# Larry Salibra
> Larry Salibra's personal website and blog.
Public Ghost content for AI and LLM tooling. This file includes a bounded export of public pages first, then recent public posts.
Append `.md` to any post or page URL to get the content in Markdown (for example, `/example-post.md`).
## Pages
### About Larry
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/about/
Last updated: 2025-02-18T07:56:04.000Z
![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2024/09/default-feature-2.png) 

## About me

Larry Salibra is a technology entrepreneur who lives is Hong Kong. He's the founder of [New Internet Labs](https://www.newinternetlabs.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com) where he's building a new internet of apps that can't be evil based on the [Stacks](https://stacks.co/?ref=larrysalibra.com) technology developed while he was an early Engineering Partner at [Hiro PBC (formerly Blockstack PBC)](https://www.hiro.so/?ref=larrysalibra.com).

Previously, Larry was the Founder & CEO of Pay4Bugs, a crowdsourced pay per bug software testing platform. He is also a founding member of the [Bitcoin Association of Hong Kong](http://www.bitcoinhk.org/?ref=larrysalibra.com).

Larry was born in Cleveland, Ohio, where he attended Mayfield High School. He has swam competitively since elementary school, first for the Lake Erie Silver Dolphins and later for both his high school and NCAA university teams.

Like many athletic teenagers, his first job was in education, teaching young children how to swim. In high school, he began working in a sleep research laboratory at Case Western Reserve University's School of Medicine. It was there that he wrote his first software package, a custom program to process the respiratory data of rats and mice.

During this time, he worked on several animal studies, spearheaded the transition from analog to digital recording of sleep data, performed immunohistochemistry and co-authored [a research paper published in the Journal of Applied Physiology](http://jap.physiology.org/content/97/5/1787?ref=larrysalibra.com) that was later presented at the NIH.

Larry graduated from [Wesleyan University](http://www.wesleyan.edu/?ref=larrysalibra.com) in 2004 with a degree in [East Asian Studies](http://www.wesleyan.edu/east/?ref=larrysalibra.com). At Wesleyan, he studied government, history and economics before realizing that the government, history and economic courses in which he was most interested in were those related to East Asia.

After spending years trying to learn French, including three semesters at Wesleyan, he put it aside after his first trip to China. Captivated by the fast pace of change and energy and excitement of the rising nation, he decided in his junior year to give foreign languages another go and learn Mandarin Chinese.

Unlike his experience in French, Larry's access to language immersion through study abroad enabled him to complete four years of university-level Chinese in only two years time.

At Wesleyan, he met his friend and Appartisan co-founder, C.S. Hsia. While discussing their respective foreign language learning experiences in between fixing the brakes on C.S.'s 10 year old Civic and economics and Japanese history classes, they observed that their successes in foreign language were directly correlated to access to native speakers, thus making the fundamental realization that would eventually lead to the Attigo concept.

After graduation from Wesleyan, he returned to China where he studied at Harbin Institute of Technology before moving to Guangzhou to work in the Quality Assurance department of one of AIG's information technology subsidiaries.

He then went out on his own and worked on a water treatment project with the Henan Province Water Conservancy Bureau and two American engineering firm that strived develop unique solutions to the ground water pollution suffered by villages in rural Henan.

In late 2005, Larry founded Attigo with C.S. Hsia and began designing what would become the Attigo Virtual Language Immersion Service. In early 2006, alternating between his parents' basement in Northeast Ohio and C.S.'s family's apartment in New York, he began working on Attigo full time, developing the business plan and a functional prototype of the system and gaining the support of educators and other key parties.

In mid-2007, he relocated to Guangzhou, China, where he put together the team that has become Appartisan and in 10 short months, brought the Attigo service to market.

Towards the end of 2008, Larry became frustrated with the cost and difficulty of getting beta testers scattered around the world to report problems with Attigo's platform in a timely fashion. Being well-grounded in economics and one of the few who still believe in free market capitalism as an ideal instead of a necessary evil to be regulated by the government, the obvious solution to him was providing a financial incentive that would entice testers to quickly report problems.

Larry lives in Hong Kong where he plays on the Hong Kong Beach Waterpolo team and is active in the ch community.

Larry is fluent in both written Chinese and spoken Mandarin, including technical software engineering jargon and cheesy jokes. He can write Cantonese better than he can speak it. He is also determined to one day finish learning French despite his horrible pronunciation and learn how to properly pronounce "jus d'orange."

**Likes:** swimming, sailing, bitcoin, [sv delos](https://svdelos.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com), stacks, hong kong, [classical liberalism](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical%5Fliberalism?ref=larrysalibra.com), octopus card, atlas shrugged, arthur c. clarke, dancing, [frédérick bastiat](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fr%C3%A9d%C3%A9ric%5FBastiat?ref=larrysalibra.com), waterpolo, the broken window fallacy, post-qing dynasty chinese history, top gear, [ stan freberg presents the united states of america volume one the early years](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stan%5FFreberg%5FPresents%5FThe%5FUnited%5FStates%5Fof%5FAmerica%5FVolume%5FOne%5FThe%5FEarly%5FYears?ref=larrysalibra.com), backpacking, french, [mtr](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MTR?ref=larrysalibra.com), flying, airports, overnight trains, lanzhou beef noodles, adirondacks, [lou monte's pepino the italian mouse](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lou%5FMonte?ref=larrysalibra.com#Albums), ayumi hamasaki, [pingyao](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pingyao?ref=larrysalibra.com), karaoke, mandarin chinese, foot massages, road trips, mobile phones, rock climbing, [dukang](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Du%5FKang?ref=larrysalibra.com "An inexpensive brand of chinese liquor from Henan Province named after the symbolic and legendary inventor of liquor.")\-brand [baijiu](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baijiu?ref=larrysalibra.com), liberal arts

**Dislikes:** second-hand smoke, shellfish, beer

Profile picture:

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2025/02/larry.png)
### Contact Larry
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/contact/
Last updated: 2020-03-06T16:29:04.000Z
Email me: [hello@larrysalibra.com](mailto:hello@larrysalibra.com).

Tweet at me: [@larrysalibra](https://twitter.com/larrysalibra?ref=larrysalibra.com).
### Greatest Hits
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/hits/
Last updated: 2024-09-09T09:08:04.000Z
![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2024/09/hits-feature.jpg) 

## Greatest Hits

Some popular posts and personal favorites.

It always excites me when people enjoy reading my posts as much as I enjoy writing them.

  
Each of audiences shows their love in different ways. The Hacker News & Reddit communities sends tons of page views and shows their interest by discussion on their respective platforms. Those interested in culture, language and lifestyle like to email me or leave comments on each post. Bitcoiners and entrepreneurs tend to retweet or find me in person.

  
I've put together a selection of posts that readers like and a few of my personal favorites.

## Personal freedom

Identity and personal freedom are both very near and dear to me. I often meet Americans traveling or living abroad and without fail the topic of U.S. citizenship and its burden comes up. Here's the story of how I left:

[Goodbye USAThe story of how I left America.![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/size/w256h256/2020/03/favicon.png)Larry SalibraLarry Salibra![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/size/w1200/2020/11/IMG_1166.jpeg)](https://larrysalibra.com/goodbye-usa/)

## Apple

My post on how I [caught everyone's favorite fruit company practicing on-device censorship](https://larrysalibra.com/blog/how-apple-censors-news-in-china) got picked up by [Tom Grundy](https://twitter.com/tomgrundy/status/652407328226938880?ref=larrysalibra.com) of the [Hong Kong Free Press](https://www.hongkongfp.com/2015/10/09/apple-automatically-self-censors-news-app-in-china/?ref=larrysalibra.com) and [Paul Mozur](https://twitter.com/paulmozur/status/653445033459253250?ref=larrysalibra.com) of the [New York Times](http://nytimes.com/2015/10/12/technology/apple-is-said-to-deactivate-its-news-app-in-china.html?ref=larrysalibra.com) before taking on a life of its own and making the rounds in tech and mainstream media both in  
the US and \[abroad\]\[9\].

It also managed to get some traction behind a term I made up for software  
that disables features on a device or app to comply with Mainland Chinese laws, the “China Kill Switch,” with both [Time](http://time.com/4069355/apple-deactivates-news-app-china/?ref=larrysalibra.com) and [Fortune](http://fortune.com/2015/10/13/apples-recent-concessions-in-china-have-a-pattern/?ref=larrysalibra.com) using it.

While I was flattered by the interest in this post, (people read my blog! yay!) I would have preferred the censorship to not have occurred at all. I fear we are still in the early days of on-device censorship and law enforcement.

[How Apple Censors News in ChinaThe release of iOS 9 saw the launch of Apple’s attempt to revolutionize the news industry \[http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2015/06/08Apple-Announces-News-App-for-iPhone-iPad.html\] , Apple News \[https://www.apple.com/news/…![](https://larrysalibra.com/favicon.png)Larry SalibraLarry Salibra![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2015/10/news-feature.jpg)](https://larrysalibra.com/how-apple-censors-news-in-china/)

## Startups

[Calling out Silicon Valley VCs for pushing for more immigration only for tech workers](https://larrysalibra.com/blog/paul-graham-let-in-the-programmers-but-not-the-lawyers-bankers-doctors) generated almost 40,000 unique visitors in 24 hours,  
much of it from [this Hacker News thread](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8806882&ref=larrysalibra.com).

I'm a big fan of Paul Graham and his work, but let's push for more immigration in all industries, not just the ones that are politically unorganized!

[Paul Graham: Let in the programmers, but not the lawyers, bankers, doctorsPaul Graham in his latest treatise \[http://paulgraham.com/95.html\] argues that the USA should allow more foreign tech workers into the country. > American technology companies want the government to make immigration easier because they say they can’t find enough programmers in the US. Anti-immigrat…![](https://larrysalibra.com/favicon.png)Larry SalibraLarry Salibra![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2014/12/paul_graham_programming-feature.jpg)](https://larrysalibra.com/paul-graham-let-in-the-programmers-but-not-the-lawyers-bankers-doctors/)

## Chinese Language

Language in China is closely tied to identity and politics. I wrote my post about [why the future for Cantonese didn't look bright](https://larrysalibra.com/blog/7-reasons-cantonese-is-dying-mandarin-is-king) a month before I became a Hong Kong resident, a short time after I began studying the language.

The post has continuously generated daily traffic and has attracted by far the most comments of any post on my blog. Hundreds of people have written comments sometimes stretching on for several paragraphs agreeing or disagreeing with my post.

Mandarin and Cantonese and their relationship are closely tied to how people perceive themselves and how they view Hong Kong and its relationship with Mainland China.

After spending over five years in Hong Kong, I am more positive about Cantonese's future. Technology is allowing more people to write the language than ever before and a surge of localism connected with the Umbrella Movement protests sees renewed interest in Cantonese culture.

[7 Reasons Cantonese is Dying & Mandarin is KingLast fall, the New York Times published an article describing the rising importance of Mandarin in Chinatown \[http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/22/nyregion/22chinese.html\]. This seemed to offend travel writer \[http://daisann.com/2009/10/22/cantonese-is-dead.aspx…![](https://larrysalibra.com/favicon.png)Larry SalibraLarry Salibra![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2010/02/chicken-feature.jpg)](https://larrysalibra.com/7-reasons-cantonese-is-dying-mandarin-is-king/)

## Hong Kong

Where we're going, we don't need offices! Offices can be depressing and unproductive...in Hong Kong they're also really expensive. It's no surprise that lots of readers share my excitement about working out and about the city.

[The 6 Best Places to Get Work Done in Hong KongOffices are expensive and no one really likes to go to them. When we had an office at Pay4Bugs \[http://www.lcsd.gov.hk/beach/en/beach-address-south.php#bigwavebay\], I found myself going anywhere but the office when I needed to get serious work done. Other members of our team felt the same way. Peop…![](https://larrysalibra.com/favicon.png)Larry SalibraLarry Salibra![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2013/10/hong-kong-sunset-feature.jpg)](https://larrysalibra.com/the-6-best-places-to-get-work-done-in-hong-kong/)

## China Business

Many things are different in China than the rest of the world...invoices are one of them. This post still gets lots of interest from China business newbies trying to get a handle on China's infamous *fapiao*.

[10 Things You Didn’t Know About Invoices in ChinaThere is a lot of confusion about invoices in China \[http://www.jonatshanghai.com/?p=109\]. If you ask for an invoice from a vendor in most of the world and you will get a piece of paper issued by the vendor that lists the items or services you are buying, total amount due and terms. In Mainland Ch…![](https://larrysalibra.com/favicon.png)Larry SalibraLarry Salibra![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2009/04/fapiao-feature.jpg)](https://larrysalibra.com/10-things-you-didnt-know-about-invoices-in-china/)

## Bitcoin

This post is a personal favorite, not because it generated much of traffic or is particularly well-written, but because I rediscovered this post in 2015 only to discover that I've found what I was looking for in Bitcoin. If only I was one of the tiny crowd of (now very rich) people that knew of Bitcoin back in 2009 when I wrote this post!

[Centralization and CensorshipFor those of you that don’t know, Facebook and Twitter have been blocked here in the People’s Republic of China for the past several months. While most would say that this offers a lessons regarding censorship, an equally important lesson is what it teaches us about systems engineering, specificall…![](https://larrysalibra.com/favicon.png)Larry SalibraLarry Salibra![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2009/10/bitcoin-feature.jpg)](https://larrysalibra.com/centralization-and-censorship/)
### Projects
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/projects/
Last updated: 2024-09-08T17:13:22.000Z
![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2024/09/default-feature-1.png) 

## Projects

[New Internet LabsBuilding a new browser for the new internet. Creator of the Can’t Be Evil sandbox.![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/size/w256h256/2020/03/favicon.png)Larry SalibraLarry Salibra![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/size/w1200/2020/04/nil-feature.png)](https://larrysalibra.com/newinternetlabs/)

[#WearAFuckingMaskA campaign that reached millions to get people to wear mask and reduce the spread of SARS-CoV-2.![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/size/w256h256/2020/03/favicon.png)Larry SalibraLarry Salibra![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/size/w1200/2020/04/wearafuckingmask-large-social-stop-covid-19.png)](https://larrysalibra.com/wearafuckingmask/)

[BlockstackAn ecosystem building the foundations for a user-owned internet. 100s of apps. Over $75M raised.![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/size/w256h256/2020/03/favicon.png)Larry SalibraLarry Salibra![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/size/w1200/2020/04/blockstack-feature-2.png)](https://larrysalibra.com/blockstack/)
### What I'm doing now
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/now/
Last updated: 2025-04-23T09:45:55.000Z
![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2024/09/default-feature-3.png) 

## What I'm doing now

*This page was updated April 23, 2025, from Hong Kong.*

## Health

I've been [regularly bouldering](https://larrysalibra.com/best-lifehack-find-something-you-love/) for the past year and a half and pretty happy with the strength and health improvements. The better I get at it, the more fun it gets. Which I think is true of anything.

I've reduced swimming down to only one or two days a week, but still enjoy keeping in the water. I started adding 10-20 minutes on the stair climbing machine once or twice a week for improved cardio at the beginning of 2025.

I'm still taking the supplements from Bryan Johnson's Blueprint, but have found the nutty pudding and other "meals" are not very palatable.

## Work

Over the western and Chinese holiday 2024-25 holiday season, I [did some work](https://x.com/larrysalibra/status/1891777217140515304?ref=larrysalibra.com) on a rust-based series of tools for BNS and [a more advanced BNS zonefile spec](https://forum.stacks.org/t/proposal-for-enhancing-bns-zonefile-configuration/17843/20?u=larry&ref=larrysalibra.com) which will open BNS for more use cases besides just identity.

Based on discussions at Consensus Hong Kong with several OG members of the Stacks community and my long-term interest in bitcoin being more usable for payments, I decided to put the BNS work on hold and instead [work on making sBTC a more bitcoin-like option](https://x.com/larrysalibra/status/1895787738877841638?ref=larrysalibra.com) for bitcoin payments. 

## Learning

I continue to study Italian part time on the side by reading short stories and watching videos. If I want to make more progress, I'm going to have to find something more structured and/or spend more time in Italy. I'm not sure if I want to make that investment...I'm leaning towards investing the time in improving my Chinese reading, writing and vocabulary.

The inexpensive digital piano is still great fun. I'm still going through Simply Piano and working on Czerny exercises. My sight reading seems to have improved and I enjoy playing to relax before bed.

I've sailed only once this year and our Etchells team got first in our class in a very fun pursuit race. Instead of actually sailing much, I'm helping our yacht club redraft their bylaws.

## Travel

I've been largely in Hong Kong this spring save for a Chinese New Year trip to Bangkok and a few short trips to the Chinese mainland. One was a three night trip to the Wanda Changbaishan ski resort in northeast China where I learned to ski for the first time. A second trip was to Chongqing where I met someone from the Stacks community.

I don't have any long haul trips planned and am very much enjoying staying within the same time zone and not feeling jet lagged. 

*This page was inspired by* [*Derek Sivers*](https://sivers.org/?ref=larrysalibra.com) *and his* [*/now*](https://nownownow.com/about?ref=larrysalibra.com) *page.*
### AI Usage
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/ai/
Last updated: 2024-09-18T20:24:30.000Z
*As of today, September 18, 2024, here is how I’ve used generative AI/LLM tools.*

I occasionally use one of the mainstream chatbot AI tools through [Kagi Assistant](https://kagi.com/assistant?ref=larrysalibra.com) for programming or general research.

I've have never used AI to generate text that replaces my own voice. Every post on this website was written and edited by me. I write to become a better writer and improve my thinking, not to publish blog posts.

I occasionally will use AI to generate images to go with posts, but will always give credit in the caption to the AI that generated it.

If anything changes in the future, I'll update this page.

*This is an /ai page. You can create your own too. See the* [*manifesto*](https://www.bydamo.la/p/ai-manifesto?ref=larrysalibra.com) *for more info.*
### About Sailing Sula
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/about-sailingsula-com/
Last updated: 2024-09-26T20:44:11.000Z
Hello! I'm [Larry](https://larrysalibra.com/). Sailing Sula is a private community where I share my sailing journey and adventures sailing my boat Sula around Hong Kong and (hopefully) beyond. 

## Getting Access

If the site looks a bit sparse, that's because most posts are limited to an audience of sailing friends and family. If you're already one of those people, reach out to me to join. If you're not yet a sailing friend and would like to become one, [click the subscribe button](#/portal), enter your email and follow the instructions.

## About Sula

Sula is a 1995 Amel Super Maramu, a 53 foot sailing ketch and one of the best cruising vessels ever made! She was originally born in La Rochelle, France, and spent her time cruising around Europe and the USA until she moved to Hong Kong in 2011\. During her life in Hong Kong, she's visited every corner of Hong Kong, Macau and even made two extended trips to the Philippines. She joined my life (and I joined hers!) in 2020.
### Sailing Sula Archive
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/sailingsula/
Last updated: 2024-09-26T20:56:11.000Z
SailingSula.com was my partially private sailing blog when I owned the 53 ft Amel Super Maramu sailing ketch, "[Sula](https://larrysalibra.com/about-sailingsula-com/)." 

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2024/09/Screenshot-2024-09-26-at-10.48.03-PM-2.png)

SailingSula.com on the final day.

I sold Sula in the summer of 2023 and in September 2024, I shutdown the blog and migrated posts to this site. Below is a list of all articles that were published. If you were one of the members, you'll need to sign in with your email address to this site and refresh this page to see the members-only posts.

## Public posts

[🐬 Dolphins in Hong Kong - Autumn 2021A video compilation of dolphin sightings around western Lantau, Hong Kong from a sailing trip in autumn 2021.![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/icon/favicon.png)Larry SalibraLarry Salibra![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_1630.JPG)](https://larrysalibra.com/dolphins-in-hong-kong-autumn-2021/)

[A guide to sailing in Hong KongMy guide to sailing in Hong Kong![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/icon/favicon-1.png)Larry SalibraLarry Salibra![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_4322-1.jpeg)](https://larrysalibra.com/sailing-in-hong-kong/)

[Picture perfect spinnaker dropLearn how to drop the spinnaker on Sula and enjoy some photos from a spectacular sail.![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/icon/favicon-6.png)Larry SalibraLarry Salibra![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_4128.jpeg)](https://larrysalibra.com/dropping-the-spinnaker-on-sula/)

_This page is for paying subscribers only._
## Posts
### Apple Hong Kong's credit card fraud problem
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/apple-hong-kongs-credit-card-fraud-problem/
Last updated: 2026-09-14T14:05:20.000Z
[The Standard reports](https://www.thestandard.com.hk/news/article/342733/?ref=larrysalibra.com):

> The police on Monday noted that a security gap in the online checkout process—which bypassed the standard requirement for one-time verification passwords—has enabled scammers to ring up HK$25 million in fraudulent charges during the launch of Apple's latest smartphone series.

> During the initial two days of pre-orders over the weekend, police had already logged complaints from more than 700 individuals involving roughly HK$14.7 million, with the single largest case reaching approximately HK$114,000\. 

Apple Hong Kong has a long history of ignoring fraud prevention measures in their credit card checkout procedures. Some years ago, I, too, was victim of a similar fraudulent charge from Apple Hong Kong in the high 5 digits when my credit card was stolen out of my wallet out of a [Hong Kong public swimming pool locker](https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/law-crime/article/2089830/hong-kong-police-bust-criminal-syndicate-stole-credit-cards?ref=larrysalibra.com). In my case, the card was a UK-issued Chip and PIN American Express card. Despite a PIN being required for purchase, Apple Hong Kong decided to accept the card anyway. They either did not ask for the PIN or accepted an incorrect PIN. Compare this to the average 7-11 in Hong Kong which will request the pin for a Chip and PIN card for even a tiny HK$8.00 transaction.

> However, investigators identified a significant procedural gap in the online checkout system, which did not require customers to enter a one-time password via SMS or undergo two-factor authentication. 

Now, I can't be entirely sure why they do this, but knowing Apple I would not be surprised if it is intentional. Apple cares very deeply about user experience and interrupting their carefully designed purchase flow asking for a PIN or redirecting to a bank's (ugly) two-factor SMS verification page is something the would probably not want to do.  
  
In the credit card industry, what typically happens when a merchant opts out of a security feature is that liability for the fraudulent transactions moves from the bank to the merchant. This is supposed to incentivize merchants to use security features. I wouldn't be surprised if a company as large and rich as Apple was able to negotiate a special deal for itself.

The problem from a consumer perspective is not so much the liability but the time cost and inconvenience incurred when a company like Apple opts out of these security features and that results in fraudulent transactions that customers have both notice and spend time dealing with. And as any Hong Kong will tell you, there is no punishment worse than having to call the customer support of a Hong Kong bank.
### Larry's Weekly Newsletter - September 13, 2026
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/newsletter/larrys-weekly-newsletter-september-13-2026/
Last updated: 2026-09-13T18:21:47.000Z
Hi friends,  
  
This past week was the 25th anniversary of 9/11\. It stands out as a major turning point in my life and marks the time I started to notice the glitches in the matrix. I wanted to flag [my post on that](https://larrysalibra.com/a-fork-in-the-timeline-9-11/) this week for your consideration. Does 9/11 stand out in the narrative of your life or was it a nothing-burger?  
  
As always, you'll find links to my posts from this past week below.  
  
Yours,  
Larry  

[50 cent debunks the massive mansion myth“Americans don’t have hobbies, they have houses” In the video below, rapper 50 Cent debunks the male dream of having a massive mansion: I think 50% of my reason for making a life in tiny-housing-Hong Kong is a reaction to growing up in a ridiculously large (but![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/icon/favicon-b548b335-e7e3-45c7-975f-bbbe30066e55.png)Larry SalibraLarry Salibra![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/thumbnail/50cent-15d3451e-b882-43bd-bec2-6377077c0c4c.jpg)](https://larrysalibra.com/50-cent-debunks-the-massive-mansion-myth/)

[Cutting haircutsX user/digital nomad JuanSanchez on haircuts: Haircuts around the world from a dude who got cuts in 50 countries. You don’t speak the language, what do you do in a foreign country at the barber? Step 1: show them a picture of you with the hair you want.![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/icon/favicon-d0cd8c54-b228-4abd-ab0b-ef116ff5e497.png)Larry SalibraLarry Salibra![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/thumbnail/samsbarber-full-1-b59486aa-ea7c-436d-90e7-3e23f1ba1172.jpg)](https://larrysalibra.com/cutting-haircuts/)

[Dream feed magicFor those unfamiliar with babies, the “dream feed” is the middle-of-the-night feed around midnight. It is so named because it is given a few hours after his bedtime in the middle of his night sleep session when he is sleepy and should be dreaming. As father, I’![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/icon/favicon-e9a6f852-140d-4b1c-8553-d48bdec02dbc.png)Larry SalibraLarry Salibra![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/thumbnail/larry-4-3257576a-7ff9-4293-924c-bb8ce5d0d1e8.jpg)](https://larrysalibra.com/dream-feed-magic/)

[iPhone Duo: the high price is a featureOpen Hacker News on any iPhone keynote day and, without fail, you’ll see the same comments. Today with the launch of iPhone Duo, things were no different. “It’s too big” “When are they bringing back the iPhone mini?” “It’s too expensive” I can’t really help these![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/icon/favicon-4d7486f7-a7f9-48b2-98b5-d2be59b93ad5.png)Larry SalibraLarry Salibra![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/thumbnail/apple-new-fold-phone.jpg-f9bc6be6-73b1-47d8-b3fb-42b4b476e1b1.webp)](https://larrysalibra.com/iphone-duo-the-high-price-is-a-feature/)

[A fork in the timeline: 9/11Twenty-five years ago today, I was sitting in a history class called “The History of US Foreign Relations,” at Wesleyan University in roughly a two-hour drive from New York City. A classmate’s phone rang (or perhaps she got an text message...I don’t remember) and she![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/icon/favicon-598fba11-48b5-4664-82b0-20946f858030.png)Larry SalibraLarry Salibra![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_2760-c7c2fa96-79cf-46a6-b5b3-a810791c3ebb.JPG)](https://larrysalibra.com/a-fork-in-the-timeline-9-11/)

[Buying a folding bikeEarlier this year, I moved to the suburbs of Hong Kong and bought the first car of my adulthood this year in preparation for my new entry into family life. A downside of living in the suburbs in Hong Kong is that one needs to take a bus or drive![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/icon/favicon-271ed91c-ae28-42ec-a6ff-8473a41e3baf.png)Larry SalibraLarry Salibra![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/thumbnail/3860x-ff6f4ac1-ad6c-4bc6-80fb-4727b36835e8.webp)](https://larrysalibra.com/buying-a-folding-bike/)

[Drive like someone is watchingDance like no one is watching I was driving this afternoon in Hong Kong and saw flashing headlights in my rearview mirror. A driver who had been speeding was suddenly tailgating me and wanted to pass. I was in the right-hand, overtaking lane because I had just been passing![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/icon/favicon-0a141760-b359-4779-9a82-fe14e8ae69cd.png)Larry SalibraLarry Salibra![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/thumbnail/flickedoff-802728d2-0bbe-436b-9d1a-4620cfc08f38.jpg)](https://larrysalibra.com/drive-like-someone-is-watching/)
### Drive like someone is watching
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/drive-like-someone-is-watching/
Last updated: 2026-09-13T18:12:07.000Z
> Dance like no one is watching

I was driving this afternoon in Hong Kong and saw flashing headlights in my rearview mirror. A driver who had been speeding was suddenly tailgating me and wanted to pass. I was in the right-hand, overtaking lane because I had just been passing much slower trucks and vehicles in in the middle lane and we were now coming upon a right-hand exit that I needed to take.

The very impatient driver pulled out from behind me to speed by me on the left, triggering my car's rear collision alert system. As he sped past me, he gave me the finger and then pulled to the far left lane to take the other exit. Naturally, he started tailgating the car ahead of him in that exit as well.

It's amazing to me that some people behave like this in public on highways surrounded by cars like mine that are literally covered in cameras that record all the time. Gone are the days when small lapses in judgement or outbursts of anger won't get recorded and published on the internet. Better to drive like someone is watching. Because they are...and they are recording!
### Buying a folding bike
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/buying-a-folding-bike/
Last updated: 2026-09-12T18:21:56.000Z
Earlier this year, I moved to the suburbs of Hong Kong and bought the first car of my adulthood this year in preparation for my new entry into family life. A downside of living in the suburbs in Hong Kong is that one needs to take a bus or drive to get to a proper commercial gym. An upside, though is that there are cycling paths everywhere. All I needed was a bike!

I could have used the QR code rental bikes that are all along the cycling paths in Hong Kong, but both my origin and destination of my gym commute are not immediately on the cycling path and therefore outside the service area of these GPS monitored & restricted bikes. Instead, I decided to get a folding bike with the idea that I could occasionally fold it up, put in the trunk of my car or push it on to the MTR and take to it remote places in Hong Kong and the mainland to go cycling.

When I first got this idea earlier this year, I visited a shop called LifeWheels in the OCT Loft area of Shenzhen that exclusively sells folding bikes. It also was a coffee shop. I walked in and said I was looking for a folding bike. Little did I know that folding bikes in China have been a major hobbyist subculture with a zillion models. Folding bikes now range from super cheap traditional Dahon-style, one hinge-in-the-middle-of-the-frame folding bikes to very expensive Brompton-style "tri-fold" (two hinges on the main frame) bikes with prices approaching some of inexpensive entry level EVs in China. Like other industries, a number of Chinese folding bike brands had recently popped up and they are very busy trying to outcompete each other in a consumer-friendly game of involution. 

One of the staff members randomly gave me a black Brompton-style bike and told me to try it out. It had 16-inch wheels and hydraulic brakes. I rode it back and forth and was blown away by both the quality of the ride and the speed with which it braked. Not that my opinion on bikes really meant anything since my entire riding experience over the past two decades has been limited to QR code rental bikes.

"This is great!" I said, "How much is it?" "8000 renminbi," the shopkeeper said. More than US$1,200 was a bit more than I wanted to pay and seemed expensive for a bike made by a company I'd never heard of. Overwhelmed by the number of choices, I decided that I needed to get a better idea of what I wanted before I made a purchase decision.

A few months later when visiting a Decathlon in Zhuhai, I noticed that they also sold folding bikes and kindly let you try them out in store. They were priced much more reasonably with the most expensive topping out ¥2999 and a few cheaper options below that. Unfortunately, they were very heavy and, unlike the Brompton-style folding bikes, they only folded in half and didn't stand very well on their own. 

After a bit more research and a couple more shop visits, I came across the Java brand of bikes. They are a Shenzhen-based company most well-known for the Neo and Eco lines of Brompton-style bikes. Both the Neo and Eco come in multiple wheel sizes and have "premium" features like hydraulic brakes and all aluminum frames. The best part was the price. The 16-inch Eco starts at ¥1999 or less than US$300\. After test riding both 16-inch and 20-inch models, I settled on the 20-inch Java Neo because it felt closest to a "normal" bike while still being very light. I ended up purchasing the 20-inch Java Neo in a two-toned orange version that was upgraded with a carbon fiber fork for HK$4,280 or US$545 from [Addy Bikes in Tseung Kwan O, Hong Kong](https://www.addybike.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com). This was essentially the same as the ¥3900 tax-inclusive mainland price minus the 9% VAT rebate.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2026/09/IMG_5136.jpeg)

Owner Addy & I with my new orange bike!

The bike is very easy to fold and unfold. Below is a video of the owner teaching me how to fold it.

Some more pictures of the bike. It looks a lot nicer in real life than I expected.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2026/09/IMG_5134-1.jpeg)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2026/09/IMG_5139-1.jpeg)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2026/09/IMG_5140-1.jpeg)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2026/09/IMG_5141-1.jpeg)

Folded, the 20-inch Java Neo ALF easily fits in my trunk.

Time to get riding!
### A fork in the timeline: 9/11
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/a-fork-in-the-timeline-9-11/
Last updated: 2026-09-11T14:37:16.000Z
Twenty-five years ago today, I was sitting in a history class called "The History of US Foreign Relations," at Wesleyan University in roughly a two-hour drive from New York City. A classmate's phone rang (or perhaps she got an text message...I don't remember) and she ran out of the room crying because there'd been a terrorist attack in New York City and her family member was missing. I went back to my dorm room and saw video of the burning World Trade Center on my computer. It was 9/11/2001 and a day I will never forget.

In my mind, 9/11 was the day that the timeline forked both for me and the country of my birth. Before 9/11, I was an American patriot and my homeland was the greatest country on Earth. After 9/11, things were much different. The [changes to me](https://larrysalibra.com/goodbye-usa/) and the country didn't happen all at once, they took decades, but nothing was ever the same.

In the short-term, the days shortly after the attack, I started to notice the cracks in the Matrix. The reaction of the liberal art students on my campus stood in stark contrast to the reaction I saw on TV and off campus. While Wesleyan students held memorials for those lost, they generally blamed US foreign policy for the attacks. According to them, the 9/11 attacks were predictable blowback and largely America's own fault for its long history of overseas wars.

For those that weren't around during that time, commercial air traffic came to a halt. When flights resumed, tickets were incredibly cheap because many people were scared to fly. Always the contrarian, I was not afraid and snapped up an inexpensive $99 roundtrip first-class ticket between Hartford and Seattle that would give me a day to see the city during fall break.

The airports after 9/11 were unlike anything I'd experienced before or after. Soldiers in uniforms, body armor and holding big guns were everywhere. Security lines were long and everyone was extremely nice to each other and patient.

Arriving in Seattle, my first time off campus since the attacks, I was surprised to see nationalist, pro-USA rallies on the streets. People were dressed in red, white and blue, waving flags and chanting, "U-S-A, U-S-A." They made me feel very uncomfortable and the whole situation felt very surreal. The problem wasn't that they loved and supported their country - that is normal and to be expected. It was that I got the sense they didn't know why they were out there chanting or even what they were supporting. There was no self-reflection or critical thought, just a base, biological urge generated by fear and anger to support one's group when it was under attack.

The following year, in the summer of 2002, I visited China for the first time, spending roughly three weeks in Hong Kong and a week in Beijing. While I had a mobile phone at the time, mobile data was very rare at the time as was wi-fi or internet of any kind for one's laptop. Because of that, I was largely disconnected from the world during that trip. I remember returning home after the trip to see that suddenly the US political elites were talking about possibly invading Iraq as payback for 9/11\. I remember thinking that it seemed weird to invade an apparently unrelated country as a response to 9/11.

The rest is history. The US political elite successfully harnessed the goodwill and nationalism generated amongst the American people and its allies by the 9/11 attacks, along with their fear and anger and embarked on a multiple-decade string of wars. These wars indebted the country to the tune of $40 trillion and cost millions of lives. At the same time, the politicians created a massive surveillance state, and curtailed many of the freedoms people in the country had once enjoyed.

I, myself, moved to China permanently in May 2007...first to Guangzhou before finally settling in Hong Kong, attracted by the energy and excitement I found in a country which was focused on building its future and a better life, not on overseas wars and foreign entanglements. I watched from afar as the political situation in the US became increasingly disjointed and chaotic. 

When future historians do an autopsy on the US experiment, they'll point to two or three dates that were turning points that pushed the country into terminal decline. I am confident they will list September 11th, 2001, as one of those dates. Had 9/11 never happened or had US leaders decided to channel the fear, anger and raw nationalism to more constructive ends, the USA, the world and my life would look very different.
### iPhone Duo: the high price is a feature
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/iphone-duo-the-high-price-is-a-feature/
Last updated: 2026-09-09T20:32:05.000Z
Open [Hacker News on any iPhone keynote day](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49630931&ref=larrysalibra.com) and, without fail, you'll see the same comments. Today with the launch of iPhone Duo, things were no different.

> "It's too big"

> "When are they bringing back the iPhone mini?"

> "It's too expensive"

I can't really help these people - usually men in tech - with their complaints about modern iPhones being too big. Most people don't have "real" computers at desks with 3 arm-mounted screens like you programmer...uhh...prompt engineers do. Phones are most people's main and only computer, so they'd prefer the biggest screen possible. And, somehow, 100s of millions of women with statistically much smaller hands than the average tech bro have no problem using or carrying an iPhone Pro or Pro Max. Amazingly, they often do this successfully while wearing outfits that don't even have pockets. If your pockets aren't big enough for a phone, buy better pants or get a sling bag.

But perhaps I can shed some light on their issues with the US$1999 starting price, because it shows that they fundamentally misunderstand the main purpose of a phone for a large number of people. You see, many for many people, a nice phone, usually an iPhone, is as a luxury good that is used to signal one's class and status. Luxury items are Veblen goods that are more desirable the higher the price and their point is to be exclusive, expensive and visible. That makes the iPhone Duo's high price a very important feature.

And if you want a luxury item, what's more practical than an expensive, unique-looking iPhone? It's not only really expensive, but will likely be backordered, and therefore very exclusive, for weeks if not months! That it happens to be a really good phone is really just icing on the cake.

I live in Hong Kong and within 1 week of iPhone Duo shipping, I have no doubt you will see it *everywhere* across the city. By the end of the year, every well-dressed, self-respecting, attractive (or wishes they were attractive) person in Asia that hasn't already bought the latest flagship Huawei or Samsung phone will own an iPhone Duo. Plenty of them will be people who happily spend their entire money's salary on Apple's folding phone, because status and aspirational class signaling is valuable, especially if you don't have a lot of money. And, at $1999, it's a steal.
### Dream feed magic
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/dream-feed-magic/
Last updated: 2026-09-09T16:59:35.000Z
For those unfamiliar with babies, the "dream feed" is the middle-of-the-night feed around midnight. It is so named because it is given a few hours after his bedtime in the middle of his night sleep session when he is sleepy and should be dreaming. 

As father, I've taken the role of Official Dream Feeder so that mom can pump and tend to other things. Official Dream Feeder is a role I very much enjoy. I get to gently wake baby up, change his diaper and give him his midnight bottle. I then [burp baby](https://larrysalibra.com/babys-last-burp/), clean up any spilt (or spit-up) milk and put him back to sleep.

Handling the dream feed every night gives me quiet time to observe the day-to-day changes in our son's behavior. It's really amazing the changes that you can notice when you're paying attention. Last night, for example, he would wave his little hands around bumping them into the sides of the bottle. Sometime during the day today, though, he figured out how to actually hold the bottle on his own. When I sat him on my lap tonight and lifted the bottle towards his mouth, his tiny hands immediately shot out and securely grabbed both sides of the bottle. A new level unlocked.

No one taught him this and he didn't observe anyone else holding the bottle that way since adults only use one hand to hold a bottle. He figured it out all on his own. I know this is entirely normal and that all babies figure out how to hold their bottles, but it doesn't detract from the feeling of magic and awe that I feel watching my son learn without being taught.
### Cutting haircuts
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/cutting-haircuts/
Last updated: 2026-09-09T00:20:01.000Z
X user/digital nomad [JuanSanchez](https://x.com/JuanSanchez0x0/status/2097082924546101361?ref=larrysalibra.com) on haircuts:

> Haircuts around the world from a dude who got cuts in 50 countries.  
>  
> You don't speak the language, what do you do in a foreign country at the barber?  
>  
> Step 1: show them a picture of you with the hair you want.  
>  
> Step 2: they give you the 'local special' haircut anyway.  
>  
> You're going to get the local haircut, so just accept it. You can either only get your haircut in places you like the hairstyles, or you can be an ogre until that point. My female can grow her hair out. I go between looking like an ogre or a retarded local.

> Other terrible haircuts are in fancy places that require washing. Fuck you, I'm autistic and I don't like my head touched. I'll give you money NOT to massage my head. This is actual torture to me but I look insane with my long hair and nothing else is open so I'm getting my hair cut in a salon. 

> Barbers outside the US are career focused. This is what they do, and they do it well. Barbers inside the US are mentally unstable individuals with sharp objects. Just nod, smile, tip, and get the hell out of there.

Once upon a time, I too got haircuts. Now I do not. Some say it's because I can't grow hair, but that's not the entire story.

Back before I regularly shaved my head, I disliked longer-than-very-short hair because mine would curl on the edges and get uncomfortable. Because of this, I was getting frequent haircuts every other week. It was annoying and time-consuming.

And when I lived in Guangzhou \~15 years ago, they found a way to make it more time-consuming. They would insist that I get a wash and head massage. Even after agreeing not to...because it was all the rage. While, unlike Mr. Sanchez, I appreciate a good head massage and wash, I hated being forced to do it when all i wanted was my hair trimmed so the edges would stop itching.

At some point I got tired of arguing with them and mad at the massive waste of time caused by my weekly or biweekly trim + involuntary wash/massage and solved it by shaving my own head instead, cutting barbers out of my life permanently. 

In the interests of transparency (like the hair at the time on the top of my head), my hair was also starting to thin, so this not also saved time & money but also solved that unattractive problem.

Best barber: my childhood US barber Sam Vella who was an Italian immigrant in his 60s or 70s. For the two decades I went to him, I could barely understand what he said but boy did he have a lot to say! Best conversations ever.

It broke my heart when he retired at age 80 and sold the barbershop to a young guy a couple of years older than me. I was uncomfortable around the new proprietor and his sharp objects and solved that problem by moving away from the country forever. 

