Philosophy
“If you want to build a ship, don't drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.”
— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Sovereign Engineering is grounded in the values embodied by Bitcoin: self-sovereignty, agency, and censorship-resistance. We build technology that maximises individual freedom, minimises reliance on trusted third parties, and treats the individual as the ultimate node in every network.
From "Fix the Money, Fix the Web" we take the conviction that a sound monetary foundation is a moral imperative, and that Bitcoin's paradigm of extreme ownership demands equally sovereign applications. Likewise, Nostr reminds us that protocols, not platforms, will reclaim the vibrant, open experimentation that defined the early web.
Freedom by Design
“Freedom Tech is rugpull-resistant technology.”
— Gigi
Bitcoin, Lightning, and Nostr prove that code can embed freedom at the protocol layer: freedom of speech, assembly, movement, and of course financial freedom. We strive to reproduce that super-power in every system we touch, so that liberty is enforced by mathematics rather than maintained by promises.
Good design begins with values. We minimise dependencies, maximise verifiability, and keep exit-costs asymptotically close to zero. When the design is right, freedom is a property—not a permission.
This way of thinking is what we call Freedom Tech: technology that is rugpull-resistant by design. When betrayal is impossible, trust becomes optional and collaboration scales.
Solved By Walking
“Solvitur ambulando.”
— Saint Augustine
No ill-defined problem was ever solved in isolation. By gathering bright minds in a high-trust setting we tap into what cognitive scientist John Vervaeke calls distributed cognition. Ideas bounce, mutate, and compound until entirely new solution-spaces appear.
The fuel for that process is conversation, and the best conversations happen while walking. Saint Augustine called it Solvitur ambulando—"by walking it shall be solved." Madeira's levadas offer kilometres of cognitive runway.
Friday's Demo Day then serves as an epistemic checkpoint. Six minutes to show, two to discuss. Brutal, illuminating, and endlessly inspiring.
Explorers of a New Frontier
“Re-invent the future.”
— Bell Labs
Our logo is a ship for a reason. Bitcoin and Nostr open a digital ocean as uncharted as the Age of Discovery. We welcome builders who yearn for that "wild and open sea," who embrace risk, and who delight in charting new waters.
Like Shackleton's crew, participants must trust one another when storms hit, and celebrate together when new land appears on the horizon. The sea is vast, and so is the opportunity.
Those who prefer calm harbours and predictable schedules need not apply. We are optimised for the pirates, the adventurers, and the stubborn optimists who believe the internet can still astonish us.
In-Person, High-Bandwidth
“If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”
— African Proverb
The magic happens face-to-face. Six weeks of shared meals, shared walks, and shared victories forge bonds that bandwidth-limited Zoom calls simply cannot replicate. Trust is built in the queue for poncha, not in a Discord channel.
Madeira's Bitcoin-friendly ecosystem (see the BTCMap or visit FREE Madeira) provides the perfect real-world playground to test ideas minutes after they compile.
Prototype on Monday, ship it on Tuesday, receive sats on Wednesday, buy coffee on Thursday, iterate by Friday. That feedback loop is only possible when hardware, merchants, and curious peers live within walking distance.
Bias for Action
We prototype first, critique later. Imperfect code is welcomed if it advances the conversation. Novelty, experimentation, and rapid iteration trump premature optimisation.
This bias for action produces tangible results: from Blossom to ZapStore, many cohort projects were conceived on a Monday walk and open-sourced before the next weekend. The world needs working code, not slide decks.
Direction beats speed, yet speed still helps. We chase the 80-20, knowing that the last 20 % can wait until the idea survives first contact with reality.
Want to see how this rapid loop plays out week-by-week? Explore the full cadence in our Concept section.
Cypherpunks Write Code
“The computer can be used as a tool to liberate and protect people, rather than to control them.”
— Hal Finney
"What does it mean to 'build it right'?" ask Pablo & Gigi. It means writing code that the user can verify, fork, and exit from; choosing architectures that minimise trust; and favouring primitives that stand the test of decades.
Hal Finney's challenge calls for code that stands on its own—transparent, user-verifiable, and resilient to adversarial pressure. We prize lean binaries, readable source, and simple dependency graphs so every sailor on this digital ocean can audit the hull before they board.
No Solutions
“No solutions, only trade-offs.”
— Thomas Sowell
Our craft is the art of choosing the right compromises—those that maximise sovereignty, minimise trust, and preserve optionality for generations of builders to come.
The No Solutions podcast is our experiment in Dia-Logos—capturing the same free-flowing, exploratory conversations that spark during every cohort and pressing record.
Endurance
“Fortitudine vincimus.”
— Ernest Shackleton
Building self-sovereign systems is a marathon, not a sprint; endurance and steady iteration win the day.
Freedom Tech is not built in fiscal quarters; it is forged across decades. We favour antifragile tooling, small teams, and battle-tested primitives that will still compile when our grandchildren fork the repo.
We endure because the mission matters: fix the money, fix the internet. Everything else is a footnote.
