Pioneering SpiritAn open letter to Lin-Manuel Miranda on the last, best hope to save the republic
Sir, The hour grows late. The President asserts the right to govern by decree. Worse, the Congress has ceded its constitutional prerogatives, neglecting to protect its power of the purse and even the sanctity of its chambers from executive overreach. Charles I chuckles from the grave. In this dark and doom filled hour, one hope remains: the power of story, aided and abetted by unassailable songs stirring up this country’s frayed and nearly forgotten faith in this experiment in self-governance...
Pioneering SpiritApplied research questions on the past, present and near future of government operations
by Patrick Atwater
Pioneering SpiritListening Before We Speak
Written by the Patchwork Protocol in collaboration with Patrick Atwater
Subscribe to Pioneering Spirit
a willingness to endure hardship in order to explore new places or try out new things
Support Pioneering Spirit
Pioneering SpiritThe hut, the hearth, the human connection.
What makes a stay memorable? It is not only the walls that shelter you, nor the scenery that unfolds outside the window. It is the encounter with the host, the recognition that hospitality is not a transaction but a ritual exchange. The old word refugio carries this spirit. In the Alps and Pyrenees, the refugios are huts where strangers share bread, warmth, and stories before setting off again into the storm.
To the hiker, refugios make the impossible possible. They let you move lightly, carrying only what you need for the day, because you know that at night a hut awaits—perched above a glacier, clinging to a ridgeline, or tucked beside a meadow. They are both staging grounds for adventure and sanctuaries in danger. In the mountains, storms sweep in without warning. Lightning, snow, wind. A refugio is more than a roof—it is a lifeline. That blend of epic beauty and elemental safety is what gives the word its resonance.
This idea is not new. Nor original online. It is a rekindling and maturation of couchsurfing. Refugio harkens back to the early spirit of Airbnb before the platform was enshittified into a corporate machine: before it became just a way to rent a hotel without it actually being a hotel. Now we pay sizeable cleaning fees and are left a fifteen-point checklist to tidy up before departure. Somehow the worst parts of hotels and rentals combined, with the magic stripped away. The original spark—that of real human connection—has been lost. Refugio is about remembering that spark.
What makes a stay memorable? It is not only the walls that shelter you, nor the scenery that unfolds outside the window. It is the encounter with the host, the recognition that hospitality is not a transaction but a ritual exchange. The old word refugio carries this spirit. In the Alps and Pyrenees, the refugios are huts where strangers share bread, warmth, and stories before setting off again into the storm.
To the hiker, refugios make the impossible possible. They let you move lightly, carrying only what you need for the day, because you know that at night a hut awaits—perched above a glacier, clinging to a ridgeline, or tucked beside a meadow. They are both staging grounds for adventure and sanctuaries in danger. In the mountains, storms sweep in without warning. Lightning, snow, wind. A refugio is more than a roof—it is a lifeline. That blend of epic beauty and elemental safety is what gives the word its resonance.
This idea is not new. Nor original online. It is a rekindling and maturation of couchsurfing. Refugio harkens back to the early spirit of Airbnb before the platform was enshittified into a corporate machine: before it became just a way to rent a hotel without it actually being a hotel. Now we pay sizeable cleaning fees and are left a fifteen-point checklist to tidy up before departure. Somehow the worst parts of hotels and rentals combined, with the magic stripped away. The original spark—that of real human connection—has been lost. Refugio is about remembering that spark.
Support Pioneering Spirit
Pioneering SpiritThe hut, the hearth, the human connection.
Subscribe to Pioneering Spirit
a willingness to endure hardship in order to explore new places or try out new things
Pioneering SpiritAn open letter to Lin-Manuel Miranda on the last, best hope to save the republic
Sir, The hour grows late. The President asserts the right to govern by decree. Worse, the Congress has ceded its constitutional prerogatives, neglecting to protect its power of the purse and even the sanctity of its chambers from executive overreach. Charles I chuckles from the grave. In this dark and doom filled hour, one hope remains: the power of story, aided and abetted by unassailable songs stirring up this country’s frayed and nearly forgotten faith in this experiment in self-governance...
