beautiful misunderstanding.

Back to the court queue: if the only way to get in was for citizens to queue personally, and they couldn’t receive any other benefit, then yes, that PoW mechanism is fair. However, when shameless people can hide in the background and pay a small amount of money to hire a “queuing gang” to occupy precious seats, that PoW is hardly “fair.”

From Proof of Work to Proof of Capital

In the context of Bitcoin, economic incentives have pushed the entry barrier for “work” higher and higher. It started with personal computers, moved to specialized hardware (ASICs), and then to massive mining farms. Proof of Work has long since evolved into “Proof of Capital.” If your financial power is weak, you are essentially just helping the network for free; your chance of getting a reward is lower than winning the lottery.

In contrast, Ethereum’s Proof of Stake, while capital-centric, is designed with better details. Ordinary people can participate with as little as 0.01 ETH to earn about 3% APR—the same rate as Bitmine, a “whale” holding 4 million ETH. In other words, the “economies of scale” are not as dominant.

I make these analogies to give citizens a new angle to learn about Web3, and to give the Web3 community a chance to understand civil society. Individual power is small. Whether it’s a queue in daily life or mining on a blockchain, I may not have the wisdom to design a better mechanism. What I do have, however, is the power to be a good citizen: refuse scalpers, don’t jump the line, and most importantly, resist the queuing gangs.

“If I don’t come here to sleep, it gives one more chance to a ‘queuing gang.’ So I stay here. I don’t want so many paid people taking up all the spots.”

— Former Eastern District Councilor, Chan Wing-tai

Save the Date: Next Community Call

• Date: Monday, February 2, 2026

• Time: 18:30 – 19:30 (GMT+8)

• Venue: meet.google.com/ndv-fbfx-cat

Critical Deadline

Please be reminded that there are only a few days left to unstake your LikeCoin (v2) to meet the migration window for v3.

If you do not take action now, you will miss the February 2, 2026 deadline. Your tokens will remain in v2 and will not be compatible with the new features and liquidity available in v3.

Community Call Recap

Thank you to everyone who joined the LikeCoin community call this past Monday. For those who missed it, here is a recap of the key updates:

LikeCoin v3 Migration Status

The current number of migrated wallets is likely an underestimate. This data currently excludes users who:

• Deposited, staked, or sold all of their tokens post-migration.

• Provided their entire balance to liquidity pools after migrating.

LikeCoin v3 Usage

New Tech Subdao Members

New members have been officially endorsed via LIP-102.

• Multisig Guardians: The guardians of the 2/3 multisig vault for tech subdao have been set as wancat.eth, arttseng.eth, and ckxpress.eth accordingly.

• Acknowledgements: We would like to extend a huge thank you to Greg Sung and Dr. Simon Chan for their invaluable contributions to the tech subdao over the past four years.

Save the Date: Next Community Call

The next call will take place on the day of the migration deadline.

• Date: Monday, February 2, 2026

• Time: 18:30 – 19:30 (GMT+8)

• Venue: meet.google.com/ndv-fbfx-cat

While most people are busy exchanging holiday greetings or sharing year-end reviews this Christmas, I am here, seemingly untactful, urging users to upgrade their LikeCoin. Forgive me—the window for the upgrade is closing fast, and I’m suffering from a severe case of FOMO. But it’s not that I’m afraid of missing out; it’s my Fear Of Your Missing Out. I’m terrified that users will miss the last train, leaving their LikeCoin to become digital dust.

The Ultimatum: Action Required by Early January

Let me repeat the most critical point: Users holding LikeCoin v2 (wallet addresses starting with like1) must upgrade to LikeCoin v3 (on the Base chain, addresses starting with 0x) before February 2, 2026.

Do not see that date and think you can deal with it later. If your LikeCoin is currently staked, it takes 21 days to unstake. In other words, you must initiate the process by early January at the latest, and that’s assuming everything goes smoothly. While the upgrade itself usually takes only minutes, if you forget your login, need a password reset, or require support, I might not be able to help you immediately due to the high volume of support tickets. Please, leave yourself more time.

