Microes on John Wooten

New Site Structure

Tue, 21 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

New Site Structure

I'm in the lull between political bureaucracy processing at the moment. It's that place where I've put in my work and just have to twiddle my thumbs with both the SEC and the SDF until they make a call. I've taken that time to execute some cutbacks on this repository.

Since it's not apparent at all what I've done from the public deployment, I'm going to lay it all out here. I'm also going to talk about the self-discovery process I went through these last six months to get to these changes. It's been a really interesting journey rediscovering parts of myself since the exam's pressure.

Little Allocation Wagers: Friendly and Productive

Fri, 20 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Little Allocation Wagers: Friendly and Productive

I'd like to start making more bets with people, especially in the Stellar community. People don't understand how good I am at trading, which is fine — that's not the qualm. I realize that it's a chance to test out my decisions against a market and receive real, immediate feedback.

For instance, I told people there would be a problem in migrating the AQUA pools in Prop 98. Just a couple of DAO votes later, they're paying millions to rectify the exact problem I said. Of course, that was after all the technical experts told me there was no way there'd be any issues.

Editing Self-Censorship

Wed, 28 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Editing Self-Censorship

To combat some of the stress last year, I started a companion site for my more personal relationship developments. It's been nice to have a place like that where I can synthesize some of my more raw journaling thoughts surrounding my partner.¹ To put it very briefly, I've made significant life changes lately to get closer to markets and further from draining distractions.

Along that journey, I came to understand self-censorship much more intimately. It's something I've dealt with for a really long time, so when I saw it pop up in a GitHub issue this morning, I knew I had to write about it.

Willing to Let Go

Wed, 15 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Willing to Let Go

I'm cleaning up a lot of old media because I work so much better with all my clutter processed. Most of my dream life involves having nothing on my hard drive because it's all organized in public references. While I still have a lot of work to do organizing GitHub work, I'm coming to an end of local files and comms, which is super relieving.

During this clean-up, I'm learning again how to let things go. I remember shredding all the paper documents I had for MonerAds after dissolving the entity. That was a real "no turning back" point for me, in that I was going to focus only on the Syndicate (and the start of deprecating trading, as it was the housing vehicle for the fund in certain brokers).

Finding Trusting and Stable Community Expansion Despite Anxious Interfaces

Tue, 14 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Finding Trusting and Stable Community Expansion Despite Anxious Interfaces

I think this is my first time documenting things after the heat of that SEC review died down. It's really nice not waking up to emails from the SEC anymore. Don't get me wrong, they are totally awesome and asked for entirely reasonable and relevant things.

But I just hold a high regard for a handful of institutions because they've helped me a lot growing up. I want to put my absolute best foot forward when it comes to my/our interactions, especially in our first official correspondence. Initial impressions count, and I think I've got a great basis with the staff now.

Centralized Responsibility for Decentralized Systems

Fri, 08 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Centralized Responsibility for Decentralized Systems

I'm at a pretty important crossroads, and I just can't get a bit of work done until I nail down a little bit of what's going on right now. Basically, my efforts are becoming extremely centralized. I am pushing everything hard to the redline, and it's producing exceptional output and comprehension at the cost of my sanity.

There is an impending light ahead with a response from the Commission next workweek. It won't be the end of things, but rather the start of significant newfound documentation efforts. But it will be the terminus ending of all my mental speculation.

Scheduling Across Time Zones

Wed, 30 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Scheduling Across Time Zones

I've had a very interesting last few months going extremely hard into very late nights for preparations to the Commission. On the tail end of this phenomenon, I've found myself awake at day's end and beyond within the confines of my worn self-directed work. It was under these circumstances that I had a pretty interesting thought, to the extent one can proclaim the self-assured quality of their own perspective.¹

Not a Trader Anymore

Tue, 24 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Not a Trader Anymore

Three years ago, I got my Galaxy Fold 3 phone off a Facebook Marketplace post while visiting my dad in Florida.¹ I was so excited because I knew I was about to enter some big trades, and this was just the device I needed.² Briefly, my dad wanted me to go on a trip across Europe after I graduated, and a tablet in my hand meant I could keep up with the TradingView app.

When Single Perspectives Value Work

Tue, 27 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

When Single Perspectives Value Work

I've been debating adding an "estimated value" field to items in my Agenda for some time now. Originally, I went against this instinct because I thought it was up to the market to decide how much my work is worth. This value can only be accurately found through the wisdom of crowds, as occurs with corporate valuations.¹

We all know the rhetoric that "pigs get slaughtered" in the markets, but what about the market for labor? Clearly, this does not seem to happen in most cases of excessive compensation, largely for the fact that funds or widely held securities have a nature of creating great wealth with less risk of loss than, say, strictly invested income. Thus, we find ourselves exploring particularly the employer–employee relationship, which is in itself an artificial market for work.

