SEC-01: A Pirate Ship Full of Guinea Pigs

20 March 2024

Oh my, what a ride. Where do I even begin? A wise man once said that the best place to begin is at the beginning. So I’ll try to do just that.

SEC-01: The Beginning

I don’t even know how it all started anymore, but I know for a fact that it was Martijn’s idea. And the idea was this: let’s do something like a Bitcoin Academy on Madeira!

“Neat,” I thought. “Let’s do it,” André said. “Let’s fuck shit up and do a nostr thing instead,” Pablo remarked. “But it must have a pirate theme,” was my only objection. “Deal.”

“Deal.”

SEC-01: What’s the Big Deal?

I don’t think we did anything special. What we’re trying to do, and what I think we managed to do, is to get the right people together at the right time. We knew from the get-go that we didn’t know what we were doing. And we decided that that’s okay.

We decided that that’s okay because any explorative adventure is by definition unknown. And that’s what the Sovereign Engineering Cohort was and still is: an explorative adventure.

So I guess the big deal was that we were knowingly venturing into the unknown. And 21 people signed up for it. Willingly.

That’s a big deal.

SEC-01: The Crew

Every pirate ship needs a crew. We started as four: Martijn, André, Pablo, and myself. We invited three more: Paul, Ben, and Tony—our North Star team for SEC-01. And then we invited 21 more to board the ship.

Our 21 participants were people with vastly different backgrounds, from vastly different countries, having vastly different ideas about how Bitcoin, Lightning, and nostr could transform the internet, and the world at large. One thing that everyone had in common was a deep-seated dissatisfaction with the status quo. Everyone knew and still knows that large parts of the internet are broken. And everyone felt that there’s something we can do about it to fix it.

We talked a lot about what it means to build it right. Or at least what it means to build it wrong.

One goal we had in mind was to learn from each other so that we may not repeat all the mistakes that we made in the past. And I think it started working immediately.

SEC-01: The First Week

We started the program with a brief introduction about what we had in mind for the eight weeks, as well as an introduction of the crew, the participants, and what everyone was working on.

One thing that we try to focus on is what I will call the loop. The loop is what I consider the Cornerstone of the Sovereign Engineering Cohort, as it neatly summarizes the main idea of the program.

The idea is simple: you talk about what you’re going to build, you build it, and you show it to everyone. Rinse and repeat. Every week. For eight weeks.

SEC-01: Distributed Cognition

I am convinced that the problems that we are facing cannot be solved by traditional means. More importantly, they cannot be solved by a lone wolf. “Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.”

So the question becomes: how do we get enough eyeballs looking at the right thing? And more than that: how do we get them to look at problems from the right angle, inhabiting the right perspective?

SEC-01: Walking the Walk

Looking at things it’s necessary but not sufficient. If you want to solve deep problems you have to think about them deeply. So again, the question becomes: how do we create an environment that facilitates and allows for deep conversations?

I think the Ancients were onto something when they came together at the gymnasium to discuss deep problems, have deep conversations, and—pardon the pun—hash things out. It strikes me as odd that all the paintings of these times show people not only talking but walking.

A lot of people who figured out solutions to hard problems in the past enjoyed an occasional stroll through the park. Not alone, but with company. There’s something about walking and talking that really gets the brain juices flowing. From Aristotle to Einstein, the greats all intuitively figured out that walking facilitates proper talking, and proper talking facilitates proper thinking. Someone from the cohort remarked, “Left foot right foot; left brain right brain.” I believe it.

So that’s what we did. Not only did we talk the talk, but we also walked the walk. Once a week. Granted, not all of our walks were perfect or magical, but many of them were. And a lot of stuff got figured out. And once you’ve got stuff figured out, it’s almost trivial to build it. Figuring it out is the hard part.

SEC-01: What Came out of It

Some of you might have been fortunate enough to experience the final Demo Day of SEC-01, held on the last day of Bitcoin Atlantis. It took us three hours to show what came out of it, failing demos and all. There’s so much stuff that I had to put the list in a separate post, aptly titled:

• ”SEC-01: What Came out of It”

Vibes were high, the room was packed, and while most of the presentations kinda sucked, everyone tried their best to paint a picture of what they have been working on or what problems they cared about most.

And that’s what we cared about most: Getting the people together that care, and providing an environment where they are encouraged to collaborate and discuss freely.

We strongly believe that the pie is big enough for us all. Now it’s not the time to think about competition. Now is the time to focus on collaboration. We believe that Bitcoin is a move from zero-sum to positive-sum thinking. We believe that we should aim at win-win-win: good for you, good for me, good for us and the environment we’re embedded in.

SEC-02: What’s Ahead

The space that has opened up by Bitcoin, nostr, and other freedom tech is vast. We have barely scratched the surface.

The goal of the Sovereign Engineering Cohorts is to scratch the surface as properly as we know how. So we’re going to do it again. In May. Same recipe, same crew, different participants. The focus will be on P2P markets and exchange.

We’re not here to make any promises. I want to repeat once more what we’ve mentioned in the past: “Men wanted for hazardous journey. Low No wages, bitter cold, long hours of complete darkness. Safe return doubtful. Honour and recognition in event of success.”

But it’s going to be fun. Maybe.

Sign up, and let’s find out: https://sovereignengineering.typeform.com/SEC02