LikeCoin v3 Upgrade

I am usually a man of few words who hates repeating himself. However, I often remind myself: Speaking doesn’t mean being heard; being heard doesn’t mean being understood. I am learning to restate important messages from different angles.

For this v3 upgrade, I’ve thrown my usual reserve out the window—I’ve been “shameless.” Beyond weekly reminders in every article regardless of the topic and a permanent notice on the Keplr dashboard, I’ve been doing a daily countdown on X. I’ve written about the same thing in a dozen different ways. By day 20, even X’s algorithm got fed up with me and started shadow-banning my tweets.

But mass broadcasts are only half the story. Most of the heavy lifting happens in small circles or one-on-one. I’ve compiled a list of over 30,000 wallets that hold LikeCoin and have an associated email. Since November, I’ve sent five dedicated articles to every email on that list. Yet, through the funnel of delivery, opening, reading, and taking action, the numbers dwindle. After all that, the successful upgrade rate is less than 10%.

Mass mailing tools often get flagged as marketing mail or even spam by Gmail. To increase delivery rates, I sorted the list by LikeCoin holdings and sent one-on-one emails to the top 50 whales. For the rest, I sent emails in small batches directly from my own address. By the 989th “LikeCoin tycoon,” even ProtonMail warned me of spamming and rate-limited me for an hour. I can’t afford to have my email or domain blacklisted, so I’ve had to lay low like a “wanted man” for a while. I also tried Mailchimp, but had my account banned. I’ll omit the details to avoid creating “criminal evidence.”

The real breakthrough of my comfort zone came next—I started calling people. Yes, for most, a phone call is routine. But those who know me know that I view an unannounced call as the social equivalent of sneaking up behind someone and screaming in their ear. In a typical year, I make fewer phone calls than I write handwritten letters. True story: even when Dave has owed me money for years, I’ve never called to debt-collect. To call people proactively just to prevent them from losing their assets? For me, that is truly “doing whatever it takes.”

Giving Up the Upgrade = A Donation to the Community

If you think that’s all, I’m afraid you’re wrong. Those 30,000 email-linked wallets are only a fraction. Many “Web3 natives”—including one of my own wallets—have no personal data linked to them at all.

No one knows who owns these wallets except the users themselves. This is the pinnacle of privacy, but it also means I have no way to reach them. It’s like cash: a holder remains anonymous, but when a specific banknote is being phased out, the bank has no way to notify the holder. All I can do is broadcast as loudly as possible and hope users open my messages or that social media algorithms show some mercy.

This is the fundamental difference between Centralization and Decentralization. In a centralized app, the developer decides on an upgrade, and it happens without user permission or action. Decentralized systems are different. Because assets are self-custodied, the user must take action. It’s like a currency redesign; you must physically go and exchange your old notes for new ones. Imagine a “Brave New World” where your digital currency upgrades automatically without your involvement. Convenient? Yes. But it also means you never truly owned those assets in the first place.

Let’s look at the LikeCoin books: v3 has a total supply of 1.5 billion. As of this writing, over 930 million have been upgraded from v2, while over 560 million remain unclaimed. That’s an upgrade rate of about 62%.

The reasons for not upgrading are many. Some simply don’t care because the amount is small. But even with Bitcoin, it’s estimated that 28% is lost forever. It’s not just about the money; it’s about being unaware, forgetting the wallet exists, losing mnemonics, or having an expired email. Whatever the reason, if a user still cares—even if it’s just for a few LikeCoins—I will do my best to support them.

Satoshi Nakamoto once said:

“Lost coins only make everyone else’s coins worth slightly more. Think of it as a donation to everyone.”

The same applies to LikeCoin. Technically, if more people miss the upgrade, it benefits me and other holders. After the deadline, unclaimed LikeCoin will flow into the “Community Pool” to be redistributed by the community. In other words, users who miss or waive the upgrade are essentially donating to the community.