Sam's old barber shop is now the Vape & Tobacco shop or perhaps a "Jewelry & Coin Exchange" (whatever the heck that is...a pawn shop?) in a depressing, trashy strip mall that has clearly seen better days enveloped by air that looks like it belongs in early 2000s Beijing. (Wtf is going on in suburban Ohio??)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2026/09/samsbarber-full.jpg)

While writing this, I learned that [Sam passed away 5 years ago at the ripe old age of 95.](https://www.dignitymemorial.com/obituaries/mayfield-heights-oh/salvatore-sam-vella-10498166?ref=larrysalibra.com) I didn't know much about his personal life while I was a customer, but I am not surprised to find out that he was as good at life as he was at cutting hair. He was happily married for 69 years, and like a gentleman, let his wife pass first. His lasting legacy: two children, three grandchildren and six great-grandchildren and our collective memories of all the great haircuts. You are missed, Sam! Rest in peace!

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2026/09/salvatore-sam-vella-mayfield-heights-oh-obituary.jpg)
### 50 cent debunks the massive mansion myth
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/50-cent-debunks-the-massive-mansion-myth/
Last updated: 2026-09-07T13:44:41.000Z
> “Americans don’t have hobbies, they have houses” 

In the video below, rapper 50 Cent debunks the male dream of having a massive mansion:

I think 50% of my reason for making a life in tiny-housing-Hong Kong is a reaction to growing up in a ridiculously large (but not very expensive because it was Ohio) suburban house. If you’re rich enough like 50 Cent to have your family office maintain and manage it, fine. But otherwise, massive houses just suck up all of your family’s time and/or money. Experiences and activities get put off or never happen because you need to take care of the house.

In Hong Kong, tiny houses still suck up all your money but at least they don’t take all your time. There’s a big exciting world out there and no need to or point in trying to recreate a lame version of it on your middle-of-nowhere plot of suburban grass. 

To all LARPing men out there, your home is not a castle, and unless you have an army, you are not the king of anything.
### Larry's Weekly Newsletter - September 6, 2026
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/newsletter/larrys-weekly-newsletter-september-6-2026/
Last updated: 2026-09-06T15:20:36.000Z
Hello friends!  
  
The weather in Hong Kong started cooling (slightly) this week and (as you'll read in today's post) my son started sleeping through the night. All of this means that spirits are high in my corner of the world!  
  
This past week, I had a kind visit from a friend who moved away from Hong Kong but was back in town briefly for business. When sending him off at the airport, I unexpectedly ran into digital nomad friends that had just landed in Hong Kong from Spain to begin a two-month stay. Sometimes the world feels like a very small place!  
  
Please find my daily posts from the past week below.   
  
Yours,  
Larry

[There’s no freedom on a boatBoats, unlike solid land, exist to keep the people on the boat out of harm’s way with “harm” being the 2/3rds of the surface of the earth that is covered by water. That’s because humans, even ones who are very strong swimmers, can’t survive very long![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/icon/favicon-d6465d5f-4699-452e-9969-d835cc391727.png)Larry SalibraLarry Salibra![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/thumbnail/larry-4-9793b6ea-eece-4211-b76f-0093396ef800.jpg)](https://larrysalibra.com/theres-no-freedom-on-a-boat/)

[The Angell Paradox is a destruction of trustThe Angell Paradox can be roughly stated to say that when powerful countries with commercial trade impose tariffs or sanctions, they often hurt themselves more than they hurt others. This is because their tariffs or sanctions undermine the legal certainty needed for trade and countries now need to discount the![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/icon/favicon-c6f4a007-50fc-45fd-8ab8-202926c6f5b9.png)Larry SalibraLarry Salibra![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/thumbnail/larry-4-bd92d995-73b7-432b-9ec8-61b17178f5bf.jpg)](https://larrysalibra.com/the-angell-paradox-is-a-destruction-of-trust/)

[White Africans from the British EmpireLiving in what was once a British colony, reminders of the empire are everywhere and often what you’d expect. We drive on the wrong side of the road, there are some coins that have the Queen on them in circulation and the judges wear funny wigs. There’s also![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/icon/favicon-e5c422a9-620c-4363-bd08-26f904bd87fc.png)Larry SalibraLarry Salibra![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/thumbnail/larry-4-76fa2f04-636d-4889-befe-271b0bde4a86.jpg)](https://larrysalibra.com/white-africans-from-the-british-empire/)

[A reminder to donate bloodI donated blood yesterday at the Hong Kong Red Cross in Causeway Bay. I’ve donated blood on and off throughout my years in Hong Kong, largely because it’s a fun, feel-good activity to do with friends. It has all the positive mental health benefits of a volunteer![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/icon/favicon-c24ebb49-798b-40bc-80bb-ec70894b0d95.png)Larry SalibraLarry Salibra![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/thumbnail/hkblooddonate-d2b1f09b-a5a8-42db-b04b-8ad5ec0cb57f.jpg)](https://larrysalibra.com/a-reminder-to-donate-blood/)

[Is Costco the problem or a symptom?After watching family members struggle with weight for decades, I’m convinced Costco is responsible for a significant portion of America’s health problems. Costco causes real challenges for people who are both frugal and have challenges controlling overeating. They feel like they’re being responsible…even intelligent…by buying![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/icon/favicon-6a20a0f1-d519-4a91-a787-d409249056cb.png)Larry SalibraLarry Salibra![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_4038-8748c722-cd3f-4239-8051-b1cbdc1f8bb8.jpeg)](https://larrysalibra.com/is-costco-the-problem-or-a-symptom/)

[Hong Kong’s public spaces in private buildingsIn Hong Kong, space is at a premium. Homes are small and cramped and buildings are built closely together in the area between the ocean and the mountains. While Hong Kong’s housing constraints are in large part the outcome of self-imposed policy choices, there are some bright spots![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/icon/favicon-4c740a76-a591-4244-8d2b-20237f240050.png)Larry SalibraLarry Salibra![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_6733-3cf02d30-225e-4fef-a1d2-48d581e5e56e.jpeg)](https://larrysalibra.com/hong-kongs-public-spaces-in-private-buildings/)

[Sleeping through the nightFiguring out baby’s sleep and how to manage your own life around it has been one of the hardest challenges of being a new parent to this point. Newborn babies can’t really tell the difference between day and night and need to be fed very often, so as![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/icon/favicon-4dbf4450-1f08-4613-a1e3-7edd139b58a3.png)Larry SalibraLarry Salibra![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_4983-239cac07-1cc6-4ec6-b4e6-8823697b67c2.PNG)](https://larrysalibra.com/sleeping-through-the-night/)
### Sleeping through the night
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/sleeping-through-the-night/
Last updated: 2026-09-06T14:03:54.000Z
Figuring out baby's sleep and how to manage your own life around it has been one of the hardest challenges of being a new parent to this point. Newborn babies can't really tell the difference between day and night and need to be fed very often, so as a new parent you're thrown into what is essentially a 24-hour, seemingly endless game of feed baby, play with baby, get baby to sleep, figure out why baby has woken up, crying and repeat. After the first week of this, the effect of sleep deprivation is real. 

This all might have been a lot easier to deal with when we lived with large extended families and/or in close proximity to friends (tribes?) that also have young babies where the burden and knowledge can be shared, but it's a very big challenge for a small nuclear family far from home in the modern era. There are dozens of books and as many theories as what one should do or not do to make the process more manageable. Some theories have very detailed, impossible-to-follow age-dependent minute-based schedules attached to them and promise that your baby will be sleeping through the night in no time. Other theories have parents following the baby's lead and sleeping with their children in the same bed until they're 3 or 4 years old (or older!) And there's everything in between. 

We were feeling pretty exhausted and confused after a few months of this when a close friend and mother of three was kind enough to offer to spend some time with us to see what was going on and offer her approach. Her theory is that babies need to join their parents' lives and that we shouldn't be taking the lead from a baby. He's a baby, not a leader. We needed to break the habit of an adult appearing within seconds of the baby crying and give him a chance to learn how to calm himself down and self-soothe on his own.

I won't go into the details, but suffice it to say we took her advice and after a week or two, found that our baby's sleep had massively improved. No longer was he waking up 40 to 45 minutes into every period of sleep crying and looking for someone to console him. And last night, I'm happy to share that he finally made it through an entire night from his midnight feeding until morning on his own.

If you don't have kids you might not understand, but its feel like a massive accomplishment for us as parents. And our son seems much more well-rested and happier during the day. Our days which were long stretches of sleep depreviation suddenly seem to be back to "normal." Taking care of our baby is no longer an all-hands-on-deck 24x7 job, but something not only manageable but enjoyable.
### Hong Kong's public spaces in private buildings
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/hong-kongs-public-spaces-in-private-buildings/
Last updated: 2026-09-05T13:30:10.000Z
In Hong Kong, space is at a premium. Homes are small and cramped and buildings are built closely together in the area between the ocean and the mountains. While Hong Kong's housing constraints are in large part the outcome of self-imposed policy choices, there are some bright spots in Hong Kong's building policies. One of these is the "Public Open Space in Private Developments" (POSPD) policy. It encourages developers to build public spaces into developments that the public has a legal right to enter and use in exchange for zoning bonuses or as a condition of Town Planning Board approval.

One of the largest and most well-known POSPDs is the rooftop of the [IFC Mall in Central](https://www.map.gov.hk/gm/s/F/548350?ref=larrysalibra.com). It has a few enclosed restaurant/bar areas and combined with a large open public area with seating, shade and a beautiful view of the harbor and skyline. The most famous corner of the IFC rooftop is the area next to the base of Hong Kong's second-tallest building, IFC Two. The F&B unit adjacent to this area is currently occupied by Shake Shack which makes it easy to grab a burger or a drink in case you don't want to bring your own. Because it is easy to find for visitors and locals alike and conveniently located just above the Hong Kong end of the train to the airport, it's a great location for both planned and impromptu meetups.

Having these public spaces in high quality, well-maintained venues freely available to anyone is beneficial to society because they enable social interaction and community building that otherwise might not occur because arranging a private venue would be too expensive, too high friction or impossible on short notice. 

The IFC Mall rooftop, for example, has played a prominent role in my life in Hong Kong. In my early years in Hong Kong, I spent many Friday evenings having a BYOB get-togethers with college friends after work. Over the past decade, I've lost count of how many technology and other community meetups I've either hosted or attended on the rooftop. I regularly catch up with friends who pass through Hong Kong on short layovers and come into town for an hour or two over a Shake Shack shake. And now that I have a baby, the IFC rooftop has been a convenient place to park the stroller so that baby can be fed while mommy and daddy get a bite to eat and the whole family gets some fresh air and sun before the drive home.

Public spaces in private buildings really contribute to the feeling that the city is an extension of your backyard or your living room. It's not just a place where you go to spend money or do work but a place you go to live. While this is a concept I hope to develop more in the future, for now, let's just say that POSPD policy is a great policy and I hope we see more of it!
### Is Costco the problem or a symptom?
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/is-costco-the-problem-or-a-symptom/
Last updated: 2026-09-04T15:34:05.000Z
After watching family members struggle with weight for decades, I’m convinced Costco is responsible for a significant portion of America’s health problems.

Costco causes real challenges for people who are both frugal and have challenges controlling overeating. They feel like they’re being responsible…even intelligent…by buying food at Costco because they’re getting a “good deal.” And on a pure price-per-taste-adjusted calorie basis, they are!

But then they struggle with the willpower required not to eat the entire 2 kg key lime pie in 2 days that they just bought for $17.99\. They feel like they need to eat the entire pie because throwing it out would be “wasteful.” Perhaps maximizing yummy calories per dollar spent is not the best receipe for good health and a healthy weight.

It’s better off not putting oneself in the situation of needing to use willpower to resist snacking on a 5 pound bag of chocolate covered pretzels or microwaving something from a case of 24 frozen “gourmet” Costco frozen hamburgers for a midnight snack.

Those people would be much better off buying just what they need for the next meal or two at the local fresh meats & vegetables market or supermarket that’s a 5-minute walk from home instead of stocking their homes with 2 weeks of bulk, tasty temptations. 

This is an ask that, of course, is structurally impossible to grant in almost all of the USA. This is because very few people live within walking distance of anything, let alone a daily farmer's market. The time cost of going to the market every day or two like happens in Hong Kong and other areas of China would be way too much for Americans suburbanites already burdened with long commutes. Their only other options are expensive grocery delivery or weekly trips to the nearest grocery store to stock on smaller and more expensive versions of the same food items sold at Costco. Given those options, Costco doesn't sound so bad.
### A reminder to donate blood
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/a-reminder-to-donate-blood/
Last updated: 2026-09-03T15:52:17.000Z
I donated blood yesterday at the Hong Kong Red Cross in Causeway Bay. I've donated blood on and off throughout my years in Hong Kong, largely because it's a fun, feel-good activity to do with friends. It has all the positive mental health benefits of a volunteer activity, and unlike many volunteer activities, you actually directly contribute to saving lives. All you have to do is get jabbed by a needle. Did I mention there are free drinks and snacks?

Hong Kong being a pretty small and relatively homogeneous place leads to some interesting issues with the blood supply. The blood supply seems very volatile. Everyone decides to donate blood around the same time...usually when some sort of high-visibility accident occurs like the Tai Po fire. This causes the Red Cross blood transfusion service to be overwhelmed with way too many people and way too much supply. But in normal times, people are all very busy (time is money!) and forget to donate blood and then supplies fall and they struggle to keep adequate supplies on hand.

Hong Kong's homogeneity means that Rh-negative blood is always in high demand because it is very rare in the local ethnic Chinese population: only 1 in 370 have Rh-negative blood. For Caucasians like me, roughly 1 in 7 people have Rh-negative blood.

Since blood supplies are low right now, they were giving out free branded water flasks as souvenirs. In addition to that, there was a second "gift" for Rh-negative donors like myself. If you're in Hong Kong, give the gift of life and go donate!

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2026/09/hkbloodlevels.jpg)
### White Africans from the British Empire
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/white-africans-from-the-british-empire/
Last updated: 2026-09-02T17:44:43.000Z
Living in what was once a British colony, reminders of the empire are everywhere and often what you'd expect. We drive on the wrong side of the road, there are some coins that have the Queen on them in circulation and the judges wear funny wigs. There's also reminders in the population. As one would expect, there are still a large number of (aging) white English people living in Hong Kong who moved here before the handover and never left. There are also large numbers of South Asians and people from other places Britain has colonized that found their way to Hong Kong and made this their home.  
  
But there's another smaller group of people that one doesn't often think about that also ended up in Hong Kong...white Africans . These are people whose parents were white British people that were born in one of the British Empire's numerous African colonies: places like Zambia or Zimbabwe. They always have some of the most interesting life stories about the path they took to ending up in Hong Kong. Sometimes their paths are long and winding traversing several Commonwealth countries before settling in Asia's World City.

Empires come and go but their fingerprints on the world and its inhabitants never truly fade away.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2026/09/image.png)

British decolonization in Africa. Source: Wikipedia
### The Angell Paradox is a destruction of trust
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/the-angell-paradox-is-a-destruction-of-trust/
Last updated: 2026-09-01T17:05:09.000Z
The [Angell Paradox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman%5FAngell?ref=larrysalibra.com) can be roughly stated to say that when powerful countries with commercial trade impose tariffs or sanctions, they often hurt themselves more than they hurt others. This is because their tariffs or sanctions undermine the legal certainty needed for trade and countries now need to discount the value of trade with the risk of expropriation. An agreement made today with a firm in one country to sell $100 of goods might be taxed or completely banned tomorrow making that agreement worth significantly less than $100 or perhaps nothing at all. 

Economically, the effect of punitive tariffs or sanctions on the sanctioning country is indistinguishable from the effect of contracting with an untrustworthy party. If Lying Lucy promises to buy $100 of Alice's apples, one needs to discount the value of the agreement by the risk that Lying Lucy doesn't do what she says. If Trustworthy Tommy, makes the same promise to buy apples from Alice but Trustworthy Tommy lives in the Sanctioning States of Tariffia, one must likewise discount the agreement based on the risk that the nation in which Tommy lives prevents him from fulfilling his side of the deal. Sanctions levied on the country in which Trustworthy Tommy lives have the effect of making Tommy not very trustworthy to his global trading partners.
### There's no freedom on a boat
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/theres-no-freedom-on-a-boat/
Last updated: 2026-08-31T15:45:50.000Z
Boats, unlike solid land, exist to keep the people on the boat out of harm's way with "harm" being the 2/3rds of the surface of the earth that is covered by water. That's because humans, even ones who are very strong swimmers, can't survive very long in water unless the temperature of the water, weather and the sea state (waves, etc) are in a very narrowly constrained range. If the water is too hot your body will overheat and you'll die. If the water is too cold, your body won't be able to stay warm enough and you'll die. If the water is too rough, you'll end up exhausted, breathing in water, drowning and you'll die. If you're in salt water, without fresh water to drink, you'll suffer dehydration and you'll die. These are just some of the many threats humans face from the ocean that make staying on a boat preferable to falling off it. 

When on a boat, it is best to treat staying on the boat as a matter of life and death. During sail training, we teach crew to treat the sides of a boat with the same respect and healthy fear you would have of a 2000-foot cliff. If you fall off the side, you're as good as dead. While there's a chance you might get rescued, it's far from certain. In our sailing community in Hong Kong, we've had people fall off of sailboats in perfect weather in the middle of Victoria Harbour surrounded by boats and government rescue authorities and still die from drowning.

The point I'm trying to drive home, is that, on the ocean, a boat provides safety for humans and keeps them alive. Because of this, it is just as important to keep the boat safely afloat as it is to keep people from falling off the boat. If a boat catches fire or sinks, the crew will be in danger. 

There are a surprisingly long list of ways you can cause a boat to come to harm and put her crew in danger. Besides obviously dangerous behavior and activities, failure to perform proper maintanence can also put her at risk. Because of this, there will never be the level of freedom on a boat (that is not yours) that exists on land. Even if that boat is yours, your freedom will be constrained by the operational realities of the vessel and her needs. That is unless you have a death wish.
### Larry's Weekly Newsletter - August 30, 2026
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/newsletter/larrys-weekly-newsletter-august-30-2026/
Last updated: 2026-08-30T15:58:17.000Z
Hello friends!  
  
It was great to see so many familiar faces this past week in Hong Kong at Bitcoin Asia. Thanks to those who reached out to tell me they would be in town!  
  
Below find my posts from the past week!  
  
Yours,  
Larry

[The inflight patronizing weIn English, The patronizing we is when someone uses the word “we” as a synonym for “you.” This is one of the most annoying linquistic habits of American so-called “service” staff. They are so-called service staff because whenever they’re using the patronizing we, they have no intention![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/icon/favicon-785d8746-c20e-4675-ba6a-b4cd140c710c.png)Larry SalibraLarry Salibra![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_8508-badd7d5a-1548-4192-997b-c08091cb89c1.jpeg)](https://larrysalibra.com/the-inflight-patronizing-we/)

[AirPods Pro protect parentsI’ve been protective of my hearing since I started listening to cassettes of children’s music on a Sony Walkman in the late 1980s. I’d keep the volume low so as not to damage my hearing. I’d always wear ear protection when participating in activities with loud![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/icon/favicon-cd1b3554-bf94-407f-9632-0693d49a537d.png)Larry SalibraLarry Salibra![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_4649-1-4511072e-f046-4825-aa69-6b4dfedd2eca.jpg)](https://larrysalibra.com/airpods-pro-protect-parents/)

[Bitcoin at Frank’s Records in Hong KongThe Bitcoin Association of Hong Kong’s pre-Bitcoin Asia meetup was a massive success. Over 300 people signed up with additional 100s on the waiting list. The event was on the 7th floor of 79 Wyndham Street at Frank’s Records. This is a vinyl record-themed bar with![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/icon/favicon-7bc0c66d-05c1-4310-9d16-92bd40fe4693.png)Larry SalibraLarry Salibra![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_4659-33ee7df0-b20d-44ff-b8c5-5f5cc60629e8.jpeg)](https://larrysalibra.com/bitcoin-at-franks-records-in-hong-kong/)

[Devaluing diamondsThe other day, a friend of mine excitedly told me about how one can buy absolutely massive lab grown diamonds in Shenzhen for very cheap. And then she showed off a massive, sparkling diamond on her finger and bragged about its very cheap price. Sometime after that, I met someone![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/icon/favicon-7701cac1-537a-4d75-a7cf-6cac49c57744.png)Larry SalibraLarry Salibra![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/thumbnail/larry-4-975f9840-e4bf-4a42-9463-54b2c4feb1c9.jpg)](https://larrysalibra.com/devaluing-diamonds/)

[No one believes WarshBloomberg writes: Bitcoin slipped back below $80,000 on Friday after Federal Reserve Chair Kevin Warsh pledged to bring inflation back to target, pushing short-term Treasury yields higher and cooling some of the week’s risk-on momentum. The move was modest rather than a reversal of the broader![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/icon/favicon-e7ad6730-365a-4d09-83be-e34f6e5f9b49.png)Larry SalibraLarry Salibra![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/thumbnail/larry-4-2c5e9b88-3f03-48c4-bb33-cedd5d1a8c88.jpg)](https://larrysalibra.com/no-one-believes-warsh/)

[Watching the Rust Belt get hollowed outWhen I graduated from university, I found myself in a Rust Belt whose manufacturing was well on its way to being hollowed out by the Wall Street-led offshoring movement. While I was never directly involved in manufacturing myself, growing up in Northeast Ohio in the heart of the Rust![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/icon/favicon-8f34c063-6fa9-4617-b4b4-d9e2f9a4d881.png)Larry SalibraLarry Salibra![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/thumbnail/larry-4-be847e87-12c3-40bc-a46c-1aea1a73d0c9.jpg)](https://larrysalibra.com/watching-the-rust-belt-get-hollowed-out/)

[Not stealing is table-stakes for civilizationWhen people visit China, they often proclaim how safe it is. Deliveries are frequently left on a table outside hotels or housing on the side of the street or in the lobby and no one worries about their lunch or package being stolen. You can leave your phone, computer and![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/icon/favicon-ec489801-b340-48ad-a75c-0031c2aed042.png)Larry SalibraLarry Salibra![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/thumbnail/larry-4-21c10e1c-5f7f-4296-8787-b8adc356ccf1.jpg)](https://larrysalibra.com/not-stealing-is-table-stakes-for-civilization/)
### Not stealing is table-stakes for civilization
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/not-stealing-is-table-stakes-for-civilization/
Last updated: 2026-08-30T15:52:43.000Z
When people visit China, they often proclaim how safe it is. Deliveries are frequently left on a table outside hotels or housing on the side of the street or in the lobby and no one worries about their lunch or package being stolen. You can leave your phone, computer and other valuables unattended in on a table in a coffee shop while you go to the restroom and no one will as much as touch them. 

This isn't just a characteristic of mainland China and its pervasive video surveillance, but is true of Hong Kong and has been true long before police cameras were a thing. My wife and I have a long running "joke" that it's impossible to lose anything in this city. That's because I'm perennially leaving things behind, but someone always finds it and either holds on to it until I go back to claim it or figures out how to return it to me.

Public spaces where others won't steal your stuff are a basic requirement for a modern civilization. Visitors from the West, once they've gotten over the initial shock of the high trust and secure public spaces in China should instead be asking why the states or cultures in which they live fail to create a society where people don't steal other people's stuff. If a society can't even deliver this basic level of security, what exactly is it doing?
### Watching the Rust Belt get hollowed out
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/watching-the-rust-belt-get-hollowed-out/
Last updated: 2026-08-29T15:50:49.000Z
When I graduated from university, I found myself in a Rust Belt whose manufacturing was well on its way to being hollowed out by the Wall Street-led offshoring movement. While I was never directly involved in manufacturing myself, growing up in Northeast Ohio in the heart of the Rust Belt meant I was closely connected with friends that had a front row seat for it.

When I was working on my first start up, at some point I connected with the son of a local boat manufacturer who had purchased a stainless steel factory in China. He went on and on about how much better the quality was of the machined hardware for their boats delivered faster and cheaper than local metal shops.

Several years later, after I'd actually relocated to China myself, a friend who worked at a General Motors supplier in Michigan found that his employer had been acquired by the [Beijing Municipal Government](https://www.reuters.com/article/business/china-group-closes-deal-for-auto-supplier-nexteer-idUSN29216132/?ref=larrysalibra.com).

This hollowing out wasn't simply the result of free trade, but policy decisions - trade and monetary - made by a political elite beholden to Wall Street and interested only in maximizing shareholder returns and a government interested in avoiding fiscal funding constraints.
### No one believes Warsh
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/no-one-believes-warsh/
Last updated: 2026-08-28T15:15:07.000Z
Bloomberg [writes](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-08-28/bitcoin-slips-below-80-000-after-kevin-warsh-inflation-vow?srnd=homepage-asia&ref=larrysalibra.com):

> Bitcoin slipped back below $80,000 on Friday after Federal Reserve Chair Kevin Warsh pledged to bring inflation back to target, pushing short-term Treasury yields higher and cooling some of the week’s risk-on momentum.

> The move was modest rather than a reversal of the broader crypto rebound. Warsh said financial conditions are not restrictive and stressed that inflation must move clearly toward the Fed’s target, reinforcing expectations that policy could stay tighter for longer. Bitcoin eased with other rate-sensitive assets but remained well above levels seen earlier this month.

The US is spending 7 trillion dollars on revenue of 4 trillion dollars. There is no world in which there is not more inflation.
### Devaluing diamonds
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/devaluing-diamonds/
Last updated: 2026-08-27T11:49:54.000Z
The other day, a friend of mine excitedly told me about how one can buy absolutely massive lab grown diamonds in Shenzhen for very cheap. And then she showed off a massive, sparkling diamond on her finger and bragged about its very cheap price.

Sometime after that, I met someone that said they were in "fine jewelry." I know very little about jewelry beyond what I'd recently learned about lab-grown diamonds, so I asked the fine jewelry expert if she sold those. She looked visibly uncomfortable. I was a bit worried that I'd said something wrong and possibly insulted her. She went on to say no, of course she does not deal in lab diamonds and then went on to tell me about how she has access to pieces from this and that famous designer. Not knowing anything about jewelry, let alone fine jewelry, this didn't impress so much as confuse me.

Another day, I met someone who told me they sold luxury cars. I asked if they sold any of the luxury Chinese EVs in the market like the massive luxury Nio ES9 EV SUV I'd test driven a few weeks ago. This time, I too got a similar reaction. No, we don't sell EVs, only LUXURY cars. Knowing a bit more about cars than jewerly, I pushed back saying that EVs are now among the best cars and some of them are very luxurious. The response I got was, "EVs are like riding in microwaves, they're poorly made and break easily and we wouldn't ever think of selling them." Those were of course some pretty big and ridiculous claims. Surely some EVs might be poorly made, but all of them certainly aren't. And I'm not really sure how to address the microwave claim.

Anyways, I realized what was going on here. Both of these people were in the business of selling physical products as proxy for status. The status associated with their products was connected to the fact that their products - diamonds and traditional luxury cars - were, once, very expensive. This meant that only the richest could afford them. 

But thanks largely to Chinese manufacturing, many people can now afford EVs that have all the luxury build and features of traditional luxury vehicles. And they can also now buy massive, absolutely perfect diamonds for very little money.

The mass market production of what were previously very exclusive goods is resulting in the decline of the status of those goods. And this threatens the livelyhood of vendors that have built a business around selling these products as status.
### Bitcoin at Frank's Records in Hong Kong
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/bitcoin-at-franks-records-in-hong-kong/
Last updated: 2026-08-26T16:46:58.000Z
The Bitcoin Association of Hong Kong's pre-Bitcoin Asia meetup was a massive success. Over 300 people signed up with additional 100s on the waiting list. The event was on the 7th floor of 79 Wyndham Street at Frank's Records. This is a vinyl record-themed bar with an additional rooftop terrace, in the same building as and owned by Frank's New York Italian restaurant.

Bitcoin was accepted and I saw lots of people happily paying with Lightning. Even more exciting was to see how many people who didn't have any Bitcoin or Lightning on their phones were asking others if they could buy some sats for Hong Kong Dollars. It's been many years since I've seen that sort of excitement around using Bitcoin for in-person payments. And most importantly, every payment went smoothly and the whole process seemed very low friction for the bar staff.

Looking forward to seeing how attendance is tomorrow at the main Bitcoin Asia conference.
### AirPods Pro protect parents
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/airpods-pro-protect-parents/
Last updated: 2026-08-25T16:50:19.000Z
I've been protective of my hearing since I started listening to cassettes of children's music on a Sony Walkman in the late 1980s. I'd keep the volume low so as not to damage my hearing. I'd always wear ear protection when participating in activities with loud sounds such as working with power tools and heavy equipment. 

Since meeting the founder of made-for-music festival earplug manufacturer [EarPeace](https://www.earpeace.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com) in the bar of a suburb of Guangzhou many years ago, I started becoming more cognizant of the risks of environmental noise is social environments. He gave me a demo of his product and made me an instant convert. I religiously carry their earplugs in my pocket and use them every time I'm in a bar, concert or other venue where the sound is dangerously loud. 

I like to think that this has protected my hearing and kept it at a level that is much better than expected for my age.

As a new father, I was pretty shocked at the volume of my son's cry. I'd never really thought about how loudly babies cry before, but I guess I assumed it wouldn't be loud enough to harm their parents' hearing. Evolution certainly wouldn't do something like that! Except it did!

The cry of an infant is one of the loudest naturally occurring sounds most people will ever be exposed to....and certainly the loudest randomly occurring sound I've ever had to live with. It can get as loud as 120 decibels which is the sound of an aircraft taking off or a chainsaw. I didn't expect that having a child would also mean that I'd have the sound pressure equivalent of an aircraft taking off in my home periodically throughout the day.

When he's unhappy or uncomfortable and I'm at close proximity trying to change a diaper or calm him, his cry felt so loud as to be almost physically painful. I, of course, wanted to take care of him, but I also didn't want to end up being a deaf father, so I needed a solution.   
  
When I'm home, I don't usually have the EarPeace earplugs close at hand as they live on my keychain, so those were out. And even if they were in my pocket, they tend to be a bit fidgety to put in or remove. And fidgeting with tiny rubber earplugs in the dark when you have an unhappy infant is not a recipe for success.

But it turns out I already had a solution in my pocket...AirPods Pro. They are large, easy to put in and take out in a dark nursery and by default they reduce loud noises to protect my hearing. I leave mine in adaptive mode which not only protects me from the loudest of my son's cries but also slightly reduces the volume and, consequently, the emotional intensity of the entire situation. I find this also helps to calm me down and get less frustrated by his crying so that I can focus on meeting his needs instead of my own physical discomfort. And that's music to all four of our ears.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2026/08/IMG_4649.jpg)

AirPods Pro reduces my baby's crying by up to 25 decibels!
### The inflight patronizing we
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/the-inflight-patronizing-we/
Last updated: 2026-08-24T16:42:07.000Z
In English, The patronizing we is when someone uses the word "we" as a synonym for "you." This is one of the most annoying linquistic habits of American so-called "service" staff. They are so-called service staff because whenever they're using the patronizing we, they have no intention of actually serving you...they're giving you an order.

For someone that spends very little time in the country, it's very easy to be tricked or confused by this language. 

This exact thing happened to me several years ago on a domestic American Airlines flight during a brief trip to the country:

I boarded my flight, placed my carry-on in the overhead compartment and bag under the seat in front of me, sat down, put on headphones and started listening to music. The flight attendant tapped me on the shoulder and I took off my headphones to hear what she had to say. She said, "Sir, we're going to have to move your bag."

I think "gosh that's really kind of her to give me a heads up that she's going to move my bag" and replied "oh, okay! thanks for letting me know!" And put my headphones back on.

The flight attendant suddenly got very angry and raised her voice and said loudly, "No, *YOU* move your bag." At that point, I thought, maybe I should have flown on that airline that promises the friendly skies, because this one didn't seem very friendly.

Interestingly, the overhead bins on the flight I was on had pieces of duct tape on them holding on trim or patching holes or something. Probably just a coincidence.
### Larry's Weekly Newsletter - August 23, 2026
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/newsletter/larrys-weekly-newsletter-august-23-2026/
Last updated: 2026-08-24T11:59:55.000Z
Hello friends!

Very happy that the vibes about both Hong Kong and Bitcoin have both turned to positive. It's just as hard to HODL through bear markets as it is to watch many of your friends leave your favorite city because they are convinced it's over. Maybe it was for them. But it's not for me...Bitcoin and Hong Kong are both alive and well...and better than ever!  
  
Speaking of Hong Kong and Bitcoin, hit me up if you'll be at Bitcoin Asia this week! And check out [this new map of merchants that accept Bitcoin in Hong Kong](https://map.hkbitcoincity.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com). 

[![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2026/08/hkbtcmap.jpg)](https://map.hkbitcoincity.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com)

Yours,  
Larry  
  
PS: As always, below, please find my posts from the past week.

[Hong Kong has a service problemI was sending off family at Hong Kong International Airport this evening and took them to 2 Café which is a chain serving Hong Kong-style diner food. For those familiar with the airport, 2 Café took over the massive premises behind McDonald’s in the pre-security departure level![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/icon/favicon-954e718c-2920-4e1b-b391-c7e0e42c60ac.png)Larry SalibraLarry Salibra![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/thumbnail/Table_sharing_etiquette_sign_in_a_Cha_chaan_teng_-Hong_Kong--68fa2f48-09b0-4c21-8f01-e5e5196d2c74.jpg)](https://larrysalibra.com/hong-kong-has-a-service-problem/)

[The adventure of calling a landlineI miss the telephone. No, not the smartphone, but the physical landline telephone. With landline telephones, phone numbers were addresses connected to physical spaces and not people. When you dialed your friend’s home phone number, you were literally causing a ringing sound inside the physical building that they called![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/icon/favicon-a203aedf-2477-4aa9-bd08-cdbb9c261698.png)Larry SalibraLarry Salibra![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/thumbnail/WE554wallphone-1-17670945-6e22-480e-99c5-1d643713ba71.jpg)](https://larrysalibra.com/the-adventure-of-calling-a-landline/)

[Classic McDonald’s desserts live on in Hong KongMcDonald’s apple pies are as American as, well, apple pie. But in 1992, McDonald’s ruined their classic apple pie formula by changing the pies from being deep-fried to baked in the USA. All in the name of “health.” As if anyone eating at McDonald’s was seeking![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/icon/favicon-5d5b7568-262a-44ff-89d4-293573e6379a.png)Larry SalibraLarry Salibra![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_4479-1-63c9d516-edd8-4db3-badd-05a3aad042fd.jpeg)](https://larrysalibra.com/classic-mcdonalds-desserts-live-on-in-hong-kong/)

[Once upon a time in the Middle EastThis evening, I popped up to Shenzhen to watch the recently released Chinese anti-war movie Once upon a time in the Middle East (欢迎来龙餐馆). It’s the story of a Chinese chef who moves to a fictional country in the Middle East to work in a restaurant and pay![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/icon/favicon-6c61c688-1ab0-4e9a-a51e-531a43599787.png)Larry SalibraLarry Salibra![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_4525-ed2f9e1c-9cd2-4d65-827e-6f58a071b221.jpeg)](https://larrysalibra.com/once-upon-a-time-in-the-middle-east/)

[Hong Kong is backBeginning from the period of political unrest in 2019 through the end of covid, many people left Hong Kong. There was a period of time where it seemed like I was going to a couple going away parties every month. Singapore, Canada and the UK were anecdotedly the top destinations.![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/icon/favicon-18534b77-bd7a-400a-be09-a57cbdebc3aa.png)Larry SalibraLarry Salibra![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/thumbnail/larry-4-613f13e1-1fe9-47c9-9f84-8be9225b8517.jpg)](https://larrysalibra.com/hong-kong-is-back/)

[Fix healthcare by increasing supplyI previously wrote about my experience getting blood tests in a Chinese public hospital and how fast, efficient and inexpensive the whole process was. One of the things that struck me was how much better and more accessible healthcare is in the Chinese mainland than two decades ago when I![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/icon/favicon-472adb70-4fa6-4708-9ece-1a32c42bff30.png)Larry SalibraLarry Salibra![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/thumbnail/larry-4-73bbc00e-5bda-4369-b953-20937694b043.jpg)](https://larrysalibra.com/fix-healthcare-by-increasing-supply/)

[Whiners are the worst part of bear marketsSomething changed this week when US Treasury Secretary Bessent took a step towards yield curve control. The money printing is coming...it is mechanical and inevitable...and the market suddenly decided to acknowledge this. Bitcoin and high-quality altcoins, including Stacks, pumped in response. But it wasn’t just the![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/icon/favicon-0247c710-2626-4c5c-9078-1c8513be1cf2.png)Larry SalibraLarry Salibra![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/thumbnail/larry-4-560d0243-cada-41e3-bd4b-6028995aad1d.jpg)](https://larrysalibra.com/whiners-are-the-worst-part-of-bear-markets/)
### Whiners are the worst part of bear markets
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/whiners-are-the-worst-part-of-bear-markets/
Last updated: 2026-08-23T16:22:45.000Z
Something changed this week when US Treasury Secretary Bessent took a step towards yield curve control. The money printing is coming...it is mechanical and inevitable...and the market suddenly decided to acknowledge this. Bitcoin and high-quality altcoins, including Stacks, pumped in response.

But it wasn't just the price that changed, sentiment also changed. The bear market whiners finally stopped whining. 

Speaking of whiners, they are the absolute worst part of bear markets. A 99% price drawdown is nothing compared to months upon months of listening to incredibly insecure, yet well-meaning people, whine about the direction of projects. I get it, you lost paper wealth...welcome to the club...so did everyone else! Whining, however, is not productive. You should either constructively contribute by building, marketing or building consensus to move in an alternative direction, be supportive, or you should exit your position and go do something else. Complaining about what could have, should have or would have happened wastes everyone's time. It's also not psychologically healthy for you or the people to whom you whine.

I suspect the whining was even worse this time around because so many members of the FOMO crowd couldn't handle that AI people were making bank while Bitcoin was behaving more like a stable coin. Not only can you not time the market, you can't be early on every new trend. So stop beating yourself up over it...or at least beat yourself up quietly and leave the rest of us in peace!

But now, everyone that wanted to sold has sold and the whiners are gone. Those of us still here actually want to be here. The future is bright, possibilities are endless and there was never a better time to start building than now!
### Fix healthcare by increasing supply
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/fix-healthcare-by-increasing-supply/
Last updated: 2026-08-22T17:45:45.000Z
I [previously wrote about my experience getting blood tests in a Chinese public hospital](https://larrysalibra.com/blood-tests-in-a-chinese-public-hospital/) and how fast, efficient and inexpensive the whole process was. 

One of the things that struck me was how much better and more accessible healthcare is in the Chinese mainland than two decades ago when I first arrived. I did a bunch of reading on what's changed over the past years. It's apparent that China treats healthcare and all the inputs to it - doctors, nurses, medicine, hospital buildings, etc -as inputs whose supply should be increased and cost should be decreased. There's been a targeted effort to significantly increase the supply of medical education and production of doctors.

Compare this to the USA which caps the number of positions for medical residencies based on numbers 30 years ago in 1996.

Another thing they do is to amortize the fixed costs of building, equipment and even personnel over a much larger volume of patients. This was pretty obvious during my visit where the dozen or so nurses in the blood collection area were collecting samples at the rate of one patient every \~2 to 4 minutes. It's hard to imagine nurses in American practices processing such a large volume of patients at such a high speed. In fact, my experience with American medicine is that speed and efficiency is the last thing you'll get. Unless you're talking about the speed of the doctor leaving your examination room after he made you wait 30 minutes past your scheduled appointment to see you.
### Hong Kong is back
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/hong-kong-is-back/
Last updated: 2026-08-21T16:43:44.000Z
Beginning from the period of political unrest in 2019 through the end of covid, many people left Hong Kong. There was a period of time where it seemed like I was going to a couple going away parties every month. Singapore, Canada and the UK were anecdotedly the top destinations. Housing prices fell as those emigrating sold their properties and rents fell as fewer tenants competed for the same number of rental flats.

In response to the population decline, the Hong Kong government rolled out a number of preferential visa schemes for "talents" to attract educated and well-paid people to move to Hong Kong. Initially, almost all of those taking advantage of these new visas were from the Chinese mainland. You could see and hear the change as more well-to-do Mandarin speakers were in and around areas, venues, and businesses previously mainly frequented by foreign residents.

Over the past year though, that's visibly changed as foreign residents and tourists have returned as well. This is reflected empirically in the Immigration Department's visitor arrival numbers and visa issuance numbers. It's also visible anecdotally by going to a place like the IFC rooftop podium on a Friday night where you'll now see absolutely packed spaces of young people in their 20s and 30s from all over the globe.

Those of us that stayed in Hong Kong through the down times though knew that Hong Kong never left. It's nice to see the rest of the world finally agrees with us!
### Once upon a time in the Middle East
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/once-upon-a-time-in-the-middle-east/
Last updated: 2026-08-21T03:44:54.000Z
This evening, I popped up to Shenzhen to watch the recently released Chinese anti-war movie *Once upon a time in the Middle East* (*欢迎来龙餐馆*). It's the story of a Chinese chef who moves to a fictional country in the Middle East to work in a restaurant and pay off his debts. Unfortunately for him, he arrived right before an American invasion that struck an uncanny resemblance to the 2003 Iraq invasion. It was a very intense, moving and ultimately enjoyable movie that I think even audiences with no connection to China would enjoy.