Next Working Goals

Sun, 25 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Next Working Goals

Now that TAR1's done, I see my role at every organization materially changing. I'm only a couple weeks away from finishing the DEX documentation, which will be the last material nonspecialized thing I ought to need to complete. Something about this time period brings me back to the bull run we started at the end of last year.

Pretty much everyone could draw a straight line from the discussion (however unexpected) from Tino and Tasset acquisitions. While this was explicitly not my intent, and I even was apologizing to Chives mid-convo in DMs, nonetheless it showed me something important. I'm an asset manager, and asset managers determine their value and worth based on markets.

Keep Going!

Wed, 14 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Keep Going!

Wow, guess the month of April flew right by! Sometimes the deeper thoughts here get pushed back as work deadlines pile up. Never a fan of hard centralized deadlines, but they certainly keep me up when the world says it counts.

I was originally going to do a much longer post, and hopefully soon I will have the time to purge through this backlog and formalize a lot of these ideas. I only have three pressing things to finish in my agenda before I've done everything I can alone. And it's relatively clear now that the projects need to grow imminently through combined efforts far exceeding my technical expertise.

On Perfectionism in Decentralized Work

Sat, 29 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

On Perfectionism in Decentralized Work

Yesterday, Chives was awesome enough to independently notice that the notes they prepared regarding the Syndicate's annual meeting were not properly added to the livestream replay comments. It was a minor Google bug that just didn't save the comment, a bug I experienced as well when trying to link to the Discord post on open-sourcing TAD3 and the subsequent repository transition dates. When Chives originally messaged me privately that they commented their timestamp chapter summaries on the replay, I knew that this had happened but didn't say anything.

Creating Collaborative, Accessible GitHub Issues

Fri, 21 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Creating Collaborative, Accessible GitHub Issues

One thing I've noticed quite often when viewing projects across GitHub: it can be quite difficult to help my favorite projects.

Sometimes, projects label things as a "good first issue" or try to otherwise categorize them into a (sometimes organized) database of work items. The latter traditionally incorporates itself into Projects, which are increasingly more centralized given the permissions requirements to manage such. I've seen the Gantt feature therein as a key point for some items that actually get visually "assigned" to people.

Another Walk in the Woods

Wed, 05 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Another Walk in the Woods

Accepting Leadership

Today I had a nice walk to the nearby river. It was quite a 2+ hour journey all in, and it was worth its time in gold. Just awesome to get back in nature after so much head-down time.

I was supposed to have a reflection day today, but I wasn't able to get TAR1 out on time. Sucks, but I'll get it going ASAP and fingers crossed have a weekday off for it by SFA flights. Really wish I had another few to use the last couple of days on my ski pass, but I guess that's just loss aversion kicking in given the insane rates they charge.

Editing PRs as a Reviewer

Sun, 19 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Editing PRs as a Reviewer

Recently, Chives submitted a pull request to make some great stylistic changes to the WhyDRS org's intro page. When I saw them, I added a single-line comment asking if they thought it would be a good idea to format the links in a specific way (they were just plaintext).

There was general agreement between not only myself and Chives but also another community member whom Chives had requested to review the PR. So there were two of us suggesting this change, which I had introduced into the scope of the request, even though it was completely outside (a) the existing skillset and (b) the original intent of Chives.

Technical Excellence Over Opposition

Wed, 15 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Technical Excellence Over Opposition

In discussing the blocksize war "as a one-sided competence trap" Vitalik once wrote:

One side monopolizes all the competent people, but uses its power to push a narrow and biased perspective; the other side correctly recognizes that something is wrong, but engulfs itself in a focus on opposition, failing to develop the technical ability to execute on its own.

I've seen this relatively recently with the discussion over Aquarius Proposition 98, and its related discussion. For posterity, I won't link to the exact specifications. Made briefly, the two sides in the discussion were either for or against migrating AQUA DAO reward tokens to Soroban AMM contracts.

Emojis as Light Responses

Sun, 08 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Emojis as Light Responses

Light touches can have a nuanced impact when gently guiding behavior towards your preferred outcome. This, of course, requires that you have a material goal in mind towards which you can shape actions. However, there is a fine line between telling someone what to do and providing advice.