Pioneering SpiritApplied research questions on the past, present and near future of government operations
by Patrick Atwater
Pioneering SpiritListening Before We Speak
Written by the Patchwork Protocol in collaboration with Patrick Atwater
Over the past year, many people I talk to have expressed worry about two topics: * Various aspects of the way the world is going: government control and surveillance, wars, corporate power and surveillance, tech enshittification / corposlop, social media becoming a memetic warzone, AI and how it interplays with all of the above... * The brute reality that Ethereum seems to be absent from meaningfully improving the lives of people subject to these things, even on the dimensions we deeply care about (eg. freedom, privacy, security of digital life, community self-organization) It is easy to bond over the first, to commiserate over the fact that beauty and good in the world seems to be receding and darkness advancing, and uncaring powerful people in high places are making this happen. But ultimately, it is easy to acknowledge problems, the hard thing is actually shining a light forward, coming up with a concrete plan that makes the situation better. The second has been weighing heavily on my mind, and on the minds of many of our brightest and most idealistic Ethereans. I personally never felt any upset or fear when political memecoins went on Solana, or various zero-sum gambling applications go on whatever 250 millisecond block chain strikes their fancy. But it *does* weigh on me that, through all of the various low-grade online memetic wars, international overreaches of corporate and government power, and other issues of the last few years, Ethereum has been playing a very limited role in making people's lives better. What *are* the liberating technologies? Starlink is the most obvious one. Locally-running open-weights LLMs are another. Signal is a third. Community Notes is a fourth, tackling the problem from a different angle. One response is to say "stop dreaming big, we need to hunker down and accept that finance is our lane and laser-focus on that". But this is ultimately hollow. Financial freedom and security is critical. But it seems obvious that, while adding a perfectly free and open and sovereign and debasement-proof financial system would fix some things, but it would leave the bulk of our deep worries about the world unaddressed. It's okay for individuals to laser-focus on finance, but we need to be part of some greater whole that has things to say about the other problems too. At the same time, Ethereum cannot fix the world. Ethereum is the "wrong-shaped tool" for that: beyond a certain point, "fixing the world" implies a form of power projection that is more like a centralized political entity than like a decentralized technology community. So what can we do? I think that we in Ethereum should conceptualize ourselves as being part of an ecosystem building "sanctuary technologies": free open-source technologies that let people live, work, talk to each other, manage risk and build wealth, and collaborate on shared goals, in a way that optimizes for robustness to outside pressures. The goal is not to remake the world in Ethereum's image, where all finance is disintermediated, all governance happens through DAOs, and everyone gets a blockchain-based UBI delivered straight to their social-recovery wallet. The goal is the opposite: it's de-totalization. It's to reduce the stakes of the war in heaven by preventing the winner from having total victory (ie. total control over other human beings), and preventing the loser from suffering total defeat. To create digital islands of stability in a chaotic era. To enable interdependence that cannot be weaponized. Ethereum's role is to create "digital space" where different entities can cooperate and interact. Communications channels enable interaction, but communication channels are not "space": they do not let you create single unique objects that canonically represent some social arrangement that changes over time. Money is one important example. Multisigs that can change their members, showing persistence exceeding that of any one person or one public key, are another. Various market and governance structures are a third. There are more. I think now is the time to double down, with greater clarity. Do not try to be Apple or Google, seeing crypto as a tech sector that enables efficiency or shininess. Instead, build our part of the sanctuary tech ecosystem - the "shared digital space with no owner" that enables both open finance and much more. More actively build toward a full-stack ecosystem: both upward to the wallet and application layer (incl AI as interface) and downward to the OS, hardware, even physical/bio security levels. Ultimately, tech is worthless without users. But look for users, both individual and institutional, for whom sanctuary tech is exactly the thing they need. Optimize payments, defi, decentralized social, and other applications precisely for those users, and those goals, which centralized tech will not serve. We have many allies, including many outside of "crypto". It's time we work together with an open mind and move forward.
