Red team blues - a story only made possible by misunderstanding Bitcoin

I am currently enjoying "Red team Blues" by Cory Doctorow (Funny side note: for a long time I thought his name was made up. It's not.)

Anyway, Red Team Blues describes a modern day whodunit investigation by the protagonist Martin Hench. In the story, a cryptographic backdoor is programmed into a fictional cryptocurrency called Trustcoin. This backdoor seems to fall into the wrong hands and Martin's job is to recover the cryptographic keys. Furthermore in the story, Trustcoin is explained to be better than Bitcoin because one can interact on this blockchain privately. This sounds a lot like the real-world usage of Cashu e-cash, Fedimint, Liquid, Monero or Beam just to name a few projects that either build on Bitcoin, or roll their own Blockchain. 

Without giving away any spoilers, about 2/5 into the story Martin and his client both think he's solved the mystery. He is then to be paid about $300 million. Several pages in the book are then used to describe how that much money can move hands. It is in worldwide real estates, numbered accounts, weird sounding LLCs on the Cayman Islands, and so on.

This book came out in 2023, so I would guess Cory should know that holding and moving $300 million in Bitcoin is trivially simple. Also, he could have known that building yet another privacy crypto project is nonsense because money tends to be winner-take-most. But I guess that would have made the story shorter and less interesting? Or maybe he, like most people, isn't understanding how truly useful and liquid Bitcoin and adjacent projects are yet? 

I guess only mis-understanding Bitcoin can make one a sceptic, and only misunderstanding it gives you the need to make a 'better' alternative. It so happens that this week I was listening to a podcast episode on Tetragrammaton where Rick Rubin is interviewing Jack Mallers. In it, he explains the how?, what? and why? of Bitcoin. If you want to understand Bitcoin better, give the episode a listen. Bonus: even the adverts on this podcast are a joy to listen to. I only wish more podcasts were made with such love for the craft. 

Are there any good blogging platforms left in 2025?

We don't do it because it is easy, but because we thought it would be easy. - jest at the famous JFK quote.

I'm one of those stubborn bloggers persons who like to blog. Why? Because getting things off my chest is a liberating feeling. Or sometimes I have a "deep" insight that I feel the universe, or at least posterity, should be able to look back at. One of my blogs is mostly tech focussed, and sharing tips and tricks is as much a service to the Congregation (shout out to all my fellow fans of Alastair Reynolds' Ness-sisters) as to my future self. I can't remember the number of times that I had to look at my own blog posts to find the exact FFmpeg commands that I need. 

Everyone has their own reason(s) to blog. But the reason I kept at it is mainly because it is almost free. That it is (or can be) free is a coincidence of history as much as anything else. You see, since about 2003/2004 I've been blogging on platforms such as my own site hosted by my provider. But when I switched from Sun-web (or was it Surf-web?) to HCC-net, and then to XS4ALL, I felt tired of Ftping over my files and telling all my friends about a new domain name once again. I needed a static web address, or better yet, my own domain name. So Janromme.com was bought. 

I also needed a hosting solution that would just work. Blogger.com was big at the time, and appeared to be free as well. It wasn't until recently that I discovered that my beloved website was infested with banners for random advertisements. You see, I've been using Nextdns and add blockers for decades now, so I never realized the garbage that people who don't use these tools see on the internet, including on my own beloved website.

"If you are not paying for it, you're not the customer; you're the product being sold". I've recently decided that I want to switch over from blogger.com to another hosted solution. Blogger's way to make money is to show my readers adverts. I don't want that any more. So I've been looking into different hosting providers like Montaigne, Ghost, Pica.page, njump.me, Picapods, Alto, Micro.blog, Blot.im and EX0Text.  

I accept that I will need to pay for hosting. But since I want to set this up and forget about it for another decade or two, it will have to be both ridiculously cheap and durable. I know that nothing lasts forever, but a service that is too cheap will go bankrupt or be acquired by another party that will stop its services. It would also be really nice if I could upload my posts as Markdown files. That way, switching over to another platform in 20 years time will be easier. 

I guess this graph (I've got permission to use this picture, the original version is hosted here) illustrates my point nicely: the cheaper and easier the hosting is, the more likely it is that a blog will be actively used and will stand the test of time.

So I am currently in the market for a new blogging platform. The minimum requirements are in no particular order:

• Custom domain name support 
• RSS support (I've got no clue how many people read my blog through RSS, and that is a liberating feeling).
• File hosting included (for pictures and video's)
• Close to free (I am willing to pay $50 per year) but that's only about $4 per month. Only Picapod comes close to this pricing. Blot was $4 when I signed up, but for new customers it's already pricing at $6 at the time of writing. 
• Easy posting/uploading. The way I use Blogger is by sending an email to [mysecretaddress]@blogger.com and the email with pictures included is just posted at my blog.  Blot is quite easy too. I just save a markdown file in my Dropbox folder, and voilà, it becomes a new blog post. 
• Easy to set up and forget. This is where Pica falls flat on it's face: you are renting a VPS, which requires attention.
• Cheap to maintain for the builders. After all, if the company or person quits tomorrow, I'm bereft of a good hosting solution once again.
• I want to be the customer, not the product, so no inserted advertisements. 

If you have any tips, mail me or comment on HN.

update: shout out to sirodoht and treetalker for pointing me to mataroa. Mataroa seems to cost just $9 per year, has everything I listed above, except for the file hosting part, and is probably my new blog platform soon™️