A few quick notes/thoughts:

- This wasn't a pro or anti-American movie. No effort was spent trying to explain, defend or criticize the geopolitical reasons for the invasion.
- I'm guilty of having a heavy diet of Hollywood movies, so I'm definitely not used to seeing the US military in a movie without being the protagonist. It's not that they were the good guys or the bad guys in this movie, but that they were just guys: some good, some flawed, all human.
- Overseas Chinese workers and the Chinese diaspora are absolutely everywhere and have been for centuries. This story of just a tiny taste of crazy situations some of their members must have encountered.
- Once you speak Chinese, every Chinese restaurant in the world is gold mine for local insight, tips and intelligence. The owners and staff will happily give you the lay of the land and share their unfiltered opinions of their host country.
- The cinematography, especially the footage of food, was literally mouth-watering. The acting and storytelling were both top notch.
- I think this movie could be globally appealing, at least in markets where people are used to watching foreign movies that are subtitled and not dubbed. Hollywood might be getting closer to having their Deepseek moment. Strangely, though, the movie isn't even playing in Hong Kong theaters, nor has a release date been scheduled or announced.
### Classic McDonald's desserts live on in Hong Kong
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/classic-mcdonalds-desserts-live-on-in-hong-kong/
Last updated: 2026-08-19T16:17:32.000Z
McDonald's apple pies are as American as, well, apple pie. But in 1992, McDonald's ruined their classic apple pie formula by changing the pies from being deep-fried to baked in the USA. All in the name of "health." As if anyone eating at McDonald's was seeking that! 

The apple pie isn't the only classic McDonald's dessert sacrificed by strange American market conditions (such as trying to pretend McDonald's is healthy). The tasty peanut-covered chocolate and strawberry sundaes also fell victim to the American market. At some point, it seems like everyone was very worried about peanut allergies so McDonald's removed peanuts from the sundaes and instead included a plastic packet of peanuts on the side. Apparently, they at some point made the packet of peanuts optional and so few people asked for them, that they recently totally removed the option of requesting peanuts all together.

Happily, the original deep-fried McDonald's apple pie lives on in Hong Kong alongside the classic chocolate and strawberry sundaes both sprinkled with peanuts by default, as Ray Kroc intended it. 

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2026/08/IMG_4479_full.jpeg)

Dessert options in a McDonald's in Hong Kong. Prices in HKD. 7.8 HKD = 1 USD
### The adventure of calling a landline
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/the-adventure-of-calling-a-landline/
Last updated: 2026-08-18T15:28:40.000Z
I miss the telephone. No, not the smartphone, but the physical landline telephone. With landline telephones, phone numbers were addresses connected to physical spaces and not people. When you dialed your friend's home phone number, you were literally causing a ringing sound inside the physical building that they called home. This happened whether or not your friend was actually in the building or even in the same country. 

You'd never know who would answer a landline and what their relationship was with the person you wanted to speak with. Often it was a parent or other relative. Sometimes, it was a sibling or a friend of a sibling. If you were unlucky, it was a groggy, very unhappy person who had been sleeping until you just woke them up. Other times it was your friend's parent's co-workers' friend who was attending a dinner party and happened to hear the telephone ring as they walked into the house to refresh their martini. Sometimes it was a total stranger like the plumber the family hired to fix the leaky sink.

Once your call was answered, you had to explain to the person answered who you wanted to speak with. This sounds easy, but in practice could be a challenge. People often called my family's home phone asking to speak with Larry. They'd then be asked "with which Larry would you like to speak?" This was usually followed by a confused silence and then a "uhh...the younger one?" 

Trying to reach your friend by calling their home landline frequently turned into an interrogation. Whoever answered would want to know who you were and why you wanted to talk to the person you were asking for. Often this turned into a negotiation over the priority of your call: "I'm sorry, Mary is busy doing her homework right now, can she call you back later?" "But I need to ask her an important question on our group homework project, Mrs. Smith! Can I please talk to her now?"

Landlines often had multiple phones in different rooms connected to the same line. This meant the magic spell of your deep conversation with the love of your middle school life could instantly broken as her mom picked up the phone in the kitchen to tell her that dinner was ready. And what teen of the late 1990s could forget the screeching sound of an analog modem interrupting you and your buddy planning for the Friday night football game as your sibling tried to check their email.

Mobile telephones brought us the certainty of one person, one number and the smartphone brought us control over who calls us, when and where. But from us, they took the away the fun and adventure of calling a landline and wondering who will answer and what hoops will I have to jump through to talk to my friend. And for that, I will never forgive them.
### Hong Kong has a service problem
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/hong-kong-has-a-service-problem/
Last updated: 2026-08-17T18:42:59.000Z
I was sending off family at Hong Kong International Airport this evening and took them to 2 Café which is a chain serving Hong Kong-style diner food. For those familiar with the airport, 2 Café took over the massive premises behind McDonald's in the pre-security departure level previously occupied by Tsui Wah.

It was pretty late in the evening and the massive restaurant had about 2/3rds of its tables empty. Seeing that the restaurant was mostly empty, I picked a comfortable-looking table for our tired-from-traveling party of three and their carry-on luggage. It had benches on one side and, in the normal world, would comfortably sit 6 people, but in Hong Kong restaurants would expect it to seat 8 or more.

A waitress who didn't even bother to walk over to us and yelled something at me in English about that table being too big for us and ordering us to go sit at a four person table which in most of the world (and most of China) would be a two person table. I responded in Cantonese, don't worry, it's fine. To which she started lecturing me in Mandarin - again yelling from halfway across the restaurant - that this was the wrong-sized table for my party. I assured her that it doesn't really matter and that this won't cause any problems because the restaurant is empty anyways and there are plenty of other large tables that are also empty. Eventually she gave up and stormed away in a huff.

I understand that someone probably told her to make sure customers occupy tables in such a way that maximizes revenue generating butts in the chair. And this is very understandable in a city where rent is expensive and space is at a premium, especially during peak dining hours. As a resident for almost two decades, I'm very sensitive to this and am happy to share tables with strangers or move seats, even mid-meal, if it means some hungry potential patrons can get their food a bit sooner. But it made no sense in the context of a massive, mostly empty restaurant after peak dining hours.

This sort of customer abuse happens regularly across Hong Kong. The perpetrators of this abuse, unfortunately, disproportionately work in places that visitors are more likely to encounter such as uniquely Hong Kong local F&B outlets, taxis and minibuses, to name a few. And they are equal opportunity abusers, serving up their bad attitudes to locals and visitors alike. They're not reflective of the average Hongkonger...or even the average Hongkonger who works in the F&B...who is incredibly kind-hearted and caring. It's a small, but not insignificant, highly-visible minority that gives service in the city a bad name. 

In the Chinese mainland, service culture has significantly improved over the past decade. It's now to the point where one very rarely encounters the types of truly mean-spirit service personnel that cause the sorts of problems we encounter in Hong Kong. Is it any wonder that so many Hongkongers prefer to spend their weekends and holidays in the mainland?
### Larry's Weekly Newsletter - August 16, 2026
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/newsletter/larrys-weekly-newsletter-aug-16-2026/
Last updated: 2026-08-16T17:33:18.000Z
Hi friends!

I spent the past week in Shenzhen with family that are in town. Shenzhen is incredibly livable these days...especially Nanshan District. I particularly enjoyed exploring the seemingly never-ending bike paths in lush, green, interconnected parks along rivers and the waterfront!  
  
Please find this past week's writing below. Have a great week!  
  
Yours,  
Larry

[The future of memories is here and it’s spatial“The future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed.” -William Gibson I have an infant son and have been taking spatial photos and video of him since his birth (and previously during the pregnancy) so that I can view them on Apple Vision Pro. It’s really hard![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/icon/favicon-65c0fa57-7b46-40e4-9b6b-c6c0df0ed733.png)Larry SalibraLarry Salibra![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/thumbnail/larry-4-ca65b9dd-1482-455a-89a6-b48e7fbcf202.jpg)](https://larrysalibra.com/the-future-of-memories-is-here-and-its-spatial/)

[Shenzhen scale is so much bigger than Hong KongOfficially, Hong Kong’s nominal GDP was US$424 billion in 2025 versus Shenzhen’s US$557 billion. I assert that these numbers severally understate the relative value produced by Shenzhen vs Hong Kong in the same way comparing the USA’s nominal GDP to China’s GDP severely understates![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/icon/favicon-bda3a466-e4f0-4ecb-9806-af467f07c7f5.png)Larry SalibraLarry Salibra![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/thumbnail/larry-4-57dfc90f-2d24-4345-ae40-5bc97cee1038.jpg)](https://larrysalibra.com/shenzhen-scale-is-so-much-bigger-than-hong-kong/)

[Amazon US is 8x more expensive than Costco ChinaAmazon US prices used to be among the cheapest in the world. Leading up to and during the pandemic, I would do much of my shopping on Amazon US, which ships to Hong Kong for free without Prime and is 100% tax-free. Slowly over the past decade, though, their![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/icon/favicon-525825d6-6386-4cf0-94f5-3ee4b2144ab1.png)Larry SalibraLarry Salibra![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_4094-3-00c3cd4f-8560-41d4-a44c-c68498563457.jpg)](https://larrysalibra.com/amazon-us-is-8x-more-expensive-than-costco-china/)

[The entire city should be your backyardChinese cities aren’t making the same mistakes American cities made.![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/icon/favicon-3e19d6aa-1697-44f7-bd9c-6a881494bc7e.png)Larry SalibraLarry Salibra![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_4130-ef8ec450-1b63-4f02-ab1a-927dff6df14b.jpeg)](https://larrysalibra.com/the-entire-city-should-be-your-backyard/)

[Hong Kong public healthcare’s strange quality incentivesA strange incentive of the Hong Kong public healthcare system is that for some things it’s actually faster and more convenient than the private system while still also being incredibly cheap. A few years ago, I fell between the stairs and pontoon in the Causeway Bay Typhoon Shelter and![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/icon/favicon-d49d5d5b-59d4-4d58-84da-152ac5611181.png)Larry SalibraLarry Salibra![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/thumbnail/larry-4-4d6edbe4-a1bb-4971-ad75-4ce6114b3ddd.jpg)](https://larrysalibra.com/hong-kong-public-healthcares-strange-quality-incentives/)

[The world’s largest App Clip deploymentThe world’s largest deployment of App Clips is in China.![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/icon/favicon-91bb22f6-65de-4ca5-85b0-f143c5c21a71.png)Larry SalibraLarry Salibra![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_5238-2-b7b249df-66c4-4b59-b030-a81720260f06.jpeg)](https://larrysalibra.com/the-worlds-largest-app-clip-deployment/)

[Babies are fun!If I knew how much fun babies were, I’d have started having them much earlier. Sure they cry a lot but watching them grow up and develop their own personalities so quickly is the ride of a lifetime. I recently learned from my parents that their generation (baby boomers)![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/icon/favicon-0f3c8394-284d-49b3-abd1-bf5f884258d2.png)Larry SalibraLarry Salibra![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/thumbnail/larry-4-75db5663-46b7-4ad5-a22b-3c7c4f58590e.jpg)](https://larrysalibra.com/babies-are-fun/)
### Babies are fun!
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/babies-are-fun/
Last updated: 2026-08-16T17:07:14.000Z
If I knew how much fun babies were, I’d have started having them much earlier. Sure they cry a lot but watching them grow up and develop their own personalities so quickly is the ride of a lifetime.

I recently learned from my parents that their generation (baby boomers) had fewer kids than their parents' generation as a reaction to the huge growth in birthrate post-World War Two. Apparently people really were worried about overpopulation.

 A major side effect of this is that, compared to my parents who grew in large families, near their extended families, with babies always around, I have little experience with babies. I grew up far from my extended family and the only baby I know was my younger brother and he was a baby when I was too young to help out or really even remember much.

Because of this, my main exposure to babies was strangers' babies in public. When strangers' babies are well-behaved, you don't really notice them, but when they are crying or throwing a tantrum you definitely do. This left a massively negative impression, at least in my mind, on babies as a group. Had I grown up around more babies, I'd have gotten to partake in the magic of their cooing and early efforts of talking. And the joy of watching them discover the world starting with their own two hands and feet.

Small families who are far from their extended families is now the norm. The question is how can we give today's children who are unlikely to have more than one sibling of their own, the opportunity to spend more time around babies so they see the fun times and not just the hassles and responsibilities?
### The world’s largest App Clip deployment
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/the-worlds-largest-app-clip-deployment/
Last updated: 2026-08-15T18:10:39.000Z
[App Clips](https://support.apple.com/en-us/102093?ref=larrysalibra.com) are an Apple iOS feature that allows users to use a subset of the functionality of a native app without having to first install the app from the App Store. The feature has failed to get traction to the point that most iPhone users in the world have probably never encountered an App Clip in the wild.

That is of course, unless you are in Mainland China, where App Clips are absolutely everywhere. This is thanks to Alibaba's payment company Alipay which is working overtime to convince users to pay with Alipay instead of Tencent's ubiquitous Weixin Pay. 

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2026/08/IMG_5238.jpeg)

Chinese users are in Weixin (formerly called WeChat) all day long chatting with friends, family, colleagues and customers. It's so ubiquitous that most users go straight to Weixin to scan QR codes instead of their phone's camera app as users do outside of the Chinese mainland. These QR codes are the entry point for menus and ticket sales and other e-commerce functions and you see them absolutely everywhere. . And when users enter the flow with Weixin, they almost always end up also paying with Weixin Pay.

Alipay, which got its start as the only payment method for Alibaba's popular Taobao e-commerce platform, has faced an uphill battle getting users to change this behavior and scan QR codes with Alipay instead of Weixin Pay. Instead of trying to change user behavior, they've instead introduced a new behavior that is even more convenient and lower friction than opening an app to scan a QR code. This behavior is called "碰一下” or "Tap it!" 

See Alipay NFC + App Clip in action at a Pizza Hut in Foshan in the short video below:

As you can see, it's very similar to tap to pay using Apple Pay but Alipay had to implement it on iOS without the privileged hardware access on iPhones that Apple reserves for itself. To do this they combined NFC and iOS App Clips. It works like this: an NFC tag is on a table, sign or payment device and tapping an iPhone on it causes iOS to load the the Alipay App Clip. If you don't have Alipay installed, you're prompted to download it, if you do have it installed, you're prompted to tap the "open" button to complete the transaction in Alipay.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2026/08/IMG_5421.jpeg)

Tap your iPhone to order Burger King via Alipay & its App Clip.

If the NFC tag is a link to a mini app ("小程序"), tapping open opens the mini app in Alipay so you can browse the menu and place your order. If the NFC tag is from a point-of-sale device, tapping open automatically pays your bill using your default payment settings in Alipay. 

While Alipay appears to be the largest deployment of this NFC+App Clip technology in China, I have also come across use of the same technology NFC+App Clip by Bytedance's Douyin (the Chinese version of TikTok).

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2026/08/IMG_5636.jpeg)

Tap your iPhone to open Douyin via an App Clip and group buy a meal for a discount.

The combination of NFC and App Clips is actually very elegant. It delivers most of the benefits of Apple Pay for payment while also offering an entry point for more customized payment and e-commerce flows using mini apps. It works so well that I'm surprised we don't see this combination of NFC + App Clips in more markets.
### Hong Kong public healthcare’s strange quality incentives
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/hong-kong-public-healthcares-strange-quality-incentives/
Last updated: 2026-08-14T09:50:00.000Z
A strange incentive of the Hong Kong public healthcare system is that for some things it's actually faster and more convenient than the private system while still also being incredibly cheap. 

A few years ago, I fell between the stairs and pontoon in the Causeway Bay Typhoon Shelter and scraped open a large part of my shin. The yacht club lifeguard cleaned me up and had me take a taxi to the Ruttonjee Hospital Accident & Emergency department.

After a quick triage and twenty minute wait, Ruttonjee A&E patched me up. The doctor instructed me to go to the Sai Ying Pun government clinic every other day for the next several weeks to have my wound cleaned and bandage changed. 

The public clinic was a five minute walk from home and I could go to the clinic any time within opening hours. On each visit, I was in and out within 5 minutes and the nurses were all very kind and efficient. The cost was only HK$19 (US$2.52) per visit. Because of their amazing care, I have basically no visible scar on my leg.

I felt kind of bad using public health resources when I can afford private but have no idea how one would replicate the quality of care and convenience in the private system. Private system would probably have told me to just clean your wound and change my bandage myself at home and charged me a dear sum for that not very helpful advice.
### The entire city should be your backyard
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/the-entire-city-should-be-your-backyard/
Last updated: 2026-08-13T16:59:48.000Z
Throughout the second half of the 20th century, Americans flocked to the suburbs. Houses got bigger and backyards grew to include decks, pools, playgrounds and sandboxes. People competed with the Joneses to have a bigger house so that they could fit more toys. 

The movement to American suburbs grew out of violence in once bustling cities as people escaped dangerous downtowns to find a fenced-in oasis of their own to raise their families in peace and safety. While they gained safety and exclusive space, they lost the convenient access to third places and social interaction that safe and well-designed cities provide to their residents.

A walk around modern Shenzhen shows how Chinese cities aren't making the same mistake. There is park after park filled with grassy areas for picnics, play and sports facilities of all kinds, benches, tables and exercise equipment all connected together with tree-shaded bicycle paths and sidewalks. Every where is clean, safe and well-lit and no one is doing drugs or harassing passersby. Neighbors and their families are eating, playing and enjoying each other's company in a type of peace, safety and comfort that is absent from any North American or European city.
### Amazon US is 8x more expensive than Costco China
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/amazon-us-is-8x-more-expensive-than-costco-china/
Last updated: 2026-08-12T16:45:11.000Z
Amazon US prices used to be among the cheapest in the world. Leading up to and during the pandemic, I would do much of my shopping on Amazon US, which ships to Hong Kong for free without Prime and is 100% tax-free. Slowly over the past decade, though, their advantage has eroded and almost of my regular shopping is done on mainland Chinese or Hong Kong e-commerce platforms. I don’t think most US-based Amazon customers who don’t have access to these other option…especially US Prime members who loyally buy everything from Amazon for the “free” shipping…realize how much they overpay for Amazon products. Yesterday, I found out exactly how much.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2026/08/IMG_4059-4.jpeg)

I was visiting Costco in Shenzhen with a family member and came across an apparently American-brand inflatable backyard pool for 114.70 CNY…approximately US$17\. With a new infant that might like floating around in a backyard (floating infants is all the rage in this part of the world!), I wanted to see if the pool was a “real” American brand and how much it “normally”sold for in its home market, so checked Amazon US. I found that it is a real American brand and the product sells for the bargain-basement price of exactly US$126.06 which, for those keeping track, is 850 CNY. That’s an 8x markup over the Costco China price to buy the exact same product. 

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2026/08/IMG_4094-2.jpg)

And the Costco China price includes China’s value added tax while the Amazon US price does not. If I wanted to ship this US$126.06 pool to Florida, for example, I’d have to pay an additional US$8.82 in sales tax. The Florida sales tax on this plastic pool alone is itself more than 50% of the entire tax-inclusive price of the pool at Costco China.

The implication of this is that an American consumer need to make more than 8 times as much money after taxes to enjoy the same inflatable pool quality of life as a Costco China shopper. That's brutal.
### Shenzhen scale is so much bigger than Hong Kong
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/shenzhen-scale-is-so-much-bigger-than-hong-kong/
Last updated: 2026-08-11T17:50:35.000Z
Officially, Hong Kong's nominal GDP was US$424 billion in 2025 versus Shenzhen's US$557 billion. I assert that these numbers severally understate the relative value produced by Shenzhen vs Hong Kong in the same way comparing the USA's nominal GDP to China's GDP severely understates the relative value produced by China compared to the US. I imagine that comparing PPP adjusted GDP values would more closely reflect reality but still even that would understate how much bigger Shenzhen's real economy is than Hong Kong's.
### The future of memories is here and it's spatial
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/the-future-of-memories-is-here-and-its-spatial/
Last updated: 2026-08-10T16:12:36.000Z
> “The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed.”   
> \-William Gibson

I have an infant son and have been taking spatial photos and video of him since his birth (and previously during the pregnancy) so that I can view them on Apple Vision Pro.

It's really hard express the intense emotional feeling I feel when look back at spatial photos and videos from just a few months ago when he was so tiny and had just entered the world. View spatial photos on Vision Pro in 3D is so much different than looking at photo on a two dimensional screen or print. It feels like I can reach out and touch my minutes or days old son like I'm back in the delivery room experiencing his birth one more time. Viewing spatial photos and videos on Vision Pro is the absolute best way on planet earth to relive memories.

Vision Pro + spatial photos and videos is one of those technologies that will be absolutely everywhere in the future but that because of the cost and complexity, only a very few people have experienced today. It's very similar to automonous cars today. There are cars today that can drive themselves. But, even now, most people don't really believe it until they experience it themselves. Similarly, you can record precious moments in your life today and relive them tomorrow exactly as you saw and heard them and most people have no idea.
### Larry's Weekly Newsletter - August 9, 2026
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/newsletter/newsletter-august-9-2026/
Last updated: 2026-08-10T16:15:08.000Z
Hello friends!  
  
Today's post is the 31st daily post in this streak. I've very much enjoyed writing something everyday and sharing it with you.  
  
Below, please find my posts from the past week.  
  
Yours,  
Larry

[Coldcard shows the challenge of a bitcoin-only businessThe Coldcard hack shows how hard it can be to run a bitcoin-only business. While building the hardware wallet itself might not be that expensive, it is a one-off cost. The associated ongoing software updates, paying for the updates to be professionally audited and running a credible bug![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/icon/favicon-8ab42742-4ced-40cf-a295-80beda99b3b5.png)Larry SalibraLarry Salibra![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/thumbnail/larry-4-323a6e2b-0a19-496a-acc8-9b57fc241c92.jpg)](https://larrysalibra.com/coldcard-show-the-challenge-of-a-bitcoin-only-business/)

[Don’t ignore the doubtThere’s a lot of unspoken assumptions in societies about how things work. In democracies, at least the US one in which I was raised, there was a strongly held belief that somehow voting picks the best people for the job. Even as early as middle school, it was pretty![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/icon/favicon-aaca010f-152b-4b4d-abe3-53bd5eb7bb61.png)Larry SalibraLarry Salibra![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/thumbnail/larry-4-342bab9d-1be2-4756-bb81-7d974910edcd.jpg)](https://larrysalibra.com/dont-ignore-the-doubt/)

[Baby’s last burpI just sat my 3 month old son down on my leg for his post midnight feed burping. Deep in milk food coma, I tilted him forward and gently patting him on the back with a cupped hand until I heard that satisfying sound of a baby’s burp. I![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/icon/favicon-b0569064-5ee7-4bd2-8ac6-bd2b4d8128ee.png)Larry SalibraLarry Salibra![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/thumbnail/larry-4-95675ce5-0a10-43bf-813b-45179e18465d.jpg)](https://larrysalibra.com/babys-last-burp/)

[Immigration needs to feel fairAdopted from a reply to Erik Voorhees and fluidvoice.btc’s discussion on X re protectionism with regard to immigration: Nothing is ever fair in life or markets, but I respectfully submit that if a nation allows lots of immigration for one class of people or category of jobs while![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/icon/favicon-eff28859-c793-4c9e-b6fa-1b285c5d1be7.png)Larry SalibraLarry Salibra![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/thumbnail/larry-4-ee9c03d1-1a41-4b00-ba67-f2ab91cb8bb1.jpg)](https://larrysalibra.com/immigration-needs-to-feel-fair/)

[Completely isolated == easily homogenizedI’ve always wondered why Chinese people living in mainland China seem so much less propagandized than Americans. I think I finally found a possible answer while listening to historian Darryl Cooper interviewed by Tucker Carlson. ...go back to the internal migrations in the 20th century after the Second World![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/icon/favicon-14d36597-c651-4441-8aef-449f52241ae2.png)Larry SalibraLarry Salibra![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/thumbnail/larry-4-89d7a14a-2ff2-42a4-a8fa-e2ac54a88d86.jpg)](https://larrysalibra.com/completely-isolated-easily-homogenized/)

[Stay sustainablyAnother article about another American leaving China. This one is a weird one though. But from 2023 — a time of widespread pressures on local government finances following three years of virus restrictions and a property slowdown — he was asked instead to pay closer to market rent. Given that his visa![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/icon/favicon-471145e1-ad78-401f-8b1b-445ba62d0da9.png)Larry SalibraLarry Salibra![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/thumbnail/larry-4-ff6d0f68-3cd5-48ed-a0b6-2d45cfa817fa.jpg)](https://larrysalibra.com/stay-sustainably/)

[True self-driving is freedom from responsibilityI was taking a Pony AI robotaxi around Shenzhen this evening with my dad. Until the post month, I’d only take a Pony AI robotaxi to experience the technology or demonstrate it to visitors. The reason is that, up until recently, there weren’t really enough vehicles in the![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/icon/favicon-f2635c78-be70-42c4-81d8-7089352fcf99.png)Larry SalibraLarry Salibra![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_3610-dde0a020-ac79-463b-9d41-aa483ea2de83.jpeg)](https://larrysalibra.com/true-self-driving-is-freedom-from-responsibility/)
### True self-driving is freedom from responsibility
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/true-self-driving-is-freedom-from-responsibility/
Last updated: 2026-08-09T18:25:40.000Z
I was taking a Pony AI robotaxi around Shenzhen this evening with my dad. Until the post month, I'd only take a Pony AI robotaxi to experience the technology or demonstrate it to visitors. The reason is that, up until recently, there weren't really enough vehicles in the fleet in Shenzhen, so you'd often have to wait 15 or 20 minutes for a vehicle. Now the wait seems to be down to 3 to 5 minutes. That doesn't sound like a lot, but you can usually get a Didi (China's uber) that's within 1-3 minutes of your pick up location. And even that isn't fast enough to compete with Shenzhen's oversupply of taxis...there's usually an empty taxi (or taxis) waiting wherever you'd like get a ride or an empty one driving by.

The thing about showing visitors robotaxis is that you end up very focused on the uniqueness of the experience. But now that they're convenient enough to use regularly, I found for the first time tonight that I totally stopped noticing that it was anything out of the ordinary. I could relax and shut my eyes or look something up on my phone without worrying if we are going to hit something or someone or safely arrive at our destination.

I've also used retail self-driving products like Xpeng's XNGP, Tesla's FSD and others (Nio, Zeekr, etc). These are usually called "supervised self-driving" features because the driver has a legal obligation to monitor what the cars are doing and take over in the event of a problem. While the driving quality and safety seems close to that of a robotaxi, you never get that ability to relax: because you're legally and financially responsible for the car and any problems (or deaths) that it causes. 

Monitoring a self-driving car is just as much responsibility as driving it. In fact, it might be even more responsibility than driving it, because not only do you to know what's going the road and predict problems the might occur, you also have to predict which actions the car might take that could cause a problem. It's very similar to being the skipper or person in charge of a yacht. The crew's job is to drive the boat and trim the sails - the skipper's job is to monitor (and manage) - but if something happens to the boat, ultimately the skipper is responsible even if someone else was driving. With retail self-driving products, you are the skipper and the car is the driver.

To change this dynamic, besides technology improvements, which will come, there needs to be legal, financial and ethical changes such that we the cars owner are no longer responsible for any problems our cars causes. Until that happens, it doesn't matter how good the self-driving technology in our cars are, we'll still carry the burden of responsibility. And freedom from responsibility is what we ultimately want from self-driving.
### Stay sustainably
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/stay-sustainably/
Last updated: 2026-08-08T17:11:19.000Z
[Another article about another American leaving China](https://archive.ph/fjgT8?ref=larrysalibra.com). This one is a weird one though. 

> But from 2023 — a time of widespread pressures on local government finances following three years of virus restrictions and a property slowdown — he was asked instead to pay closer to market rent. Given that his visa was tied to his employment operations, as with most foreigners in China, a much more uncertain arrangement took hold.

He and his wife rolled up (flew over?) to China in their 40s and started a government subsidized boutique hotel and planned to stay here for "40 years." The local government renegotiated their contract so that the business was no longer government subsidized and it sounds like now the economics no longer work. It sounds like he'd like to stay but his stay was tied to a work visa.

What makes it weird is who moves to a country in their 40s to a country that has stopped renewing work visas at age 60 for basically forever and plans to stay for 40 years without figuring out some method besides a work visa. You'd think this would be obvious, but I've run into many older folks who run up against the 60 year old age barrier with no plan.

It's not an impossible problem to solve as there are a number of ways for foreigners to stay in China forever. There is, of course, the so-called "China Green Card" - a "permanent" residence card for the Chinese mainland. There's also permanent residence in either of China's two special administrative regions, Hong Kong or Macau. Or the good old marriage route and obtaining a family or dependent visa.

While it's not odd that a couple such as this didn't seem to think about how to stay in the country sustainably...people move to countries and run into these sorts of visa problems all the time. They're just not usually the sort of people you'd read about in the Financial Times. It makes you wonder why this "story" was published at all.
### Completely isolated == easily homogenized
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/completely-isolated-easily-homogenized/
Last updated: 2026-08-07T16:10:30.000Z
I've always wondered why Chinese people living in mainland China seem so much less propagandized than Americans. I think I finally found a possible answer while listening to [historian Darryl Cooper interviewed by Tucker Carlson](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-tucker-carlson-show/id1719657632?i=1000779786472&ref=larrysalibra.com).

> ...go back to the internal migrations in the 20th century after the Second World War, like in the United States, and the way that the internal migrations were used to break up these traditional Catholic parish communities in city after city after city around the country. And done so, I mean, we know this from documentation, that this was something that they knew what they were doing. They knew they were breaking up these communities that they saw as pools of insularity, these black boxes that the system itself couldn't really see into and didn't exactly know what was going on.

> Because when you break up, say, those parish communities, you drive everybody out to the suburbs, everybody's living within their own fence line now. They're not living in a community, they're living in their own fence line. They maybe don't even know their neighbor's names.

> You have all of these people who are completely isolated and easily homogenized over time. And, you know, they lose their distinctiveness and become, and melt into a part of a mass that you can now propagandize on a mass level in a way that, you think about it like, if you lived in a parish community back in the 1920s in the United States, you lived in an Irish parish community in New York City, and the government was, or the culture, whatever outside force it is, is trying to propagandize you in a given way that your grandfather and your priest and the elders in your community, that everybody respects, are all telling you is not true. You're not going to believe that.

Americans in the post-WWII 20th century were intentionally pushed out of their trusted communities and forced (via racial violence in cities) to live in isolating suburbs where mainstream media became their main and often only source of information. 

Chinese, in comparison, haven't been forced out of their cities or communities by violence. Every city square in the country has hundreds or thousands of aunties and uncles dancing to music every night and sharing the latest gossip. Multiple generations often live together or nearby. While there is the government-approved media, it is supplemented by communication that happens in physical, in person communities. And in densely populated cities, you can't help but encounter strangers through taxis and stores and restaurants that have their own take on the official narrative of what's happening in the world and can't wait to share it with you. Just take a Beijing taxi.
### Immigration needs to feel fair
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/immigration-needs-to-feel-fair/
Last updated: 2026-08-05T16:46:16.000Z
*Adopted from a reply to* [*Erik Voorhees and fluidvoice.btc's discussion on X re protectionism with regard to immigration*](https://x.com/ErikVoorhees/status/2085002741097599347?s=20&ref=larrysalibra.com)*:*

Nothing is ever fair in life or markets, but I respectfully submit that if a nation allows lots of immigration for one class of people or category of jobs while protecting other classes of people or categories of jobs from immigration, it's going to end up with a lot of very unhappy people.

People's feelings don't really care about your or my ideological beliefs, especially when their livelyhoods are at stake or threatened. This is especially true when they make sacrifices for their nation such as paying taxes and they feel that their nation doesn't return the favor. Not only does it not return the favor, it gives the favor to someone else who not only didn't make the sacrifice, but isn't even from the nation.

And that seems to be what is happening/has happened in the USA.

[Wrote about this](https://larrysalibra.com/paul-graham-let-in-the-programmers-but-not-the-lawyers-bankers-doctors/) back in 2014 when Paul Graham was calling for more foreign programmers (but not doctors, lawyers etc).
### Baby's last burp
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/babys-last-burp/
Last updated: 2026-08-04T17:26:08.000Z
I just sat my 3 month old son down on my leg for his post midnight feed burping. Deep in milk food coma, I tilted him forward and gently patting him on the back with a cupped hand until I heard that satisfying sound of a baby's burp. I looked at his face and found him peacefully asleep, blissfully unaware of the burping victory his dad had just achieved.

I couldn't help but to think that one day I will burp my son for the last time. When the time for the final burp comes, will I even know?
### Don't ignore the doubt
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/dont-ignore-the-doubt/
Last updated: 2026-08-04T16:49:18.000Z
There's a lot of unspoken assumptions in societies about how things work. In democracies, at least the US one in which I was raised, there was a strongly held belief that somehow voting picks the best people for the job. 

Even as early as middle school, it was pretty clear that wasn't true. One just needed to look at a middle school student government election: who chose to run, who was elected and who should have been elected. The person who got the most votes was rarely the most competent. Often they were the most popular and sometimes they had even bought that popularity by giving out free candy to their classmates.

I never really openly questioned this belief in the power of voting because everyone seemed to believe it in so strongly. To question such a strongly held belief seemed akin to blasphemy. It's not that voting isn't useful and that democracy doesn't sometimes work. It's that there's often much more than just voting that makes the system work even when it appears as if voting is doing most of the heavy lifting. That something else could be many things: shared cultural beliefs, a less visible alternative power structure, the rules about who gets to participate in the election or rules about who gets to vote.

I bring this up not to pick on democracy or voting but because there are widely-held beliefs like this where the beliefs or the justifications for the actions don't hold up to basic scrutiny or empirical observation. Instead of ignoring that lingering feeling of doubt, we should dig deeper to try to understand the bigger picture of what's really going on.
### Coldcard shows the challenge of a bitcoin-only business
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/coldcard-show-the-challenge-of-a-bitcoin-only-business/
Last updated: 2026-08-03T16:27:32.000Z
The Coldcard hack shows how hard it can be to run a bitcoin-only business. While building the hardware wallet itself might not be that expensive, it is a one-off cost. The associated ongoing software updates, paying for the updates to be professionally audited and running a credible bug bounty program to catch problems before they effect users are real ongoing, recurring costs that continue on for as long as anyone is using your wallets. Businesses that don't charge a subscription fee need to pay for these recurring costs by one-time sales of wallets.

Bitcoin-only wallet companies have both a much smaller total addressable market and one that tends to use their wallets much less frequently than the broader "crypto" ecosystem. In contrast, competitors like Ledger which target the entire crypto market, not only sell many more wallets but can also have token projects pay for the auditing of at least some of the code.

I'm not actually sure if that's what happened in this case, but there's a lesson to be learned. Suspect vendors that voluntarily restrict their addressable market, especially when they pitch a smaller market as somehow better for your security.
### Larry's Weekly Newsletter - August 2, 2026
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/newsletter/larrys-weekly-newsletter-august-2-2026/
Last updated: 2026-08-02T15:41:15.000Z
Hello friends!

I spent the past week taking family members that haven't visited China in a decade and a half around Guangdong province in the Chinese mainland. Things have really changed here in the past decade and if you haven't visited China in a while (or ever) you're missing out!

Below are my posts over the past week. Hope you enjoy!

Yours,  
Larry

[EV charging: slow mode is all you needThere are basically two modes of EV charging: Fast mode and slow mode. Fast mode is where you want to use the car, are in a rush and are waiting for the charge to complete so you can continue on a journey. This is the mode used by people on![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/icon/favicon-3dc7119c-0954-414d-a4c3-c6cc10314941.png)Larry SalibraLarry Salibra![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/thumbnail/larry-4-3f2c7a58-1357-4799-b1d7-51f308a242e4.jpg)](https://larrysalibra.com/ev-charging-slow-mode-is-all-you-need/)

[SpaceX isn’t a very good businessI didn’t invest in the SpaceX IPO and even if I wanted to, couldn’t easily do so since they blocked Hong Kong residents. It seems like Elon timed and priced it perfectly for the company. The thing is, it’s not a very good business at anything near![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/icon/favicon-3eea06e6-5559-45e5-b9e7-e33e6c099a42.png)Larry SalibraLarry Salibra![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/thumbnail/Screenshot-2026-07-28-at-11.55.06---PM-bbbbb609-4d7b-4cb4-bab9-4f36c054ea56.jpg)](https://larrysalibra.com/spacex-isnt-a-very-good-business/)

[China’s biggest EV SUV has a sense of humorOn a rainy day in China with visitors from abroad, one of the best forms of entertainment is free: test driving Chinese EVs. Today, I test drove China’s largest EV SUV, the 5.4 meter long NIO ES9 “Executive” SUV. It has 697 hp and is absolutely massive. I![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/icon/favicon-59a86d99-d5b1-4c52-8edb-254598322377.png)Larry SalibraLarry Salibra![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_3526-c406b7d4-a786-47b9-83d5-652c2e653671.jpeg)](https://larrysalibra.com/chinas-biggest-ev-suv-has-a-sense-of-humor/)

[HK taxis & buses don’t need handouts, they need EVsDiesel and LPG fuel prices in Hong Kong have massively increased since the beginning of the Iran war. As of today, the diesel price is around US$4.6 per liter...that’s approaching US$18 per gallon for the metrically challenged. To help cushion the fast change in price,![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/icon/favicon-caf86b00-b19f-4d8a-84f9-681921446f78.png)Larry SalibraLarry Salibra![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_2602-4ec0c0c5-8e19-4ffa-b5cf-705be64c181f.jpeg)](https://larrysalibra.com/hk-taxis-buses-dont-need-handouts-they-need-evs/)

[Winners compete, losers cheatBanning Chinese competition is a losing strategy.![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/icon/favicon-84cb846f-bcb5-4d62-85a9-4e2dc1777bad.png)Larry SalibraLarry Salibra![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_0622-91983cb1-5870-4baa-b91a-e4ddbc3084bd.jpeg)](https://larrysalibra.com/winners-compete-losers-cheat/)

[A Rockefeller connection in Hong Kong’s MTRAfter listening to The Knowledge Project’s episode on John D. Rockefeller over the past few days, I started reading more about him online. I knew Rockefeller’s Standard Oil was big, but didn’t know that it was so big that it was selling kerosene in China during the![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/icon/favicon-f01d8d64-de07-47fc-bc16-62b32310bd7b.png)Larry SalibraLarry Salibra![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/thumbnail/1978025-08c87272-e51f-4467-be52-9f345cbf2007.jpg)](https://larrysalibra.com/a-rockefeller-connection-in-hong-kongs-mtr/)

[We can’t choose the era we live inA Chinese friend was telling me today that many of his friends felt that the economy today was very unfair. Today isn’t like the 1990s in China where everyone was equally poor and “just” working really hard was a receipe for success they say. It sounds a lot like![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/icon/favicon-d27a2c52-8f5f-4aa0-b6d0-b4133c009d33.png)Larry SalibraLarry Salibra![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/thumbnail/larry-4-0ac77bf8-00a7-4e47-9b33-b2b21e05fe9c.jpg)](https://larrysalibra.com/we-cant-choose-the-era-we-live-in/)
### We can't choose the era we live in
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/we-cant-choose-the-era-we-live-in/
Last updated: 2026-08-02T15:11:28.000Z
A Chinese friend was telling me today that many of his friends felt that the economy today was very unfair. Today isn't like the 1990s in China where everyone was equally poor and "just" working really hard was a receipe for success they say. It sounds a lot like those who grew up in the US from my generation that complain that life isn't fair for us Millennials because American Boomers were born in the right place at the right time. This may or may not be true, but it's also totally irrelevant.

We can't choose which era we live in and there's nothing we can do to chance it. And we won't know how lucky or unlucky we were to be born when we were born until our lives are almost over. What seems to be unfair or unlucky today might be out to have actually been the opportunity of lifetime tomorrow. The future is what we make it, so let's make it a good one!
### A Rockefeller connection in Hong Kong's MTR
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/a-rockefeller-connection-in-hong-kongs-mtr/
Last updated: 2026-08-01T20:14:30.000Z
After listening to [The Knowledge Project's episode on John D. Rockefeller](https://fs.blog/knowledge-project-podcast/outliers-john-d-rockefeller/?ref=larrysalibra.com) over the past few days, I started reading more about him online. I knew Rockefeller's Standard Oil was big, but didn't know that it was so big that it was selling kerosene in China during the Qing dynasty. The trade name it used in China was Mei Foo (美孚).

The Hong Kong MTR also has a Mei Foo Station. The station was named after one of the world's largest privately financed residential estates called Mei Foo Sun Chuen. It was built by a subsidiary of what was once Standard Oil and is now ExxonMobil on land that used to host their oil terminal.

Rockefeller's fingerprints are everywhere.
### Winners compete, losers cheat
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/winners-compete-losers-cheat/
Last updated: 2026-07-31T16:58:28.000Z
I naively once believed that the American state really believed in free trade. It certainly spent a lot of time preaching the benefits of free trade in the 80s and 90s and even into the 2000s. 

When first visiting China in 2002, it struck me that there were Holiday Inns and Marriotts in Beijing, and a Starbucks in the Forbidden City which also happened to be sponsored by American Express. Chinese hotel and coffee brands were simply not as good as American ones. Thanks to free trade Chinese could also enjoy the best hotels and coffee. 

I imagined that one day Chinese companies would also be better at some things than American companies. Just like Chinese could enjoy Starbucks in the Forbidden City and stay in high quality American hotels, one day Americans would perhaps enjoy tea from a high quality yet-to-be-created tea shop chain on the National Mall in Washington, DC. Free trade would go both ways, rewarding the best producers and delivering benefits consumers around the world.

