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<h1>Hi, Pablo here</h1>
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<section>
<h2>One property where gold beats Bitcoin</h2>
<p><em>Published: 2026-06-25</em></p>
<p>
Gold is typically mocked by Bitcoiners (along with Peter Schiff). The
honorable grandpa pet rock of sound money was the best thing we ever
had, up until Bitcoin, and now Bitcoiners find it hilarious. No
practical way to verify it, insanely hard to transact with, consistent
inflation (even if not rampant like fiat), must be stored physically...
Once you get used to Bitcoin, there are certainly many properties of
gold that make you wonder why people still hold on to it. I must admit I
have regularly taken part in the memetic "Ha-ha" aggressions towards
gold and had my fair share of laughing when listening to Peter Schiff.
</p>
<p>
But in my mother tongue we say that wise men change their minds when
they're wrong. And recently, as I've become more knowledgable about
Bitcoin (does the rabbit hole ever end?), I've come to realize there is
one category in which gold woops Bitcoin's ass. And I think in the long
term, this will become significant.
</p>
<h3>Wars</h3>
<p>
I'm not an OG. It took me many years to pay any attention to Bitcoin,
and a few more to actually become enlightened and start to understand
what I was looking at. This means I was not around when the Blocksize
wars happened, and thus all I know about it comes from posts, books and
grandpa Simpson styled ramblings of Bitcoiners with more years of
service than me. And as much as the story makes sense, it always felt
more like history than a story. I mean to say, I can understand the
facts I'm told, but I can't imagine going through it. I can't imagine
how it felt. It's just a bunch of cold, timeline facts.
</p>
<p>
But now, time passed since I fell down the rabbit hole. And it seems
we're heading for new wars, and this time it is my turn to live through
them, not just be aware of a few journalistic-styled facts.
</p>
<p>
A bunch of Core developers have been acting stupid for years. I won't go
into details because others have documented this issue much better than
me. Now, theoretically, in the astral
plane of "bitcoin is the invincible honey badger because muh game theory
will fix everything no matter what", a bunch of devs being corrupted by
VC money and flashes of prestige shouldn't be a threat because "the rest
of the network" will go and do what needs be done: fork the code, ignore
whatever proposals which are harmful to Bitcoin they bring, and just
continue to build good code, run it, point hashrate to it.
</p>
<!-- TODO: ADD LINKS TO JON ATTACK INTERVIEW | ADD LINKS TO HODLNAUT PIECES | ADD WHATEVER ELSE MARCELLUS SENDS ME -->
<p>
And it's true: this immune system like reaction is kind of happening.
The recent increase in the adoption of Bitcoin Knots over Bitcoin Core
is testament to it. And now we have BIP110, which keeps on getting more
nodes and more hashrate. I don't know if the softfork will be adopted
widely and become the chain with most work, but surely it seems there is
a reaction to the fuckery that a clique of big pockets with their teams
of devs tried to pull.
</p>
<p>
But even if BIP110 goes through, and we keep preventing and perhaps even
undoing malicious changes and mistakes in the protocol, I'm left
concerned. Because living through this conflict in detail, unlike the
Blocksize Wars, has allowed me to see the trenches with my own eyes: how
plebs think. How they react to the actions of each side. How they form
their opinions. How they come to decide. What they do, and what they
don't.
</p>
<p>And it makes me worry.</p>
<h3>Crowds</h3>
<p>
Most Bitcoiners deeply hate collectivism and instead root for
individualism. Powerful states that take aggression on the individual
with the pretext of favoring the group are not seen with good eyes by
Bitcoiners. I certainly share the feeling. Following that rabbit hole has
led many Bitcoiners to actually find Democracy itself a flawed model:
they see how the crowd is short-sighted, stupidly greedy, aggressive.
How it votes for evil taxes to support unfair wealth redistribution. How
it allows and applauds authoritarian measures promoted for the sake of
some supposed security. The crowd is seen as a dangerous animal, and
representative democracy is a way for powerful evil men to unleash the
crowd on all individuals who won't bend the knee.
</p>
<p>
The view on this problem, I think, is widely shared. The solutions, on
the other hand, tend to be more varied. I find some Bitcoiners don't see
any solution, or think any alternative is worse. Others have fallen in
love with the strong man in charge rethoric, monarchical or in other
flavors. Others fall in between, proposing various forms of Aristocracy.
The common thread is: most people don't have enough virtue to rule over
others and make the world better (or at least not make it a hellhole) in
the process. So either it's only a few, or none. The common thread is the
view that the crowd can't be left in charge, for they will mess everything
up.
</p>
<h3>Meritocracy</h3>
<p>
Bitcoiner is an overloaded word. I find myself using it every day,
meaning different things each time.