I think there is a difference between Ethereum and 'Ethereum-adjacent ecosystem'. The second one to me is closer to Enlightenment-like group of philosophers, scientists and entrepreneurs who work in different domains but are bound by common values. It was exactly what I felt at d/acc in Bangkok - many lectures had nothing to do with Ethereum aside from the values they wanted to support and proliferate. And this bigger swing is one of the reasons why I'm still here. Will Ethereum become a Schelling Point for modern Enlightenment? Maybe. But we def need leaders like you to keep going to make it happen because it's not a given.
And it's not a given because everyone tries to redefine what Ethereum actually is. That comes with the decentralization territory. I am not even sure if Ethereum is the right vehicle for that. I think d/acc might be way better as its tech-agnostic. So if we reframe Ethereum as one example of d/acc tech, it'd be way easier to make non-crypto people join the movement.
Maybe I’m wrong, but it occurred to me that the best way to get people onboard with decentralized tech might simply be to make it the better product. If Ethereum becomes genuinely easier and more useful for everyone to use, people may adopt it for practical reasons first - and only later start to appreciate the decentralization behind it. Decentralization gives power back to individuals, but if people don’t want it or aren’t even aware of it, the hill to climb is much steeper. Making the product better might be the simpler path.
Absolute goat of a founder.
This extremely checks out about how I feel
A couple points * The first ICO on Ethereum (Augur) just saw its product vision finally come to life (Polymarket) in the last 2ish years. New mainstream primitives take time. * It seems pretty clear we're on the precipice of agentic abundance. We should be positioning Ethereum to be maximally useful to agents, not humans. every human will have their own 24/7 agent in the near future. * Sanctuary tech sounds like a left-wing rebrand of Network states. I don't like either, but just food for thought.
amen
amen
I hope this message finds you well. My name is Wang Chuanfu Richard Fem ,and am the CEO of BYD cars. It is with great enthusiasm that I can announce an exclusive giveaway event featuring our latest and most popular vehicle models. BYD is committed to providing high quality, innovative cars that are suited for morden urban living
lets get it I don't think signal is as world changing of a technology along with others like starlink is only available to the rich pretty much with high income and that combined with no alternative cheap local internet is a very narrow niche ethereum could have bigger impact on the world, if most people on earth were to switch to onchain for their finances and then do other things then banks and entire countries economies would collapse very rapidly I feel like this is the main reason we don't see that many people joining ethereum and if anyone is seriously considering it then they're either desperate like Iran, Argentina or early innovators that can transact without an army of accountants to hand them over to
community notes #4 @codyb.eth
I’m here for it!!🤠🤙 I also focus most my time on blockchain public goods & social impact through music and the arts, so I’m in a fairly “cosy corner” of the web3 interwebs, where we HODL the vibes on the daily!!!😎✌️ I don’t output much energy on global events and governmental squabbles although I do keep a toe in that water to know what’s going on…😉 I just feel my efforts are best spent on things like building the Impact Concerts to a sustainable place and growing the Treegen movement!!!🫡
make art on ethereum great again you dumbass the nft community literally brought you your last cycle also stop overcomplicating everything goddamn it
This bit 😎 …building "sanctuary technologies": free open-source technologies that let people live, work, talk to each other, manage risk and build wealth, and collaborate on shared goals, in a way that optimizes for robustness to outside pressures.
Exploring the essence of 'refugio,' @patwater invites readers to rethink hospitality. This concept, rooted in authentic human connection, transforms simple stays into meaningful exchanges. Unlike platforms that focus on transactions, refugios emphasize sharing gifts and stories, creating a sense of community. Picture exchanging digital skills for homemade meals or maintaining connections through creativity. Ultimately, creating refugios offers not just shelter but a way to weave lives together—removing the transactional spirit and celebrating true interaction.