So, the fact that I am working this hard to keep every user is, strictly speaking, irrational. I’ve participated in many token swaps and airdrops as a user, and I’ve never seen a project beg people to claim their tokens. Usually, there’s an announcement on X, maybe a Medium post, and that’s it. If you don’t follow the news, you’re out. That approach is justifiable; it allows the team to focus on the new version and core users.

I am this “FO-Y-MO” because I refuse to leave any user behind. Decentralized publishing shouldn’t be a toy for tech geeks; LikeCoin aims for the general public. In the past, it was difficult to use due to technical constraints. But as the industry evolves, those who have used LikeCoin v3 and 3ook.com will agree: registration and usage are now much easier. This is just the beginning. In the coming years, LikeCoin will be simpler, more fun, and more powerful. It would be a tragedy for someone who has been with us since v1 or v2 to drop out now.

Ultimate Support: Live at Just Books

Finally, I’m adding one more form of support: Live upgrade assistance at Just Books.

Oops, I “accidentally” let the secret slip. After a year of delays, Just Books (義守書店) has finally started its soft opening. We are located right across from Sam Kee Book Store in North Point: Shop 8, B/F, King’s Centre, 193 King’s Road.

In 2026, I will transition from “unemployed” to “small business owner,” occasionally manning the shop. The official schedule isn’t set yet, but as a warm-up, I’ll be spending Christmas Day and New Year’s Day at the bookstore to help users solve LikeCoin-related issues. If you are in Hong Kong, come by:

• Dec 25: 14:00 – 18:00

• Jan 1: 12:00 – 20:00

Please bring your laptop. To avoid a queue, please make an appointment in advance.

See you at Just Books.

POLL: Regarding LikeCoin holders who haven’t upgraded to v3, we should…

1. Carrot and Stick: Emphasize potential future value; make them fear the regret of giving up.

2. Patient Persuasion: Use emotion and logic; save as many as we can.

3. Formal Notice Only: A few posts on X and the website; doing the bare minimum for accountability is enough.

4. Ignore Them: Why bother? Fewer upgrades mean more for the rest of us.

5. None of the above: Let me leave a comment.

P.S. Thanks to your support, 75 copies of the “Attack of Freedom” (進擊的自由) IBO have been sold, with only 25 remaining. I will write another post soon to introduce the book’s content. If you wish to participate in the first-ever IBO in publishing history, I suggest grabbing your copy now before they’re gone. Wishing you all a peaceful holiday and a Merry Christmas.

The “excuse” this time was “Connecting Local: Digital Innovation Workshop for Local Chronicles,” hosted by Carbon Valley Digital (3ook.com’s local partner in Taiwan) and co-organized by the Google News Initiative and Digital Transformation Association. The goal was to promote the idea that, beyond paper distribution, local chronicles should utilize digital technology to enhance information storage, facilitate circulation, and promote niche topics.

The workshop lasted all afternoon and was incredibly rich in content. Relying on my memory, this article roughly records—and takes the liberty to reorganize and supplement—the dialogue between myself and Valeria from Islander Studio, sharing it with those who attended and readers who couldn’t make it.

“YouPaper”

Decentralized publishing covers a vast area. It involves applying decentralized thinking to listing, storage, curation, and governance, avoiding single points of failure in every aspect of publishing. Due to time constraints, my dialogue focused on listing and operations, using 3ook.com as an example to discuss how decentralized publishing empowers local chronicles and niche topics.

When talking about 3ook.com, I am invariably asked how it differs from other e-book platforms like Kindle or Google Play Books. This time was no exception. In the context of Taiwan’s local chronicles, we can understand it this way: Kindle is like the Netflix of publications, while 3ook.com is more like the YouTube of publications.

Let me share a true story. When the first edition of my humble work, Sociology of Blockchain, was released in 2020, I self-published the e-book. I prepared the file and uploaded it to a mainstream Taiwanese e-bookstore, waiting for approval. A few days later, the store rejected it on the grounds that “the cover does not contain the book title.” The cover was a photo of the Lennon Wall I took in Prague; the title and author name were actually there, just written unobtrusively. I was unwilling to change my cover design, so I simply gave up on listing it there and sold it on my personal blog instead.