</p>
<p>
If the definition of being a Bitcoiner was to have exposure to price,
things would look great: I would guess that group must be at least in
the double digit million size worldwide already.
</p>
<p>
If the definition of being a Bitcoiner was to hold your own keys... that
would narrow things down quite a bit. Single digit million? Perhaps even
less than a million?
</p>
<p>
Notch it up to only people who also run their own node and now we're
certainly under a million. I would be surprised if it was more than a
hundred thousand.
</p>
<p>
If we dive deeper into people who also mine, I don't think there is more
than ten thousand.
</p>
<p>
And I'm picturing the final stage of this peculiar cypherpunk ladder to
Olympus would be... writing their own code. How many can actually fork
Bitcoin Core and work on adjusting the code to their wishes, without
forking themselves off or introducing deadly bugs accidentally?
</p>
<p>A thousand? A hundred?</p>
<p>
What's the picture? There's millions of people who "use" Bitcoin, at
varying heights of the rabbit hole. But probably barely a few thousands
have anything resembling sovereignty in the network. Are you even
sovereign if you don't have the knowledge to fork off on your own,
should someone push a soft fork you don't support into Core, and no one
else write the right URSF you need to run to oppose it?
</p>
<h3>Email and the healthbar that doesn't refill</h3>
<p>
The death of email as a decentralized protocol has been documented by
others thoroughly. I won't try to replicate that here.
</p>
<p>
I'll just emphasize one ugly fact: the capture of email did not happen
suddenly. It happen slowly over decades. It happened as many individual
people took decisions that they probably didn't feel were terrible, even
important, when they were doing so. We would have trouble having someone
point himself in the mirror and yell: "It was me! I killed email".
</p>
<p>
The decentralization of email disappeared because mistakes piled up and
they were not reverted. Why weren't they?
</p>
<p>
Well, that's a question we could ask ourselves today. Why can't we save
email right fucking now?
</p>
<p>
Email died due to many decisions related to spam. There are solutions to
spam that could be embedded into the protocol. But none of those would
be backwards compatible, and that generates a massive issue: if you
apply the solution yourself, you cut yourself out of email since others
didn't follow along. So you need to bring everyone along with you and
have them all apply the same backwards incompatible change with you. The
only issue is that is impossible. We're all too busy doing things to pay
attention and coordinate and trust each other to do such a thing. Does
it feel somewhat familiar to Bitcoin?
</p>
<p>
To me, it does. Millions of people out there holding IOUs. Some of them
puting their life savings into it. But most have no time or willingness
to run a node. And barely a fraction of them will spend any calories
judging what side is in their best interest when a fork war, hard or
soft, comes around. And then only a sliver of a fraction of a minority
would even be able to escape the duality of such a situation and say
"fuck you guys, it's not red or blue, I'll go write my own color and
show you".
</p>
<p>
And so, small bad decisions piled up with no way to undo them, since the
crowd will just accept whatever is on the table, until they had grown
into the cancer that killed the patient. Any time you manage to sneak
any tiny damaging into the protocol, it's as if you've soldered a
leeched onto it. And it's so scary: we already fucked up with Segwit.
Now Core is a bunch of amateurs salaried westerners that sit in a couple
of offices, and they do whatever shit they want on each release and
people just upgrade. And then you go to Twitter and read on the BIP110
discussions and most of it is just ignorants on either side that
understand nothing, slinging noise at each other. And then you go to
reddit and it's just normies memeing about dips and pumps and asking if
DCA-ing 100$ a week will retire them at 32.
</p>
<p>
This all made me think that a decentralized protocol is like a character
in a shooter videogame where there are no health potions, no medkits, no
bandaids. And you only get to play once, no second tries. You can be as
skilled as you want, but it's still a fact someday you'll get hit. With
no way to recover your health, over a long enough time horizon, you will
die.
</p>
<h3>Mix it all up</h3>
<p>
All of this combined is what I find concerning.
</p>
<p>
Most people in this world are not fully fledged participants in Bitcoin. They don't have the willingness to actively engage in the maintenance of the protocol. They don't care. Most don't even know what they don't know. Their "usage" of Bitcoin is like second-hand smoke: the only way they can interact with the network is via tooling that others build and run. The only knowledge they hold on its inner workings come from metaphors brought by third parties, which many times are wrong, biased or outright maliciously crafted to confuse them.
</p>
<p>Instead, only a minuscule minority can play the game properly. People intelligent and educated enough. With filled bags that both give them the freedom and the incentive to engage.</p>
<p>It wouldn't be that terrible if Bitcoin ended up being an aristocratic monetary network. It would be orders of magnitude less useful than if it was global money, surely. But it would surely help, not hurt, the world.