As Chinese companies started moving up the value chain and becoming more competitive though, America changed its tune. Each newly successful Chinese product or service of significance was labeled a threat to national security and accused of being run by or for the Chinese military. 

It’s gotten to the point where the USA, far from singing the tune of free trade, is now banning many of the world’s best companies and products from its shores: the best drone company, the best consumer camera company, the best network hardware company, and most recently this week, the best robot companies…all banned

Banning your competitors is not a winning strategy. The Chinese know this because foreign competition and cooperation through joint ventures helped to make their companies great. Chinese EV companies are great because their consumers have the option to buy American EVs. Chinese hotel chains have improved their game because they have to compete on their home turf with Marriott, Hyatt, IHG, Accor and other foreign brands. DJI’s and Insta360’s action cameras are excellent because if they’re not, Chinese consumers will just buy Americans GoPros.

This isn’t to say that policies might not be needed to create the circumstances where American robot companies can become competitive with Chinese robot companies, but one of those policies is not completely protecting American robot companies from any amount of Chinese competition. That’s a recipe for laziness and rent collection. Winners compete, losers cheat.
### HK taxis & buses don't need handouts, they need EVs
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/hk-taxis-buses-dont-need-handouts-they-need-evs/
Last updated: 2026-07-30T15:31:37.000Z
Diesel and LPG fuel prices in Hong Kong have massively increased since the beginning of the Iran war. As of today, the diesel price is around US$4.6 per liter...that's approaching US$18 per gallon for the metrically challenged. To help cushion the fast change in price, the Hong Kong Government offered a two month fuel subsidy for commerical vehicles which is now about to expire. 

The Hong Kong Taxi Owners’ Association, more famous for regularly complaining about competition from ride hailing vehicles, [argues that the subsidy should be extended](https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/transport/article/3362356/extend-lpg-subsidy-or-watch-costs-go-hong-kong-taxi-light-bus-drivers-urge?ref=larrysalibra.com). They complain that costs will increase for cabbies and income will fall if the taxpayer handout is ended. But this is only true for cabbies that haven't switched to newer electric cabs, only those that are driving 20+ year old Toyota Crowns. Many taxis have already switched cheaper to operate electric vehicles and deserve to be rewarded for their foresight instead of penalized by giving out handouts to their less thoughtful competitors. On top of that, Hong Kong would be better off in terms of cleaner air and quieter streets if the holdouts made the switch. The is doubly true for diesel buses and trucks which generate even more noise and pollution than much smaller taxis.

Instead of using taxpayer money to pay to keep loud and dirty vehicles on the street, end the subsidies and allow the Iran War vis-a-vis the market to encourage operators to invest in cheaper-to-operate, clean and quiet EVs.
### China's biggest EV SUV has a sense of humor
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/chinas-biggest-ev-suv-has-a-sense-of-humor/
Last updated: 2026-07-29T15:53:01.000Z
On a rainy day in China with visitors from abroad, one of the best forms of entertainment is free: test driving Chinese EVs. Today, I test drove China's largest EV SUV, the 5.4 meter long NIO ES9 "Executive" SUV. It has 697 hp and is absolutely massive. I didn't realize this was China's largest SUV EV until after the test drive...I was mostly interested in trying out NIO's famous battery swapping technology. It performed as expected, installing a new, fully charged battery in about 3 minutes.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2026/07/IMG_3525.jpeg)

The interior was incredibly comfortable...probably the most comfortable car I've ever sat in. Certainly better than any business or first class seat on any commercial airline. The handling was very nimble especially for something the size of a tank. Most impressive was the turning radius which was absolutely tiny thanks to 8+ degree rear wheel steering. You could do a complete u turn from one lane to the adjoining lane while remaining completely within the lines.

The self-driving software felt good but seemed a bit less aggressive (or less "confident") than Xpeng's XNGP, at least as I tried it last December.

My favorite "feature" wasn't really a feature at all and isn't unique to the Nio, but shared among many of the mainland market Chinese EVs: playfulness and a willingness to add fun and "unserious" features and gimmicks to the car. The Nio ES9 had a cute little robot head on the dashboard that personified the voice assistant in the car and made cute faces at you. It even turned to face you when you talk to the car from outside the car. It was totally unnecessary and serves no real useful purpose besides being fun and putting a smile on your face.

I supposed Tesla started this trend with their fart apps but Chinese EVs manufacturers have really taken this to the next level. The result is cars that don't feel corporate and soulless like they were designed by bean counters and committee. Instead, they feel like they were designed by passionate people with a sense of humor who don't take life or themselves too seriously. Because life's too short to not have a robot comedian in your car or glowing clouds in your recessed door handle (looking at you Huawei).
### SpaceX isn't a very good business
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/spacex-isnt-a-very-good-business/
Last updated: 2026-07-28T15:56:02.000Z
I didn't invest in the SpaceX IPO and even if I wanted to, couldn't easily do so since they blocked Hong Kong residents. It seems like Elon timed and priced it perfectly for the company.

The thing is, it's not a very good business at anything near its current valuation...and the market seems to be starting to agree. The price has been dumping since the IPO. 

Here's why I think it isn't a very good business:

- Going to the moon and mars is going to be loss making for decades if not generations.
- Starlink, while pretty cool, isn't close to an iPhone-size of business and there's lots of competition coming online.
- The AI business isn't competitive with the US frontier labs or the leading Chinese lab and even if it was, there's so much competition and switching costs are almost zero, it's unclear if the business would be profitable.
- Re AI data centers in space: The limit on earth-bound data centers on a global scale seems to be the ability to make gpus and memory, not space, cooling or energy. The US might have data center construction or power issues, but many other countries don't have this problem and inference doesn't need to be done on shore.
- The launch business has the biggest moat, but I suspect that will disappear within the decade as multiple US and Chinese competitors progress.

Perhaps X money will be the golden goose?

All of this said, I have no doubt though that none of this will have any impact on Elon and his success in any or all of these endeavors. He'll figure out how to make the price go up when he needs to to raise the money to achieve his goals.
### EV charging: slow mode is all you need
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/ev-charging-slow-mode-is-all-you-need/
Last updated: 2026-07-27T16:28:33.000Z
There are basically two modes of EV charging: Fast mode and slow mode. Fast mode is where you want to use the car, are in a rush and are waiting for the charge to complete so you can continue on a journey. This is the mode used by people on roadtrips, people driving long distances away from home, people who don't have the ability to charge at home or fleet vehicles that are in continuous use. 

Slow mode is when you don't need to immediately use the car and don't really care when or even if the charge completes. This is the mode used by people who charge at home, work, a hotel or the shops. 

In fast mode, you're at the charger because you need the power now. In slow mode, you're at a specific location because you want or need to be there and there just happens to also be a charger there. 

Fast mode is similar the traditional paradigm for fueling ICE cars: you are low on fuel, so you go to the gas station to quick buy some more. Slow mode is unique to EVs and frees you from having to take detours to get more energy from your vehicle.

For many people, especially those that can charge at home or work, slow mode is really all you need.
### Larry's Weekly Newsletter - July 26, 2026
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/newsletter/larnewsletter-jul-26-2026/
Last updated: 2026-07-26T14:38:40.000Z
Hello friends,

We are just drying off from last night's typhoon Noul here in Hong Kong. It was 3rd closest typhoon to hit Hong Kong this century...but otherwise uneventful.  
  
Below, please find my writings from the past week. I hope you enjoy them!  
  
Yours,  
Larry

[Ben Thompson is wrong: US frontier labs are right to be panickingAmerican tech blogger Ben Thompson writes today that US frontier labs should not be panicking about Chinese open source models like Kimi K3, despite them being competitive with the best models from American labs. We can “distill” (ha!) his post down to two main arguments: Anthropic and OpenAI likely have![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/icon/favicon-b18ed15a-bab6-4f33-9867-c13d2535d87b.png)Larry SalibraLarry Salibra![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/thumbnail/scared-claude-code-c0299f1f-6584-4c61-b8e4-b757c67c623c.jpg)](https://larrysalibra.com/ben-thompson-is-wrong-us-frontier-labs-are-right-to-be-panicking/)

[The freedom of public transitI spent the last 3 weeks in Zhuhai, the city in mainland China across the river delta from Hong Kong and Shenzhen, just north of (also technically west, east and south of) Macau. With the advent of the Northbound Travel for Hong Kong Vehicles scheme, car owners, Zhuhai has become![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/icon/favicon-73c633bc-fcd2-45fa-935b-324ab77d309e.png)Larry SalibraLarry Salibra![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_0820-e9e008b4-1559-403f-8f0c-abdc8d44e6bf.jpeg)](https://larrysalibra.com/the-freedom-of-public-transit/)

[800v vs 400v EVs...does it really matter?Headline EV charging power specs are misleading and 800v vs 400v really matters.![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/icon/favicon-17d65649-18b5-4a6c-939b-28f74b587688.png)Larry SalibraLarry Salibra![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_3278-3a026fd7-f967-4565-9f25-f41705e4435a.jpeg)](https://larrysalibra.com/800v-vs-400v-evs-does-it-really-matter/)

[Farewell BitMEXHong Kong-based BitMEX announced it’s closing its doors on the 23rd of September of this year. I had the good fortune to know the founders and follow their journey from before they launched in December of 2014\. It was amazing watching them go from an idea to a![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/icon/favicon-ac82e4af-a974-48ef-83ae-af377e369b89.png)Larry SalibraLarry Salibra![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/thumbnail/Screenshot-2026-07-23-at-11.59.08---PM-1ee57841-557d-479a-88d8-60549126aa2d.png)](https://larrysalibra.com/farewell-bitmex/)

[Indoor air in China...better, but still not smoke-freeThe high rate of cigarette smoking in mainland China has been one of its major downsides for the \~23 years I’ve been around. And the progress on this has been very slow. I’ve heard theories about this having to do with the tax revenue generated by the State![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/icon/favicon-60146228-9a14-4f82-a212-d82b39ad794a.png)Larry SalibraLarry Salibra![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_3301-e53b5ed7-5de1-4a81-b525-a8ac504872ce.jpeg)](https://larrysalibra.com/indoor-air-in-china-better-but-still-not-smoke-free/)

[Purchasing a product is not a political statementIn the past week, I’ve come across half a dozen comments saying that the poster wants to use the search engine Kagi but cannot in good conscience because Kagi apparently sources some results from the Russian search engine Yandex. To spend $5 a month on Kagi would mean the![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/icon/favicon-73848879-e32b-4376-bca4-512138d7b3b2.png)Larry SalibraLarry Salibra![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/thumbnail/larry-4-6885d934-76b8-41e1-881c-a172f5dd5fc5.jpg)](https://larrysalibra.com/purchasing-a-product-is-not-a-political-statement/)

[Western policy wonks intentionally “misunderstand” ChinaChina energy expert David Fishman penned a masterful analysis and refutation of the theory that China is closing the path that earlier generations of developing countries took to industrialization. This theory is all the rage in western policy circles and most recently espoused in a wildly shared article in Foreign![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/icon/favicon-ab8f8262-bb8d-4868-a790-2db234a2bae5.png)Larry SalibraLarry Salibra![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/thumbnail/larry-4-a832c573-54ed-4def-a43b-8acb806d0d1e.jpg)](https://larrysalibra.com/western-policy-w-intentionally-misunderstands-china/)
### Western policy wonks intentionally "misunderstand" China
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/western-policy-w-intentionally-misunderstands-china/
Last updated: 2026-07-26T14:17:52.000Z
China energy expert [David Fishman](https://x.com/pretentiouswhat?ref=larrysalibra.com) penned [a masterful analysis and refutation of the theory that China is closing the path that earlier generations of developing countries took to industrialization](https://www.feelingthestones.com/p/china-is-not-pulling-up-the-ladder?ref=larrysalibra.com). This theory is all the rage in western policy circles and most recently espoused in a wildly shared article in Foreign Affairs. David's article is well worth a read for anyone interested in China and its development.

David's article is a good faith effort to address the arguments made by people holding this theory, the facts are he sees them and come to a conclusion. The problem is that the people espousing this theory are not operating in the realm of good faith and facts. Instead, Western dialogue starts with the conclusion they have in mind- "China is a problem. China is bad." - and cherry picks or invents facts to concoct a narrative that supports their conclusion.

The high-level issue is that US is in a fiscal bind that everyone has known about for decades, spending more money than it can afford thanks to the power of the fiat money printer. For decades, China enabled Americans' extravagant lifestyles, accepting pieces of green paper for real world physical goods created by hard work and sweat. But the price Americans paid was not just their toilet paper fiat money, but also the hollowing out of American industrial capacity and capability. The country is like the college student that had a blast skipping class and partying throughout the semester only to find reality hit when faced with the final exam. American invented the rules of the game and China played the game and won. But instead of manning up and taking the F on the exam and studying harder next time, the US is trying to blow up the classroom.

Instead of soberly analyzing the situation and the possible paths forward, the western propaganda class generates plausible-sounding, highly-intellectual policy cope whose main goal is to reassure elites that they are definitely not the baddies and to generate support for ultimately self-owning policies. They don't want to understand China...if they did, they would be living here and not in places like Washington DC. Drinking one's on kool-aid isn't a winning strategy.
### Purchasing a product is not a political statement
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/purchasing-a-product-is-not-a-political-statement/
Last updated: 2026-07-25T15:39:44.000Z
In the past week, I’ve come across half a dozen comments saying that the poster wants to use the search engine Kagi but cannot in good conscience because Kagi apparently sources some results from the Russian search engine Yandex. To spend $5 a month on Kagi would mean the commenter is supporting Russia’s war effort in Ukraine. 

Just this evening, I came across similar comments advocating against the VPN Mullvad because apparently one of the founders personally donated some money to a small Swedish political party the commenter does not like.

Analyzing the political implications of every small transaction you make sounds like a very tiring way to live.

My personal policy is this: Purchasing a product does not mean you support the politics, views or actions of the producer or their supply chain or their supply chain’s supply.

If I only purchased things from people I entirely agreed with, there would be nothing I could buy and I would starve to death.
### Indoor air in China...better, but still not smoke-free
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/indoor-air-in-china-better-but-still-not-smoke-free/
Last updated: 2026-07-24T14:35:51.000Z
The high rate of cigarette smoking in mainland China has been one of its major downsides for the \~23 years I’ve been around. And the progress on this has been very slow. I've heard theories about this having to do with the tax revenue generated by the State Tobacco Monopoly, but don't follow the policy area closely enough to know if this is true.

One area where things have actually improved is - in my experience - the rates of indoor smoking. Two decades ago, people smoked pretty much anywhere except for on airplanes...perhaps they believed it would crash the plane. Over the intervening years though, indoor spaces have slowly but surely became increasingly smoke-free. I say increasingly because it wasn't like one day there was smoking, a law was passed and the next day the same place was magically or via heavy penalities and strict enforcement smoke-free. But instead, the indoor places it was socially unacceptable to smoke slowly increased. And I don't mean on a discrete venue-by-venue basis - often this process was noticeable even within the same venue.

At the beginning, everyone would walk into the venue smoking and not think twice. Then at some point, some portion of the people that walked in smoking would think after a few steps "hey maybe I shouldn't be smoking here" and then put out their cigarette. It wasn't that everyone did this, just that the proportion of people doing this slowly and organically increased. Sometimes this was even added aided by signs, or occasionally, a staff member with patience of steel suggesting that perhaps not smoking in the venue might be appreciated. 

While this first behavior was slowly spreading, a new behavior would organically emerge where these same people started thinking "hey, maybe I should just stop smoking BEFORE I enter the venue" or "hey, if I'm going to smoke, maybe is should do it only in the bathroom or only in the stalls of the bathroom.

Fast forward to today, and in certain areas of mainland China, I'm impressed by how much less frequently I encounter indoor smoking EVEN IN THE MEN'S BATHROOM. Nicer areas in cities like Zhuhai and Shanghai are particularly impressive. That said it doesn't seem to be strictly tied to economic development or city tier level as some top tier cities like Shenzhen, are decidedly behind their counterparts when it comes to indoor smoking.
### Farewell BitMEX
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/farewell-bitmex/
Last updated: 2026-07-23T16:30:35.000Z
Hong Kong-based [BitMEX](https://www.bitmex.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com) announced it's closing its doors on the 23rd of September of this year. I had the good fortune to know the founders and follow their journey from before they launched in December of 2014\. It was amazing watching them go from an idea to a product launch and struggle through the process of finding product-market fit, before eventually rocketing to success. At one point they had daily trading volume regularly in excess of US$1 trillion.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2026/07/EFEgHopUEAAV4ad.png)

Few will remember today, but BitMEX launched in the same year as the massive MtGox hack. In the shadow of that, they made it rule number 1 to not lose the customer's bitcoin. And they never did.

Unlike many of the VC-funded competitors who ran on a playbook of regulatory capture and state protection from day one, the BitMEX ran the business on their own terms and bowed-down to no one. 

This eventually led to the Biden deep state going after the founders and the company, forcing them into a plea bargain for a made up crime in a place they didn't even do business. While they stayed out of jail, kept their money and the company, and even eventually had their names cleared by the Trump administration, I can only imagine the amount of stress they were under during this ordeal. 

While the business never recovered, the respect the founders earned for doing things their own way, will live on forever. Yahtzee.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2026/07/Screenshot-2026-07-24-at-12.05.47---AM.png)
### 800v vs 400v EVs...does it really matter?
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/800v-vs-400v-evs-does-it-really-matter/
Last updated: 2026-07-22T16:57:10.000Z
EV and charging infrastructure manufacturers like to list the maximum charging rate the vehicle will accept or the charger will put out, but in the wild, it is very difficult to hit those numbers. 

Why is that? 

Let's take a look at what determines charging rate. There are actually three things that need to for a car to charge at its maximum rate:

1) the battery needs to be in such a condition that it can accept the max charging rate...this is some combination of having the correct state of charge, temperature and other conditions.

2) the charger need to be able to provide a high enough voltage

3) the charger needs to be able to deliver that voltage at a high-enough amperage

Battery conditions are something that the driver of the vehicle has control over, so this post will examine the other two.

I'll use my experience with the Xpeng g6 in and around Hong Kong as an example. The Xpeng g6, has a 800v charging system and claims to be able to charge at up to 451 kw...10-90% in 12 minutes.

In reality, I've never found a charger in Hong Kong or mainland China that both has a CCS2 plug that works with my vehicle AND can charge at a voltage of more than about 650v. Even Xpeng's self-branded charger in Hong Kong won't actually charge at 800v. I've also never found a charger that will deliver more than 400 amps at any voltage. Because of this, the max charging rate I've hit in the wild is only about 400 amps x 600v... roughly \~240 kw. 

If you're going to have trouble finding DC fast chargers that can max out your charging rate anyways, then it doesn't really matter if your car has an older, slower 400v system instead of a 800v, right?

Wrong. An EV with a 800v system will still usually charge faster than an EV with a 400v system even if the charger won't max out either car's charging capabilities. I started noticing this when I was charging next a Hong Kong-registered Tesla capable of charging at 250 kw in Zhuhai at chargers that maxed out at 150 kw. 

I pulled up next the Tesla that was already in the process of charging, completely charged my Xpeng and left while the Tesla was still parked there charging. Why was my Xpeng charging so much faster than the Tesla on a charger that was far from maxing out either car's capabilities? What exactly was going on?  
  
In this location, the chargers only put out a max of 250 amps and \~600v which meant I was only able to charge at 150 kw. The Tesla was also subject to the same 250 amp limit, but also due to its 400v architecture, it also self-imposed a 400v limit. This meant that at 250 amps it could only charge at around 96 kw...much less than its headline max charging power capability and materially slower than 800v architecture Xpeng.

There are two ways to increase the amount of power delivered by a charging...increasing the voltage or increasing the amperage. When one of the two properties reach their limit, the only option to further increase power is to increase the other property.   
  
In our example, the Xpeng's 800v architecture was able to take the maximum amount of both voltage and amperage that the charger could deliver. The Tesla, in contrast, with its 400v architecture was only able to accept the maximum amperage the charger could deliver but unable to accept the maximum voltage the charger offered. 

Even though neither the 800v nor 400v vehicles in our example got remotely close to maxing out their headline charging capability, the 800v vehicle still significantly out performed the 400v vehicle. So, yes, I'd 800v vs 400v does matter.
### The freedom of public transit
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/the-freedom-of-public-transit/
Last updated: 2026-07-21T15:36:44.000Z
I spent the last 3 weeks in Zhuhai, the city in mainland China across the river delta from Hong Kong and Shenzhen, just north of (also technically west, east and south of) Macau. With the advent of the [Northbound Travel for Hong Kong Vehicles scheme](https://www.hzmbqfs.gov.hk/en/?ref=larrysalibra.com), car owners, Zhuhai has become a popular destination. It’s a 90 minute drive from most urban areas of Hong Kong and only about 55 minutes from Hong Kong’s airport.

The scheme allows individual owners of Hong Kong registered private vehicles to drive into the mainland via the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macao Bridge Port (located in Zhuhai) without the expense cost of procuring a "regular quota" for a second vehicle license plate with entry permission at one of the much more convenient Shenzhen land crossings. 

Zhuhai is a unique city in the region with its lack of urban rail transit. While there is an intercity spur of the national high speed rail network, it’s not very useful to those getting around the city. Although there are public buses, and bike paths everywhere, ride hailing is inexpensive and many people have cars making it really a car-first city. 

Driving on a daily basis was a bit of a novelty to me. While I do drive regularly in Hong Kong, it isn’t something I really need to do. In Zhuhai, it felt like something I had to do. Besides roadtrips, where driving was the main point short trips abroad visiting family, driving daily out of necessity isn’t something I’d really done I since high school living in the USA.

Towards the end of my stay, after weeks of rain and squinting in downpours, the novelty started wearing off. Having to find parking spots in massive multi-floor garages, then find my car again when I’m ready to leave, figure out the garages’s custom vibe coded mini app for payment, etc, really started to wear on me. But since ride hailing is cheap and convenient, I could leave the car in the parking lot and have someone else drive me.

And now, I’m back in Hong Kong. After driving back across the bridge, I decided to give the car and its faithful driver (me!) a break and take public transit. It’s hard to explain the feeling of freedom I feel on Hong Kong public transit. Buses are clean and comfortable and reliable. And Hong Kong’s rail transit, the MTR is a truly pleasant place to be.

Public transit freedom is a unique type of freedom. It's a freedom that, ironically, comes from the constraints and regularity of scheduled service. The freedom doesn't come from just not having to drive…I don’t have to drive when I’m in an uber or taxi or self driving car either. Instead, it’s freedom from the mental load of being responsible for and committed to the vehicle and its destination. And the freedom from having to decide exactly where I’m going before I start going there. Sure, I might be start out going to a certain MTR station, but I don’t have to get off there. I could hop off the train a station before or a station after. Either way, the train doesn't care...the train is going to go where it’s going to go, with or without me. And that makes me truly free.
### Ben Thompson is wrong: US frontier labs are right to be panicking
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/ben-thompson-is-wrong-us-frontier-labs-are-right-to-be-panicking/
Last updated: 2026-07-20T17:23:34.000Z
American tech blogger Ben Thompson writes today that US frontier labs [should not be panicking about Chinese open source models](https://stratechery.com/2026/whos-afraid-of-chinese-models/?ref=larrysalibra.com) like Kimi K3, despite them being competitive with the best models from American labs. We can "distill" (ha!) his post down to two main arguments:

> Anthropic and OpenAI likely have among the lowest costs per unit of frontier-quality intelligence, thanks to model capability, serving scale, and token efficiency. 

The first is that US frontier labs are "likely" the cheapest providers of inference and, because of that, what they lose in pricing power due to Chinese model competition, they can make up in volume.

> It’s striking the extent to which Claude Code and Codex are proving to be quite sticky; whichever harness you start working with is likely to be the one you stick with, and that figures to be even more the case with non-technical users.

The second is that US frontier labs now own, and will continue to own, the user relationships because of the "stickiness" of their tools.

Thompson is wrong on both points.

## Unit costs

Let's examine his first point about supposedly low US frontier labs unit costs. While US frontier labs likely have more chips than Chinese labs, everything else in their token supply chain: electricity, data center construction costs, etc, cost significantly more than the equivalent commodities in China today. And this is before Huawei's latest chips are shipping in volume.

Today, all Chinese unit cost inputs except chips are cheaper, so how likely is it that the US frontier labs have the lowest unit costs today? And as alternatives to US chips come online, like Huawei's latest chips, increasing market supply, how likely will it be that US frontier labs have the lowest unit costs in the future?

## Stickiness

His second point, that tool stickiness will save US frontier labs is unconvincing to anyone who has actually been using AI instead of just writing about it. Take the examples he gives: "Claude Code" and "Codex." As any reader of Hacker News will tell you, Claude Code is already yesterday....in fact, it's last week. Yesterday was Codex, and Cursor is ancient history. Today, all the cool kids are using Opencode, which makes it trivial to switch between models and inference providers. But even when developers were still using Claude Code, they quickly figured out unapproved ways (often with Claude's help) use Anthropic's app with non-Anthropic, 3rd party models and inference providers. And often you couldn't even tell the difference.

And if this wasn't convincing enough: right now, literally as I write this, there's an [article on the front page of Hacker News with over 200 comments telling us why we should all stop using Opencode](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48978112&ref=larrysalibra.com) with dozens of comments pitching Opencode alternatives. I've never heard of most of the suggestions, but I would be entirely unsurprised if one of them turns out to be the hottest, must-use tool that absolutely everyone in the developer community is using tomorrow. 

The situation is the same with non-technical users who are seriously using AI. Today, they're using Claude Cowork but yesterday they were all using Manus. And before that, they were using Perplexity. These are professionals or prosumers trying to get an edge in their jobs or in their lives, they're willing to spend money and they jump ship as soon as something slightly better appears. 

Sure, the mass market consumer user who asks "AI" a question a few times a week might have downloaded ChatGPT or Doubao when they first heard of AI and never switched to anything else. But those users usually don't pay much if anything at all and will hardly bail the labs out of their sinking ships.

Tool stickiness will save US frontier labs. Right.

## US frontier labs are structurally screwed

Investors invested ungodly amounts of money in these labs because they told them they have some secret sauce and it turns out that the secret sauce was just ketchup. Everyone, [even Chinese food delivery apps](https://www.longcatai.org/?ref=larrysalibra.com) have the LLM ketchup. Not only do US frontier labs not have any secret sauce, they're building businesses where the largest input in their unit production is electricity in a country that has for decades been unable to build more electricity production. These US labs made massive capital commitments based on the assumption of future levels of profit that aren't ever going to come. And that's before you really dig down into the [leveraged, financial house of cards](https://www.groundbrkr.com/p/the-second-derivative-why-no-one?ref=larrysalibra.com) they've built for themselves.  
  
US frontier labs are right to be scared. And what do US businesses do when they're scared? Lobby for a government bailout.

I'm going to go out on a limb here (okay it's not a limb...it's more of bridge...a strong Chinese-made bridge, not [one of those American ones that gets knocked down and never rebuilt](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis%5FScott%5FKey%5FBridge%5Fcollapse?ref=larrysalibra.com)) make three predictions:  

1. US frontier labs will not be saved by their unit costs or tool stickiness.
2. US frontier labs will not be "frontier" for much longer.
3. China will become the inference capital of the world: the highest quality, largest quantity and least expensive producer of tokens. This will happen over the next few years either in the absence of government regulations preventing US companies from using Chinese inference providers, or in spite of them.

Let's watch.
### Larry's Weekly Newsletter - July 19, 2026
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/newsletter/larrys-weekly-newsletter-july-19-2026/
Last updated: 2026-07-19T15:58:22.000Z
Hi friends!

Long time no write! Now that AI is taking over the world, it seems more important than ever for us (you included!) to write regularly so that we do not find ourselves among the [Write-Nots](https://paulgraham.com/writes.html?ref=larrysalibra.com).

In accordance with my [AI policy for this blog/newsletter](https://larrysalibra.com/ai/), all writing is lovingly human-crafted on my keyboard or iPhone. I edit everything myself and don't do silly things like "ask GPT how this could be better" or "claude fix my blog post."

Selfishly, I'm doing this first for me...to improve my thinking and writing. But I also keep you, my friends, in mind and hope that you will occasionally find what I write interesting.

I will periodically (tentatively every Sunday) email you with what I've written the previous week (or since I last emailed you). If you don't like this, feel free to unsubscribe. I won't be offended!

I hope that this email finds you (or your AI Email Agent) well, in good health and in even better spirits. Until next time!

Humanly yours,  
Larry

[A Letter to Hong Kong’s Financial Secretary on the 2025-26 BudgetMy open letter to Hong Kong’s Financial Secretary on the 2025-26 Budget.![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/icon/favicon-31a515dd-6fe2-4a42-86d3-290011a865c0.png)Larry SalibraLarry Salibra![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/thumbnail/hkbudget2025-ac5b6ba0-7a2a-4b88-b128-ab17a4c02bf5.jpg)](https://larrysalibra.com/a-letter-to-hong-kongs-financial-secretary-25-26/)

[What to make? A sandwich?AI makes it really easy to build things until you realize you don’t know what to build. You may think you know what you want to build until you start to build it, only to find out that not only have you not defined some of the requirements of![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/icon/favicon-305a871c-c5e6-42fa-aeae-79eaeac2e7e5.png)Larry SalibraLarry Salibra![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/thumbnail/larry-4-296b164c-9ec0-4b94-ae56-cb63f546638b.jpg)](https://larrysalibra.com/what-to-make-a-sandwich/)

[Bryan Johnson blood tests in a Chinese public hospitalI wanted to get some Bryan Johnson-inspired blood tests for a baseline of biomarkers. He sells an expensive testing service that, as far as I know, isn’t available outside of the USA. And getting blood tests in Hong Kong means going to an expensive private lab or expensive![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/icon/favicon-41e67dae-1cce-475d-8124-288219e0d8db.png)Larry SalibraLarry Salibra![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/thumbnail/bloodtest-f7e04894-53e0-4db7-a613-9932284984d0.jpg)](https://larrysalibra.com/blood-tests-in-a-chinese-public-hospital/)

[QR code menu enabled phone addictionPhone addiction in mainland China seems to be much higher than the already ridiculous levels it is in other places in the world. It’s very common in restaurants and coffee shops for tables of people to be ignoring each other and their kids bent over their phones. I suspect![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/icon/favicon-e766da61-3212-4057-b80b-932c07cd2f00.png)Larry SalibraLarry Salibra![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/thumbnail/larry-4-1aecfb25-98d6-4b4f-89e7-57fb948375b6.jpg)](https://larrysalibra.com/qr-code-menu-enabled-phone-addiction/)

[Apple is winning the AI raceI don’t think people realize how easy it is to make use of on-device AI models in an app on most of Apple’s devices shipped in the past two years. And I’m talking about the currently shipping 26 versions of iOS and macOS...not some upcoming![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/icon/favicon-eb399ae3-860e-4854-9711-e24bbed86215.png)Larry SalibraLarry Salibra![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/thumbnail/Screenshot-2026-07-13-at-11.46.53---PM-e0a10f22-cc46-48db-8cea-321c22934924.png)](https://larrysalibra.com/apple-is-winning-the-ai-race/)

[The big bad Chinese subsidiesThis is in reply to a thread on X where Matt Stoller claims that 100% of China’s success is due to state subsidies. The “China subsidized its way to success” is really just a cope shibboleth that some Americans repeat without thinking to signal group unity across political lines.![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/icon/favicon-0436a3b4-26e1-4bab-8ba3-dd0570a7225b.png)Larry SalibraLarry Salibra![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/thumbnail/Screenshot-2026-07-14-at-1.32.27---AM-1a27d3d4-461c-4da1-8349-f17b21652ca7.png)](https://larrysalibra.com/the-big-bad-chinese-subsidies/)

[Rudd on Xi...more Western naval-gazingI listened to Ezra Klein’s interview with former Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd about Xi Jinping. Rudd speaks Chinese. He served in the Australian foreign service where he met Xi earlier in his career while he was in Xiamen. Rudd later went on to do a PhD at Oxford![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/icon/favicon-922cc585-bedc-4115-a827-cb8b671c3211.png)Larry SalibraLarry Salibra![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/thumbnail/9394cd1fe0194fb56f4ad1ff2d59f75a-81c9b757-bacd-4978-a250-f7f472b2e142.jpeg)](https://larrysalibra.com/rudd-on-xi-more-western-naval-gazing/)

[LLMs, nationalism & open sourceInkling came out yesterday - an open source LLM by an American firm. It’s supposedly not bad but also not notably good outside of its multi-modal support for audio compared to the leading open source LLMs which just happen to be created by Chinese firms. What was more interesting![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/icon/favicon-059e6e74-d01e-4f83-a5e8-8dcff81018e0.png)Larry SalibraLarry Salibra![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/thumbnail/Screenshot-2026-07-17-at-1.39.27---AM-56baa002-ca35-4283-b995-501494445f2f.png)](https://larrysalibra.com/llms-nationalism-open-source/)

[Tesla is juicing its China salesIf you haven’t heard, Chinese EVs are amazing and they’re taking over the world. And as someone who was just in the market for an EV this spring in Hong Kong, I can assure you that Chinese EVs are excellent: better features, nicer interiors, better ride, charge MUCH![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/icon/favicon-de158e04-8d60-4ce8-b71b-914e4dd15816.png)Larry SalibraLarry Salibra![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/thumbnail/IMG_3142-50cb2208-bede-4977-a29f-b03add4a0f7f.jpeg)](https://larrysalibra.com/tesla-is-juicing-its-china-sales/)

[Low standards for white Chinese speakers“Your Chinese is very good...for a white guy.” I strongly identify with this statement. Chinese is a great language to learn for many reasons. One such reason is that native Chinese speakers are incredibly supportive of you, no matter how little effort you’ve put in or progress you’![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/icon/favicon-c55c4aef-4f78-41b4-a43c-f532e0a0ec08.png)Larry SalibraLarry Salibra![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/thumbnail/Screenshot-2026-07-18-at-11.48.41---PM-498d3ba2-3ca2-49cb-bd17-ac03e531a925.png)](https://larrysalibra.com/low-standards-for-white-chinese-speakers/)

[A phone is a whiskey flask“a phone is a whiskey flask and humanity is drunk out of our collective minds.” -me on X There’s a lot to say on this topic especially with regards to the implications for things many once took for granted in their societies. For now, I’ll just say that![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/icon/favicon-a2cf2a47-ca3b-4c98-97bb-8613d7875f95.png)Larry SalibraLarry Salibra![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/thumbnail/1906242e-f12a-40a4-8d77-8e22bc0802c8-7d763022-2122-488c-ad40-666f51178556.jpg)](https://larrysalibra.com/a-phone-is-a-whiskey-flask/)
### A phone is a whiskey flask
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/a-phone-is-a-whiskey-flask/
Last updated: 2026-07-19T15:33:53.000Z
> "a phone is a whiskey flask and humanity is drunk out of our collective minds."  
> \-[me on X](https://x.com/larrysalibra/status/2078847243902452213?s=20&ref=larrysalibra.com)

There's a lot to say on this topic especially with regards to the implications for things many once took for granted in their societies. For now, I'll just say that I've been trying to dilute the whiskey in my flask. I've deleted the social media and news apps from my phone and used content blocking to block their corresponding websites. I've also turned the screen on my whiskey flask to grayscale in the hope that It makes it less addicting. 

So far so good. I'm still driving under the influence but at least I can now see straight.
### Low standards for white Chinese speakers
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/low-standards-for-white-chinese-speakers/
Last updated: 2026-07-18T15:53:56.000Z
["Your Chinese is very good...for a white guy."](https://hanfeizi.substack.com/p/chapter-3-the-art-of-war) 

I strongly identify with this statement.

Chinese is a great language to learn for many reasons. One such reason is that native Chinese speakers are incredibly supportive of you, no matter how little effort you've put in or progress you've made. If you can even manage a totally flat, tone dead "NEE HOW," the average person you run into in China will start drowning you in compliments about how very good your Chinese is. Part of this is them just being polite, but a large part of this is their cultural expectation that no one who is not East Asian-looking will speak Chinese. This is because everyone around them is Chinese and almost none of the non-Chinese they have ever encountered spoke Chinese. And all the media and entertainment they consume strengthens their expectations.

This is very different from the linguistic expectations in English speaking countries where many of we white people grew up, surrounded by people of all races and cultural origins that all spoke English.

The thing about speaking Mandarin (or Canto or any other Chinese dialect for that matter) as white person is that there are very few of us...we are the exception not the norm. And being the exception by definition makes us exceptional. It has nothing to do with our ability or lack of ability. It's simply a numbers games.

When they compliment me, they are saying "your Chinese is very good compared to what I expected from a white person which was that you are unable to speak Chinese and illiterate." They are not saying "your Chinese is very good compared to a native Chinese speaker who studied at Tsinghua."

So while I properly "accept" the compliments about how amazing my Chinese is every day by modestly disagreeing and suggesting that, instead, my Chinese is at best "ok" or that it "gets the job done", as is culturally expected, I, myself, do not judge myself against their low standards. 

And what exactly are my standards?

I've been complimented on my Chinese ability at least a half a dozen times a day, every day of my life for going on two and a half decades. On the one hand, I've very happy with my Chinese ability for the amount of time I spent studying it...which was part time for 3 semesters in university, \~6 months studying abroad in China and 2 months studying Chinese in Washington, DC. My Chinese was good enough to set up and run a company in Guangzhou for a few years with no English speaking staff, read (and negotiate) contracts and manage a software development team. I used to post in Chinese regularly on Weibo and at one point had a decent following. And back in my younger years, when I still had hair and was still an American, I even occasionally [wrote blog posts in Chinese](https://www.lizhaojing.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com). (AI didn't exist!) I can also speak enough Cantonese for daily life in Guangdong and Hong Kong and, unlike many native Cantonese speakers, read and write it. 

But all of that notwithstanding, my Chinese is still very far from where I'd like it to be. While I'm fine at reading news and legal documents, reading fiction is a struggle because my descriptive vocabulary is weak and I don't understand all of the cultural allusions. My chengyu is also not good. I also haven't read any of the classic books that all Chinese speakers should read. Overall, my Chinese language ability nowhere close to that of a college educated. I'd like to someday get to the level of a native speaker who is not only a native speaker, but a well-educated native speaker.

One might even say I think that my Chinese is very good...for a white guy.
### Tesla is juicing its China sales
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/tesla-is-juicing-its-china-sales/
Last updated: 2026-07-17T16:00:53.000Z
If you haven't heard, Chinese EVs are amazing and they're taking over the world. And as someone who was just in the market for an EV this spring in Hong Kong, I can assure you that Chinese EVs are excellent: better features, nicer interiors, better ride, charge MUCH faster, much less expensive and no expensive subscriptions or software "activation" fees. 

Then why is Tesla still selling so many cars in China? The answer is two words: FREE MONEY!

When I was shopping for a car in Hong Kong, all of the Chinese EVs dealers required that I book a test drive days in advance. The Tesla showroom, in contrast, let me do a walk in test drive because they weren't busy. They also offered me something none of the Chinese EV dealers did: 7 year financing at 0.99% interest per year. This made the Tesla which had a higher sticker price, actually less expensive because HKD (which is pegged to the USD) loses value at much faster than 0.99% a year.

And they've got an even better deal in mainland China. 5 year interest-free financing. I asked a friend who recently bought a new car in the mainland and he told me that Tesla was the only one using their own capital to offer customer financing. Chinese EV brands didn't offer their own financing instead directing customers who wanted to borrow money to buy a car to commercial banks.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2026/07/IMG_3142-1.jpeg)

Taken in a Zhuhai Tesla showroom in July 2026

I'm not an auto market analyst and I'm just speculating here, but it sounds a lot like Tesla's China financing is letting them book a lot more sales than they otherwise would if customers had to get their own financing and pay for it. Let's see how long the sales last!
### LLMs, nationalism & open source
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/llms-nationalism-open-source/
Last updated: 2026-07-16T17:39:39.000Z
[Inkling](https://thinkingmachines.ai/news/introducing-inkling/?ref=larrysalibra.com) came out yesterday - an open source LLM by an American firm. It’s supposedly not bad but also not notably good outside of its multi-modal support for audio compared to the leading open source LLMs which just happen to be created by Chinese firms.

What was more interesting than the actual model was the reaction in the American tech world upon its release. Suddenly, American developers were in feeds and comments everywhere cheering on the “smartest American open source LLM.” 

Since when did people start caring about the nationality of corporations spending their own money to give you free, open source software? Did any Americans care that for two decades that the namesake author of the world’s best open source operating system was not American but Finnish? 

Why do American tech people feel the need to cheer on national LLM development anyways…like it’s some sort of sports team or religion? What’s the underlying motivation for this...is it emotional? or insecurity? or something else? Why does the thought of China possibly making a better LLM seem to present an existential crisis to them?

I’m just a observer from afar so I won’t speculate on their reasons and instead only observe that Chinese developers don’t seem to have this weird nationalist mind virus with regards to LLMs that Americans and some other Western developers have suddenly contracted. At least not to the same degree.

In fact, a Chinese developer I had lunch with this past weekend in Zhuhai told me that while he uses a Codex with Deepseek at work, he’d much rather be using Claude Code with Anthropic's models. Unfortunately, his company finds Anthropic too expensive.