Generally, I try to share as much specific, relevant, and parallel context as possible through thorough comments responding to others' actions. This is helpful (at least by my interpretations of others' responses) when the topic at hand is something I have experience in. If it's a little out of my wheelhouse but I have developed some relevant principles, then I will disclaim that technical difference before sharing what I think can help based on experience.

General v. Specific Compliments

Thu, 05 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

General v. Specific Compliments

Today we had an interview community chat in Decentralizing Capitalism where time was a bit limited due to personal circumstances. I had an incredible time diving into some of the nuances of ETFs, a prime example of centralized intermediated capital allocators. Indeed, they are potentially the prime example of both a virtue in a world of low-interest fiat bonds and a burden of poor returns compared to proper equity management.

Specialization of Unique Abilities

Thu, 05 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Specialization of Unique Abilities

I remember years ago just after quitting to trade full-time. The school year was approaching on the tail end of summer. I had just learned about crypto and decided to set up a mining rig.

It only took a week or two to piece everything together on the first motherboard, running everything via PCIe 1x USB wires. I installed Windows and tried to get all the devices recognized, but it was nearly impossible to get all the GPUs on one device. I later learned that this was a hardcoded limitation in Windows, which I could've bypassed if I knew how to install the Linux miners.

Control and Education Parallels

Mon, 25 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Control and Education Parallels

Recently, I've been reflecting on the Stellar liquidity arguments and realizing that framing them as "arguments" is entirely misguided. These are not mere debates but pivotal design choices influenced by the complex interplay of interests in the network—a system not governed by any single individual.

This perspective has also shaped my interpretation of WhyDRS actions in two specific cases: (i) TAD3 inter-agent usage and (ii) GitHub organization and security. The first case is more extensively documented in my personal decisions folder and has been the subject of ongoing community discussions and outreach. I’ll avoid elaborating further here since it intersects profoundly with antitrust and regulatory policy implications, especially considering the insolvency of Cede.

Centralized v. Decentralized Capital

Tue, 19 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Centralized v. Decentralized Capital

Firstly, capital or money is by definition the means to produce infrastructure, and infrastructure naturally leads to power in all its forms. Whether this organization process is distributed voluntarily or by force, its influence on the stakeholders in its system is a trivial aftereffect. The most important factors are set generally in stone at birth.

Recently, I've been thinking greatly about central v. decentral organization, especially given the recent pop in lumens. Aside from the fundamental technical obviousness, which I will not care to cover, it's gotten me thinking about the difference between Web3's new world and the incumbent central orgs. Namely, I was just contemplating the interactions I've had with Rahul, a director at GT's CREATEX.

Controlling GitHub Sponsors Influence

Tue, 12 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Controlling GitHub Sponsors Influence

The other day I started sponsoring tuplui based on prior work together in Discord and of course open-source projects. They're a stellar dev doing exceptional work, especially around easy-to-implement infra like Python. 💜 They tweeted about it and thanked me in Discord, where I enthusiastically replied via DM.

If the Discord callout happened in a public channel, I would've happily praised them there. But there was something about the X post that sorta irked me and stopped me from immediately replying in support of them. Namely, the post included a link to their GH sponsors page, as it does by default via the share button.

Investing in Self / Business

Tue, 12 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Investing in Self / Business

Today I realized—it hit me—that I've invested nearly 10% of my net worth in a principle. Worded another way, I've spent thousands of dollars—10% of NW, half a year of split rent—for the privilege of writing an article expressing the point I'm trying to make. Like, damn, geez, that's kind of crazy to think about.

For context, it was the TX in the Rahim reply to the Stellar interleaving chat, although calling it an interleaving discussion is almost facetious. Granted, I had to pump the thing out in five days. Fast publishing deadlines work well for static work like news, documentation, or fiction (probably on that last one—lol, idk).

Back to Conceptual Control

Mon, 04 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Back to Conceptual Control

Today I was a bit harsh to someone via a relatively uncontextualized report, and I really shouldn’t have been. It's a valuable community member (in a good way) who's out there searching for the best solution to a materially challenging problem. It was relatively clear from prior observations of this individual’s thoughts that they weren’t a super-expert in this particular field, but they were certainly trying their best to advance the conversation.

Asking Better Questions in Walkthroughs

Sat, 26 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Asking Better Questions in Walkthroughs

Today we had a spontaneous meeting in the WhyDRS Discord about GitHub config between different repos. It was exciting to chat amongst top contributors and overall active community members. Everyone is doing such a stellar job working their individual parts into the final advocacy movement.