</p>
<p>
But the problem is that there are no meritocratic barriers to participate in Bitcoin. Both brilliant people and absolute brutes are welcome alike. The crowd comes in. And the crowd becomes the stone foundation that makes the protocol resistant to change: you have to convince them all to push changes. </p>
<p>This ought to be good, right? If you want to change Bitcoin, you have to convince the participants that your change is in their best interest, hence nobody can take over maliciously the protocol.
</p>
<p>But the reality is that the crowd is ignorant and lives in an incredibly dense fog of war. They know jackshit of the protocol and how it works. They don't know how software works. They don't understand economics. Their opinions on protocol changes are either non-existant ("Oh, a new version of Core! I'll update right away! Have I read the changelog? What do you mean? What is a changelog?"), or instead formed from the result of online propagandistic crossfire.
</p>
<p>And so, I come to this observation: that the decentralization of Bitcoin surely makes protocol changes expensive. But it hardly guarantees that bad changes are less likely than good changes. With enough resources and patience, I'm confident you have a decent chance at psy-oping the network into crazy shit like supporting tail emission. And once you fuck the protocol, it is very hard to unfuck. After all, it is the crowd who turned email in to Gmail.
</p>
<p>And the healthbar doesn't refill.</p>
<h3>Gold's latest fork war</h3>
<p>
I started this rant heretically proclaiming there is some aspect of gold
that is superior to Bitcoin.
</p>
<p>
Well, do you remember gold's last fork war? Of course not, because there
wasn't one. There's nothing to discuss.
</p>
<p>
I'm not saying gold is superior. Hard to custody, hard to transport,
hard to verify, forever inflationary, tends to be centralized.
</p>
<p>
But at least it escapes the crowd: it is what it is, and no human can
change that. There's no signaling, no forking, no socratic seminar of
people discussing the greatest and latest update proposal from Pieter
Wuille to make TheMempool&trade; 0.7% more schgaboozing, no ugly VCs
pouring money into young devs who still get yelled at by mom when they
don't drop their undies in the dirty clothes bag. No greedy masses who
completely ignore the nature of the technology their betting their
financial future on. No hashrate competitions, no threats of changing
the PoW algorithm. No Tone Vays.
</p>
<p>
I can shit on gold, but the truth is it's done its thing for millenia
because we can't change it. It might be a shit money in the 21st money, but that's because the world has changed, not because gold has enshittified.
</p>
<p>
It makes me wonder: will we ever truly find good money? Is it even
posible?
</p>
<p>
It also makes me think how materially effective it is to indebted in
money: you get to buy real hard things today, only in exchange of
promises of imperfect money in the future. With so many ways for the
unit your liability is denominated to go upside down, letting you run
free with the asset while you pee on the debt.
</p>
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<h1>Hi, Pablo here</h1>
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<section>
<h2>Thoughts after departing Galoy</h2>
<p><em>Published: 2026-08-30</em></p>
<p>
I recently left my position as a Data Engineer at Galoy to pursue some other opportunities. I thought it would
be a good time to reflect a bit and jot down some notes for my future self. I did that for the first time when
leaving Superhog and it proved useful, so here it goes.
</p>
<ul>
<li>
Having a technical CEO saves you from many pains that a non-technical CEO will bring to your door. But it
will introduce other ones. It is definitely not heaven on earth compared to non-technical CEOs, but rather a
different set of trade-offs. If you care about being surrounded by a culture of great engineering, though, a
technical CEO really helps.
</li>
<li>
The team stayed away from anything that resembled a production environment for my full tenure. I could see how
it rots away the spirit. There are issues with having a bunch of engineers crank code against a future
hypothetical usage that never comes. Eventually, care degrades. You do not build things the same way when the
quality bar is being able to call the task done, even with very good CI and a good culture of testing, as you
do when your stuff will actually be used in the real world. Operations also take a hit: when you can always
reset any environment, because you do not live under the terrible threat of at least one true production
environment that needs to be treated like a jewel, you tolerate many deployment and operation quirks. Finally,
without clear guidance provided by business needs, the team will sometimes deviate into funky technical nerd
snipes that, after weeks or months, might end up providing nothing useful to the product or business.
</li>
<li>
Working with a globally distributed remote team can be a challenge. You can get the feeling that things slow
down dramatically because communication sometimes ends up working with one working day of latency: you ask
your coworker, who is sleeping, something; then he replies back when you are AFK. Now I can see why some
companies make it strict to only hire people within certain timezone boundaries. Also, executing an offsite is
a logistics nightmare. No matter which place you pick to meet, someone will have visa nightmares to get there.
