Blog
Notes from the world of The Chain: the systems, the pressure, and the choices behind the story.
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The Song Nobody Wrote
Leonard Cohen sang a Resistance song he did not write, in a translation that quietly reversed its ending. Nobody reviewed the change.
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Nobody Wants to Run Their Own Servers
A system built so no one has to be trusted still ends up trusting a handful of companies. And, in the story, one man.
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Scoring a Novel
The Chain has a soundtrack, one song per chapter, in three versions.
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The Ledger
There are two ledgers in The Chain. One was built so that nobody has to be trusted. The other is a notebook.
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The Dead Man's Switch
A tram control, made universal by a disaster it could not have prevented, and what happens when you wire the same idea to one person's signature.
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Twelve Innocent Commits
No single pull request held the weapon. Each one passed review clean.
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Code Has a Tell
You can name the author of a function before you read the commit.
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The Physician
The crude men broke things to get answers. Chen Wei kept the asset whole, and took the answers anyway.
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Commits as Alibis
Every change leaves a witness. The question is who taught the witness what to say.
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Consensus Is Pressure
Distributed systems do not care who is scared. They care which version of events enough machines accept.
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Runway
He could read any failing system and find the surface to push on. His own company was the first one that left him nothing to push.
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The Unicorn
The night Mats Frost learned that a market pays you to be on time, not to be right.