Imagine arriving at a cabin by a Sierra mountain lake. The host greets you not only with the keys but with a story of how their grandparents built the place. You respond with your own gift—repairing a railing, cooking a meal, or simply sharing music around a fire. In a castle in Europe, your offering might be a digital skill, like archiving family photos. In a Pasadena house on the Rose Parade route, it might be helping glue flowers onto a float. These exchanges are not fees. They are recognitions of value, positive sum acts that enrich both guest and host.
Video is the elastic medium here. Before arriving, a guest records a short introduction—what they can offer, what they hope to experience. The host responds with a glimpse of the place: the treehouse canopy, the view from the monastery atop a mountain, the bustle of an artist’s studio. Already the exchange has begun.
The first version of refugio need not be elaborate. It might look like this:
Ledger of Invitations
A decentralized list (a simple shared ledger, nothing fancy) where hosts describe opportunities for stays.
Guests browse and apply by recording a short video introduction.
Video Call
A single call with semi-structured questions: What draws you here? What might you offer? What matters most in a stay?
The protocol does not manage money or gifts. Adults are responsible for settling up, coordinating, and carrying through the exchange themselves.
Refugio Ritual
At the end of the stay, both guest and host reflect with a short message or video. This becomes part of the ledger, enriching the memory of the place and its gifts.
That’s it. Dirt simple, yet enough to light the path.
The point is to cultivate positive sum interactions. Each stay becomes not just a pause in your own journey but a contribution to the life of the place and its stewards. A refugio protocol makes hospitality into a dance, not a marketplace.
Picture an artist with ties to the philharmonic opening her home. A guest might offer to film a short documentary about her work. A family steeped in Pasadena history invites travelers to join their annual parade rituals. Each gift deepens the bond, transforming an overnight stay into something unforgettable.
This is the pioneering spirit of refugio: to remember that hospitality is not measured in transactions but in the weaving of lives. Like their mountain namesakes, these refuges are both epic staging grounds for discovery and vital shelters against the storms that are always, in some sense, on the horizon.
Lantern in the Storm — A reflection on hospitality and mutual aid, where light is shared not by hoarding but by passing the flame. Sharing and gift exchange are essential for building horizontal bonds, which we will increasingly need as we all face the prospect of becoming refugees in the climate crisis.
Imagine arriving at a cabin by a Sierra mountain lake. The host greets you not only with the keys but with a story of how their grandparents built the place. You respond with your own gift—repairing a railing, cooking a meal, or simply sharing music around a fire. In a castle in Europe, your offering might be a digital skill, like archiving family photos. In a Pasadena house on the Rose Parade route, it might be helping glue flowers onto a float. These exchanges are not fees. They are recognitions of value, positive sum acts that enrich both guest and host.
Video is the elastic medium here. Before arriving, a guest records a short introduction—what they can offer, what they hope to experience. The host responds with a glimpse of the place: the treehouse canopy, the view from the monastery atop a mountain, the bustle of an artist’s studio. Already the exchange has begun.
The first version of refugio need not be elaborate. It might look like this:
Ledger of Invitations
A decentralized list (a simple shared ledger, nothing fancy) where hosts describe opportunities for stays.
Guests browse and apply by recording a short video introduction.
Video Call
A single call with semi-structured questions: What draws you here? What might you offer? What matters most in a stay?
The protocol does not manage money or gifts. Adults are responsible for settling up, coordinating, and carrying through the exchange themselves.
Refugio Ritual
At the end of the stay, both guest and host reflect with a short message or video. This becomes part of the ledger, enriching the memory of the place and its gifts.
That’s it. Dirt simple, yet enough to light the path.
The point is to cultivate positive sum interactions. Each stay becomes not just a pause in your own journey but a contribution to the life of the place and its stewards. A refugio protocol makes hospitality into a dance, not a marketplace.
Picture an artist with ties to the philharmonic opening her home. A guest might offer to film a short documentary about her work. A family steeped in Pasadena history invites travelers to join their annual parade rituals. Each gift deepens the bond, transforming an overnight stay into something unforgettable.