Chinese people in general don’t see American technological successes as an existential threat probably because they've lived in a world of US technological dominance for much of their lives. In contrast, they are often among American technology's biggest fans. Just ask anyone in China what they think of Tesla, SpaceX or Elon! Or Apple! They love them!
### Rudd on Xi...more Western naval-gazing
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/rudd-on-xi-more-western-naval-gazing/
Last updated: 2026-07-15T22:03:30.000Z
I listened to [Ezra Klein's interview with former Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd about Xi Jinping](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-ezra-klein-show/id1548604447?i=1000776737823&ref=larrysalibra.com). Rudd speaks Chinese. He served in the Australian foreign service where he met Xi earlier in his career while he was in Xiamen. Rudd later went on to do a PhD at Oxford which seems to have been mostly focused on reading Xi's books.

I expected more nuanced and insightful views on China from someone such as Rudd with his academic and foreign service background. Instead, Rudd mostly repeated the normal Western talking points about China: OMG the repression of dissent and OMG the civil society repression and "wen invade Taiwan" OMG the oversupply of high quality goods and OMG there's not enough domestic consumption. Things that Western audiences and politicians in general are absolutely obsessed with, but are really not among the most interesting things about China.

Rudd insinuated that somehow things are not going well in China now. But things were going well before Xi and that he somehow "derailed" China's progress. As someone who's lived in China throughout that entire time, it is really hard for me to square that with the reality I see living in and traveling around the country. And looking at the live situations of friends I've known for decades. 

In contrast, I'm constantly shocked at how amazing the quality of life, quality of products and services and quality of the people in the Chinese mainland have become...and not just in Tier 1 cities. Even the goverment bureaucracy has become polite, efficient, and professional...and they certainly provide better customer service than US Amazon!

I'd had hoped someone like Rudd who supposedly knows Xi so well could instead shed some light on how things work so well and what Xi's special sauce is for being such a successful and results-oriented leader. Because talent leadership skill like Xi's is very rare in this world...and he's clearly very talented. The world would be a much better place if the world had more leaders like him that could deliver such impressive results for their people.

Klein's interview of Rudd felt sort of like Rudd was someone claiming to be an expert on Steve Jobs and spending the whole time talking about how Jobs failed because the revolutionary products he created never ran Windows. You may really like Windows and think it's much better than macOS, but that doesn't mean there's nothing to learn from Steve Jobs.

You don't have to like China's political system or culture or Xi personally to acknowledge that he's delivered some pretty impressive results over the decade and a half he's been leading the country. SOMETHING Xi is doing is clearly working. And wouldn't it be interesting if we could learn about how and why that is?

But looking at China dispassionately seems to be impossible for Western "China hands"...especially those of Rudd's era. They believe, or, out of political or professional necessity, pretend to believe, that China's "progress" should mainly be analyzed on the degree to which it is adopting or converging on Western ideologies and political religions. Which says a lot more about themselves, their own beliefs and their personal and national insecurities than it does about China.
### The big bad Chinese subsidies
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/the-big-bad-chinese-subsidies/
Last updated: 2026-07-13T17:33:04.000Z
*This is in* [*reply*](https://x.com/larrysalibra/status/2076720183138492778?ref=larrysalibra.com) *to a thread on X where* [*Matt Stoller claims that 100% of China's success is due to state subsidies*](https://x.com/matthewstoller/status/2076632503683531239?s=20&ref=larrysalibra.com)*.*

The "China subsidized its way to success" is really just a cope shibboleth that some Americans repeat without thinking to signal group unity across political lines. It means "It's not our fault, it's the big bad Chinese subsidies!"

It's so obviously not true that it's really embarrassing to see otherwise intelligent people repeat it.

Every government subsidizes stuff...that's what they do. They take tax money and spend it on public goods which are then distributed for free or at below market rates.

The US just subsidizes dumb unproductive stuff like 20 year wars to take Afghanistan from the Taliban and give it back to them again, Wall Street paychecks, corn & boomer assets bubbles...because doing this bought votes and enriched the politically well-connected.

The Chinese subsidize useful infrastructure and services that make their country a better place to build stuff, live and do business: like an electrical grid that doesn't crap out when it rains, health care, rail, roads and public transport and lots and lots and lots of education. 

And they did these subsidies by fostering market conditions that created a lot of inexpensive supply instead of simply giving cash handouts to private parties offering fixed supply. (Hello US healthcare "system"!)

China did other stuff too, like made it really hard for people to "invest" in number go up games (us equities, crypto) which incentivize large groups of smart people to be economically unproductive. And capped finance salaries to make working in finance less attractive relative to getting a real job. 

And China also generally had a plan that lasted longer then current news cycle.

[Matt Stoller on X](https://x.com/matthewstoller/status/2076664839657635905?ref=larrysalibra.com):

> If we slapped massive tariffs on foreign products and subsidized production we’d fix this quickly, business people just don’t want that. 

Chinese vehicles have had like what 100-125% tariffs on them in the USA for years now. How come US cars cost 2x-3x more than Chinese cars and are, besides Telsa, still garbage?

> They like the cheap subsidized profits.

Of course they do! American cars are garbage because of the cheap subsidized profits they can make by selling garbage cars for a lot of money! Why spend money to figure out how to make better cars when you have a captive customer base with no better options? They're businessmen, not idiots!

And even if they wanted to make better cars, who are they going to hire? The smart people all went into finance and software and they don't have the skills and education needed for this anyways. And the capital is there too..why would you want to invest in a business with cost of goods sold, machinery and inventory? That sounds way less profitable and way more work than working in PE, VC or banking!
### Apple is winning the AI race
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/apple-is-winning-the-ai-race/
Last updated: 2026-07-13T15:56:04.000Z
I don't think people realize how easy it is to make use of on-device AI models in an app on most of Apple's devices shipped in the past two years. And I'm talking about the currently shipping 26 versions of iOS and macOS...not some upcoming developer releases or betas.

A few lines of code are all you need. 

First you make a struct to hold the generated results and you give the model instruction would what should go in it the data structure...in our case, an array:

```swift
@Generable
struct TagSuggestions {
    @Guide(description: "One or two lowercase tags: first is the best category, second only if it adds real value", .count(1...2))
    var tags: [String]
}
```

Next you give the model its instructions...think of these as the system prompt:

```swift
private let instructions = """
    You suggest tags for a personal journal entry that will be published as a blog post. \
    Your main job is to pick the best **category** tag — the single broadest topic the entry \
    belongs to. Prefer reusing a tag that already exists on the blog over inventing a new one; \
    only create a new tag when none of the existing ones fit at all. \
    Suggest at most one additional, more specific tag, and only when it clearly adds value. \
    When in doubt, suggest just the category. Tags are lowercase.
    """
```

For example, let's say you want to suggest some possible tags for a user of a blogging app based on the contents of the post that they've written.

Next you initiate the model and session:

```swift
let session = LanguageModelSession(model: model, instructions: instructions)
```

Finally, you construct the prompt and ask the model to respond to it by generating the *TagSuggestions* model.

```swift
let prompt: String
if existingTags.isEmpty {
    prompt = "Entry:\n\(body)"
} else {
    prompt = "Existing tags on the blog: \(existingTags.joined(separator: ", "))\n\nEntry:\n\(body)"
}
let response = try await session.respond(to: prompt, generating: TagSuggestions.self)
```

It's really that easy. 

Notice what we haven't done and what isn't happening:

- We haven't made any network requests
- We haven't signed up for API access for openrouter or another model provider,
- We don't need to manage API or user authentication credentials
- There are no servers
- We haven't sent the user's data to a third party,
- And perhaps most importantly, it doesn't cost us or the user any additional money. We're using the hardware they already paid for and the battery they've already charged.
- No one is training models on the user data

This is already available on 10s or 100s of millions of Apple devices already out there in the users' pockets and on their desks. In a couple years as older devices get retired, Apple's entire installed device base will support on device AI. And when people update the OS on their Apple devices (which almost everyone does), apps and developers will get access to even better on device models and the ability to transparently access more powerful models in Apple's secure cloud on the 27 versions. 

All of this happens without the developer having to be responsible for handing user data over to a party the user hasn't already proactively opted-in to trusting. Sure you might not be doing agentic coding with these models or generating full length feature films on iPhones in the next year or two, but most apps aren't Claude Code or Kimi Code competitors. Many existing apps can often benefit from a sprinkling of AI to reduce some user friction here or add a bit of convenience there. The operating system tools and hardware to accomplish today is already out there waiting to be used. That looks like winning to me!
### QR code menu enabled phone addiction
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/qr-code-menu-enabled-phone-addiction/
Last updated: 2026-07-12T14:31:27.000Z
Phone addiction in mainland China seems to be much higher than the already ridiculous levels it is in other places in the world. It’s very common in restaurants and coffee shops for tables of people to be ignoring each other and their kids bent over their phones.

I suspect a large component of this is the degree to which phones have become a necessary component of eating out in China. Without WeChat or Alipay, you can’t see the menu, you can’t order food and you can’t pay. 

As someone who consciously tries to be present and pay full attention to those I’m eating with, family or friends, I find it much more challenging to do so when I need to constantly pick up a phone to order or add an item. It’s too easy to see something on the screen that distracts me and takes me out of the moment. 

Hong Kong is a bit better in this regard as many restaurants let you order and pay with methods that don’t require a phone. But the QR code menus are encroaching on our phone-free spaces.

I’m not really sure what the solution is…the economics of QR code menus are such that they are far cheaper a printed physical menus and the competitive environment is such that these costs can be the difference between a restaurant that is a going concern vs that can’t survive. 

Perhaps we are destined for a future where phone-free environments are limited to places open to the wealthy. No one else will be able to afford to be present.
### Bryan Johnson blood tests in a Chinese public hospital
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/blood-tests-in-a-chinese-public-hospital/
Last updated: 2026-07-11T15:36:20.000Z
I wanted to get some Bryan Johnson-inspired blood tests for a baseline of biomarkers. He sells an expensive testing service that, as far as I know, isn’t available outside of the USA. And getting blood tests in Hong Kong means going to an expensive private lab or expensive private hospital or clinic. Since HK public hospital care is paid for by the taxpayers, elective testing isn’t really a thing. And even when lab work is medically indicated, unless it’s an emergency, it can take days or weeks to come back through the public systems.

Since I’ve been in Zhuhai in the mainland for a few days, I thought I’d try to get tests done at a public hospital here as a learning experience. In contrast to Hong Kong’s public health care system, there’s an option to self-pay for all care even at public hospitals. I expected it to be inexpensive…and it was, but what I didn’t expect was how fast and convenient the whole process was.

I made an appointment for a GP during the 11 to 11:30 am slot at 10:45 am the same morning for 17 CNY. Next I hopped in a Didi and arrived at the hospital and only had to wait about 2 minutes to see my assigned doctor. I told him nothing was wrong and I just wanted to get some blood work.

I gave the doctor a list of tests I wanted and selected each test in the computer and added to my record. Interestingly, the doctor could see the exact price of each test as he added it.

He gave me a ticket which I took outside to a machine where I paid for the tests before walking over to the blood collection area. Total cost a bit over 300 CNY

There were about a dozen blood collection windows and about 50 people waiting ahead of me. Names were called in the order of arrival and it took only about 10 minutes until it was my turn.

I walked up to a window with a nurse. A machine sitting next to the nurse dispensed the vials required for your case pre-labeled with your patient information. It took the nurse about 90 seconds to insert the needle and collect my blood. She told me that because I’d ordered a lot of tests, I’d have to wait until around 430pm that afternoon to get my results.

I headed out to lunch and continued about my day. Around 1:30pm I checked the hospital’s WeChat mini app and my test results were already available…3 hours before they were promised.

The overall experience was very impressive…low cost, fast, easy access to medical diagnostic tests is really a game changer. It allows a motivated individual to better understand how changes in exercise, diet and lifestyle affect their body without having to wait once year for annual checkup.

The whole experience was cheaper and faster than the fancy private hospitals in Thailand.
### What to make? A sandwich?
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/what-to-make-a-sandwich/
Last updated: 2026-07-10T10:57:23.000Z
AI makes it really easy to build things until you realize you don't know what to build. You may think you know what you want to build until you start to build it, only to find out that not only have you not defined some of the requirements of your project, but you hadn't even considered that those types of requirements might exist.

Building with AI makes me think back to my time in second grade. One day for homework, our teacher asked us to write instructions for making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. The next day in class, everyone was tasked with making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, but they had to follow their instructions exactly.

One can imagine how some second graders wrote their instructions. Precise instructions such as "put the peanut butter on the bread," led to unopened bottles of peanut butter placed precipitously on top of unopened bags of bread and other such silly occurrences. Of course anyone who knows what a peanut butter and jelly sandwich is, knows that you need to first open the loaf of bread, put two slices face down on a plate and spread peanut butter using a knife on one side of the bread. These sort of unspoken assumptions are exactly the things that AI can be trained to figured out on its own. It's the unknown and unspoken assumptions it has trouble with.

Maybe you wanted all natural organic crunchy peanut butter and you've been eating grape jelly every day for the past two weeks and today you really have a craving for toasted sourdough bread and marmalade jam. And you didn't realize this until the peanut butter and jelly sandwich was already made. All the AI training in the world isn't going to figure that out absent a direct connection to your brain (hi neuralink!).

We talk about how agentic software development moves the bottleneck to verification. But because it's never been easier to start building something, it makes it easier to start building before we've even thought clearly about what we want. Sometimes this is a good thing in that the process of building and seeing a result - any result - allows us to refine our requirements or inspires us to move in a new and potentially fruit, until know unknown direction. But sometimes it also just sucks up a lot of time and tokens to just build up a pile of technical debt that sort of does something that it turns out we didn't really want it to do in the first place.
### A Letter to Hong Kong's Financial Secretary on the 2025-26 Budget
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/a-letter-to-hong-kongs-financial-secretary-25-26/
Last updated: 2025-02-25T01:11:59.000Z
Last month, Hong Kong's Financial Secretary started a public consultation for the 2025-2026 budget. A long time Hong Kong Resident, I've been concerned about financial state of the Hong Kong Government over the past few years. Expenditures have been growing much faster than revenue and the Government is now running a deficit and consuming its fiscal reserves. This is unsustainable.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2025/01/Screenshot-2025-01-21-at-1.43.15-PM.png)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2025/01/Screenshot-2025-01-21-at-1.43.58-PM.png)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2025/01/Screenshot-2025-01-21-at-1.43.43-PM.png)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2025/01/Screenshot-2025-01-21-at-1.44.22-PM.png)

Hong Kong Government financials. Source: [Government of HKSAR](https://www.budget.gov.hk/consultation25/pdf/2025-26%5FBudget%5FConsultation%5FInformation%5FPack.pdf?ref=larrysalibra.com)

Because I'm really happy living here and would like to keep being happy living here well into the future, I wrote a letter with some constructive advice on how to make the public finances more sustainable.

In the interest of public discussion and civil society, I'm publishing a scan of my letter below with the text to follow:

[2025-26 HK Budget Public Budget Consultation Letter2025-01 Public Budget Consultation Letter.pdf3 MBdownload-circle](https://larrysalibra.com/content/files/2025/01/2025-01-Public-Budget-Consultation-Letter.pdf "Download")

**RE: 2025-2026 Budget Public Consultation**

Dear Mr. Chan,

I write to you regarding your request for input on the 2025-2026 Hong Kong Budget.

I moved to Hong Kong in 2010 via what is now called the "Investment as Entrepreneur" visa scheme, attracted by its unique quality of life, efficient and low cost business environment, low tax environment, efficient government, status as the freest economy in the world and unique position as a Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China. 

Over the years, I've started two businesses in Hong Kong and co-founded the Bitcoin Association of Hong Kong, the oldest Bitcoin advocacy group in Hong Kong and one of the longest operating in the world. Fifteen years later, I am still happy and proud to call Hong Kong my home, having become a Permanent Resident.

It is with great concern that I've watched the Government's fiscal situation deteriorate over the past few years and wanted to share some of my thoughts as to how you might improve the management of the public finances:

**Return to the user-pays principle**

Traditionally, it was the well-established policy of the Government to operate on the "user-pays" principle which ensures that the costs of providing public services don't fall on the taxpayer alone. While this principle has never been strictly followed across the board, issues such as public affordability and other policy concerns have factored in to the Government's decision to price services at full or partial cost recovery, it has nevertheless been a guiding principle for the decades.

Recent administrations, however, perhaps emboldened by over a decade of budget surpluses have, drifted from this policy. Many user fees haven't been increased in many years despite significant increases in the costs to the Government to provide these services.

As a personal example, during my decade and half of residence, if memory serves correctly, the entrance fees for public swimming pools, of which I am a frequent user, have only increased in price once and stand at $17 and $19 for weekday and weekend entrance respectively. When I moved to Hong Kong from Guangzhou in 2010 this was already less than half the price for entrance to a public pool in that city and today it is significantly less than the fees one pays to access public pools north of the SAR boundary.

The Government should conduct a thorough review of the pricing of public services and adjust them upwards to reflect the increasing cost environment to ensure closer adherence to the "user-pays" principle. 

**Tie public service subsidies to financial situation**

Generally, subsidized public services are provided at the same price for all residents irrespective of their needs or ability to pay. The main large scale exception to this, the Government Public Transport Fare Concession Scheme for the Elderly and Eligible Persons with Disabilities, instead ties eligibility to age for most users.

Instead of providing heavily subsidized services to all residents or to an age-based cohort of residents (a cohort which owns most of the property and wealth in the city), the Government should instead only offer subsidized public services to those residents who need it. "Need" could be defined as those eligible for public housing or someone receiving Comprehensive Social Security Assistance (CSSA). 

**Enact Two-tiered Hospital Authority Fees**

Hong Kong's high quality public health care system is a cornerstone of our society. Unfortunately, the current financial arrangement where all residents are eligible for almost free care in public hospitals paid for by the Government is not sustainable due to our aging population. While the Government has recognized this problem and provides incentives to buy private insurance through the Voluntary Health Insurance Scheme tax incentives, more steps are needed to encourage those that can pay for their own health care to do so. 

The Government should consider significantly increasing public health care fees for residents that aren't eligible for public housing or CSSA. These fees could be rolled out progressively over multiple years so that the public has an opportunity to make preparations. It would also give the private sector a chance to develop additional Tertiary hospital services that have typically been not available in Hong Kong because of competition from the free services provided by the public sector.

**Reduce public transport subsidies**

Prior to the decision of the previous administration to roll out the Public Transport Subsidy Scheme, Hong Kong was proudly one of the few places in the world where public transport was paid for by the people that use it. There was no solid public interest in ending "user-pays" transport practice and the cost to the Government is not sustainable. The Government should immediately end population-wide transport subsidies along with phasing out of the age-based Government Public Transport Fare Concession Scheme for the Elderly and Eligible Persons with Disabilities, and replace both by targeted subsidies only for those in need.

**Increase vehicle fines**

Hong Kong's $320 fixed rate traffic penalty hasn't been increased in 30 years and is so low that it provides little incentive to not park illegally on streets. The Government should increase traffic penalty fees by 5x for first time offenders and 10x or more for repeat offenders. This would either increase government revenue or reduce the illegal parking problem that further congests are already overcrowded streets.

**Increase vehicle fees, institute vehicle congestion pricing and increase road tolls**

Despite the high first vehicle registration tax, Hong Kong's roads are increasingly overcrowded despite having the best public transport system in the world. The Government should significantly increase annual vehicle registration fees so that the disincentive for vehicle ownership is ongoing and not one time. The Government should also institute congestion pricing in busy areas like Central/Western District and Wan Chai and significantly increase tunnel fees territory-wide. 

These policies would deter growth in Hong Kong's private vehicle fleet and ensure that the 'user-pays' principle is followed, potentially increasing government revenue. Reduced vehicle traffic would make busy areas of Hong Kong more pedestrian-friendly, which in turn would drive foot traffic growth for local businesses and make Hong Kong a more attractive place to live.. It would also increase traffic speed for vehicles that still need to use the roads which is good for business.

**Make Hong Kong more friendly for bitcoin and crypto**

Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, Hong Kong was seen as the global center of the crypto industry because of its free economy and freedom from major regulation. While some regulation was likely inevitable, the policies enacted by the Government specifically with regards to licensing have discouraged major global players from expanding here. The Government should revisit its regulations and revise them to be less invasive and more light touch, start up and business-friendly so that Hong Kong can regain its competitiveness with places like Singapore and the United States under the upcoming Trump Administration.

**Consider diversifying government financial assets with Bitcoin**

Geopolitical tensions have made it increasingly risky for the Government to invest the public wealth in the assets of a country, the United States, that has decided that the People's Republic of China is its principal enemy. The USA has been increasingly weaponizing the global financial system to achieve its geopolitical goals, primary of which is to slow the economic, technological and geopolitical rise of the country we call home. At the same time, the USA endlessly debases their own currency to fund their own profligate public spending. Their money printing has the side of effect of also debasing our USD-backed Hong Kong Dollar but without any of the corresponding fiscal benefits to our Government. 

The Government should consider moving some of the its assets into Bitcoin, which, as a neutral global currency, would allow the Government to hedge some of its geopolitical financial risk while simultaneously capturing the economic benefits of US money printing for Hong Kong's public balance sheet.

I believe these suggestions in addition to the ideas you have already shared for reigning in public spending will result in more prudent management of the public finances by increasing revenue while decreasing recurrent expenditures in a way that ensures the costs are public services are generally borne by those that benefit from them under the "user-pays" principle while making Hong Kong an even more attractive place to live and do business.

Thank you for your consideration of these suggestions and for your service to Hong Kong. I remain available should you require any clarification or additional input.

Sincerely,

Lawrence A. Salibra

*Update: received thank you letter for my submission*

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2025/02/image-1.jpeg)
### ⛵️Sula is sold!
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/newsletter/sula-is-sold/
Last updated: 2024-09-26T21:23:53.000Z
Hi sailing friends! 

You're receiving this email because you were part of my one time sailing blog "sailingsula.com". As many of you no doubt already know, I sold Sula in the summer of 2023 to a very kind and loving new owner. As of now, she remains in Hong Kong, however the new owner plans to take her on an around the world adventure in the next couple years.

It was finally time to shut down the sailing blog. All of the articles and videos have been migrated to my personal blog:

[Sailing Sula ArchiveAn archive of my sailing blog sailingsula.com.![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/icon/favicon-7.png)Larry SalibraLarry Salibra![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/thumbnail/Screenshot-2024-09-26-at-10.48.03-PM-1.png)](https://larrysalibra.com/sailingsula/)

Most of the posts on the sailing blog were members-only posts and remain so. You can still sign in with your email to view these.

I'm still sailing, occasionally racing Etchells in Hong Kong, and keen to do some cruising or passages outside of Hong Kong. If you're doing something interesting, reach out if you need crew! Otherwise, if you'd like to know more about what I'm up to now check out my [now page](https://larrysalibra.com/now/).

Yours,  
Larry
### A comparison of cellular bands in Apple's 2024 products
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/a-comparison-of-cellular-bands-in-apples-2024-products/
Last updated: 2024-09-10T17:46:37.000Z
Yesterday was Apple's yearly iPhone and Watch keynote where they announce their latest products to the faithful. While they have four customer facing models of iPhone 16 (16, 16 Plus, 16 Pro & 16 Pro Max) and two models of Apple Watch Series 10 (42mm & 46mm), the reality is a lot more complicated there are also models for specific regions. Each of the latest iPhones has [four region specific models](https://www.apple.com/iphone/cellular/?ref=larrysalibra.com) and Apple Watch has [three region-specific models](https://www.apple.com/watch/cellular/?ref=larrysalibra.com).

There are two types of main hardware differences between these models. The first is whether or not the model supports eSIMs (all but the Greater China models), how many physical sim cards it supports (USA: 0, Greater China: 2, everywhere else: 1). The second is which cellular frequencies they support.

I travel frequently between the EU, Asia and the USA so cellular frequency support is of interest to me because different models might not support a frequency I might need in a certain area and cause me to have a weak or no signal with other locally purchased phones work fine. Currently, I'm using an iPhone 15 Pro Max purchased in Thailand (this is a "Rest of World" model) and while it works great in Asia and the EU, it's missing Band 71 in both 5g and LTE which is heavily used in rural and suburban coverage by T-Mobile in the USA. This means poor coverage when visiting family and more frequent areas of no service.

Each year, I hope that Apple will release products that have all the cellular bands for all the markets of the world, but alas, this year is not that year. I put together a quick spreadsheet comparing the various regional models. Below are quick comments and screenshots.

## Key

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2024/09/Screenshot-2024-09-11-at-1.17.46-AM.png)

Key

## iPhone

### 5G

For the iPhone, the USA model is still the only model with mmWave and has all of the 5G bands supported by the other region models. The Greater China (Mainland, Hong Kong/Macau) model supports the fewest 5G bands. 

**USA model wins.**

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2024/09/Screenshot-2024-09-11-at-1.05.41-AM.png)

iPhone 16 Pro/Pro Max 5G Bands

### LTE (4G)

Things stack up differently in LTE band support. The Canada/Mexico/UAE model has supports the most LTE bands - all of the ones supported by the other models and then some for a total of 32 bands. The Greater China models comes up last again, missing six bands compared to the winner. 

**Canada/Mexico/UAE model wins.**

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2024/09/Screenshot-2024-09-11-at-1.11.28-AM.png)

iPhone 16 Pro/Pro Max LTE Bands

## Watch

### LTE (4G)

The competition is closer on the Watch with the USA/Canada/Mexico model supporting the most LTE bands including all of the LTE bands supported by the other two models.

**USA/Canada/Mexico model wins.**

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2024/09/Screenshot-2024-09-11-at-1.20.53-AM.png)

Watch Series 10/Ultra 2 LTE Bands

### UTMS (3G)

Greater China and the Rest of the World (ROW) score a rare victory against North America supporting one more UTMS band than the USA/Canada/Mexico.

**Greater China and ROW models win.**

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2024/09/Screenshot-2024-09-11-at-1.21.42-AM.png)

Watch Series 10/Ultra 2 UTMS Bands

## Final thoughts

I have no idea why Apple doesn't support all frequencies on all devices. The mmWave support on the US iPhone requires an additional antenna so perhaps it is related to cost? Are there regulatory reasons? Something else? If know the answer leave me a comment below or [tweet at me](http://x.com/larrysalibra?ref=larrysalibra.com).

For my travel patterns, the USA model iPhone makes the most sense along with an Apple Watch bought in Hong Kong. What regional models did you choose?

If you want to play around with the spreadsheet yourself, you can download it in your preferred format below:

[Apple Numbers2024-09 Apple Cellular Frequency Support.numbers.zip91 KBdownload-circle](https://larrysalibra.com/content/files/2024/09/2024-09-Apple-Cellular-Frequency-Support.numbers.zip "Download")

[Microsoft Excel2024-09 Apple Cellular Frequency Support.xlsx13 KBdownload-circle](https://larrysalibra.com/content/files/2024/09/2024-09-Apple-Cellular-Frequency-Support.xlsx "Download")

[PDF2024-09 Apple Cellular Frequency Support.pdf112 KBdownload-circle](https://larrysalibra.com/content/files/2024/09/2024-09-Apple-Cellular-Frequency-Support-1.pdf "Download")
### Best life-hack: Find something you love
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/best-lifehack-find-something-you-love/
Last updated: 2024-06-27T17:23:18.000Z
I spent 3 hours in the gym tonight. I hate going to the gym. Or at least I used to.

The idea of mindlessly lifting weights up and down...even with the mental distraction of a Lex Fridman or Acquired podcast was never very attractive to me. I went through brief periods of my life where I regularly lifted weights in the gym. It was easiest when I found friends to lift with. But as people came and go it was hard to keep up. 

So what changed? I swapped the weight lifting gym for the climbing gym...bouldering gym to be more precise.

Bouldering gives me the strength and core training I greatly needed while providing the social and mental engagement that makes me keep wanting to go back. 

I've always found traditional weight gyms not very social. People are rarely very friendly or interested in interacting with others. Beyond asking for a quick spot or if someone's using a machine, no one really talks. The crowd is usually some combination of massive dudes who want to be left alone with their beloved weights and girls focused more on taking selfies for instagram. Everyone has AirPods in and seems deeply engrossed in their workout mix or favorite podcast.

In contrast, bouldering gyms are very social. The colored routes we try to climb are literally called "problems" and collaboration is great for problem solving. When you're on the wall, it's hard to see what all four of your limbs are doing at all times and often times a second or third pair of eyes makes the "problem" much easier to solve. 

The better I get at bouldering, the more frequently and the longer I want to go. I don't think of it of an exercise or strength training choose, but a fun activity I "get" to do a couple times a week as a reward at the end of the day. And there in lies the hack...take what you "need" to do (eg. build strength, exercise) and keep trying activities that can get you what you need until you find one that you find fun. 

Relying on willpower alone is a recipe for failure...very few people "like" or "want" to exercise. And it's not just exercise but anything that you "should" be doing that you are having trouble doing. So don't beat yourself up if you don't want to or like doing it either. There's nothing wrong with you. Just keep trying activities until you find one that clicks and feels like fun and everything else will fall into place.
### Gloomy Guangzhou
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/gloomy-guangzhou/
Last updated: 2024-02-29T09:53:50.000Z
I just got back from an extended weekend trip to my old China home of Guangzhou. I first visited Guangzhou in early-2003 right before SARS and lived there off and on until around late 2012\. This was my first extended visit back since well before covid. 

I have several friends still living in the city, one works in a large well-known state owned firm in their property development business. Another owns a few restaurants. It was great to catch up with them and see how things are going.

From my perspective, Guangzhou has developed quite nicely...it still maintains its character with massive, old trees everywhere and high density shops in its older districts. At the same time, the quality and quantity of everything has improved. 

When I first visited Guangzhou in January of 2003, the Guangzhou Metro's line 2 had only just partially opened a week or two before. The entire system looked like this:

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2024/02/Screenshot-2024-02-29-at-13.46.08.png)

Fast forward \~21 years and it looks like this:

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2024/02/Guangzhou_Metro_Network.png)

The number of, quality and variety of products, goods and services available saw similar growth. 20 years ago it might be very hard to find certain products or services if they were available at all. Now everything you can imagine is available within a walking distances or by delivery, a few taps on your mobile phone.

Absent are the developing country traffic problems that still plague places like the Philippines and Thailand. There's no waiting 10 or 15 minutes for a Grab...every time I ordered a car on Didi, a brand new locally made EV was waiting for me within 3 minutes. Traffic moved smoothly and drivers no longer drive like madmen. It seems like most cars are now EVs and I even saw self-driving taxis out and about.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2024/02/IMG_5303.jpeg)

From a high-level perspective, Guangzhou has developed very well and it even surpasses so-called developed countries on many metrics. So why did it feel so gloomy?

The friend working in property development told of large scale layoffs in his company because of the decline in housing prices. He had recently went on a business trip and taken a Didi car only to find that the driver was one of his former colleagues.

The friend in the restaurant business was considering closing one of her two locations because business had dropped off a cliff...fewer people were eating out and it was getting increasingly hard for her to make rent, payroll and pay mortgages on her two residential properties.

Walking around on my own, visiting both my old stomping ground and newly developed areas, one take away was how much fewer people there were than in my memory. Some of the new malls, which were carbon copies of malls built by the same developer in other cities or districts, felt very empty.

How much of this was temporary because of people staying home in the cold weather and the proximity to Chinese New Year two weeks early with many residents not yet returned? How much of this is a temporary adjustment of expectations of people regarding the value of the property investments? How much of this is just an indication that China has made it and graduated - at least in tier 1 cities - to developed economy status and the golden days during the 40 years of post reform and open doors policy easy growth and exuberance are over? How much of this is because global geopolitcal competition and monetary tightening? How much of this is payment for covid policies? How much of this is simple hangover from too much debt fueled growth?

As always, I left with more questions than answers. I have no idea what the future will bring, but I hope that my friends in Guangzhou can shake off this gloom so that they can enjoy the well-earned fruits of their labors over the past decades.
### Why I post reviews on centralized corporate platforms
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/why-i-post-reviews-on-centralized-corporate-platforms/
Last updated: 2023-12-11T04:31:12.000Z
I really enjoyed [Lane Rettig](https://twitter.com/lrettig?ref=larrysalibra.com)'s post entitled [Principals and Agents](https://rettig.substack.com/p/principals-and-agents). In the post he talks about why he doesn't post reviews on centralized corporate platforms like Uber, Amazon and Airbnb. He lists three general reasons: 1) he isn't an owner so value doesn't accrue to him and he has little agency 2) they aren't open source (which again boils down to someone else owning the platform) and 3) he sees writing reviews as doing "work" for the company as an agent. He goes on to draw conclusions about the relationship between the reasons he doesn't post reviews and his career decisions to be either a founder (owner) or a contractor instead of an employee.

I found myself reading along and shaking my head in a agreement with a lot of the points he made.

> I’m willing to invest a great deal in myself, my home, and my family because they’re mine and they’re always going to be mine—I’m stuck with them! I’m willing to invest a bit in my local community because I feel some degree of ownership and agency, but less than I do at home. This relationship continues outwards in ever more distant concentric circles, so to speak: I feel less agency in my city than I do in my local community, even less in my state, very little in my country, and hardly any at all at the global level. (Incidentally this is one reason I think large nation states are inherently ungovernable, but that’s a topic for another week.)

This paragraph on family vs community vs state vs country really resonated with me in that I feel the same way and am on the same page. (And also have views on why large nation-states aren't great!)

I've also generally gone down the same road as Lane in my career as either founder/co-founder/early team member or contractor. Most of my work is in open source and I use it every day. I'm also a strong believer in incentives.

But somehow, I have different conclusions about posting reviews on corporate platforms compared to Lane.

While I don't post reviews on Amazon, I do post reviews on Uber, Grab, Airbnb and even sometimes a shopping site like HKTVmall.

I find Uber (and many other centralized platforms) very responsive...to feedback...often shockingly so. While Lane seems to look at posting reviews as doing free work for a platform you're already paying, I look at it in a totally different, selfish way. I see posting a review as something that I benefit from. I get a lot of value from reading Airbnb reviews so always post an honest one that I hope someone else will find useful and that the service provider will fix anything I had a problem with and/or keep doing the things I like. As long as I keep using the system, I'll get to take advantage of this in the aggregate.

Now, you may be thinking, this is irrational because for every dollar of time you spend posting a review, you might only get some fraction of a cent of value. And you'd be right looking at the problem solely from a utilitarian perspective of money changing hands. But there's so much more than that...when I post a positive review for a service provider that did right by me, I am helping them and that gives me a warm fuzzy feeling one gets when showing gratitude. And that feeling is very selfishly good for me...both for [my mental and physical health](https://www.mayoclinichealthsystem.org/hometown-health/speaking-of-health/can-expressing-gratitude-improve-health?ref=larrysalibra.com). It makes me feel like I'm living in a great world and I'm always winning.

When I post a negative review, I'm helping a future fellow human avoid a negative experience I had to endure...which again makes me feel good and happy. I've also found that platforms are very responsive to negative reviews and proactively reach out to resolve whatever problem...usually via a refund...even if I don't expect it! (Uber consistently does this...in Hong Kong. HKTVmall as well!)

A physical world example of this behavior is this: where I live in Asia, generally people don't bus their own trays in McDonald's, food courts or similar cafeteria-style establishments...someone is paid to do this. This results in the problem where as a customer, you sometimes find that there are tables with no people but aren't really usable because they are still covered with trash from the previous diner. No one really wants to clear up someone else's trash.

My approach is to always bus my own table so that people looking for a seat have a clean empty table...despite the culture saying that I should not bus my table. Much of the time, the (overworked) person responsible for cleaning the tables is very happy that I've helped out lighten some of their workload and I get a big smile and thank you. Often, people who were stressed out looking for an empty table will be relieved and grateful to have my clean table. The "worst" case scenario is that I clean my table, nobody notices but I still imagine how someone in the future will be happy to use this clean table. It's a win-win-win-win-win scenario for everyone involved. 

Does some big faceless corporation benefit from me? Probably...but who cares? Life isn't a competition to ensure that we capture 110% of the value of our actions and that people who aren't paying us get nothing. (I'm not suggesting this is Lane's point of view!)

I'm a big fan of acting like you live in the world you want to live in. And I want to live in a world where everyone is nice, helpful and looking out for each other. And I've found when you live life like that, the world bends to your expectations.
### Voting in the 2023 Hong Kong district council election
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/voting-in-the-2023-hk-district-council-election/
Last updated: 2023-12-10T06:41:06.000Z
I tried to vote in [today's district council elections](https://www.elections.gov.hk/dc2023/eng/index.html?ref=larrysalibra.com) but was unable to because apparently I registered too late. 

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2023/12/Screenshot-2023-12-10-at-14.38.31.png)

The cutoff for this year was 2nd June and I just got my "you are registered" confirmation from the Registration and Electoral Office (REO) earlier this week.

I actually put a significant amount of effort into voting this year and am confused by the government's stated desire to get people to vote and the confusing, high friction nature of the registration process. 

There were signs everywhere suggesting we register to vote online, but online registration seemed predicated on having a paid digital certificate from the [Hong Kong post e-cert certificate authority](https://www.ecert.gov.hk/index.html?ref=larrysalibra.com)...the one built into the government's "[iAM Smart](https://www.iamsmart.gov.hk/?ref=larrysalibra.com)" digitals services app would not work. 

I eventually gave up trying to figure out how to register online and instead registered to vote by mail using the paper form. 

I had a lot of questions along the way. The REO's "[Voter Registration FAQ](https://www.voterregistration.gov.hk/eng/faq.html?ref=larrysalibra.com)" included all of the questions that I had, but most unhelpfully did not actually include clear answers to any of these questions. Below is my attempt to clarify the answers in case anyone else finds this information useful.

## Do you have to register again?

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2023/12/Screenshot-2023-12-10-at-14.01.27.png)

The answer to Q8 is not "You are not required to register again," but "Yes, you have to register again if you moved and we decided we couldn't reach you because we canceled your registration." At the very least you should check your registration status each year to see if you need to re-register.

## Can you vote immediately after registering and are there any deadlines?

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2023/12/Screenshot-2023-12-10-at-14.06.41.png)

No, you cannot vote immediately after registering to vote. The deadline for registering to vote or updating your address was the 2nd June 2023 and you cannot vote unless you registered by that date. If you register after that date, you can vote in elections held sometime next year after a new list of voters is published.

I'm not the only person that was confused by this because when I went to try to vote the poll officer was confused at why I had a confirmation from REO that I'd successfully registered to vote but wasn't showing up in their system. She had to call someone at the REO to understand the situation.

## All was not lost!

Despite being unable to vote, the poll staff kindly gave me a "Thank you for voting" greeting card.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2023/12/IMG_2106-1.jpeg)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2023/12/IMG_2107-1.jpeg)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2023/12/IMG_2108-1.jpeg)
### Day 33: Our ability to learn is mind-blowing
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/day-33-our-ability-to-learn-is-mind-blowing/
Last updated: 2023-09-12T15:34:04.000Z
I've climbed off and on over the years but never really practiced or did it regularly. Perhaps one trip to the climbing gym every other year. This past month, I've replaced some of my weekly trips to gym for lifting with trips to the rock climbing gym for bouldering. I'm at that early time in the process of learning something where progress is very quick. I've only taken two one-hour courses and gone about a half a dozen times in the past 3 weeks and am pretty amazed by the progress I've made. Problems (the name for routes in bouldering) that seemed totally impossible to me a week ago even this past Saturday are now easily doable.

One of the things I've learned about bouldering is that if a problem seem too tiring or if it seems like I don't have enough strength, I'm probably doing something wrong. Usually poor technique is to blame. In fact, this is a good indicator for a lot of activities in life...people over estimate the amount of strength they need and underestimate the role of technique as a multiplier for the strength you have. 

It's amazing how quickly we humans can learn both mentally and physically. And the sense of accomplishment it gives you from seeing the progress is enough to overcome any mental rut you might find yourself in. Give it a try!
### Day 32: Good skippers ask what's next
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/day-32-good-skippers-ask-whats-next/
Last updated: 2023-09-11T12:00:40.000Z
If you've ever heard of the [Getting Things Done (GTD) productivity method](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Getting%5FThings%5FDone?ref=larrysalibra.com) and the eponymous book, you are probably familiar with creator David Allen's concept of the Next Action. This is the next tangible step that you take on a project to move it forward. As I was undergoing training for the RYA Yachtmaster sailing credentials, I came across the exact same concept. It turns out that overlap between productivity schemes and sailing was not a coincidence as GTD creator David Allen is also a sailor. And a good skipper is always thinking about what the boat and its crew needs to do next.

The way it works is something like this. Imagine your 50 foot boat's destination is the RHKYC's pontoon in the Causeway Bay Typhoon shelter. You are currently entering Victoria Harbour by way of Lei Yue Mun. Your crew has already taken the sails in and is currently enjoying the beautiful evening view of the city. 

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2023/09/typhoonshelter.jpg)

Your destination is the pontoon at the bottom center of this picture.

While the crew is relaxing, the skipper's train of thought is something like this: "We want to end up on the pontoon...this means we'll need fenders to put between the boat and the pontoon and mooring lines to tie us up. We'll also need a look out on the bow as we enter the typhoon shelter to make sure the path is clear of boats."