I mention this trivial matter not to complain, but to illustrate that mainstream e-bookstores believe they must gatekeep the quality of books—for instance, rejecting covers that appear to lack titles (even if they are there, just stylistically subtle), or enforcing other opaque criteria I am unaware of.

In contrast, 3ook.com, built on the philosophy of decentralized publishing, only checks if the file format complies with epub or pdf standards and if necessary metadata (like title and author) is filled out during the listing process. Beyond that, it makes absolutely no judgment on whether the publication looks “presentable.” Whether the cover is a blank page, the content is only one page long, or the illustrations are children’s doodles, none of these are reasons to prevent listing. In fact, once the text is uploaded and metadata is completed, the publication is listed immediately. The entire experience is very similar to YouTube.

Celebrating its 20th anniversary this year, YouTube is now an all-encompassing video platform that everyone watches to some degree. But twenty years ago, when co-founder Jawed Karim uploaded that low-resolution, poorly filmed, 19-second video (“Me at the zoo”), most people’s reaction was, “Who would watch this junk?” Fortunately, the founders didn’t intend to gatekeep the quality of the content, and that is why we have the YouTube of today.

Publications are to books what videos are to movies. Although neither “movies” nor “books” have precise definitions, convention and industry authority dictate that most videos are not considered movies, and most publications are not considered books, preventing them from being listed on mainstream e-book platforms. This is usually not due to technical reasons, but factors like length, style, or positioning. Just as it is normal for Netflix to select quality movies and series, there is nothing wrong with mainstream e-book platforms having their own positioning. The problem lies in the fact that when a publication doesn’t fit the mainstream imagination of what a book “should look like,” it lacks a suitable home on the internet.

The emergence of 3ook.com is precisely to fill that void, providing a landing spot for local chronicles, marginalized groups, niche content, and any publication that might struggle to enter the “halls of high culture.”

Meaning is Assigned by Posterity

Some argue that the reason most publications aren’t considered books is a lack of information density or the “meaning” a book should possess. I don’t entirely disagree, but rather than letting a few professional organizations decide, I advocate for a decentralized ecosystem where the audience judges. Traditional professional editors and literary critics should certainly continue to exist—the market isn’t everything; otherwise, we wouldn’t need the Golden Horse Awards or the Oscars, box office numbers would suffice. However, professionals should judge technique, craftsmanship, and artistry, not whether a work is worthy of being published in the first place.

Often, whether a work is considered a book and enters the traditional publishing ecosystem is one thing; whether a work has meaning and is worth preserving is another. Local chronicles—small in market but deep in significance—illustrate this best. Beyond that, annual reports of companies large and small, leaflets from NGOs, theater pamphlets, student newspapers, class newsletters, doujinshi, family memoirs, or even personal zines all hold meaning for the world, or at least for a small group of people. Yet, these are almost never placed in e-bookstores for purchase or download.

Physical paper requires considering the costs of printing, warehousing, logistics, and display, so pre-publication selection is necessary. But with advanced technology, bandwidth and storage have become incredibly cheap; the cost of digital publishing is negligible and is no longer a constraint.

Furthermore, whether a work will be popular or hold epochal significance is often only known in hindsight. Taking YouTube as an example again, most viral videos are unintentional works by amateurs, whereas calculated, meticulously crafted videos often struggle to become classics. Since the technology is mature and cheap enough, borrowing from the experience of video, copyright holders of publications only need to consider if they mind others reading and possessing their work. There is no need to assess market reaction beforehand. This isn’t to say promotion isn’t important—that comes later. Promote as best as you can, but works have their own destinies. No one can predict the final audience reached or the impact made. Since that is the case, why not just publish it?

In Hong Kong, currently shrouded in a “New Cultural Revolution,” countless movies, theater productions, concerts, sharing sessions, book clubs, and various events have been cancelled. Just at the end of last month, the stage play We Are Gay (我們最快樂), which premiered in 2022 and which I was eagerly looking forward to seeing in its rerun this year, was unreasonably suppressed and cancelled.