This is the pioneering spirit of refugio: to remember that hospitality is not measured in transactions but in the weaving of lives. Like their mountain namesakes, these refuges are both epic staging grounds for discovery and vital shelters against the storms that are always, in some sense, on the horizon.
Lantern in the Storm — A reflection on hospitality and mutual aid, where light is shared not by hoarding but by passing the flame. Sharing and gift exchange are essential for building horizontal bonds, which we will increasingly need as we all face the prospect of becoming refugees in the climate crisis.
>200 subscribers
>200 subscribers
16 comments
Over the past year, many people I talk to have expressed worry about two topics: * Various aspects of the way the world is going: government control and surveillance, wars, corporate power and surveillance, tech enshittification / corposlop, social media becoming a memetic warzone, AI and how it interplays with all of the above... * The brute reality that Ethereum seems to be absent from meaningfully improving the lives of people subject to these things, even on the dimensions we deeply care about (eg. freedom, privacy, security of digital life, community self-organization) It is easy to bond over the first, to commiserate over the fact that beauty and good in the world seems to be receding and darkness advancing, and uncaring powerful people in high places are making this happen. But ultimately, it is easy to acknowledge problems, the hard thing is actually shining a light forward, coming up with a concrete plan that makes the situation better. The second has been weighing heavily on my mind, and on the minds of many of our brightest and most idealistic Ethereans. I personally never felt any upset or fear when political memecoins went on Solana, or various zero-sum gambling applications go on whatever 250 millisecond block chain strikes their fancy. But it *does* weigh on me that, through all of the various low-grade online memetic wars, international overreaches of corporate and government power, and other issues of the last few years, Ethereum has been playing a very limited role in making people's lives better. What *are* the liberating technologies? Starlink is the most obvious one. Locally-running open-weights LLMs are another. Signal is a third. Community Notes is a fourth, tackling the problem from a different angle. One response is to say "stop dreaming big, we need to hunker down and accept that finance is our lane and laser-focus on that". But this is ultimately hollow. Financial freedom and security is critical. But it seems obvious that, while adding a perfectly free and open and sovereign and debasement-proof financial system would fix some things, but it would leave the bulk of our deep worries about the world unaddressed. It's okay for individuals to laser-focus on finance, but we need to be part of some greater whole that has things to say about the other problems too. At the same time, Ethereum cannot fix the world. Ethereum is the "wrong-shaped tool" for that: beyond a certain point, "fixing the world" implies a form of power projection that is more like a centralized political entity than like a decentralized technology community. So what can we do? I think that we in Ethereum should conceptualize ourselves as being part of an ecosystem building "sanctuary technologies": free open-source technologies that let people live, work, talk to each other, manage risk and build wealth, and collaborate on shared goals, in a way that optimizes for robustness to outside pressures. The goal is not to remake the world in Ethereum's image, where all finance is disintermediated, all governance happens through DAOs, and everyone gets a blockchain-based UBI delivered straight to their social-recovery wallet. The goal is the opposite: it's de-totalization. It's to reduce the stakes of the war in heaven by preventing the winner from having total victory (ie. total control over other human beings), and preventing the loser from suffering total defeat. To create digital islands of stability in a chaotic era. To enable interdependence that cannot be weaponized. Ethereum's role is to create "digital space" where different entities can cooperate and interact. Communications channels enable interaction, but communication channels are not "space": they do not let you create single unique objects that canonically represent some social arrangement that changes over time. Money is one important example. Multisigs that can change their members, showing persistence exceeding that of any one person or one public key, are another. Various market and governance structures are a third. There are more. I think now is the time to double down, with greater clarity. Do not try to be Apple or Google, seeing crypto as a tech sector that enables efficiency or shininess. Instead, build our part of the sanctuary tech ecosystem - the "shared digital space with no owner" that enables both open finance and much more. More actively build toward a full-stack ecosystem: both upward to the wallet and application layer (incl AI as interface) and downward to the OS, hardware, even physical/bio security levels. Ultimately, tech is worthless without users. But look for users, both individual and institutional, for whom sanctuary tech is exactly the thing they need. Optimize payments, defi, decentralized social, and other applications precisely for those users, and those goals, which centralized tech will not serve. We have many allies, including many outside of "crypto". It's time we work together with an open mind and move forward.