Thinking in GTD terms, the boat's next "project" is coming alongside the pontoon and there are a number "next actions" that can be taken right now in parallel so that when the boat arrives at the typhoon shelter in 15 minutes, everything is in order. A good skipper assigns each action to the crew well in advance and using clear and concise language following the three step process for effective command we discussed yesterday: 

1. Say the crew person's name.
2. Give a precise and clear instructions
3. Observe the crew's execution

"Megan & Jon, please put five fenders on each side at pontoon height with the bottom hanging about 3 cm above the water"

"Jim, please put get out 4 mooring lines. We don't know which side of the pontoon we'll be free, but for now, rig the bow and stern lines on the port side cleats and put the bow and stern spring lines on the deck near their respective cleats. If we decide to come alongside on the starboard side, you will be responsible for moving the lines to the starboard side."

"Tony, I'd like you to stand on the bow as we enter the typhoon shelter and look out for any boat traffic that might be in our way. Please yell "clear" if our path is all clear. Also, please tell me the distance in meters from the pontoon as we come alongside."

Once the skipper gives the instructions, he watches how the crew carries out his orders. Is every thing correct? Are there five fenders on each side and are they at the right height? Are the mooring lines rigged properly? Is the lookout in position?

Knowing what needs to happen next is the hallmark of being securely in command of both your boat and your life.
### Day 31: To command effectively, always say the name
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/day-31-to-command-effectively-always-say-the-name/
Last updated: 2023-09-10T11:37:13.000Z
Anything larger than a one person dinghy and sailing becomes a team sport. The person in charge of the boat, known as the skipper, leads one or more crew to safely and effectively operate the boat. 

As with managing people in a company, clear and effective communication are key to effective leadership. On a boat, this means taking the three steps:

1. Say the crew person's name.
2. Give a precise and clear instructions
3. Observe the crew's execution

Tonight, I am going to write about step 1 since it's the one people commonly get wrong and the easiest to correct. One of the biggest problems I've seen is that many skippers forget step number 1... they don't say the crew person's name. Instead of "Billy, trim the jib," they will just say "Trim the jib!" What generally happens is that about two-thirds of the time, this works and someone, hopefully the assigned jib trimmer, trims the jib. But the rest of the time nothing happens because either the jib trimmer wasn't paying attention or everyone else assumed someone else was supposed to trim the jib.

One could even say that if the jib trimmer wasn't paying attention, this is really jib trimmer's fault. There is some truth to this, but even the best crew will momentarily lose focus after a long day. Besides, a skipper's job is to make the most of the crew he has...to maximize his crew's chance of success. Not imagine how much better it would be if he had perfect crew.

Saying someone's name before requesting that they do something isn't just a lesson for skippers commanding boats. If you've ever taken a first aid course, the instructor will no doubt have told you the same thing as a lesson for how to command a first aid scene. You don't want to say "Someone call 911!" Instead you want to ask the name of someone nearby and then say "Mary, you call 911!" By using someone's name you give them responsibility for executing on the task. By calling for "somebody" to do it, you give everyone an excuse not to do it. 

In sailing (and in life) because not saying someone's name gets results most of the time, inexperienced skippers and even many experienced, skippers, get into this bad habit. But good skippers don't want results most of the time, they want results as much as possible.
### Day 30: URLs and composability
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/day-30-urls-and-composability/
Last updated: 2023-09-09T14:21:28.000Z
URLs, Uniform Resource Locators, are the addresses we see everyday in our browsers. They tell the browser what we're looking for, how they should retrieve it and where to find it. Most of the time these are web addresses that look something like https://example.com/page. "page" is what we're looking for, "https" is the protocol that should be used to retrieve it and "example.com" is where to find it.

URLs are a specific type of URI...

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2023/09/Screenshot-2023-09-08-at-17.03.16.png)

Source: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform\_Resource\_Identifier](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform%5FResource%5FIdentifier?ref=larrysalibra.com)

The "where to find it" part of of the URL is also known as the "authority." The fact that the location of where to find something is also its authority implies a degree of control over the information. But what if we don't care where we find the thing that we're looking for? What if we separate the "where" from the "how" and the "what"?

At the present, composability in terms of the web means loading resources from other authority and including them into your web app. These resources might be static - like "hotlinking" an image...or dynamic, such as making an API call to an ordinals indexer. There are a lot of upsides to this type of composability, but the major downside is that it makes apps and users vulnerable to third party authorities. It's not always great for the authority either. With great power comes responsibility.

But what if we remove the authority from URI? What types of composability would we see then? Could we build powerful building blocks without having to be an authority?
### Day 29: The great Hong Kong floods of 2023
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/day-29-what-happened-with-the-hong-kong-floods/
Last updated: 2023-09-08T10:05:26.000Z
[I wrote smugly last week about how nothing likely happen from Hong Kong's direct hit by a category 4 tropical cyclone](https://larrysalibra.com/day-23-predictable-natural-disaster-are-not-natural-at-all/)...no deaths...little damage. And I was correct. Last night, the remains of the typhoon formerly known as Haikui hit Hong Kong and there was massive flooding caused. So what happened?

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2023/09/rfmap24hrs1700e.png)

Well, it rained...a lot. At the Observatory, they experienced the highest 1 hour rainfall rate since records started being kept in 1884\. Over the past 24 hours, parts of Hong Kong island got over 600 millimeters of rain. For those imperialists reading, that's almost 2 feet of rain...the liquid form...not snow. If it was in snow form, 600 mm of rain over 24 hours would be the some as getting from 20 feet to 195 of snow over the same period of time. The amount of water is pretty mind blowing.

At the government press conference, when asked about why there was so much flooding and preparations weren't better, they said wrote it off to this storm being unexpected. This isn't entirely correct. 

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2023/09/3ce11553-8d2f-4d2f-b6ef-3256c97b7740_cee20fe1.webp)

The storm was the remains of a typhoon that the Hong Kong Observatory (HKO) was tracking on their website for the past few week. In fact they tracked it up until 2 days before last night's storm when it was 240 km from Hong Kong. They stopped tracking presumably because tropical cyclones as classified based on wind strength not on rain. The winds slowed down so it no longer was qualified to be tracked under the typhoon tracking criteria.

However, just because tracking stopped didn't mean that the low pressure system wasn't still moving towards Hong Kong...we knew there would a storm and that it would rain a lot and HKO forecast it as such.

So what happened? I think two things happened.

1) Normal pre-typhoon procedures - cleaning out drains, putting in flood prevention boards, etc - were not followed because those are triggered by the typhoon warning signals. Some of these preparation steps are triggered in the government bureaucracy - in the drainage services department for example - but many are also triggered in private business as insurance policies frequently mandate behavior that must be taken during typhoon signals if the policy holder wants to be insured against loss. 

This is a coordination and communication problem. Perhaps an advanced warning system of possible black storm that would trigger action would make sense. There's also the risk of the boy who cried wolf effect where warnings of a possible event that's so rare cause people to tire of or ignore them.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2023/09/Screenshot-2023-09-08-at-17.57.04.png)

Hong Kong businesses have written plans of which steps are taken at each typhoon warning level. Source: [https://www.hko.gov.hk/en/publica/gen\_pub/files/tcws.pdf](https://www.hko.gov.hk/en/publica/gen%5Fpub/files/tcws.pdf?ref=larrysalibra.com)

2) That the amount of rain exceeded the design capacity of the drainage systems...there's nothing you can about that in the short-term...requires long term infrastructure investment....short-term warning of a storm doesn't help. While Hong Kong has [robust drainage infrastructure](https://www.dsd.gov.hk/EN/Education/DSD%5FFacilities%5FVirtual%5FTour/index.html?ref=larrysalibra.com)...things like underground rain water overflow the size of 100 swimming pools of water. If you get more rain than can fit in the tanks and be moved by the systems, it's going to flood. Advanced warning wouldn't solve this. Only long-term investment in infrastructure...which might not even be worth it if these events only happen once a century.
### Day 28: The best seat selection UI ever
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/day-28-the-best-seat-selection-ui-ever/
Last updated: 2023-09-07T13:14:47.000Z
I am planning my travel to [Bitcoin Unleashed London](https://bitcoinunleashed.org/?ref=larrysalibra.com) next month today. I already had my return flight to Hong Kong booked from Frankfurt, so I thought I'd take the train back to FRA instead of yet another flight. This would also give me a chance to try out the [Eurostar train](https://www.eurostar.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com)...the international train service that goes under the English channel...and check off another bucket list item. I'd also get to spend a night in Brussels, a city in a country I've not yet visited.

While the entire checkout flow for buying a Eurostar ticket was very good...much better than your typical airline purchase flow, I was particularly impressed by the seat selection user interface. It very clearly shows you what type of seat you're choosing and various features someone might care about when making the selection.

Some people choose a window seat because they want a wall to lean against. Other people choose one because they want to watch the scenery go by. The Eurostar seat selector clearly shows the difference between these different types of window seats.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2023/09/Screenshot-2023-09-07-at-14.47.53.png)

I also like that they clearly indication the direction the train is going and whether your seat will face forward or backwards. I'm not particularly sensitive to which way I'm facing, but I know some people that feel very uncomfortable facing the wrong way. It's very common when buying train tickets to not be able to tell which direction the seat you choose is facing relative to the direction of travel of the train.

Airline seat selection interface designers (is this a career path or job title?) would do well to study this interface and apply it to their airline's check out processes!
### ✍️ Week 3 of my writing challenge
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/newsletter/week-3-of-my-writing-challenge/
Last updated: 2023-09-06T09:05:07.000Z
Hi friends!

I've finished week 3 of my month long writing challenge and am well into the final week. Below, find the new posts since my last email. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the one about Stacks being the Paypal Mafia of bitcoin was by far the most popular and generated the most interaction. My audience is largely bitcoin and Stacks related and token financial incentives work.

I'm still deciding if I'll continue this daily habit after the conclusion of the month. If I do, I'd probably separate these daily posts in away that makes it more clear that they are largely unedited, unresearched stream of conscious rambling as opposed to the carefully word-smithed, well-researched articles I've written in the past.

Would love to hear your thoughts. As always, thanks for reading!

Yours,

Larry

[Day 14: Behave like the society you want to live inHong Kongers’ kindness makes this a great place to live.![](https://larrysalibra.com/content/images/size/w256h256/2020/03/favicon.png)Larry SalibraLarry Salibra![](https://larrysalibra.com/content/images/2023/08/IMG_7440.jpeg)](https://larrysalibra.com/day-14-behave-like-the-society-you-want-to-live-in/)

[Day 15: Employer tax withholding is a scamEmployer tax withholding is a scam used to get people to pay heavy taxes without feeling the pain.![](https://larrysalibra.com/content/images/size/w256h256/2020/03/favicon.png)Larry SalibraLarry Salibra![](https://larrysalibra.com/content/images/2023/08/Screenshot-2023-08-25-at-15.55.44-1.png)](https://larrysalibra.com/tax-withholding-is-a-scam/)

[Day: 16 Diaspora have a bone to pickDiaspora often have a bone to pick with their former homes...that’s often why they left...take their views with a grain of salt!![](https://larrysalibra.com/content/images/size/w256h256/2020/03/favicon.png)Larry SalibraLarry Salibra![](https://larrysalibra.com/content/images/2023/08/Screenshot-2023-08-26-at-14.58.44.png)](https://larrysalibra.com/day-16-diaspora-have-a-bone-to-pick/)

[Day 17: Writing about hard things is hard!Writing about topics in which I’m invested is hard.![](https://larrysalibra.com/content/images/size/w256h256/2020/03/favicon.png)Larry SalibraLarry Salibra![](https://larrysalibra.com/content/images/2023/08/hannah-grace-j9JoYpaJH3A-unsplash.jpg)](https://larrysalibra.com/day-17-writing-about-hard-things-is-hard/)

[Day 18: Stacks will be the Paypal mafia of BitcoinIt’s incredibly motivational to see what Stacks OGs and the community are building!![](https://larrysalibra.com/content/images/size/w256h256/2020/03/favicon.png)Larry SalibraLarry Salibra![](https://larrysalibra.com/content/images/2023/08/E3AFE0CB-4652-4ACD-9C9C-D3077F557669.JPG)](https://larrysalibra.com/day-18-stacks-will-be-the-paypal-mafia-of-bitcoin/)

[Day 19: Why am I paying for you to read this?Musings on the perverse incentive structure of the internet.![](https://larrysalibra.com/content/images/size/w256h256/2020/03/favicon.png)Larry SalibraLarry Salibra![](https://larrysalibra.com/content/images/2023/08/hugging.png)](https://larrysalibra.com/day-19-why-am-i-paying-for-you-to-read-this/)

[Day 20: Opting out of US healthcare and social securityI opted out of the US social ponzi scheme, but with that freedom comes responsibility.![](https://larrysalibra.com/content/images/size/w256h256/2020/03/favicon.png)Larry SalibraLarry Salibra![](https://larrysalibra.com/content/images/2023/08/no-ss.jpg)](https://larrysalibra.com/day-20-opting-out-of-us-healthcare-and-social-security/)

[Day 21: Americans have no idea how much better China’s infrastructure isFrequent power outages were the norm growing up in the USA but almost never happened while living in China.![](https://larrysalibra.com/content/images/size/w256h256/2020/03/favicon.png)Larry SalibraLarry Salibra![](https://larrysalibra.com/content/images/2023/08/F4yktbSXYAA2Gy1-1.jpeg)](https://larrysalibra.com/americans-have-no-idea-how-much-better-chinas-infrastructure-is/)

[Day 22: A snow day in Hong KongA category 4-equivalent typhoon is pounding Hong Kong...but the city is calm and everything will be fine. How is that?![](https://larrysalibra.com/content/images/size/w256h256/2020/03/favicon.png)Larry SalibraLarry Salibra![](https://larrysalibra.com/content/images/2023/09/IMG_7625.PNG)](https://larrysalibra.com/day-22-a-snow-day-in-hong-kong/)

[Day 23: Predictable natural disasters are not natural at allPredictable natural disasters, are not natural at all, but the result of human choice.![](https://larrysalibra.com/content/images/size/w256h256/2020/03/favicon.png)Larry SalibraLarry Salibra![](https://larrysalibra.com/content/images/2023/09/Ian_2022-09-28_1256Z.jpg)](https://larrysalibra.com/day-23-predictable-natural-disaster-are-not-natural-at-all/)

[Day 24: Laser-eyed HODLing alone is not enoughWe need more than just HODLing to get to us to hyperbitcoinization.![](https://larrysalibra.com/content/images/size/w256h256/2020/03/favicon.png)Larry SalibraLarry Salibra![](https://larrysalibra.com/content/images/2023/09/larry-laser-eyes.jpeg)](https://larrysalibra.com/day-24-lets-use-bitcoin/)

[Day 25: Crypto is the coordination businessCrypto is about tackling problems too big for one company to solve.![](https://larrysalibra.com/content/images/size/w256h256/2020/03/favicon.png)Larry SalibraLarry Salibra![](https://larrysalibra.com/content/images/2023/09/E_India_House.jpg)](https://larrysalibra.com/day-25-crypto-is-the-coordination-business/)

[Day 26: Four questions I ask before starting new projectsWhen considering a new project, I first ask myself these four questions.![](https://larrysalibra.com/content/images/size/w256h256/2020/03/favicon.png)Larry SalibraLarry Salibra![](https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1484069560501-87d72b0c3669?crop=entropy&cs=tinysrgb&fit=max&fm=jpg&ixid=M3wxMTc3M3wwfDF8c2VhcmNofDExfHxxdWVzdGlvbnN8ZW58MHx8fHwxNjkzOTA5MTU3fDA&ixlib=rb-4.0.3&q=80&w=2000)](https://larrysalibra.com/four-things-i-ask-before-starting-new-projects/)

[Day 27: Are airlines buses or experiences?Airlines are unable to decide if they are in the transportation or the experience business.![](https://larrysalibra.com/content/images/size/w256h256/2020/03/favicon.png)Larry SalibraLarry Salibra![](https://larrysalibra.com/content/images/2023/09/Screenshot-2023-09-06-at-16.00.29.png)](https://larrysalibra.com/day-27-are-airlines-buses-or-experiences/)
### Day 27: Are airlines buses or experiences?
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/day-27-are-airlines-buses-or-experiences/
Last updated: 2023-09-06T08:56:43.000Z
It's called business class, so you'd think this premium price airline class would be a product highly-optimized for regular business travelers. Wrong.

 Now when you travel long-haul frequently...sleep and productivity quickly become my two most important metrics. The getting-there takes a lot of time...so much that unless you are flying north and south, it always interrupts your sleep schedule. If you're going to spend 10 to 20 hours in transit, you need to be able to put that time to use. To me, this means getting quality sleep or getting work done. The main motivation for paying extra for business class is to get a bed that you can hopefully get some sleep in or an area that you can get work done. 

Instead, airlines offer one or more elaborate, multi-course meals that break up the flight into small interrupted chunks of time that make it more difficult to sleep or work. 

Why do airlines have one or more elaborate multi-course meals anyway? A multi-course meal might make sense if you're having dinner with a customer or colleague but what's the point of spending an 90 minutes or an hour eating course after course sitting by yourself?

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2023/09/Screenshot-2023-09-06-at-16.11.46.png)

Take a look at the above typical flight from Asia to Europe on one of the highly-rated gulf carriers. The first flight probably has a full meal and a pre-arrival lighter snack/meal. And the second has another full meal. The second flight is scheduled for 6 hours and 35 minutes. Of this, 20 minutes on each side is spent taxiing around on the ground. So lets say we have 6 hours of time in the air. Then there's the time climbing and descending after take off and before landing...let's say that's another hour total. Of the remaining 5 hours, about 90 minutes goes towards the meal service. That leaves three or maybe three and half hours left to actually sleep or get any work done. Not a lot.

In fact, this is the very similar on longer flights because they just add more meal services...it becomes difficult to get an interrupted period of time to sleep more than a few hours at a time.

One option is, of course, to eat before you board and opt out of the onboard meal. But it seems silly to spend even more of your time arriving early to eat in a lounge when you're already paying so much for a flight. If business class airlines were really trying to help business travelers, why don't they offer sandwiches with the boarding drink as an option for those who want to solve their hunger problem in a business-like fashion and go to sleep or use their time more productively?

My guess is that [airlines are conflicted](https://twitter.com/bdeverman/status/1699287702833967111?ref=larrysalibra.com). On the one hand, they're really just buses in the air trying to get people from point A to point as quickly and painlessly as possible. But on the other hand they feel like they're in the experience business...selling luxury experience but calling it a "business" product. Because the airlines competing in these long-haul markets are almost always state-owned or state-subsidized and largely protected from competition, they get away with offering these confused products and can avoid being forced to make a decision as to what business they're in. 

One only needs to look at competitive markets like the domestic EU market to learn that when forced to compete, airlines inevitably find that we consumers...even business consumers...prefer that they be in the bus business. We can buy better experiences than business class in an aluminum tube a million other places, we just need the airlines to get us there...like a bus.
### Day 26: Four questions I ask before starting new projects
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/four-things-i-ask-before-starting-new-projects/
Last updated: 2023-09-05T12:00:18.000Z
## Can it make money?

You can't always tell at the beginning, but you can often get a good idea. If you're creating something people want there will usually be a way to make money on it. Things that don't make money cost money and are unsustainable.

## Does it forward some sort of ideological goal I care about?

Is it moving the world in the direction I want it to go? Is it making the world a better place according to my own value set?

## Is it interesting to me?

If I'm not interested in something, I'm not going to do a very good job at it.

## Is it something I can execute on?

I need to be able to at least get to a minimal viable product with resources on. I also need to have or be able to acquire the domain knowledge to at least be competent enough to find the right people to work with me within a reasonable amount of time.
### Day 25: Crypto is the coordination business
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/day-25-crypto-is-the-coordination-business/
Last updated: 2023-09-04T13:52:08.000Z
The crypto conference circuit, put on pause during covid, is back in session. This week everyone is in Korea... next week they'll be in Singapore. Each new week brings a new blockchain week. It's a bit of a traveling circus. It makes you wonder what problem is this so-called industry trying to solve. Laser-eyed Bitcoin maxis will tell you that everyone is a bunch of degenerate VC-funded gamblers. But that's not the whole story. 

We humans are social creatures and much of our power comes from our ability to work together with other humans. These organizations take many shapes and sizes. On the small side we have the married couple and nuclear family, extended families and tribes. And more recently we have much larger organizations like the joint-stock company and eventually the modern corporation allowed humans to voluntarily pool their capital and labor to tackle tasks that are too big for one person alone. And who could forget the nation-state which does something similar but adds violence and geography into the mix...think of it as a group that tackles large problems through using force to allocate capital and labor. 

Crypto - bitcoin included - is also in the business of human coordination. While the corporation allows humans to tackle problems too big for one human and the nation-state does the same but with violence, crypto tokens enable humans to tackle problems that are too big for one corporation to tackle. When I say too big, I mean that they carry [too much risk](https://github.com/libbitcoin/libbitcoin-system/wiki/Risk-Sharing-Principle?ref=larrysalibra.com) for one entity to carry on its own.

Imagine if Satoshi said he was going to start a corporation to separate the state from its control over money. His enterprise would have co-opted by the state...as happened to PayPal or shut down like [Liberty Reserve](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberty%5FReserve?ref=larrysalibra.com).
### Day 24: Laser-eyed HODLing alone is not enough
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/day-24-lets-use-bitcoin/
Last updated: 2023-09-03T12:49:26.000Z
There seem to be two major schools of thought in bitcoin. Both schools of thought say that you should buy and HODL as much bitcoin as possible. They differ with respect to their views on using bitcoin.

One school of thought says that you should only buy bitcoin and never use it. These people say that anyone trying to get you to use your bitcoin is a scammer. The second school of thought is that you should use bitcoin as much as possible: paying for things with bitcoin and building things that use bitcoin.

For bitcoin to succeed, we need bitcoin economic activity to be as widely distributed as possible. The ultimate goal should be for every single person to be an economic node on the network...running their own node and validating their own interpretation of the consensus rules. The bitcoin network effect needs to be as large as possible...accepted on every website, in every app and on every shop on every street across the world. We need to build a world where the places you can use your bitcoin are more than just a handful of easily regulated, centralized exchanges. A censorship-resistant currency that is only accepted at Binance and Coinbase isn't a very censorship-resistant...nor is it much of a currency!

As you can probably tell, I very much subscribe to the second school of thought. I am always happy...even excited...to pay for things in bitcoin when people request it. I am always willing to accept payment in bitcoin. This is not to say one should waste bitcoin, but that that one should treat it as money. In the short-term, economize your use of bitcoin...happily trade it for things of value...a meal...an item or service that you might need. It the long-term, try to build your wealth as measured in bitcoin.
### Day 23: Predictable natural disasters are not natural at all
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/day-23-predictable-natural-disaster-are-not-natural-at-all/
Last updated: 2023-09-02T07:18:05.000Z
It's the afternoon after the direct hit of category 4 tropical cyclone (typhoon) Saola on Hong Kong. As I predicted yesterday, there were [no deaths, no landslides, no power or internet outages and mostly just minor damage](https://www.info.gov.hk/gia/general/202309/02/P2023090200477.htm?ref=larrysalibra.com). So why am I still thinking about this?

Roughly 11 months ago, my parents' new house was hit by a similar storm in the south of Florida. Tropical cyclone (hurricane) Ian was a category 4 storm when it made a direct hit in their area. In contrast to Saola's effect on Hong Kong, there was massive damage and 149 total deaths. Their own house, newly built and only a couple years old had the ceilings collapse after the roof failed and water got inside.

A year later, we as a family are still dealing with the effects of Hurricane Ian. Insurance paid out quickly and of course covered everything but the damage was so widespread in that area of Florida that only in the past month...10 months after the damage...have construction crews repaired the roof so that other workers can start to repair the interior damage.

While, for our family, the financial costs have been covered, there's nothing that can be done about the year of time that's been lost dealing with the damage.

The difference in effect of tropical cyclones in Hong Kong and Florida can't be written off as the difference between living on a rock vis living in a swamp. 11,000 people died on this rock that is Hong Kong during a typhoon in 1936 and zero died on the same rock yesterday despite a much larger population. The rock didn't change, but people's behavior did.

Tropical cylones, of course, are not unexpected in Florida and areas around the Gulf of Mexico. Yet every few years during my lifetime, a massive storm causes tons of damage, death and homeless somewhere in that region. FEMA is called out, lots of grandiose statements are made by politicians, but nothing seems to change. A few years later and it happens again somewhere else. Yet people don't seem interested in changing their behavior...my own family's included. 

The problem behavior in a place like Florida is pretty obvious. Houses are way too spread out to be able to realistically protect them with the massive investments in infrastructure that a densely place like Hong Kong can. Single family and small multifamily dwellings made by random contractors for a couple hundred thousands dollars just aren't as strong as hundred million dollar high rise buildings whose plans have been gone over with fine-tooth combs by expensive engineering firm, investors and insurers. Lightly used Florida county roads aren't backed by the [multi billion dollar drainage systems](https://edition.cnn.com/style/article/hong-kong-tunnels-climate-crisis-intl-hnk-dst/index.html?ref=larrysalibra.com) that keeps the roads on Hong Kong Island free of water. 

The list goes on and on but ultimately it can be summarized as people making a lifestyle choice. By choosing to live in the single family home on the Florida coast, you're also choosing that with high probability you'll at some point spend a bunch of time dealing with a hurricane-wrecked house. It's not the choice I would personally make, but for some, the lifestyle seems to be worth it. 

The lesson here is that predictable natural disasters, are not natural at all, but the inevitable outcome of poor human choices. If you chose to live in a wooden house in a place where the wind blows down wooden houses, wind is going to blow down your wooden house. That's your fault, not mother nature's!
### Day 22: A snow day in Hong Kong
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/day-22-a-snow-day-in-hong-kong/
Last updated: 2023-09-03T15:56:08.000Z
As I write this, the eye wall of Tropical Cyclone Saola...a "super typhoon"...is passing over Hong Kong, with the center of the storm about 40 km southwest of the city. Winds at Waglan Island are gusting at over 90 knots...that's over 170 kph for you landlubbers. The Hong Kong Observatory, our weather service, just announced the highest level typhoon warning T10\. This is a direct hit.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2023/09/IMG_7622.jpeg)

A storm of this strength, currently a category 4 if rated on the same scale as the one used for hurricanes in the Western Hemiphere, would be expected to cause massive damage, death and destruction. States of emergency would be preemptively declared, mass evacuations ordered. In comparison, in Hong Kong, it feels more like a snow day. A fun change to everyone's regularly scheduled weekly programming. Many people had the day off work and so snuck out to coffee shops to meet up with friends or to gyms before the rains and wind picked up this evening.

So why are typhoons in Hong Kong...the exact same storms that cause death and destruction in neighboring regions...mainland China...the Philippines...such a relative non-event?

*Two words: human ingenuity.* 

In the not so distance past, as recently as the 1970s, hundreds of people would died and thousands or tens of thousands would be plunged into homeless. Starting in the 1970s, Hong Kong started to examining how it could stop these predictable deaths. Massive investment was made into water run off and drainage control, with most recently [a HK$30 billion drainage tunnel and storage system](https://edition.cnn.com/style/article/hong-kong-tunnels-climate-crisis-intl-hnk-dst/index.html?ref=larrysalibra.com) bored under Hong Kong Island.

A system was put in place [to prevent the occurance of landslides](https://hkss.cedd.gov.hk/hkss/en/slope-safety-in-hong-kong/slope-safety-system/overview/index.html?ref=larrysalibra.com) by strengthing high risk slopes...essentially covering entire hills in reinforced concrete and other works and devising a system of regular maintenance and inspection. 

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2023/09/Key-Landslide-Risk-Reduction-Strategies-Eng.jpg)

Hong Kong's rail public transit system, MTR, was designed with regular typhoons in mind and continues to run underground trains even during the strongest hurricane force storms. MTR has even set up [a system to monitor all of the 33,000 possible trees that might fall on the open areas of their track](https://www.mtr.com.hk/archive/corporate/en/press%5Frelease/PR-19-041-E.pdf?ref=larrysalibra.com) and regularly practice typhoon drills.

All of this work has paid massive dividends. In the most recent large typhoon, Typhoon Mangkhut in 2018, the strongest since records started being kept, there were zero deaths and most people were able to go back to work the very next morning. And I can sit here writing this, lights on, in air conditioned comfort, knowing that I'll be able to sleep comfortably tonight and wake up to a functioning city in the morning.

The lesson for the world...especially the "OMG-the-climate-change-is-going-to-kill-us-all" people...is that humans are incredibly adaptable and with sufficient planning, engineering and coordination...and, of course, resources..., we can do anything.
### Day 21: Americans have no idea how much better China’s infrastructure is
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/americans-have-no-idea-how-much-better-chinas-infrastructure-is/
Last updated: 2023-08-31T12:00:16.000Z
I came across the [following post on X](https://twitter.com/lukegromen/status/1696913190729200095?ref=larrysalibra.com) a couple days ago talking about how US debt comes from spending on war while Chinese debt is from spending on infrastructure:

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2023/08/Screenshot-2023-08-31-at-18.18.08.png)

I don't think even educated Americans understand how much better Chinese infrastructure is than American infrastructure. There are of course the headline shiny bridges, high speed trains, a new highway network bigger than the US interstate system. Everyone knows about those. But even the relatively simple things like the electrical grid are orders of magnitude better in China. 

I grew up in a well-off suburb east of Cleveland, Ohio in the 80s and 90s. It's a place that looks sort of rural but in reality is a 10 minute drive from an Apple Store and Costco. Power outages were a regular feature of life. At one point in the dead of winter, our electricity went off for over a week. Snow or something. We ran a kerosene heater indoors to keep the pipes from freezing and didn't have running water because there electricity to pump it out of the well. 

After this experience, my parents bought one of those automatic backup standby generators that can power the whole house. And boy did we use the heck out of it. Electrical power would go out a couple times a year. Usually it would only be out for a few hours, but there were days long outages every other year or so. And of course there was the infamous [Northeast blackout of 2003](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast%5Fblackout%5Fof%5F2003?ref=larrysalibra.com) of which Ohio was apparently responsible.

My parents have since moved to Florida and despite living halfway around the world in Hong Kong, I talk to them several times a week. One frequent topic of conversation is power outages. There are, of course, the hurricane and weather-related ones. But also for a year or so their development was experiencing regular power outages in perfect weather every week or two and no one seemed to know why. How is that possible and how can it go on for so long?

I lived primarily in Guangzhou, China for about 5 years from 2007\. I also previously lived in Beijing for about half a year in 2003\. During that time, the number of times I encountered a power outage was exactly one. It was in Guangzhou and it was announced two weeks in advance to me via a flyer that [China Southern Power Grid](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China%5FSouthern%5FPower%5FGrid?ref=larrysalibra.com) left in front of my door.

In case you're thinking, "that's just because mainland China's power grid is new and not old," Since then, for the past decade or so I've lived in Hong Kong and I've only experienced one brief power outage roughly 5 years ago. Our [electricity provider](https://www.hkelectric.com/en/our-operations/hk-electric-at-a-glance?ref=larrysalibra.com#facts-and-figures), has been providing power to Hong Kong since 1887 and has been able to maintain an average of less than 1 minute of unplanned customer outage per year since 2009\. I believe it.

There's just really no reason in a developed country to have the sort of basic electrical infrastructure problems I thought were normal growing up in the USA. At least not for people living in populated suburban and urban areas where my family always lived. I'm not really sure what the problem was or is. The money was there and still is. Sure, a lot of it is just being wasted on wars in far away lands that are never won. But perhaps it's just a problem of low expectations? A culture that seems happy with its public utilities not being very good at the utility part?
### Day 20: Opting out of US healthcare and social security
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/day-20-opting-out-of-us-healthcare-and-social-security/
Last updated: 2023-08-30T12:00:47.000Z
I'm an early millennial...high school class of 2000\. Growing up in the 90s, a frequent topic of discussion on the news and current events was that by the time we got to retirement, social security and medicare would be bankrupt. We would of course be expected to pay in the system but we were unlikely to get anything close to what we paid out of the system. The demographics and math just didn't work. 

I heard this narrative over and over during middle school and high school. When I got my first white market job, teaching swimming to other kids, I was promised something like 14 dollars per hour. When I got my paycheck though and did that math, I was actually getting way less than $14 per hour. Uncle Sam was skimming off the top and part of it was going into the widely advertised ponzi scheme of social security and medicare. I imagine my dollar bills going into some pot and then immediately be sent to my grandparents. It seemed like a raw deal...a scam. How could my grandparents' generation decide like a million years ago decide that yet unborn me would have to for their retirement? How was that fair?

Anyways, I got this idea stuck in my mind that there was no way I could rely on this system that everyone was saying was going to be bankrupt and gone by the time it was my turn to receive the sweet government benefits. 

Fast forward a couple decades and I find myself in middle age in Hong Kong. By going abroad after university, save for one more summer job, I actually managed to avoid paying any money at all into the US social insurance system. Instead, I find myself responsible for my own future healthcare and retirement. There will be no social security and no medicare for me. Not being compelled to pay into that or a similar system is both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, I have the freedom to make my own decisions on what health care and retirement savings make sense for me. On the other hand, there is the responsibility that comes with that freedom. There are a lot of choices to be made and if I mess up, it's my fault, not some group of politicians.
### Day 19: Why am I paying for you to read this?
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/day-19-why-am-i-paying-for-you-to-read-this/
Last updated: 2023-08-29T12:00:11.000Z
As write this, I'm trying to try out the Llama2-70b LLM model in my browser using [WebLLM](https://webllm.mlc.ai/?ref=larrysalibra.com). It's taking forever because the developer that wrote that seems to be hosting the model on a Cloudfront CDN paid for by Hugging Face that seems to be speed limited to about 150 megabits per second. The model itself looks to be about \~40 gigabytes. If I was downloading over 4G LTE, I'd be pretty happy with this, but I'm trying to download this over my wired, 10 gigabit, fiber to home connection...so I'm getting 1.5% of what my network is capable.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2023/08/Screenshot-2023-08-29-at-13.03.06.png)

Now, I'm not a customer of Hugging Face or anyone else related to this. I'm just a random enthusiast that happened on the WebLLM project via Hacker News, happened to have the minimum hardware requirements and wanted to give it a go. They don't owe me anything...I'm downloading free software and not paying a satoshi to anyone. I should be happy that someone is willing to pay for servers to send me this data at even 150 megabits per second!

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2023/08/Screenshot-2023-08-29-at-13.03.25.png)

But that leads me to question of why is someone else paying for me to download free stuff at all. I'm the one who wants this data...shouldn't I be paying for it? And why can't I pay for to download it faster? Alas, this is how the client-server architecture of the internet works. I pay for a server, a domain name and spend time setting up blog software so that I can spend time writing (for free) so that other people can read it. And if I'm really successful, a lot of people read it so I have to pay even more for people to see the work I did for free. The incentives are entirely backwards.

Now, in my case, I'm not interested in making money from blogging. I blog first and foremost for myself...as a way of improving my thinking and communication skills. And secondarily as a way to find people who are interested in similar things to what I'm interested in. And maybe this is true about Hugging Face as well. I don't really know anything about their business except that they raised a lot of money and do something around "AI"...perhaps also don't want to make money off of distributing free LLMs to people like me. But it would certainly be nice if there was a way I could easily pay a bit of money...zap some satoshis to someone...to send these bits to me faster.
### Day 18: Stacks will be the Paypal mafia of Bitcoin
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/day-18-stacks-will-be-the-paypal-mafia-of-bitcoin/
Last updated: 2023-08-28T15:00:48.000Z
I had hotpot up in Shenzhen about a week ago with the [Ryder](https://www.ryder.id/?ref=larrysalibra.com) and [Xverse](https://www.xverse.app/?ref=larrysalibra.com) teams. Xverse just closed their [$5 mm seed round](https://larrysalibra.com/investing-in-web3-on-bitcoin/) and the Ryder team was in town working on the commercial for their new hardware wallet. 

Prior to Xverse, Bitcoin wallet innovation had mostly stopped. There were a bunch of new Lightning wallets that also have Bitcoin wallets but don't work reliably are custodial.

Prior to Ryder, development on hardware wallet UX had also stalled. Ledger just keeps adding more tokens and Trezor...I don't know what Trezor is doing. Both just punt on the "what to do with seed phrases problems" and "solve" it by giving users a piece of paper to write it down. They gave up. Nobody *likes* to use their hardware wallet...we use them only begrudingly. What Ryder's come up with will revolutionize this.

And just before writing this, I just had a call with [Chris](https://twitter.com/castig?ref=larrysalibra.com) of [Console](https://www.console.xyz/?ref=larrysalibra.com)...he's got some ideas on Web3 chat that I think might revolutionize communication for those who want to use their own identities with BNS and ENS names. 

Let's just say I'm totally blown away by all three of these teams...and it's mind-blowing to me that they all came out of the Stacks family and are building on Bitcoin. It's incredibly motivational to see what former colleagues and peers I met along with the way are capable of.

We built a lot tech while I was at Blockstack, but I think in the long run we'll find that the most valuable thing we built was the community of builders and entrepreneurs that's building on Bitcoin. Really excited to see where things go next!
### Day 17: Writing about hard things is hard!
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/day-17-writing-about-hard-things-is-hard/
Last updated: 2023-08-27T12:00:42.000Z
So I'm on Day 17, 18 days into my [month-long daily blogging challenge](https://larrysalibra.com/day-1-my-daily-blogging-commitment/). As I think about what topics to write about each day, it's become clearer to me what's easy to write about and what's hard. I've spent the past several years of my life in Bitcoin...first growing the community in Hong Kong and then building the Stacks ecosystem. As such, I have intimate knowledge, technical and social, and strong views about a wide range subjects in Bitcoin. 

Writing about these topics is hard though. Why is that? Because I am so invested in the ecosystem and community, I'm very aware that if I take a controversial position on something, there's very likely someone I personally know and like, or might want to work with who might be offended or take it out of context. But who cares what other people think? Well it turns out I care. And I can't be the only one. 

So I end up taking way more time to write something that might be perceived as controversial about things I'm invested in because I feel the need to think about every possible effect my writing may have. In contrast, it's easy to write about things only tangentially related to me. I guess you could say writing about easy things is easy and writing about hard things is hard!
### Day: 16 Diaspora have a bone to pick
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/day-16-diaspora-have-a-bone-to-pick/
Last updated: 2023-08-26T12:00:40.000Z
I came across a comment the other day on X asking why a [well-known Chinese-American Bloomberg commentator](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minxin%5FPei?ref=larrysalibra.com) is so often wrong about China despite knowing China so well. In this case it was in regards to an article written by Dr. Minxin Pei suggesting that the "financial meltdown" China is supposedly experiencing from trying to break its debt addiction will be "fatal" to the country. It got me thinking about the role diaspora play in the narratives about their former homes.

There's a long history of Chinese diaspora in the West predicting the imminent demise of their homeland. They write entire books on the subject...like the infamous the [*Coming Collapse of China*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The%5FComing%5FCollapse%5Fof%5FChina?ref=larrysalibra.com) doomsday predictor Gordon Chang who in 2001 predicted the Chinese Communist Party would cause to the country to collapse by 2011\. He was of course entirely wrong.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2023/08/China-GDP-1980-2020.png)

Diaspora are people who identify with one place but chose to live somewhere else. Moving far from home isn't something one does lightly. Usually there is some sort of underlying unhappiness with the conditions at home. This can be unhappiness with the economic or political conditions or something else.

The high cost they went through to right this perceived unhappiness makes diaspora high susceptible to confirmation bias. Every negative news item out of their homeland means that their decision to leave it behind was right and that it is closer to the inevitable collapse that will vindicate their decision

Because so many have bone to pick with their former homeland, some of them find themselves spending their lives focusing on this decision through their careers or professions. Their interest and passion about the subject matter combined with language and cultural skills that give them better access makes them natural choices for academics studying, journalists writing about or pundits pontificating about their old homes.

Combine this diaspora confirmation bias phenomenon with the fact that diaspora often end up in places that have adversarial relationships with their homes and you can quickly see why so many of them rise quickly in the ranks. Who more credible to tell us how bad our enemy is than someone who "escaped" from the enemy?

We're seeing a similar phenomenon from the latest generation of Hong Kong diaspora...people who see themselves as political refugees from Hong Kong over the past few years who have moved to the West. They're unhappy with the current China and Hong Kong SAR government and want nothing more than to believe that the system they left behind is failing. So we get a continuous stream of former Hong Kongers living in cold and dreary places like the UK, telling us that Hong Kong is over. Well I'm still here in Hong Kong and looking out my window, it doesn't seem over to me. But tell yourself whatever makes you feel better 

I, myself, am of course not immune to this phenomenon. As a former US citizen, I find myself part of the American diaspora. I sometimes find myself citing negative news out the US as a way to justify my own decision to leave. I also have my own bones to pick. Spending my life "picking bones"...trying to win imaginary disagreements that are impossible to resolve...isn't really what I to spend my time doing.
### Day 15: Employer tax withholding is a scam
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/tax-withholding-is-a-scam/
Last updated: 2023-08-25T09:17:06.000Z
> \[Employer tax withholding\] functions as an anesthetic. It dulls the pain of paying tax, but it also dulls the mind. In Hong Kong, most tax payers seem to have a reasonably accurate idea of how much tax they pay, because they pay it themselves, and the experience sticks in the mind. And the rest of the developed world, in contrast, PAYE decrides the large majority of the population for this opportunity for reflection. - Professor Michael Littleworth

I clearly remember in 2010 when I first became a Hong Kong resident being out with friends...we were at the beach on Ma Wan...and listening to them complain about having just received their Salaries tax bills from the government. This was new to me...coming from the USA and having lived in Mainland China, tax bills were usually about getting refunds, not paying more.