If we can normalize digital publishing—listing event-related publications without a second thought while events can still seemingly be held and appear to be in no danger of cancellation—I could at least read the pamphlet from the premiere of We Are Gay. Even if it cannot change reality, it is, more or less, a historical record. It reminds future generations that these works once appeared, events once took place, interactions once happened, and that Hong Kong was once normal.

Decentralized publishing is not the exclusive domain of tech geeks. Quite the opposite: only by eliminating various technical and professional thresholds, making publishing as simple as posting a video, can we distribute publishing power to the people. In the future I am striving to realize with 3ook.com, no one will give up on publishing a work for fear that it isn’t “high culture” enough, and no work will go out of print due to a lack of commercial value. Through everyday publications, the masses will collectively record history and preserve culture in their daily lives.

p.s. LikeCoin v3 migration deadline: 2026.02.02 - 45 days to go.

New stocks have IPOs, new tokens have ICOs, so why don’t new books have IBOs—Initial Book Offerings?

This is a question that has puzzled me in recent years as I pondered the innovation of publishing, but I couldn’t find an answer. So I decided to find the answer through action. Through the release of my new work, I invite everyone to build a brand-new IBO publishing model together, seeking a way out for the deteriorating cultural industry.

Three years ago, I conducted my first decentralized publishing experiment, releasing my work Moneyverse. The experiment lasted 34 days, attracted 943 participants, and sold 1,024 e-books priced at $9.90 USD. The detailed figures can be found in the fully public experiment results.

After the experiment, my partners and I continued to explore decentralized publishing. This year, we launched the “third-generation bookstore” 3ook.com. Combined with the upgrade to LikeCoin v3 and the vastly improved usability of Ethereum, we are practicing a brand-new publishing model while making it as simple and fast as mainstream applications.

Now that the infrastructure is ready, I can no longer use “being a creator delayed by entrepreneurship” as an excuse to procrastinate. I might as well go all in. Here, I announce my upcoming new work, Attack on Freedom (進擊的自由), which will go on sale simultaneously via an IBO. As for the content of the book, allow me to keep you in suspense for a moment; this article will start with the concept and philosophy of the IBO.

100 Books

Publishing Attack on Freedom via an IBO model means identifying 100 core readers who will each contribute $100 USD to support and become Co-publishers, witnessing, participating in, and facilitating the birth of this work together. Let me explain these three elements: 100 books, $100 USD, and Co-publishing.

If you view the IBO simply as selling books, participants are buying one of a limited run of 100 copies—exquisitely printed paperbacks numbered #1 to #100, signed and inscribed by the author—along with a synced digital edition. Once the new book is completed and delivered to the 100 IBO participants, the work will be sold publicly as an e-book, but the physical version will not be reprinted.

An IBO can also be understood as a pre-sale—selling “book futures”—and finding co-publishers in the process. Selling the book before it is finished is not because I am lazy, but is the core design of the IBO.

The traditional publishing model involves deciding on the print run for the first edition (e.g., 1,000 copies), shipping them to various online and offline bookstores, and reprinting only if they sell out, repeating the process until sales stall, at which point the work is allowed to go out of print.

Before the internet, or for the few bestsellers today, the model where the market tells publishers how many copies to print could be effective. But in an era ruled by smartphones and AI, where the publishing industry is in a slump, many books stop at the first printing—and even that first printing is a struggle to sell. The model of “print first, find readers later” is obsolete.

Hipsters might think that a book resting in a bookstore playing light music, waiting for a romantic encounter with a reader, is a beautiful scene. I agree. But if you have to consider real-world issues like rent, wages, and inventory, while competing with large e-commerce platforms that have everything and offer perpetual discounts, letting a work meet a reader in the torrent of time and the vast sea of books is a luxury. Or, if you are like me—an author who cannot even meet the prerequisite of having works rest in a bookstore—all that romance is just a fantasy.