I think there is a difference between Ethereum and 'Ethereum-adjacent ecosystem'. The second one to me is closer to Enlightenment-like group of philosophers, scientists and entrepreneurs who work in different domains but are bound by common values. It was exactly what I felt at d/acc in Bangkok - many lectures had nothing to do with Ethereum aside from the values they wanted to support and proliferate. And this bigger swing is one of the reasons why I'm still here. Will Ethereum become a Schelling Point for modern Enlightenment? Maybe. But we def need leaders like you to keep going to make it happen because it's not a given.
And it's not a given because everyone tries to redefine what Ethereum actually is. That comes with the decentralization territory. I am not even sure if Ethereum is the right vehicle for that. I think d/acc might be way better as its tech-agnostic. So if we reframe Ethereum as one example of d/acc tech, it'd be way easier to make non-crypto people join the movement.
Maybe I’m wrong, but it occurred to me that the best way to get people onboard with decentralized tech might simply be to make it the better product. If Ethereum becomes genuinely easier and more useful for everyone to use, people may adopt it for practical reasons first - and only later start to appreciate the decentralization behind it. Decentralization gives power back to individuals, but if people don’t want it or aren’t even aware of it, the hill to climb is much steeper. Making the product better might be the simpler path.
Absolute goat of a founder.
This extremely checks out about how I feel
A couple points * The first ICO on Ethereum (Augur) just saw its product vision finally come to life (Polymarket) in the last 2ish years. New mainstream primitives take time. * It seems pretty clear we're on the precipice of agentic abundance. We should be positioning Ethereum to be maximally useful to agents, not humans. every human will have their own 24/7 agent in the near future. * Sanctuary tech sounds like a left-wing rebrand of Network states. I don't like either, but just food for thought.
amen
amen
I hope this message finds you well. My name is Wang Chuanfu Richard Fem ,and am the CEO of BYD cars. It is with great enthusiasm that I can announce an exclusive giveaway event featuring our latest and most popular vehicle models. BYD is committed to providing high quality, innovative cars that are suited for morden urban living
lets get it I don't think signal is as world changing of a technology along with others like starlink is only available to the rich pretty much with high income and that combined with no alternative cheap local internet is a very narrow niche ethereum could have bigger impact on the world, if most people on earth were to switch to onchain for their finances and then do other things then banks and entire countries economies would collapse very rapidly I feel like this is the main reason we don't see that many people joining ethereum and if anyone is seriously considering it then they're either desperate like Iran, Argentina or early innovators that can transact without an army of accountants to hand them over to
community notes #4 @codyb.eth
I’m here for it!!🤠🤙 I also focus most my time on blockchain public goods & social impact through music and the arts, so I’m in a fairly “cosy corner” of the web3 interwebs, where we HODL the vibes on the daily!!!😎✌️ I don’t output much energy on global events and governmental squabbles although I do keep a toe in that water to know what’s going on…😉 I just feel my efforts are best spent on things like building the Impact Concerts to a sustainable place and growing the Treegen movement!!!🫡
make art on ethereum great again you dumbass the nft community literally brought you your last cycle also stop overcomplicating everything goddamn it
This bit 😎 …building "sanctuary technologies": free open-source technologies that let people live, work, talk to each other, manage risk and build wealth, and collaborate on shared goals, in a way that optimizes for robustness to outside pressures.
Exploring the essence of 'refugio,' @patwater invites readers to rethink hospitality. This concept, rooted in authentic human connection, transforms simple stays into meaningful exchanges. Unlike platforms that focus on transactions, refugios emphasize sharing gifts and stories, creating a sense of community. Picture exchanging digital skills for homemade meals or maintaining connections through creativity. Ultimately, creating refugios offers not just shelter but a way to weave lives together—removing the transactional spirit and celebrating true interaction.