In most of the developed world, employers take money from their employees' paychecks and pay it directly to the government. In Hong Kong, however, employees get paid 100% of their salary and then, only later, at the end of the government's fiscal year, get a bill for the tax owed on their salary.

Let's take a look at two employees that "make" about the same about of money. One lives in New York City and has a salary of $200,000 and the other lives in Hong Kong has a salary of HK$1,500,000\. Over the course of the year, employee in New York City making $200,000 might only ever see $129,000 of that money enter into his bank account, with the other $71,000 being paid by the employer on the employee's behalf to the government. 

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2023/08/Screenshot-2023-08-25-at-16.44.19-2.png)

In contrast, the employee in Hong Kong is paid his entire salary of HK$1,500,000 into his bank account over the course of the year. Only later does the government send him a bill for HK$208,560, the amount he owes on his salary tax.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2023/08/Screenshot-2023-08-25-at-16.43.12.png)

The Hong Kong employee is in the position of writing a cheque for HK$208,560 to the government...a very painful experience. Contrast this to the employee in New York City who never saw the money in the first place and might even be happy to find that he gets a $1,000 "refund" because his employer gave the government slightly too much money.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2023/08/Screenshot-2023-08-25-at-17.00.02-1.png)

A salaries tax bill from the Hong Kong Government.

The psychological difference between these two systems is hard to understate. Governments that use the employer withholding system do so because they would never be able get taxpayers to pay the high rates that they tax them if the taxpayers were given the money first. 

Again, Professor Michael Littleworth from around 54:30 of [his talk on the History of Hong Kong's Tax Law System](https://www.law.cuhk.edu.hk/app/the-history-of-hong-kongs-tax-law-system-by-prof-michael-littlewood/?ref=larrysalibra.com):

> The reason other countries' \[besides Hong Kong\] heavy taxes are viable is only because they're collected from the employer rather than from the employee. In the rest of the developed world, if the government were to abolish \[employer tax withholding\], and taxpayers were required to pay their tax themselves, the result would be that a very large number of them would fail to pay. In order to collect the tax, the government would have to sue the defaulters, which would be expensive. Many would turn out not to have any assets, so getting a judgement against them would be futile. Worse, the political cost of dragging otherwise law-abiding citizens through the courts would be colossal. In short, the consequence of abolishing \[employer tax withholding\] in most developed countries would be chaos. 

> Hong Kong however manages very well without \[employer tax withholding\]. The reasons for this are obvious. Saving to pay Hong Kong's light tax is relatively easy. Also, almost all of those who are obliged to pay are worth suing if they fail to pay. But the fact that the Hong Kong, and the fact that Hong Kong has no \[employer tax withholding\] gives the Hong Kong government a kind of legitimacy that cannot be claimed by the governments with most other developed jurisdictions. For surely a government that can rely on taxpayer's active compliance is in a sense more legitimate than one whose finances would be reduced to chaos if they tried to do the same. 

Professor Littlewood's [entire talk](https://www.law.cuhk.edu.hk/app/the-history-of-hong-kongs-tax-law-system-by-prof-michael-littlewood/?ref=larrysalibra.com) is worth watching both if you're familiar with Hong Kong's tax system because you live here and want to know how it came to be or if you live somewhere else and want to know what you're missing.
### Day 14: Behave like the society you want to live in
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/day-14-behave-like-the-society-you-want-to-live-in/
Last updated: 2023-08-24T12:00:59.000Z
Tourists often complain that Hong Kongers are gruff, busy and money-focused...the New York City of Asia some say. People who don't live in Hong Kong are often surprised when I tell them that one of the reasons I stay here are because everyone is so kind. From the auntie working Café de Coral that goes out of her way to help me find a table to the Inland Revenue Department official that is patient and helpful answering the question that she's probably been asked 100 times before, to the random people on the street that lend a hand when I'm carrying too much or forget an umbrella. Hong Kongers' kindness makes me want to be kind in return. 

A few nights ago, I was going for a walk with my better half after dinner in Hong Kong when we found someone's iPhone face down on the sidewalk. No one else was around. Since the phone was locked so we couldn't find out whose it was, my first thought was to give it to a police station in case someone reported it missing. 

Before we could figure out the nearest police station, the phone rang and we answered it. It was the phone's owner trying to find his phone. We told him where we were (apparently he didn't know about Find My) and waited until he could come over to pick it up. It turned out that it had fallen out of his pocket while he was driving his scooter. He was very happy to get the phone back and we felt great for doing a good deed. Everyone won. Good feelings all around!
### ✍️ Week 2 of my writing challenge
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/newsletter/week-2-month-long-writing-challenge/
Last updated: 2023-08-23T14:18:59.000Z
Hi friends!

We are wrapping up week two of my month-long daily writing challenge. Posts from Day 4 through Day 13 are linked below. If you missed the first four posts, you can find them [here in the previous email](https://larrysalibra.com/newsletter/my-month-long-writing-challenge/).

I feel like I'm really getting into the habit of writing daily and quickly. I'm also cognizant that the results are not as good as a post I might put a dozen hours into and perhaps not as worthy of the audience's time. I think there's a place for both types of writing though. I think of these as my daily thoughts - more of an online diary - as opposed to a researched and wordsmithed article.

If you'd like to follow the posts as the came out, you can [subscribe to my RSS feed](https://larrysalibra.com/blog/rss/) or [follow me on the social media platform formerly known as Twitter](https://twitter.com/larrysalibra?ref=larrysalibra.com).

Until next time,

Larry

[Day 4: The skipper does not drive the boatTo be skipper means finding good crew and delegating.![](https://larrysalibra.com/content/images/size/w256h256/2020/03/favicon.png)Larry SalibraLarry Salibra![](https://larrysalibra.com/content/images/2023/08/IMG_4373.jpeg)](https://larrysalibra.com/day-4-the-skipper-does-not-drive-the-boat/)

[Day 5: Apple keeps deleting my games and musicThe captain has turned off the seatbelt sign and my downloaded music is gone. What gives?![](https://larrysalibra.com/content/images/size/w256h256/2020/03/favicon.png)Larry SalibraLarry Salibra![](https://larrysalibra.com/content/images/2023/08/IMG_20A6AD9F4F1F-1.jpeg)](https://larrysalibra.com/day-5-apple-keeps-deleting-my-games-and-music/)

[Day 6: The intelligent investor was banned from owning goldThe intelligent investor was banned from owning the most ancient of asset classes and he thought it was funny.![](https://larrysalibra.com/content/images/size/w256h256/2020/03/favicon.png)Larry SalibraLarry Salibra![](https://larrysalibra.com/content/images/2023/08/Screenshot-2023-08-12-at-17.19.40.png)](https://larrysalibra.com/day-6-intelligent-investor-banned-from-owning-gold/)

[Day 7: iPad Mini as an eBook readerDitch your Kindle, get an iPad Mini...the perfect eBook reader.![](https://larrysalibra.com/content/images/size/w256h256/2020/03/favicon.png)Larry SalibraLarry Salibra![](https://larrysalibra.com/content/images/2023/08/IMG_1003.jpeg)](https://larrysalibra.com/ipad-mini-as-an-ebook-reader/)

[Day 8: America is not knowing how much you’re going to payThe paradox of a free market where no one knows the price.![](https://larrysalibra.com/content/images/size/w256h256/2020/03/favicon.png)Larry SalibraLarry Salibra![](https://larrysalibra.com/content/images/2023/08/supply-and-demand.jpg)](https://larrysalibra.com/day-8-america-is-not-knowing-how-much-youre-going-to-pay/)

[Day 9: Stop trying to make Bitcoin in brick & mortar happenBitcoin in brick & mortar has failed. The Lightning community should stop wasting time chasing in person payments.![](https://larrysalibra.com/content/images/size/w256h256/2020/03/favicon.png)Larry SalibraLarry Salibra![](https://larrysalibra.com/content/images/2023/08/IMG_3677.PNG)](https://larrysalibra.com/stop-trying-to-make-bitcoin-brick-and-mortar-happen/)

[Day 10: 1 year of Duolingo ItalianLooking back on a year of Duolingo Italian. Have I learned anything?![](https://larrysalibra.com/content/images/size/w256h256/2020/03/favicon.png)Larry SalibraLarry Salibra![](https://larrysalibra.com/content/images/2023/08/IMG_6867.PNG)](https://larrysalibra.com/1-year-of-duolingo-italian/)

[Day 11: Online vs offline in person paymentsIn person payment systems that require users to be online fall apart when the network stops working. A hotpot experience.![](https://larrysalibra.com/content/images/size/w256h256/2020/03/favicon.png)Larry SalibraLarry Salibra![](https://larrysalibra.com/content/images/2023/08/IMG_7396-1.jpeg)](https://larrysalibra.com/day-11-online-vs-offline-in-person-payments/)

[Day 12: Hot and not bitcoin technologiesAn informal poll of a Hong Kong ordinals meetup about which bitcoin tech is interesting and which is not.![](https://larrysalibra.com/content/images/size/w256h256/2020/03/favicon.png)Larry SalibraLarry Salibra![](https://larrysalibra.com/content/images/2023/08/IMG_7352-2.jpeg)](https://larrysalibra.com/day-12-hot-and-not-bitcoin-tech/)

[Day 13: Rent seeking medical testsI’m dreaming of a world where medical tests are cheap and automated.![](https://larrysalibra.com/content/images/size/w256h256/2020/03/favicon.png)Larry SalibraLarry Salibra![](https://larrysalibra.com/content/images/2023/08/IMG_7481.jpeg)](https://larrysalibra.com/day-13-rent-seeking-medical-tests/)
### Day 13: Rent seeking medical tests
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/day-13-rent-seeking-medical-tests/
Last updated: 2023-08-23T13:36:18.000Z
I went to the rock climbing gym last night. My first time climbing in Hong Kong in over a decade and first time climbing since going in Long Island City, NYC with Stacks colleagues in the pre-covid days. I'd forgotten what a great social activity...meet new people, learn new things and get some exercise. 

Unfortunately, afterwards, I started feeling sick. First a headache, then cloudy thinking and suddenly my energy started disappearing. I quickly went home and to bed and ended up sleeping 15 or 16 hours. When I woke up, still feeling the same, I was naturally curious as to what was wrong with me. Was it covid? Something else?

While browsing my local Mannings for cold medicines, I noticed that they still sold Covid tests...five for HK$20...about 50 cents US each. Next it was a new test I'd never seen before...a rapid test for covid, influenza A and influenza B for 10x the price...HK$40 for one test. Curious, I bought one. I took it home and tried it out but I apparently didn't have covid or the flu.

But it got me thinking, why aren't there more inexpensive diagnostic and monitoring tools available for consumers? How much time and money could be saved if we were able to get cheaply and quickly get objective information about what's going on in our bodies without having to make a doctors appointment and jump through a bunch of expensive hoops to get a test? We've seen how cheap and covid tests have gotten...imagine what we could do if barriers were removed so that the market could develop cheap and easy tests for everything.

You might take a home test once a week that checked all of your vitals and the presence of any infectious agents. Or get an early warning about a possibly developing health issue. Perhaps this can be automated into a wearable device like Apple Watch.

Instead we're stuck with expensive annual health checks gated behind the rent seeking medical industry.
### Day 12: Hot and not bitcoin technologies
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/day-12-hot-and-not-bitcoin-tech/
Last updated: 2023-08-22T12:00:43.000Z
At last Friday's ordinals meet up in Hong Kong, I spent some time asking attendees what Bitcoin tech they were excited about and why. Below is a summary of the responses I got and general sentiment (not necessarily my views - I'm just the messenger):

## Hot

- Ordinals - it was an ordinals meet up, so this was not surprising.
- Lightning - lots of excitment. Seems to be a focus on big names that everyone likes building in Lightning: Elizabeth Stark, Jack Dorsey, David Marcus
- Taproot assets - interest in how taproot assets can complement ordinals and the potential for faster trading via lightning
- Stacks + sBTC - excitement about upcoming 5 second block times and a trustless peg-in/out for BTC will supercharge Bitcoin defi
- Bitcoin L1/L2 names - ordinals meetup attendees were excited about names as a special case of NFTs

## Not

- Rootstock - does this still exist and does anyone use this?
- RGB - Many people saw [the Tether CTO's announcement that USDT will not longer be issued on Bitcoin](https://twitter.com/paoloardoino/status/1692154723875328228?ref=larrysalibra.com) but may be later be issued on RGB in the future. But no one had seen anything working on RGB.
- Drivechain - Everyone had heard of drivechain but everyone seems to write it off because of it requires a bitcoin fork.
- Liquid - everyone had heard of liquid ("oh yeah, that's Blockstream's thing"), but no one had used it.
- Bisq - no one had heard of bisq, which surprised me
### Day 11: Online vs offline in person payments
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/day-11-online-vs-offline-in-person-payments/
Last updated: 2023-08-21T12:00:17.000Z
I had hotpot last night in Shenzhen with some friends from software and hardware bitcoin companies. After dinner, I of course wanted to split the bill with bitcoin paid by Lightning and actually managed to convince one person to do so. For some reason, China Mobile hasn't been letting roaming phones connect to some portions (or certain frequencies?) of their network and so that night, my roaming HK phone didn't have a very good connection inside the restaurant. Because of this, the Lightning wallet I was trying to use to receive the payment, Phoenix wallet, wouldn't generate a QR for me to receive payment. Apparently it still can't generate an invoice without talking to the network despite containing its own LND node. However, once we walked outside where the network signal was stronger, payment [went through quickly...like lightning.](https://twitter.com/larrysalibra/status/1693290346393047202?ref=larrysalibra.com)

Another person at the dinner paid me via Hong Kong's ubiquitous bank account to bank account real time gross settlement system "Faster Payment Service." I didn't need to be online for him to send this payment...it automatically appeared in my bank account in Hong Kong. 

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2023/08/IMG_C4D7CAEB1224-1-1.jpeg)

Still another wanted to pay me via Tencent's onshore payment system which everyone calls "WeChat Pay" despite the company's position that the english name is Weixin Pay. I didn't need to be online to receive this payment from him, but I did need to be online to accept his friend request so that he could send the payment. The money he paid me was onshore renminbi (CNY) and I had paid the bill using an offshore renminbi (CNH) credit card...so I couldn't actually use the money unless I bought more stuff onshore...but that's a story for another day.

If you're thinking "wow that's a lot of fiat payments for a dinner with bitcoin friends, why aren't they using bitcoin?" You and I are on the same page. Also a story for another day.

In defense of Lightning, I had had a similar problem when I originally paid the bill in fiat money with Unionpay's QR code payment service "Cloud QuickPass". The app wouldn't provide a QR code for the merchant to scan until it could connect to the internet and the merchant needed to be online to "pull" the payment from Unionpay credit card linked to the app.

This led me start thinking about online vs offline when sending in-person payments. Some payment methods require neither party to be online, some require one party to be online and some require both to be online. 

Below is a list of payment methods I commonly encounter and which parties need to be online to send the payment. This list solely deals with the making the payment, not independent verification by the recipient that it was made.

- Cash: Neither party needs to be online
- FPS: Only the sending party needs to be online
- Alipay, Wechat Pay, Alipay HK, Wechat Pay HK:  
  - To send to individuals, only the sending party needs to be online, but they need to be friends. If not friends, they need to be online to add as a friend.
  - To send to merchants, both parties need to be online for pull payments (merchant scans customer) but not when customer scans merchant (like paying a taxi driver or street vendor's QR code.
- Bitcoin & other blockchain-based tokens: only the sending party needs to be online
- Lightning - both parties need to be online
- Octopus Card - neither party needs to online
- Credit card/Apple Pay - Neither party needs to be online, but receiving party has risk of no funds available if it is not online.

Internet connectivity doesn't work all the time. Because of this, the more parties a payment method requires to be online to send a payment, the greater the chance that the user experience is ruined when one of them has connection problems.
### Day 10: 1 year of Duolingo Italian
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/1-year-of-duolingo-italian/
Last updated: 2023-08-20T12:00:22.000Z
I'm what you might call a language junkie. I love to learn both human and computer languages. Last year while visiting my ancestral home town in Sicily, I re-discovered Duolingo, and just for fun, started doing Italian lessons. After a few days, I'd learned a few words and phrases that were immediately useful given that I was at the time in Italy. Simple stuff like "*quanto costa?"* \- how much?*, "acqua, per favore"* \- "water, please"*, "un cotello, per favore"* \- "a knife please".

Studying a language, be it a human or computer language, is always the easiest and most rewarding when you are an environment to immediately put to use what you've learned because of the sense of accomplishment you receive for being able to use each thing you've learned creates a feedback loop that motivates you to keep learning more. While you can try taking classes to learn languages, if you can't figure out how to create this motivational feedback loop, you're probably not going to succeed at learning the language that you are studying.

## Where I am today

I'm now a bit over a year into my Italian study on Duolingo. Today is day 391 of my learning streak and I'm on unit 26 of 51 units of the Duolingo Italian course and curious as to what this really means in terms of ability. I've taken a couple online language placement tests and it seems like I'm around advanced A1 or early A2 in the [CEFR common reference levels](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common%5FEuropean%5FFramework%5Fof%5FReference%5Ffor%5FLanguages?ref=larrysalibra.com).

Wikipedia describes CEFR A2 as the following:

> Can understand sentences and frequently used expressions related to areas of most immediate relevance (e.g. very basic personal and family information, shopping, local geography, employment).

> Can communicate in simple and routine tasks requiring a simple and direct exchange of information on familiar and routine matters.

> Can describe in simple terms aspects of their background, immediate environment and matters in areas of immediate need.

I've just starting to be able to do the above tasks - at least in terms of listening, reading and writing. I have very little experience with speaking besides talking to the app.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2023/08/Screenshot-2023-08-20-at-17.28.49-2.png)

## Improving my motivational feedback loop

A year out from my last trip to Italy, I'm feeling the urge to improve my motivational learning feedback loop. I live in an environment where I use Mandarin, English and Cantonese every day (in that order), none of which help with learning Italian, so I need to start adding in some real world Italian usage until I can get back to Italy.

Netflix has decent collection of tv shows and movies in Italian. I tried to to watch a bit about 6 months but it was way over my head which caused me to give up. Last week, though, I was able to finish my first Italian movie and was happy to find that I wasn't entirely lost while watching.

Social media has been a surprisingly good source of content as I happened upon some Chinese who live in Italy that explain China to presumably Italians living in Italy which I find entertaining in that I know the subject matter well and it's very simple so it's easy for me to understand.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2023/08/IMG_7346.jpeg)

I've also found as series of short stories books that control the vocabulary at the CEFR A2 level that seem the perfect level for me. The stories are a bit longer and more challenging than than \~2-3 minute stories Duolingo uses. Reading one of the short stories from the book takes me about 10-15 minutes.

I also purchased books on grammar and verbs to supplement Duolingo. While I really like Duolingo's emphasis on learning through usage instead of learning rules and memorization, I am the type of person that also likes to understand the framework in which I'm operating.

It's also fun to compare my progress in Italian versus Mandarin and Cantonese. Duolingo's Mandarin for English speakers course is longer than it's Italian course. I tried the placement test and unlocked the entire course...trying the most advanced unit, unit 57 of 57 total units, the exercise felt very easy...like child's play in fact. I can fly through a lesson with 100% accuracy as quickly as the app will respond. Compare this to where I am in halfway through the Italian course, a lesson in unit 26 feels very challenging...sometimes I can get every exercise right, but often I make a number of mistakes.

This is the natural process of learning...if I keep it up, at some point I'll look back on these lesson and realize how easy they actually were.

The next step is to try to get back to Italy for a few weeks and put my newfound skills to the test. Wish me luck!
### Day 9: Stop trying to make Bitcoin in brick & mortar happen
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/stop-trying-to-make-bitcoin-brick-and-mortar-happen/
Last updated: 2023-08-19T15:23:26.000Z
I'm a big fan of Lightning, the layer 2 payments network built on top of bitcoin. 

I like the people working on Lightning, most of them are in it for the the right reasons. They are working to solve what I believe is an important problem: how to scale permissionless payments to the entire world.

That said, I'm confused as to why so many in the Lightning community continue to focus on in-person payments instead of payments on the internet. If the past decade has shown us anything, it's that in-person bitcoin payments have not gotten traction...a decade ago I could tell you a half a dozen places in Hong Kong that accepted Bitcoin...today, besides the ubiquitous Bitcoin ATMs and OTC shops, I couldn't even name one for you. Over that same period of time, internet payments with cryptocurrency have seen massive traction.

If you think about it, this all makes sense. If you are physically in the same room as someone, you have many options available for settling a transaction and there's always cash or barter as the censorship resistant back up option. And if you're not in the same room, before bitcoin, you had to pay through a trusted third party that could always veto or reverse your transaction. After bitcoin, you no longer need a third party, and no one can veto your exchange. Bitcoin payments revolutionized internet payments...it made the impossible possible. 

The obvious thing to do is for the Lightning community to go after the users that use cryptocurrency every day. The people buying and selling things on the internet, minting inscriptions, running smart contracts, trading assets using defi etc. 

So why don't they?
### Day 8: America is not knowing how much you're going to pay
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/day-8-america-is-not-knowing-how-much-youre-going-to-pay/
Last updated: 2023-08-18T12:00:38.000Z
> There's nothing more American than not knowing how much you're going to pay

I saw [a comment to this effect](https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=37141679&ref=larrysalibra.com) on a Hacker News article discussing the fees US ISPs tack on to their published rates the other day. The sentiment really struck a chord with me. 

This reminded me of the last two times I tried to seek healthcare in the USA. The first time, it began with the hospital refused to provide me with a bill ("we don't do that here") and a massive insurance-medical-debt drama consumed a few dozen hours of my life. The second time, learning from the first, I tried my hardest to pay in advance for services. This turned out to be a Herculean task and seemed to sour the day for all the people involved in taking care of the-guy-who-wants-to-pay-now.

It's not only in healthcare, the price displayed in the USA...if there is one...is rarely the final price you pay at almost any store...it's higher. In the case of restaurants, I hear it's now up to 30 or 40% higher. And people's headline salaries are never the amount of money they're actually paid. 

Not knowing how much you're going to have to pay or how much you'll get paid is one of those things that you just sort of accept as normal when you grow up in that environment. During the school day, you're taught about the greatness of the free market and the power of prices only to go to lunch and face the paradox of paying some amount which is not $5 to purchase a $5 sandwich.

Once you've lived literally anywhere else, the whole situation appears absolutely insane. How can a nation that purports to worship the free market and the principles of supply and demand live like this?
### Day 7: iPad Mini as an eBook reader
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/ipad-mini-as-an-ebook-reader/
Last updated: 2023-08-17T12:00:41.000Z
The first and only time I've ever bought a Kindle book, I got an email from Amazon asking me to provide a passport copy to verify that I was a US citizen and allowed to buy the book. That didn't leave a great taste in my mouth, and needless to say did not encourage me to buy a Kindle. 

For a while, I looked on jealously as friends and family read book after book on their light, portable, always-in-the-bag Kindles. I tried reading books on my phone, but found it too small after about 15 or 20 minutes. I had the original iPad, which was way too heavy to read on for me and at some point later, bought the 11 inch iPad Pro which, while lighter, had the same weight problem. While holding it in one hand was possible, it quickly became tiring. Perhaps I need to lift more!

When the iPad Mini came out in 2012, [my first thought was that this would be a great reader for ebooks](https://twitter.com/larrysalibra/status/260996239859011584?ref=larrysalibra.com). I never actually tested my theory until I bought my own first iPad Mini until the 6th generation one came out in 2021, but boy was I right! 

The iPad Mini is the perfect size for extended, one-handed reading. Light enough to have on-hand all the time in a sling or backpack.

My reading volume has increased immensely. I like that unlike Kindle, I can use it for reading things in any format...not just books with text but also, books with color graphics and diagrams, pdfs, websites, forum posts, tweet storms and more.

My three goto apps on my iPad Mini are Apple Books for reading books and PDFs and an RSS feed reader to keep up with blogs and other things I follow. That used to be Reeder 5 but more recently is Readwise Reader because of the integration I've created with my email client. 

It's also my goto device for extended reading of documentation or online articles. I'll often find myself sitting at my desk part way through a long article only to AirDrop it to iPad Mini so that I can walk around or move to another room while reading.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2023/08/IMG_6915-1.jpeg)

When traveling, iPad mini goes in the seat pocket in front of me for easy access. It's even great for watching episodes of your favorite series...if you remember to download the videos before take off. The device is so light that you can hang it from the built-in entertainment system using the magnetic cover.

## Why don't more people use iPad Mini as an eReader?

The reasons others have told me for buying a dedicated eInk-based reader like Kindle instead of using a table are long battery life, readability in direct sunlight and freedom from potential distractions. This is my experience:

## Battery life

I haven't had any issues with battery life. A fully or even 50% charged iPad Mini is enough to read for hours on end-much longer than I read in one sitting. When I'm home, it lives on a charging stand on my office desk, so it's always charged and ready to go. When away from home, charging it every 3 or 4 days is enough even with daily usage.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2023/08/IMG_7339.jpeg)

## Sunlight readability

I frequently use iPad Mini to read on sun chairs at outdoor pools. Out of concern for minimizing my own skin's direct sun exposure, I almost always sit in the shade, where it works like a charm. I haven't found a problem reading the screen even in direct Hong Kong sunlight on the brightest of bright days.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2023/08/IMG_1146.jpeg)

## Distractions

I was most worried about the fact that the entire internet is accessible through the iPad Mini would be a distraction to reading but in practice, I've found that isn't the case. I think this has to do with a few steps I took to make sure that I never got into the habit of using it as a tool or avenue for procrastination. 

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2023/08/IMG_0196.jpeg)

I install very few apps on the iPad Mini. Social media and messages apps are definitely not installed. Notifications are turned off for everything. Each page of the home screen is dedicated to a certain type of behavior: Reading, News, Planning and Video. The reading home screen is default and when it's time for sleep, it is the only one that displays. 

Two years in and this system has worked very well for me. What works for you?
### Day 6: The intelligent investor was banned from owning gold
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/day-6-intelligent-investor-banned-from-owning-gold/
Last updated: 2023-08-16T12:00:51.000Z
I recently started reading the popular investment book, *The Intelligent Investor* by Benjamin Graham. I'm only on Chapter 2, but I came cross an off-the-cuff-remark he made that I found pretty mind blowing.

> “The standard policy of people all over the world who mistrust their currency has been to buy and hold gold. This has been against the law for American citizens since 1935—luckily for them.”

When Graham wrote this, buying gold was *ILLEGAL* for Americans. Like any good Bitcoiner worth his satoshis, I of course knew this, but what I found mind-blowing was his attitude towards this. Graham not only doesn't seem outraged by being banned from investing in an entire class of assets, but makes light of it. "Luckily for us we're banned buying a type of stone." 

The [ban on gold](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold%5FReserve%5FAct?ref=larrysalibra.com) apparently lasted until 1977, before I was born. Of course, growing up in the USA, we were taught in state-run public schools and Hollywood movies about how our society was about freedom and democracy. No one bothered to mention that it was public policy in the so-called "Land of the Free" to use violence to prevent our neighbors from buying chemically inert, shiny rocks. 

What did people alive at the time think of being banned from owning one of the most ancient stores of value? Did they talk about it? Did they find it contradictory to the purported values of their society?
### Day 5: Apple keeps deleting my games and music
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/day-5-apple-keeps-deleting-my-games-and-music/
Last updated: 2023-08-15T12:51:19.000Z
I'm not a gamer but when I do play a game, I like them short, simple and sweet. Mario Kart, Fruit Ninja, these are my kind of games. Minimal learning curve, just swipe the fruit or press the button to go. I have enough complicated problems to debug and decipher in my normal life without having to "entertain" myself with a game that's a complicated, infinitely complex puzzle. I want something that gives me a short break from thinking.

The other night, I went to play Fruit Ninja on my phone...old school I know. I opened it up and it started popping up annoying and irrelevant advertisements. I could have sworn that this game was on Apple's subscription game service, Apple Arcade...and that ads and unfriendly user behavior like this was banned! What gives!? A bit of investigation made me realize that the games is on Apple Arcade under an Apple-esque name like Fruit Ninja Classic+ Pro Max Ultra. But for some reason it wasn't on my phone. I could have sworn I'd played it before. Who deleted it?

So I went and downloaded the game again - the App Store button for an Apple Arcade game says "Play" and not "Get" - a hint as to what happened to it. I opened the game and my score was still there! So I wasn't hallucinating, I had played the game before. Curious if anything happened to the 2 or 3 other Apple Arcade games I'd tried over the past year, I went to checkout the Arcade category where these games lived. Totally empty, except for the Fruit Ninja I'd just downloaded.

It turns out that if you sign out of the App Store to sign in to your account in a different country/region/market/economy for even 30 seconds to download an app not available in your main App Store, Apple helpfully deletes all of your Apple Arcade games for you. And doesn't tell you. 

This isn't really that much of a surprise to me since Apple helpfully also deletes all of your downloaded music without telling you when doing the same thing. I'm helpfully reminded of this about three minutes after takeoff on every single flight when I find out that I have no music to listen to except for the half a dozen songs I bought on iTunes pre-iPhone a decade and a half ago.

Why do they do this? Well we have [Digital Rights Management](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital%5Frights%5Fmanagement?ref=larrysalibra.com), DRM, a user-hostile technology that ensures customers who pay for digital content have a worse experience than those that figure out how to copy it without paying. 

An easy solution for Apple would be to add support for multiple App Store accounts signed in at once. I can only assume that they don't do this because people that live in Cupertino don't cross borders and operate in different markets very frequently. (As I write this, I'm on about a train about 30 minutes from crossing a border into another market)

An even easier solution would be to warn users when they sign out that doing this will delete all of their downloaded music, so that people know to go re-download it. Or they could just keep letting us find out our music and games are gone just after takeoff on our 17 hour flights. Until now, I'll be stuck listening to that old DRM-free Avril Lavigne song on repeat I bought back when Steve Jobs was still alive on every flight.
### Day 4: The skipper does not drive the boat
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/day-4-the-skipper-does-not-drive-the-boat/
Last updated: 2023-08-14T12:00:18.000Z
"Skipper" is a term that we use in sailing to mean the person-in-charge of the boat. More formal terms for this person are "captain" or "master," although these are more often associated with larger and/or commercial vessels. 

There's a common misconception among new sailors and even some long time sailors that the skipper is the person who drives the boat. I suspect this is because most of us drive cars before drive boats. The driver of a car is the person in charge of the car. The drive is held responsible for the safety of the passengers and vehicle. So it seems logical that the driver of a boat would be the person in charge of the boat, ie. the skipper. This is not the case! In fact, unless the boat is very small, or short-handed, without enough crew, the skipper should not be driving the boat.

If you sign up for formal sail training to learn to become the person-in-charge of a sailing yacht...[RYA](https://www.rya.org.uk/?ref=larrysalibra.com) calls this the "Day Skipper" course...you'll find that as the skipper-candidate, you will very rarely even touch the wheel of the boat. Many students come in with the misconception that the they are here to learn to drive a boat...I certainly did! One of the first challenges for the instructor is to put an end to this misconception and break this bad habit.

You can think of a boat like a small business and the skipper is the CEO. His job is to recruit and retain adequately trained crew, assign the crew to jobs that need to be done and manage them such that the boat safely at its destination. He should stay focused on the big picture, assign tasks to his crew, monitor their execution and be thinking about what needs to be done next. One of the crew should be assigned to be helmsman with the skipper giving instructions to the helmsman how or where he should steer the boat. 

"Come up five degrees." 

"Tack at your convenience" 

"Adjust course 30 degrees to port"

"Leave the safe water mark to port"

"Steer 095 degrees compass"

The helm is left to execute on the skipper's instructions and do what is necessary to maintain the course requested by the skipper. The skipper doesn't focus on the steering but monitors the work of the crew while maintaining good situational awareness. He needs to keep tabs the location of and status of all potential dangers to the vessel at all times: other boats, navigational hazards, inclement weather. He needs to keep his head out of the boat and aware of what else is going on. It is very difficult for a skipper who is distracted by steering the boat to do a good job of this. 

This is even more true when racing. On top of the normal skipper duties, someone on the boat also needs to be the tactician, figuring out where the competitors are in relationship to your boat and the best tactics to use to improve your position in the fleet. You might see the leading boat over on the north side of the harbor has just sailed into a patch of no wind. This might mean that your boat can take a different course that avoids the dead wind area and take the lead! But to see this and think of this tactic you need to be looking around - which is hard if you're trying to steer the boat, shout orders at crew and figure out the course.

Don't be one of those "I'm the skipper that also drives the boat"-types...find good crew and delegate!
### ✍️ My month-long writing challenge
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/newsletter/my-month-long-writing-challenge/
Last updated: 2023-08-14T07:21:00.000Z
Hi friends!

Long time no email!

Like many, I suffer from long-form post-anxiety..that is to say when I'm writing a long-form post, I'll feel anxious before posting it. Thoughts like "it's not good enough, people won't like it, it's not done yet, it's not perfect" will float around my mind causing me to delay and procrastinate on shipping a post until it never gets done. I'm trying to break the habit by shipping a post a day for the next month.

I don't want to overload your inbox with daily emails, so instead of daily emails, I'll send out an email once a week with links to posts from the past week. If you'd like to follow the posts as the came out, you can [subscribe to my RSS feed](https://larrysalibra.com/blog/rss/) or [follow me on the social media platform formerly known as Twitter](https://twitter.com/larrysalibra?ref=larrysalibra.com).

[Day 0: Investing in Web3 on BitcoinWhy I’m excited to to support Xverse, the leading Bitcoin Web3 wallet, in their seed funding round.![](https://larrysalibra.com/content/images/size/w256h256/2020/03/favicon.png)Larry SalibraLarry Salibra![](https://larrysalibra.com/content/images/2023/08/F3LAcLqWAAMgdrt.jpeg)](https://larrysalibra.com/investing-in-web3-on-bitcoin/)

[Day 1: My daily blogging commitmentWelcome to Day 1 of my month-long public writing commitment. Follow along as I build a habit of writing and shipping in public.![](https://larrysalibra.com/content/images/size/w256h256/2020/03/favicon.png)Larry SalibraLarry Salibra![](https://larrysalibra.com/content/images/2023/08/IMG_7184.jpeg)](https://larrysalibra.com/day-1-my-daily-blogging-commitment/)

[Day 2: The slow train to Shenzhen is fasterThe 112 year old slow train to Shenzhen is faster than high speed rail.![](https://larrysalibra.com/content/images/size/w256h256/2020/03/favicon.png)Larry SalibraLarry Salibra![](https://larrysalibra.com/content/images/2023/08/Screenshot-2023-08-12-at-15.23.38.png)](https://larrysalibra.com/day-2-high-speed-rail-to-shenzhen/)

[Day 3: Ohio is recruiting foreigners to voteI’m not a citizen and Ohio is still recruiting me to vote.![](https://larrysalibra.com/content/images/size/w256h256/2020/03/favicon.png)Larry SalibraLarry Salibra![](https://larrysalibra.com/content/images/2023/08/Screenshot-2023-08-12-at-15.11.14.png)](https://larrysalibra.com/day-3-who-is-voting-in-the-usa/)

Yours,

Larry Salibra
### Day 3: Ohio is recruiting foreigners to vote
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/day-3-who-is-voting-in-the-usa/
Last updated: 2023-08-13T12:00:46.000Z
As I've written about before, [I am no longer an American](https://larrysalibra.com/goodbye-usa/)...I renounced citizenship in 2018\. Five years later and the State of Ohio hasn't gotten the memo and is still trying to recruit me to vote. 

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2023/08/Screenshot-2023-08-10-at-18.00.07.png)

For those of you that aren't aware, in Ohio, the process of voting absentee involves asking a county agency (there are many counties in Ohio) for a piece of paper and mailing it back from your overseas home. They'll send you a ballot wherever you want in the world and there's no real way that I could ever figure out that they can tell if the person requesting the ballot is eligible to vote. If you can't be bothered to ask for a ballot, you can also just print your own and send it in. All you need is the name, birthday and address of a voter...all of which is public information. What always confused me was that the deadline for sending the ballot back was such that there was no way it could arrive in time to actually be counted.

This all seemed normal to me for years until I started voting as an overseas Italian and in Hong Kong elections. Italy sends overseas Italians ballots automatically, but only after you've registered with your passport and proof of actually living in the place you're registering...in our case, they want your Hong Kong ID card and address proof. And they send the ballot via a trackable courier. The completed ballot needs to be sent back to the consulate well in advance of the actual election to be counted.

Hong Kong, like many places, doesn't let people even vote overseas because this would affect the integrity of the process. It's hard to have observers observe a process if they can't be there. Instead, voting takes place in person on paper that goes into a box. The boxes are taken to one building where civil servants are tasked with counting them in front of media and cameras. They count them all the same day.

The reason I bring all this up is that there seems to be some sort of drama going on in the USA where the current ruling party is using the criminal justice system to attack the losing party from the previous election for questioning the integrity of the election process. Now I'm not saying that the US election system has a problem with integrity or that the election was stolen, but if they can't even figure out that I'm not a citizen anymore, does anyone have any idea who is voting?
### Day 2: The slow train to Shenzhen is faster
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/day-2-high-speed-rail-to-shenzhen/
Last updated: 2023-08-12T12:00:06.000Z
As I write this, I'm on the train to Shenzhen. It's not the famed "it only takes 14 minutes to go to Shenzhen" high speed rail that departs from West Kowloon and goes faster than a small airplane, but the historical "Canton-Kowloon Railway" that's been running since the end of the Qing Dynasty in 1910\. When I first came to Hong Kong about 20 years ago, it was called the Kowloon-Canton Railway and these days we call it the MTR East Rail Line. Or the Light Blue Line for those that prefer colors. 

The problem with the 14-minute "high speed train" to Shenzhen, is that the whole process of getting to the station in Hong Kong, going through security, and two sets of immigration and customs takes so long and is subject to so much variance, that it's very risky for someone that lives on Hong Kong Island to buy a ticket that departs much soon than 2 hours after they leave home. You really need to arrive at the station, as a foreigner, about an hour before your train departs and to leave home 30 minutes to 1 hour before that depending on where you live. Trust me...I've missed plenty of trains trying to leave home 90 minutes before depart...it's very risky.

In contrast, the ancient, century-plus old line that I'm on now departs from within a 10 minute walk of anywhere in Wan Chai, Causeway Bay or Admiralty and an hour later drops you off at the border. You don't need to buy a ticket in advance and trains run every couple minutes. Walk across a bridge and 10-20 minutes later you're through immigration and in Shenzhen. It's both absolutely faster by about \~30 to 45 minutes for many people on Hong Kong Island and a lot less stressful because there's no need to worry over possibly missing a train and you're not surrounded by thousands of others...mostly tourists...also stress over possibly missing their trains. I highly recommend it!

*Update: Starting Monday, you won't actually have to stress about missing your train to Shenzhen, since* [*China Railway will allow you to change it*](https://www.highspeed.mtr.com.hk/en/latest-news/flexi-trip.html?ref=larrysalibra.com) *to a later (or earlier) one for free. Look forward to trying it again.*
### Day 1: My daily blogging commitment
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/day-1-my-daily-blogging-commitment/
Last updated: 2023-08-11T14:29:15.000Z
I wanted to start blogging back in 2005…perhaps earlier, but was dissuaded by my father, an ever cautious lawyer. He didn’t tell me not to blog...he would never tell me what to do...but instead reminded me, that what you post on the internet will be there forever and that it might very well affect your future.

He was technically right, of course, writing publicly does affect our future. But it's largely positive - at least it has been for me. Like any good child, I did it anyways. Luckily, I didn't entirely listen to him and in 2007 started blogging anyways. 

I've always found it difficult to keep up with a regular posting schedule. At one point, I was writing a post every Sunday and sending it out to the newsletter. This worked well for a while until the scope of work expanded to the point that my entire Sunday would disappear to blogging: researching, writing, editing, preparing images, agonizing over this and that before finally posting. I'd start earlier and post later each time. It wasn't sustainable

All that said, I got really great results from the posts. A couple of posts went viral in the mainstream media - front page New York Times, CNN interview type of thing. [A techie productivity post got noticed](https://larrysalibra.com/moving-from-evernote-to-icloud-notes/) by famous tech blogger David Pogue and the Mac productivity community. I ended up meeting a number of really cool and interesting people who reached out and found me through writing about remote work lifestyle and renouncing US citizenship. In fact, I just had lunch with one last week!

This a long winded way of saying that I want to write and *ship* more and I'm ready to do something about it. Today, August 11, 2023, I'm making a public commitment to publish a blog post a day for the next month. I want to build a habit of both writing and shipping quickly. Today is Day 1\. This is entirely a selfish exercise done out of a desire for self-improvement. 

I'm giving myself permission to write and publish about anything I want. I'm reducing friction and complexity to the minimum: just write with a 25 minute pomodoro clock, read over once, write a headline and click the publish. I'm giving myself permission to not edit for perfection or spending time looking for images or crafting tweet storms. If you want to follow along, I'll share them [on the platform formerly known as Twitter](https://twitter.com/larrysalibra?ref=larrysalibra.com) and try to send a weekly email with my posts from the past week. So sign up below if you'd like to follow along. Let's see how it goes! Happy Friday and welcome to Day 1!
### Day 0: Investing in Web3 on Bitcoin
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/investing-in-web3-on-bitcoin/
Last updated: 2023-08-10T17:10:49.000Z
There's a theory that says altcoins are actually experimental playgrounds for Bitcoin and that eventually all the good stuff - features, functions and behavior - developed on altcoins will find their way onto Bitcoin. 