I asked a few questions as seemed prudent related to expanding the community and ease of code accessibility. But really, I was blown away by Throw's implementation, as frontend is quite out of my wheelhouse right now. It was incredible to see their work interleaving a centralized frontend with a distributed backend embed, which became the native display.

Equity v. Debt Innovation

Fri, 25 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Equity v. Debt Innovation

I’ve been thinking a lot about the Global South lately. For years, I’ve had the sense inside that there’s something seriously wrong with the present monetary system. Namely, I remember driving 40 mins to the nearest bank which would offer a free checking account for minors in high school.

I just think there’s something so fundamentally wrong with charging people to use their own fucking money. Like it makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. It’s just absolutely hearsay at best.

Drafting in the Public Light

Tue, 15 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Drafting in the Public Light

I'm making material efforts to lower the bar to what I publish from large works to daily contemplations. Recently my Mom told me how lawyers have a special process to outline the "four corners" of a document. It was shared in the context of needing law school to make legal arguments, which I believe disenfranchises billions without cause or any meaning in a digital age.

Division of Labor Introductions

Mon, 14 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Division of Labor Introductions

The S-D723 comment has gotten me thinking greatly about specialization recently. It's also culminated in my efforts to upgrade to Ubuntu based on the strong community of free open-source development there. And yet even that is a link centered around one single person's actions.

Namely, I've been extensively contemplating how to remove myself from the narrative and give power, voice, and influence back to the community itself. I shouldn't have some privileged role because indeed nobody has a special privilege to think, to work, or to grow. It is precisely this individual sovereignty and freedom that I see so paramount to our long-term success.

Effective GitHub Governance Tips

Thu, 10 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Effective GitHub Governance Tips

Recently, I was thinking about the responses from Stellar core dev in re updating some documentation stylization. Namely, they commented that only programmatic syntax enforcement can create longer-term change. Indeed, they seemed unconvinced that a style guide may offer the answer to synchronization across that particular central developer repository.

This hit me extremely hard, especially given the recent actions where I've explicitly asked people to do things or even go faster. I think one of the core tenets of all this is freedom inherent in people making their own choices on a decentralized basis. The premise behind all grassroots entrepreneurship seems to be the core tenets revealed by Adam Smith, which are so deeply interwoven into social norms that have existed for centuries. I remember seeing some of the super old forms of money, property, and authority in the Zurich Money Museum.

Grappling With Reach of Politics

Mon, 09 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Grappling With Reach of Politics

Recently (in the last few hours), I started realizing (again) the immense scope of my work.

In regard to some recent developments, the immense gravity of what needs to happen here really dawned on me.

I'd like to briefly touch on some of the points, although each of these items could really be its own extensively researched thing.

Expanding Discords

Firstly, I formally defined (or at least outlined) the scope of the three upcoming/existing Discord server communities I'm building.

Meridian and Permissionless Innovation

Wed, 04 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Meridian and Permissionless Innovation

Today I was supposed to review whether or not BT should attend Meridian in London - particularly the EasyA non-technical hackathon.

Unfortunately, they haven't posted any updates as to the qualification of projects and judging, and I felt we weren't adequately recognized in Austin.

These thoughts culminated in a mini TS discussing permissionless innovation, especially since I applied to speak with Chives at the event months ago but heard nothing.

Creating a Pretty, Inviting Repo

Wed, 28 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Creating a Pretty, Inviting Repo

I made a silly mistake recently which created a messy git repo. I thought this would be fine because other people / myself would continually update the more active documents, but looking back this was fairly short-sighted/aggressively long-sighted because there probably won't be many changes for some time.¹ Let me explain.

Bulk Git Commits

It's common³ for contributors to collate diverse changes into a single commit for the sake of simplicity, ease of writing less, etc. Take your motivations as you will. I've personally found that it's the easiest way to obfuscate otherwise material information / nuanced details.

On Enabling Decentralized Development

Mon, 29 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

On Enabling Decentralized Development

As everyone knows, the best way to get someone to talk is to ask them questions.

I've always tried to do this since I've had challenges in the past with group projects.

What Happens

Basically, everyone gets excited about what we're working on, but then the flame sort of dies out. At first, I thought this was just because of self-interest or economic incentives. But I think there's more at stake; it comes down to the nature of collaboration.

Hey, what's this?

Sun, 21 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Hey, what's this?

I decided to start doing "micro-reflections" today when thinking about an interaction with @tehchives.

I was telling him about how to change his GitHub username in resetting up the inaugural WhyDRS discussion post. It made me want to do a pros/cons list for the choice (which I normally do on paper).

Don't get it?

Basically, I want to start doing micro-reflections in the same style as what will eventually be full reflection days.