</li>
<li>
It is insanely productive to have a strong CI setup and to heavily automate all things related to builds,
testing, deployment, and so on. I was a bit hesitant about going all the way with certain automations, but this
team really showed me tricks and patterns to take CI to the limit and I loved it.
</li>
<li>
Compiling Rust is a pain in the ass.
</li>
<li>
I have seen many places where you always have one engineer owning one task, and the idea of putting two people
under the same task would be considered unproductive. In Galoy, it was quite the opposite: having multiple
engineers on any non-trivial task was considered to be faster in overall team velocity, because multiple
people being hands-on with the same task would speed up design and review. I fell in love with the concept,
and now I find a lot of value in mobbing. It is also great for knowledge sharing. Galoy implemented some rules
to motivate this, like limiting PRs in flight and having the convention for engineers to always try to join a
WIP task instead of getting a brand new one started.
</li>
<li>
Incident reviews were always done collectively: whoever might have tackled the incident started a few notes,
but there were large chunks of the report that would be filled in collectively before the review meeting. Then
many details would be added during the meeting itself. The bit I found most interesting about this shared
ownership of the review was that, during the meeting, each related engineer was expected to walk everyone else
through their own subjective timeline of events, uninterrupted. This practice, as opposed to someone playing
detective and trying to craft one global sequence of events, was really helpful in making evident the
misalignments in how different colleagues collaborated together.
</li>
<li>
If you are the kind of person who likes to get shit done, traditional banking is a terrible place to be. It is
the most regulated, risk-averse environment I have ever lived in. Innovating there is almost impossible. This
is the reason you see fintechs do cool stuff and banks not: the fintech is working outside of financial
regulations, and only touching the industry in the most minimal way possible.
</li>
<li>
Another related thought: running a tradfi bank is so utterly complex due to regulation that bootstrapping one
from scratch somehow feels impossible. You are going to need double-digit millions just to get ready for
licensing and launch, with no guarantee that you will actually take off successfully. It feels like a system
made to ensure no new players enter, which is obviously in the interest of both current players and regulators.
One specifically tough part here is that licensing is a bit all or nothing: if you want to start the bank, you
must prove to the regulator that you can properly operate up to his standards everything the license offers,
even if you only intend to offer a very limited set of products. You cannot get an MVP license: you are either
a bank or not, and you cannot lean-launch yourself into existence. It reminds me of the famous John Gall quote:
<em>A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked.</em>
Here, regulators have doomed startups by forcing everyone to somehow miraculously start being complex out the
door.
</li>
<li>
I got the chance to visit El Salvador. It is a really poor country, but at the time of my visit the spirits
were high because things had been trending upwards for years already. The environment created by such a winning
streak was awesome. I found many people were very happy because, even if they were still in deep shit, things
had been improving significantly for them for quite some time, and they expected more good things to come.
</li>
<li>
I have doubted in the past about whether scheduled 1:1s, retrospectives, and performance reviews are good or
not. The good old debate between "schedule it and do it with some frequency" versus "let us just raise the
conversation when needed". After being in Galoy, I have finally come to the personal conclusion that it pays
off to have those meetings scheduled on a recurrent basis. If you feel you have nothing to say, just schedule
them less frequently.
</li>
<li>
Event sourcing is a beautiful pattern. It comes with its own complexity, but if you are in a system with true
playback and audit needs, nothing beats it. The only time I found it can give you a headache is when you deal
with requests to delete sensitive personal data.
</li>
<li>
As you try to scale throughput, strong consistency increasingly becomes an obstacle. I now understand why so
many other systems I dealt with in the past force you through async "fill a request and poll the state"
patterns: they are shoving you into an async background queue to take weight away from the overloaded main
server.
</li>
<li>
Having all the tools you usually interact with when working, both development and operations related, exposing a
CLI is awesome. The ability to mix and match information from different spots in a single terminal is very
productive. Both as a human, but also when working with LLM agents.
</li>
<li>
Testing with BATS is great. I now realize there are so many other projects that could have had great testing
if they had stepped out one more layer of the onion and run their tests at the terminal layer.
</li>
<li>
Having things that you can check in CI but not locally inevitably leads to headaches. It pays off to make all
the CI tasks runnable locally. Instead of relying on complicated multistep workflows in the CI YAMLs, perhaps
just try to have one bash script per task that runs the same locally and in the CI VM.
</li>
<li>
If you are trying to sell critical products or services to big corps, in the sense that their business will
strongly depend on what you are providing, having weak financials is a serious liability. They may love your
proposal, but they may also get really scared from the fact that it looks like you are going bankrupt in a few
months.
</li>
</ul>
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