Although I promote e-books, I never reject physical books. As long as there are readers who want them, and friends behind the wall who can only read physical copies, I will do my best to satisfy them. However, space, logistics, trees, and attention are precious. Instead of printing a large batch of books, trying to get them onto shelves, and hoping readers slowly discover them until they sell out, the IBO does the opposite: limit the print run to 100 exquisitely printed paperbacks we are confident will sell out, find the readers first, then print the books. The books are sent directly to the readers upon completion, saving the costs originally wasted on shipping, storing, and displaying large quantities of books, and channeling those resources entirely into pre-production.

100 Dollars

Small-batch printing is easy to understand, but why does the IBO use “high pricing”? Is asking for $100 USD price gouging?

First, if you think $100 is too expensive, you can wait for the “normally priced” e-book release after the IBO. I will even, as always, adopt Creative Commons license, allowing readers who cannot afford it or disadvantaged communities to access the knowledge and information through open copies. You are free to decline participation because you think $100 is too expensive, but this is definitely not price gouging.

Furthermore, is selling a book for $10 or $20 really “normal”? Take the 2020 version of the “bestseller” Sociology of Blockchain as an example. It was priced at $20. Over three years, it sold over 3,000 copies. The royalties amounted to about 30,000 HKD, averaging less than 1,000 HKD per month. How “normal” is that? I am not complaining—my situation is actually better than many authors—but I want to point out that the reason pricing and compensation in the publishing industry (and many markets) work is often not because they are “normal,” but because many people are willing to compromise for passion and meaning.

Let’s do the math for the IBO: 100 books at $100 USD equals $10,000. Deducting about 3% for credit card fees and 30% for the sales channel leaves $6,700 (approx. HKD 52,000 or TWD 200,000). To prove that the IBO will not treat the author worse than the traditional model, I, the author, will take 10% ($1,000), which I will use to support future works published via the IBO model (details to come later). The remaining $5,700 goes into editing, typesetting, design, and printing, improving the craftsmanship and quality of the physical book while providing the team with decent returns that reflect their skills and effort.

Regarding consumer decisions, I have always believed that traditional economics oversimplifies human nature by viewing it solely as self-interested. While this explains typical daily consumption, it ignores “irrational” behaviors such as gifting, appreciation, support, and sharing. For creators and documenters, I often want a high-priced product but cannot find one to satisfy that desire. I don’t need “exclusive” articles or videos for premium subscribers, nor do I need various souvenirs. Conversely, I don’t want authors and journalists to “neglect their proper duties” to make merchandise for revenue. I simply want to support them more so the author can focus on creating and niche works can see the light of day; so journalists can record with dedication and marginalized groups can have a voice. Ultimately, both I and the world benefit.

The “high pricing” of the IBO is not greed; it is to satisfy the demand to “give.” This is not a bug; it is a feature. I know I am not part of the mainstream majority, but I am certainly not the only person who thinks this way. I am confident in finding one hundred people who are willing to support me more and help bring Attack on Freedom to life. I even believe that every creator, if they work hard enough, can find a group of true fans—even if the specific number varies—to grow with them and witness their journey.

Co-publishers

The above explains the IBO concept from sales and consumption perspectives. But the deeper meaning of the IBO lies in reshaping readers from mere consumers and receivers into active participants and stakeholders.

By participating in the Attack on Freedom IBO, besides instantly receiving a digital certificate numbered #1 to #100 and receiving the limited physical and digital editions later, you will also receive irregular updates and draft previews from me throughout the writing, editing, and design process. This is a right, not an obligation. If you prefer to read the work all at once after it is finished, I will respect that. But if you wish to provide feedback on editorial direction, design drafts, or trial articles, I will regard you as a Co-publisher and, in the end, print your name on the copyright page of the work under this title.

The Attack on Freedom IBO not only allows the work to be published and the production team to receive reasonable compensation, but it also explores a new publishing model for the cultural industry, striving to continue in an era where AI reigns supreme. If it fails, it is my personal affair; the world has one less book, and at worst, one less author. However, if this IBO publishing experiment succeeds, it belongs to the entire cultural industry. It could bring thousands of excellent works to future generations, benefiting all of humanity.

Are you willing to participate in history’s first IBO and rewrite human history together?

Attack on Freedom IBO