This is no longer just a theory, it is reality. It is a movement. Technologies on both Bitcoin L1 and L2 like Ordinals, Stacks and Lightning are bringing economic activity tested on altcoins, back home to where it belongs on Bitcoin. 

Hong Kong-based [Xverse](https://www.xverse.app/?ref=larrysalibra.com) is the leading Bitcoin wallet in this movement, and I'm thrilled to support them with an angel investment in their [$5m seed round](https://www.xverse.app/blog/xverse-seed-funding-jump-crypto?ref=larrysalibra.com). I've had the pleasure of knowing and working with Xverse founder [Ken Liao](https://twitter.com/YukanL?ref=larrysalibra.com) since he joined us at Blockstack PBC (now called Hiro PBC). He's a brilliant engineer with impeccable product sense and a no-nonsense entrepreneur with an unmatched ability to execute. I've been an avid user of Xverse's mobile wallet from the beginning and was blown away by the speed of their execution this spring as the Xverse team staked out a leadership role in onboarding people to Ordinals and growing the Bitcoin community. 

Very excited to see what the Xverse team has coming next! If you haven't tried it out, [download Xverse](https://www.xverse.app/download?ref=larrysalibra.com) and give it a try!

*This is the zeroth post in a month long daily blogging habit that starts tomorrow. More on that tomorrow! Stay tuned!*
### Lightning Con & Nostr Names
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/newsletter/lightning-con-nostr/
Last updated: 2023-04-11T11:09:27.000Z
Hi friends!

I wanted to share some recent posts with you.

I went to the Lightning conference held in Vietnam a couple weeks ago and wrote up a summary of my thoughts and takeaways: 

[Thoughts on LightningCon Vietnam 2023Conference takeaways on Lightning UX, payment rails, routing and more!![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/size/w256h256/2020/03/favicon.png)Larry SalibraLarry Salibra![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2023/03/IMG_3686.jpeg)](https://larrysalibra.com/thoughts-on-lightningcon-vietnam-2023/)

I also recently created a proposal for bringing globally unique names to the decentralized social network protocol Nostr:

[Bringing Names to NostrA proposal to use BNS names as globally unique names for Nostr and an implementation in an iOS client.![](https://www.newinternetlabs.com/favicon.ico)New Internet Labs BlogLarry Salibra![](https://www.newinternetlabs.com/blog/content/images/2023/01/nip-69-feature-1.png)](https://www.newinternetlabs.com/blog/nostr-names/?ref=larrysalibra.com)

Check out my recent podcast appearances on Nostrovia:  
[https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/nostrovia/episodes/Larry-Salibra---NIP69-and-BNS-names-on-Nostr-e1u62sp](https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/nostrovia/episodes/Larry-Salibra---NIP69-and-BNS-names-on-Nostr-e1u62sp?ref=larrysalibra.com)

and the Built on Bitcoin podcast: 

[E111: Nostr, BNS, and the Decentralized Future with Larry Salibra - Founder of New Internet LabsThe potential for a truly user-owned internet is becoming closer than ever with new protocols like Nostr and decentralized identity systems like BNS.La…![](https://images.podpage.com/https%3A%2F%2Fs3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com%2Fredwood-labs%2Fshowpage%2Fuploads%2Fimages%2Fcf844760-e28e-48c7-9522-5223bff6a9e5.jpg?auto=format&h=720&w=32&s=f33805a048085625c44e4e619e6b2801)Built on Bitcoin![](https://images.podpage.com/https%3A%2F%2Fcontent.bcastcdn.com%2Fuploads%2Fxzq0j87q%2F5b596cd0-c447-11ed-9546-c1e0da203399%2F5b596e60-c447-11ed-925e-4f2d1ef23fb0.jpeg?auto=format&fill=blur&fit=fill&h=628&w=1200&s=8264a97d87fa6bafa810e0decc372698)](https://www.builtonbitcoin.xyz/e111-nostr-bns-and-the-decentralized-future-with-larry-salibra-founder-of-new-internet-labs/?ref=larrysalibra.com)

Finally, as many of you know, I am an avid sailor. Some updates on that front:

I'm proud to share that I recently passed my RYA Yachtmaster Offshore exam - one of the top credentials in the leisure marine industry. Photos here: [https://twitter.com/larrysalibra/status/1633667889990606849](https://twitter.com/larrysalibra/status/1633667889990606849?ref=larrysalibra.com)

I also had the opportunity to interview one of the most famous Youtube sailors, Brian Trautman of SV Delos on behalf of the Royal Hong Kong Yacht Club. You can watch the full interview here:

Until next time!

Yours,  
Larry
### Thoughts on LightningCon Vietnam 2023
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/thoughts-on-lightningcon-vietnam-2023/
Last updated: 2023-03-29T13:03:20.000Z
This past week I was in Da Nang, Vietnam at [LightningCon Vietnam 2023](https://lightningcon.org/?ref=larrysalibra.com). This was the first opportunity for me to attend a bitcoin conference of any sort post Covid. It was great to catch up with a lot of friends that I’ve met over the years of running and participating in Bitcoin conferences going back as far as my first conference, the Inside Bitcoin conference in Hong Kong in 2014\. What follows are some takeaways and observations from the conference.

## In-person payments

One of the things that really surprised me was the focus the Lightning community still has on in-person payments. These are payments that take place in meatspace - at a coffee shop, restaurants or bar - instead of remotely or online. One of the conference sponsors, a payment provider, told of their efforts to sign up local merchants in Vietnam to accept Lightning payments. In the city the conference was held, we were only able to find 2 or 3 of such merchants. And the merchants would only accept Lightning when the owner was on site. When paying the merchant, we had to calculate the amount of sats to pay manually - scanning the invoice QR code didn’t provide an amount. Once we paid, the merchant wanted to take a screenshot of our lightning wallet as a proof of payment. The whole experience felt strictly worse than paying for things in Bitcoin in 2013\. After almost 10 years of watching people try to get physical establishments to accept payment by Bitcoin and now Lightning…it seems pretty clear to me this is, in the short term, a failing proposition.

Why aren’t these Lightning payment providers focused on the growing Bitcoin ecosystem on the Internet? Bitcoin is, after all, magic internet money and there are plenty of situations where paying in Bitcoin or Lightning on the internet is both the lowest friction and only way to pay that makes sense. If there’s obvious demand for people to pay using Lightning for say...minting ordinals…demand that only Lightning can solve, why keep banging your head trying to get Vietnamese coffee shops to accept Lightning…something for which almost no one is asking for it? The whole strategy is confusing to me…I wonder how much ideology instead of business is behind this.

## Lightning infrastructure for internet payments

In contrast to friction in the world of brick-and-mortar Lightning payments, it sounds like there are a number of exciting Lightning-based technologies that give developers increasing options to integrate instant bitcoin payments into their apps…and, more importantly, there’s adoption! I’m personally excited about Bolt12 and plan to follow the development of that. The way several Nostr clients have integrated Lightning support - particularly with Zaps as a form of payment to boost posts - were a very popular topic of conversation. I think this is just a taste of what the future of programmatic, instant, non-custodial payments might bring. Bullish!

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2023/03/2848A551-E337-4BEF-B713-E340B0C0937F_1_105_c.jpeg)

## Lightning wallet UX

I gave up on using the Lightning node running on my Umbrel via tor and controlled with Bluewallet for payments because of constant problems and instead switched to the non-custodial wallet Phoenix for this conference. My experience with Phoenix was pretty great once I figured out how to get it to show sats instead of USD.

One of the great things about a Lightning conference is that you get the opportunity to split lots of meals with Lightning. It’s a chance to make more payments and see how other wallets work.

One takeaway was the lack of consistent user experience across apps. In my wallet, Phoenix, to scan a QR code with an LNURL to receive, you had to first click on the “Send” button to open the camera before you could receive the payment. Clicking “send” to “receive” was not obvious to say the least.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2023/03/IMG_3869.jpg)

This is a result of Lightning payments generally being an invoice-based payment system, where the person receiving money needs to generate an invoice that the payer then scans. This is the opposite of how on-chain Bitcoin and pretty much every other crypto payments system works. To make things more confusing, LNURL reverses it again (sometimes?) by providing payor with a mechanism to allow the receiver to programmatically generate and send an invoice to the payor. This results in a similar problem to that faced by Chinese payment systems like Wechat and Alipay where it isn’t clear if the user has to scan a QR code or have their own QR scanned because who scans whom isn’t related to the direction of money flow. 你扫我还是我扫你？(You scan me or I scan you?)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2023/03/scan.jpeg)

It seems like there’s a lot of low hanging UX fruit here for the Lightning community to come up with a set of consistent standards and behaviors so that users don’t end up so confused.

## Lightning routing

One of the most interesting talks for me was the one given by [Koji](https://twitter.com/Coin%5Fand%5FPeace?ref=larrysalibra.com) of Diamond Hands about the state of Lightning routing and routing communities. As mentioned, I run my own node on Umbrel. I have enough channels that I can usually make payments and occasionally route payments. I don’t really look at the channels more than once a twice a year though, so it was a surprise to me to learn that people maintain Lightning routing nodes for fun and a feeling of community. Hearing about the challenges they experience and effort into figuring out optimal strategies was very interesting. For anyone else unfamiliar with this, I highly recommend watching Koji’s talk once it is available online.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2023/03/E8E7B57A-9A52-4958-8C73-C9368E7058B1_1_105_c.jpeg)

## Paying with Lightning is not paying with Bitcoin

That paying with Lightning is not necessarily paying with Bitcoin was one of the most surprising new narrative changes for me. The way it was explained to me is to think of Lightning not as a layer 2 scaling layer for payments on Bitcoin but instead of payment rails built on bitcoin. Imagine an American credit card holder in Europe…he doesn’t ask the restaurant if he can pay with US Dollars, but if he can pay with Visa. Some envision the future of Lightning in the same way: consumers that have Lightning wallets can pay at Lightning-enabled merchants with merchants receiving payment in the stable coin of their choice (or bitcoin!). Much like credit cards, merchants need not be concerned with what currency their customers use to fund their Lightning payment.

This re-framing of Lightning makes a lot of sense to me. It’s always seemed a bit weird to me to go around asking merchants if I can pay in my preferred currency, bitcoin. It feels presumptuous. Merchants have already indicated which currency they prefer in exchange for their goods and services. This behavior is really no different than the ugly American tourist that, prior to widespread acceptance of credit cards, would go around foreign countries trying to bay in US Dollars. It’s presumptuous and rude.

While I believe that Bitcoin is going to win out as the best money - both because of its strength as hard money and its programmability, it’s really not my place to push Bitcoin on others. If Bitcoin is really to succeed, merchants will decide of their own accord to receive it and hold it…they don’t need disciples of Satoshis to (honey)badger them into to taking it.

I look forward to seeing how this works in practice both from a user experience perspective and also from a financial perspective with respect to fees and forex risk. Lightning already suffers from complexity and non-custodial wallets don’t do a great job in insulating users from the complexity…making Lightning multi-currency feels like it will add to this problem.

## Complexity in Bitcoin

[Andrew Pantyukhin](https://twitter.com/pandrewhk?ref=larrysalibra.com) had a great talk in which he touched on the idea of complexity and how it relates to Bitcoin. He shared a graph which showed the number of lines of code in bitcoin. It was around 10,000 lines when Satoshi was around and stands at over 600,000 lines today. This visualization of the growth in complexity for what, compared to other cryptocurrencies, is a relatively simple thing was pretty mind-blowing thing. We learned this year with the explosive popularity of ordinals that many people had no idea that segwit was a block-size increase that results in it being 25% cheaper to store NFTs in bitcoin compared to financial transactions. Seeing this graph made me wonder what else might be in those 600k lines of code that many of us have yet to understand or realize.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2023/03/IMG_3700.jpeg)

Ultimately, [humans need to understand decentralized systems](https://twitter.com/larrysalibra/status/1638816570330992641?ref=larrysalibra.com) and the important characteristics about them if they are to stay decentralized. This is especially important for Bitcoin…if too few people understand what Bitcoin is, it makes it possible for people to change it in a way that ultimately destroys it.

## Hacking on Ordinals tech

I was also able to do a bit of programming to help [Felix](https://twitter.com/FelixWeis?ref=larrysalibra.com) get an MVP of his new open source Ordinals project - [Ordilabs](https://github.com/ordilabs?ref=larrysalibra.com) \- off the ground. It’s currently a simple, [live mempool viewer](https://live.ordilabs.org/?ref=larrysalibra.com) that shows you what inscriptions have yet to be inscribed…but more things are in the works! This is picture is a few of us celebrating the site going live.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2023/03/C32EC12B-95A5-434C-AFD0-E595864F86A6_1_105_c.jpeg)

Hacking on things and shipping during a conference is a time-honored tradition of crypto conferences. If you haven’t tried it, I highly recommend!

## On Danang

For those that have never been, Danang is one of the hidden jewels of Asia. It is a beachfront city with a very new and modern airport located a 15 drive from pretty much everywhere. Unlike beaches in many other parts of Southeast Asia, it is clean and relatively free from touts trying to sell you this and that. The city is also free from the general riff-raff and mass tourism that one encounters in places like Phuket. It was a really great place to have a conference. The resort hotel that was the conference venue was comfortable and convenient for those who wanted to socialize or work outside of the talks. And dozens of amazing restaurants were within a 5 to 15 minute walk from the hotel.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2023/03/IMG_3667.jpeg)

## Final thoughts

I really enjoy these smaller conferences that mainly attract technical builders and industry insiders vs the massive pay-to-play, investor-funded, please-invest-in-my-thing, polished-pitch, massive money-grab conferences. Now that Asia is open for travel again, hopefully we’ll see more events like this in the future!
### Picture perfect spinnaker drop
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/dropping-the-spinnaker-on-sula/
Last updated: 2024-09-26T20:46:17.000Z
Today was one of those very rare, perfect Hong Kong sailing days where was enough wind to keep the boat going comfortably but not too much that the sea state was uncomfortable. Daniel was so kind as to meet me at Wong Shek Pier for an absolutely incredible 42.6 nautical mile sail home from Hoi Ha Wan after Sula spent almost 2 weeks around Double Have and Hoi Ha Wan. 

The two major highlights of the day, besides the excellent company, were a massive spinnaker run of over 20 nautical miles with a couple flawless gybes and light (no) wind sailing in the harbor maneuvering at tenths of knot of boat speed to avoid harbor shipping traffic while enjoying a picture perfect sunset and artisanal clouds.

In this post, I want to share a video of us dropping Sula's spinnaker and explain the process as it is slightly different than what usually happens on a fully-crewed race boats and or class boat like an Etchells. But first, some photos from the day:

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2022/03/IMG_6182.jpeg)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2022/03/IMG_4257.jpeg)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2022/03/IMG_4264.jpeg)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2022/03/IMG_4267.jpeg)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2022/03/IMG_4270.jpeg)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2022/03/IMG_4273.jpeg)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2022/03/IMG_4275.jpeg)

## Dropping the spin

In this video, Big Captain Daniel and I douse Sula's spinnaker and stow it in the starboard bow locker. As Daniel eases the working sheet, I pull on the dousing line, lowering the sock and snuffing the sail. Daniel releases the sheet and moves to the spinnaker halyard winch to prepare to ease the halyard. 

As Daniel begins to ease the halyard, dropping the sail, which now lives securely out of the wind in the sock form, I detach the tack from the tack point and the sheets from the clew and pulls the foot of the sail over the anchor windlass and into the bow locker. To make the spinnaker easy to deploy next time, I arrange the tack and clew of the sail so that the tack is on the deck forward of the bow locker and the clew is on the deck immediately aft of the locker. As Daniel eases the halyard, I flake the sock fore and aft in the bow compartment.

When the head of the sail reaches the locker, I detach the halyard, return it to the it's stowed position on the pullpit and fold the clew and tack of the sail over the head of the sail. Finally, Daniel and I disassemble and stow the sheets and the tack boot so that we can unfurl the genoa and sail closer to the wind. 

It takes a bit longer to drop the spinnaker on Sula and get the headsail out because the tack is a boot that goes on the furled genoa, so you can't hoist or drop while the genoa is in use. This is impractical for racing, but works very well for cruising, especially when the distances are long...which are Sula's forte.
### Celebrating the Lunar New Year in Tai O & Sokos
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/tai-o-sokos-over-cny/
Last updated: 2024-09-25T22:27:20.000Z
Sula spent Lunar New Year holiday cruising in western Hong Kong with Lady P.

_This post is for paying subscribers only._
### Supercharging Sula
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/supercharging-sula/
Last updated: 2024-09-25T22:27:33.000Z
Sula was lifted out and her propeller pitch adjusted to make her a faster boat!

_This post is for paying subscribers only._
### Fouled water speed transducer
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/fouled-water-speed-transducer/
Last updated: 2024-09-26T20:41:42.000Z
Despite being underway 75% of the time, Sula's speed transducer grew a small coral reef.

_This post is for paying subscribers only._
### 🐬 Dolphins in Hong Kong - Autumn 2021
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/dolphins-in-hong-kong-autumn-2021/
Last updated: 2024-09-25T22:28:15.000Z
Few realize that Hong Kong, global financial center, famous for its tall buildings and many banks is also home to Chinese white dolphins which confusingly frequently look pink. This video is a collection of dolphin sightings I made during a sailing trip to Tai O this fall. When under motor, the dolphins stayed a good 30 meters away from the boat presumably due to the propeller noise. When under sail, the dolphins came alongside as near as a few meters away from the port side of the vessel.

The first set of clips is from November 29, 2021, under engine, near Tai O. The second set of clips starts around the 3 minute mark, is from December 1, 2021, under sail, and was taken south of Fan Lau Tung Wan. All video clips were taken with my iPhone 13 Pro Max and the compilation was edited in Final Cut Pro. 

While this is generally a private community, I'll sometimes publicly share videos of dolphins or other cool things I encounter sailing I think might interest a wider audience. If you'd like to be notified when there are more dolphin videos, [join the community](https://larrysalibra.com/#/portal), it's free.
### Welcome to Sailing Sula!
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/welcome-to-sailing-sula/
Last updated: 2024-09-25T22:27:54.000Z
Sailing Sula is a private community where I share my sailing journey and adventures sailing my boat Sula around Hong Kong and beyond.

_This post is for paying subscribers only._
### 📺 The original NFTs & Signal
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/newsletter/the-original-nfts-and-signal/
Last updated: 2021-11-18T11:00:55.000Z
Hello all!

Here in Hong Kong, Whatsapp has been king since beginning of the mobile messaging wars. About a year ago there was a big uptake in Signal for various reasons. In the past few months I've started seeing Hong Kong friends drop off Signal. I wrote a post on what I think is happening.

[Signal is losingSignal is losing the network effect battle in Hong Kong.![](https://larrysalibra.com/favicon.png)Larry SalibraLarry Salibra![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2021/11/Screen-Shot-2021-11-07-at-12.26.34-PM.png)](https://larrysalibra.com/signal-is-losing/)

Decentralized names were the original NFTs - mentioned by Satoshi in the whitepaper and implemented in the first altcoin. As we're in the middle of this NFT boom, I sat down and made a short video about the state of decentralized naming projects in November 2021\. Where we came from, where we are and where we might be going.

[State of Decentralized NamingThe state of decentralized naming in November 2021 in an 18 minute video.![](https://larrysalibra.com/favicon.png)Larry SalibraLarry Salibra![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2021/11/1303217052-e40bb6190d5b84f24b6a75347fc91626f79b9bfa47516a60f.jpeg)](https://larrysalibra.com/talks/2021-11-state-of-decentralized-naming/)

As always, hit reply to share your thoughts or let me know what you're up to!

Yours,  
Larry
### State of Decentralized Naming
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/2021-11-state-of-decentralized-naming/
Last updated: 2024-09-19T20:44:05.000Z
[Watch on Youtube](https://youtu.be/c17IMsLjDf8?ref=larrysalibra.com) 

An overview of the state of decentralized naming as I see it in November 2021\. I talk about the origin of decentralized naming in the Bitcoin whitepaper, Namecoin, the origins of the Stacks BNS project and other top projects in the space, the strategies they've taken, what's worked and what hasn't.

## Timeline

00:00 - Intro  
00:14 - What is decentralized naming?  
01:35 - Namecoin  
02:08 - Onename: A white pages for bitcoin  
03:34 - Stacks 1.0 - Moving to bitcoin  
05:15 - Stacks 2.0 - Scaling with a new layer  
06:56 - Handshake  
09:48 - ENS  
11:18 - Use cases  
13:28 - Names & Censorship  
13:56 - Driving adoption  
16:49 - Incentives matter  
18:14 - Your thoughts
### Signal is losing
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/signal-is-losing/
Last updated: 2021-11-07T04:28:03.000Z
Signal is losing the network effect battle - at least in my Hong Kong-focused neck of the metaverse. While Signal has always been popular in the bitcoin and crypto space, it started [seeing traction in Hong Kong last year after the rollout of the national security law](https://www.scmp.com/abacus/tech/article/3092530/what-signal-and-why-it-suddenly-popular-hong-kong?ref=larrysalibra.com) and then again early this year when ZuckCo tried to roll out his new WhatsApp terms of service. The forced privacy changes and data sharing angered a lot of people in a city where people are sensitive about their privacy. Signal suddenly started getting popular among friends in social groups outside of my usual tech and crypto industry circles.

I’ve made a half-hearted attempt to try to exit from WhatsApp over the past year as well. I stopped sharing my contacts with it and turned off notifications, intentionally making it as hard for me to use as possible. I either don’t respond to messages on WhatsApp or respond with a week or two delay. Unlike the leap I took [exiting the USA](https://larrysalibra.com/goodbye-usa/) fully exiting the ZuckBook universe, deleting my accounts and the apps, isn’t something I’ve been able to bring myself to do.

## Are you there?

Over the couple months though as people have upgraded to the new iPhone, or otherwise lost or replaced their phones, I’ve noticed that people I used to be able to message on Signal are no longer reachable.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2021/11/Screen-Shot-2021-11-07-at-11.26.49-AM.png)

If they want to contact me, I’ll often get an iMessage (or SMS) from them asking if I’m using WhatsApp.

As someone who cares about privacy, this trend is disappointing to me because Signal offers significant privacy improvement over ZuckCo products.

There seems to be a few reasons for this migration:

## Signal spam

The first is that some people seem to have a problem with spam on Signal. This is strange to me, because after years of usage I can’t think of even one instance where I’ve received a spam message. I’m not calling them liars though, because I’ve seen friends phones with lots of Signal spam. It just isn’t my experience.

In contrast, WhatsApp, iMessage and Telegram spam is relatively common. In the past, I’ve typically received a couple of spam messages on each per month. None of these apps compare to the worst spam offender of them all, the good old telephone call. I receive typically around 2 spam calls on my Hong Kong number per day despite being listened on the Do not call registry.

## Notifications not received

Some people seem to have trouble receiving notifications for signal messages. I’m not sure if this is because they’ve misconfigured their notification settings or some other technical problem. Anecdotally, this problem seems to be more common with friends using Android.

## Poor user experience

  
While the Signal iOS app is pretty well written these days, Signal’s electron-powered desktop app is horrible. Every time I open it even on my maxed out, 64 gb, M1 Max Macbook Pro, it takes tens of seconds to load messages. After sitting through this message-loading ceremony, I’m greeted by a huge banner telling me to restart the app and go through the whole startup process again to install an update for undefined benefit.

The user experience of the Signal desktop app is frankly embarrassing. This probably stems from the desktop app’s prior life as a “Chrome App” (anyone remember those?). They should take a look at the speed and fluidity of Telegram’s native desktop apps. It opens instantly, it updates without nagging me via the Mac App Store, my older messages are there when it instantly opens and any new messages are updated after the app opens. We all know the technical problems with Telegram’s cryptography, but that doesn’t excuse Signal from learning from the things Telegram (and other competitors) do right.

## Desire to optimize

Some people are easily frustrated by having to keep track of which friends use which chat apps and have an OCD-style personality that makes them want to clean up their phone and only have one app for messaging. These people correctly see that WhatsApp is the de facto monopoly messaging app in Hong Kong and delete or disable all other apps, including the built SMS app on their phones.

## The solution

If Signal is to take marketshare away from incumbents like WhatsApp, it’s can’t only rely on its competitors making brain-dead product decisions and PR mistakes like WhatsApp’s new terms of service as a method of growing its marketshare. While these are great opportunities to introduce new people to Signal, Signal also needs to deliver with a product that not only ticks the boxes for the functionality people are looking to replace, but does so in a way that doesn’t force its advocates and donors to make excuses for areas of poor user experience.
### ✈️ Make Hong Kong Asia's World City Again
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/newsletter/make-hong-kong-asias-world-city-again/
Last updated: 2021-05-27T16:09:43.000Z
Hello!

It's been a while since I've wrote you. Like many others, life for me has changed a lot during the pandemic. More on those changes in the future. 

Here in Hong Kong, we were spared the worst of the pandemic at the price of being cut off from many of our friends and family, by 2 to 3 week border quarantine. It's time for that to end.

In today's post, I lay out my proposal for getting Hongkongers vaccinated and bringing the world back to Asia's World City: 

[Asia’s World City needs open bordersA path to vaccination and travel for Hong Kong.![](https://larrysalibra.com/favicon.png)Larry SalibraLarry Salibra![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2021/05/Screen-Shot-2021-05-27-at-6.41.21-PM.png)](https://larrysalibra.com/a-path-to-vaccination-and-travel-for-hong-kong/)

I recently sat down with fellow (Block)Stacker and founder of Daemon Technologies, Xan Ditkoff for a brief chat about the newly launched [Stacks Accelerator](https://stacks.ac/?ref=larrysalibra.com): 

[Introducing the Stacks Accelerator with Xan Ditkoff | RacketIntroducing the Stacks Accelerator with Xan Ditkoff by @larryRacketTwitter iconFacebook iconLinkedIn iconReddit icon![](https://racket.com/rails/active_storage/blobs/redirect/eyJfcmFpbHMiOnsibWVzc2FnZSI6IkJBaHBBa3M3IiwiZXhwIjpudWxsLCJwdXIiOiJibG9iX2lkIn19--ed40f30d987d3eab5aa41f95e959e912dd08a8c6/post_og_img.png)](https://racket.com/larry/r3dnf?ref=larrysalibra.com)

And finally, in case you missed it, I donated the profits from t-shirts sold in the [#WearAFuckingMask](https://wearafuckingmask.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com) to an excellent local Hong Kong charity called Sailability:

[Earnings for Charity from Wearafuckingmask.comWith your support, we sold $2,205.01 of wearafuckingmask.com t-shirts and earned $529.47 in commissions and donated HK$5,000 to charity!![](https://larrysalibra.com/favicon.png)Larry SalibraLarry Salibra![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2021/02/shirts.jpg)](https://larrysalibra.com/wearafuckingmask-earnings/)

As always, I love to hear from you! Reply to this email and let me know what you're up to!

Yours,  
Larry
### Asia's World City needs open borders
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/a-path-to-vaccination-and-travel-for-hong-kong/
Last updated: 2021-05-27T10:41:39.000Z
Hong Kong did very well during the pandemic. For much of the time, there’s been very little community spread of the virus thanks to intelligent use of contract tracing, isolation and quarantine of incoming travelers, Covid-positive people and their close contacts. When infections slipped through, spread was limited thanks to community enthusiasm for mask wearing. There have never been lockdowns of the types much of the world has seen. Hong Kong also acquired enough vaccines for its entire population and has been to offer everyone a choice of vaccines.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2021/05/Screen-Shot-2021-05-27-at-5.05.49-PM.png)

But vaccine uptake has been slow. As of May 27, 2021, only about 20% of people have had 1 dose despite vaccines being available for months and offered to residents 16 years or older. Initial uptake was fast among those of use with family, friends and business connections abroad in the hope that vaccination will make us safer should we want or need to travel. The local population has not been very enthusiastic about vaccination. People cite a number of reasons for this: government mistrust, fear of side effects, a perverse desire to keep borders closed. 

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2021/05/Screen-Shot-2021-05-27-at-5.04.24-PM.png)

Early on, numerous groups called on the government to provide some incentives for people to get vaccinated. The best the government could come up with was exemption from some mandatory testing requirements and 7 fewer days of quarantine. This means if you visit a “medium risk” location, your incentive to get vaccinated is that instead of 21 days of hotel quarantine, you “get” to “only” do 14 days of quarantine. In the past few days, an airline ticket lottery has been floated by the Airport Authority. Get vaccinated and get a free ticket to enjoy 7 to 21 days of border quarantine. Not very attractive.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2021/05/Screen-Shot-2021-05-27-at-5.47.09-PM.png)

Some have called for the government to pay people to get vaccinated by offering coupons, vouchers or even cash. Others, like [David Webb have proposed a vaccine lottery](https://webb-site.com/articles/openborders.asp?ref=larrysalibra.com) where those vaccinated get a ticket in a lottery for a large cash reward.

I think all of these proposals miss the point. The reason vaccine uptake is so low is that there's little point in getting a vaccine for a virus that you're never going to encounter. Covid isn't spreading in Hong Kong and travel to areas where it is spreading is unrealistic when there's 21 days of hotel quarantine. For someone not planning to travel abroad, the rational choice is to not get vaccinated. The way to increase vaccination rates is to change the circumnstances so that getting vaccinated becomes the rational choice.

At the same time, Hong Kongers that have been vaccinated watch with jealousy as much of the world starts to resume travel and wonder when we’re going to get to return to our normal lives of regularly scheduled jet lag and weekend trips to Thailand. For many of us, with family, friends and business contacts spread out across the world, the past year and a half has been lonely.

Well I, dear reader, have a proposal that will solve both our vaccine uptake problem and our travel problem without costing taxpayers a thing. 

I propose that the government announce that it will unilaterally cease all pandemic controls on September 1, 2021 around the time Hong Kong's existing vaccine supply expires. No more covid testing, quarantine or restrictions on non-residents at the border. No more testing, contract tracing, social distancing or mask mandates at home. Those that want to get vaccinated, have 3 months to do so. Those that don’t want to get vaccinated can try their luck when the tourists and business travelers return and inevitably bring the virus into the community.

We will, without a doubt, see a massive rush to get vaccinated. In a Hong Kong where possibly infected with Covid tourists are arriving in 3 short months, the rational decision for most of us is to get vaccinated. The desire for self-preservation is a powerful incentive.

Border infection controls, social distancing, mask wearing, testing, contract tracing, isolation and quarantine were all tools to buy us time until vaccines were available for all that wanted them. They were effective in achieving that goal and it’s time for the government to declare mission accomplished.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2021/05/c37a6cc5f88867e5387b8787aaf67afc350b3f37f357ed0a3088241488063bce.jpg)

The reality we live in is that the SARS-CoV-2 virus isn’t going away any time soon. We all - Hong Kongers included - are going to have to learn, one way or another, to live in a world where we might be exposed to the virus that causes Covid-19\. Hong Kong can’t hide forever behind 21 day border quarantine like a hermit city of hypochondriacs in self-exile from the rest of a dirty, infected world. 

The time to get vaccinated for Hong Kongers concerned about being infected with the virus is now and the time to welcome tourists and business travelers back to Hong Kong is very quickly approaching. Let's make Hong Kong Asia’s World City again!
### Earnings for Charity from Wearafuckingmask.com
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/wearafuckingmask-earnings/
Last updated: 2021-02-22T10:32:32.000Z
In March 2020, as it became apparently Covid-19 was going to be a Big Deal for the whole world, [I started a campaign](https://larrysalibra.com/wearafuckingmask/) to spread the word about the effectiveness of masks and advocate for their *voluntarily* adoption as a way to slow down the spread of the respiratory disease.

As part of the campaign, we sold t-shirts and other [wearafuckingmask.com](https://wearafuckingmask.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com) branded items through a [Spreadshirt shop](https://shop.spreadshirt.com/wearafuckingmask/?ref=larrysalibra.com) with the promise that we would donate earnings to charity.

I'm happy to share that with your support, we sold US$2,205.01 of wearafuckingmask.com t-shirts on which we earned US$529.47 in commissions. 

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2021/02/Screen-Shot-2021-02-22-at-5.19.32-PM.png)

US$202.12 of these earnings were from sales in the USA from which the US government stole (aka "Federal Tax Withheld") $48.51.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2021/02/Screen-Shot-2021-02-22-at-5.12.04-PM.png)

This leaves us with US$480.96 or HK$3,728 in after tax earnings to donate to charity.

I donated the earnings from our campaign along with some additional money for a total donation of HK$5,000 on behalf of our campaign to [Sailability Hong Kong](https://www.sailabilityhk.org/?ref=larrysalibra.com), a registered charity here in Hong Kong that does amazing work with physically and mentally disabled and other underprivileged people in our city.

In their own words:

> Founded in 2009 and with our official opening day in 2010, 'Sailability Hong Kong' provides the opportunity for anyone with a disability (physical or intellectual) to learn to sail or have a water based experience. Whether aged 7 or above, we believe that sailing increases self-confidence, independence, responsibility and self-esteem whilst learning and having fun.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2021/02/donation-to-sailability-hk.png)

Thank you again for your support!
### Goodbye USA
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/goodbye-usa/
Last updated: 2020-11-05T17:01:00.000Z
A few weeks ago, when I was trying to open an account at a financial institution here in Hong Kong, someone noticed I was born in the USA and my account was denied.

They wrote “I regret to inform you at this time we are unable to accept bank wire deposits/withdrawals from US citizens. For more information, please refer to our article: Restricted nationalities and countries.” While this is a common experience for Americans living abroad, one I’ve experienced many times before, it was a mistake, a mistake that reminded me to write this blog post.

A few days ago, I received a rather passive-aggressive email from one of my banks asking me to “let us know about your tax connection to the United States” with the threat of closing my account if I don’t. Another common experience for Americans living abroad, another mistake and another reminder to write this post.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2020/11/Screen-Shot-2020-10-22-at-5.52.02-PM.png)

Tomorrow, Americans will vote to choose one of two candidates no one really likes. I’m not allowed to vote this time around because two years ago, I finally rid myself of the burden that is American citizenship.

## A hard story to tell

I’ve tried to write this blog post a number of times over the past two years. I’ve written entire drafts of this post from scratch more than once and never published them, unhappy with the tone or the content or the narrative or worried about the reaction of people I’ve never met on the internet. Perhaps it was the years of brainwashing…I mean, “[civic education](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civic%5Feducation%5Fin%5Fthe%5FUnited%5FStates?ref=larrysalibra.com)”…in US public schools that has scared my psyche and made me afraid of what the tribe will do when it finds out I’ve deserted them. Having to say the "Pledge of Allegiance" every day during one's childhood before he knows what the words "pledge" or "allegiance" even mean really does a job on one's mind.

I want to tell my story because I hope that it will benefit others on their journey towards personal freedom just the stories of others benefited me.

Our story starts about a year ago, in October 2019.

It's 2am on a Saturday morning in Hong Kong and I can't sleep. My body thinks it's still in Paris after two weeks in Europe. One year ago today, I also couldn't sleep but for a different reason. I was tossing and turning from stress the night before what I thought was going to be the biggest decision of my life: to give up US citizenship.

After over 11 years living outside of the USA, I had made an appointment on October 12, 2018, at the US Consulate in Hong Kong to go through the process known as "expatriation" or "renouncing US citizenship."

This was the second appointment in the process. The first had been a few weeks prior, on August 31, 2018\. You see, the United States wants you to believe that giving up US citizenship is a Big Deal, and in many ways it is! You lose a whole bunch of rights granted by citizenship such as no longer being able live or work in the country unless you get a visa. In this day and age of passports, visas and borders, ([it didn't used to be like this](https://www.nationalgeographic.com/travel/features/a-history-of-the-passport/?ref=larrysalibra.com)! travel used to be free as in freedom!) if you didn't have another citizenship, you could become "stateless" with nowhere to go and no way to get past borders to get there. To someone like me who was born and raised in suburban Ohio, this felt like a Big Deal.

What they don’t tell you, is that you’re also freed from a number of coercive obligations you never agreed to that other countries don’t impose on their citizens by opting-out of US citizenship. They tell you it's all pain with no gain.

To drive home the Big Dealness of the decision, the State Department made me make two appointments at the consulate to make sure I got their point. And I had to make the appointments well in advance as they were fully booked for months. I wasn’t the only American in Hong Kong trying to exit.

At the first appointment, a nice vice consul named Rachel took me in to a tiny interview room complete with an American flag in the nondescript Garden Road compound. Our interview began with Rachel hitting her head on the phone on the wall quite hard as she was sitting down and me asking her with a bit of a shock, “OMG, are you okay?!?!" After a minute or so of rubbing her head and grimacing, she was fine and we started with our interview.

She roughly followed a script that is specified in the [US State Department's Foreign Affairs Manual](https://fam.state.gov/fam/07fam/07fam1260.html?ref=larrysalibra.com). She asked me questions about myself and my decision. Where was I from? (Ohio) How long have I lived abroad? (Since May, 2007) Where does my family live? (My parents live in the US and my brother lives in Bulgaria). Did I have another citizenship and passport? (Yes, Italian) Why did I want to give up US citizenship? (It's complicated, but I didn't feel American anymore and when visiting the US anymore I felt like a tourist).

After the questions she started reading me a list of what came off as warnings and disclaimers to make sure I knew what I was getting myself into:

- Any children I had wouldn't become US citizens
- Might not be able to travel to the US again
- Wouldn't be able to live or work in the US an appropriate visa
- I would still have to file for and pay taxes that I owe
- If I didn't have another citizenship I could be come stateless

She then instructed me to take a couple of weeks for a "period of reflection" (this is required according to State Department regulations) and handed me a packet of papers to review listing the consequences giving up my blue passport and outlining the tax implications.

Where better to go to reflect and get some clarity on my decision to exit the US than to visit a country struggling with its own exit decision, the United Kingdom? So I headed off to the UK for a short vacation followed by a work trip in London.

By the time I made my first August appointment, I'd already made the decision - I'd been thinking about it for years and had done a ton of research and due diligence. I'd read a lot about other people's experiences and thinking. I was particularly inspired by bitcoin investor Roger Ver's story and Balajis Srinivasan's talk on [Voice vs Exit](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOubCHLXT6A&ref=larrysalibra.com).

I was most concerned about losing the right to live and work in the US - it seems so many people want this right and that they're willing to go through great pain and inconvenience to get it. However, I hadn't ever used this right in the almost 20 years of my adult life. I’d always competed on the global market without the benefit of “work authorization” protecting me from competition of “aliens.” As life long entrepreneur and a strong advocate of remote work, I didn't ever see myself wanting to sign up for some office job in the States. But would I want to live there?

## A tourist in my own country

In 2016, I flew to California and rented a car to do some due diligence on the country I was thinking of leaving. I spent a month driving across the US and back, taking in the sites and visiting places I thought I might like to live. The natural beauty of America and her parks is breathtaking. While it is amazing to visit and even vacation for a few weeks, it wasn’t someplace I'd want to live. New York and Chicago were my favorite cities, but cold climate and snow is a turn off as is the crumbling infrastructure and confiscatory tax rates.

A number of tech friends moved to Austin for the low tax and warm weather, so I stopped there for a few days. After over a decade in Asia, Austin hardly seems big enough to even be called a city. My impression was that it is a bunch of suburban sprawl with some bigger buildings in the middle. And I much prefer being on islands surrounded by water instead of landlocked.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2020/11/IMG_5406.jpeg)

In June of 2018, I took a vacation to America’s only state that is “a bunch of islands surrounded by water,” Hawaii. I had found memories of visiting the Aloha state as a child and wanted to make sure that I wasn't missing out on some future destiny where Larry becomes a Hawaiian like George Clooney in *The Descendants*. The nature was nice, but the poverty, crime and remoteness from everywhere made it not very attractive as a future home.

I'd discussed the decision with family and friends. Friends ranged from very unhappy to mildly supportive to downright enthusiastic. My brother, also an entrepreneur who has lived outside of the States for more than a decade, was understanding of the challenges the USA imposes on its entrepreneurs abroad and very supportive. My parents were skeptical that it was the right decision. They'd lived their whole lives in the USA and grown up on stories of World War II valor and of their grandparents who had struggled to immigrate to the United States for a better life. They shared their views with me but never gave me any pressure and let me make my own decision.

## The oath

October 12, 2018, my second appointment in the renunciation process, quickly arrived. I couldn’t really sleep the night before. I was nervous about both the appointment and a [big work announcement](https://blog.blockstack.org/a-path-to-decentralization/?ref=larrysalibra.com). Lots of things were changing.

In the morning, I woke up and took a taxi to the US consulate for my appointment. Here’s a picture of me before the appointment. You can see the stress in my face.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2020/11/IMG_8562.jpeg)

After entering the consulate and going through security, the first step of the appointment was paying the fee: US$2,350\. You can’t free yourself from the Land of the Free without having the cash money to buy your freedom. Think of the renunciation fee as an emancipation fee, a lot of money, but a small price to pay for freedom.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2020/11/https---blogs-images.forbes.com-robertwood.jpg)

The actual renunciation ceremony was sort of an out-of-body blur. I felt like I was watching myself in the little room with the American flag renouncing my allegiance (which of course the US education system forces children who don’t know what the word “allegiance” means to “pledge”) to the USA.

The consular official told me that they would take my US passport and hold on to it until the State Department approved my renunciation and return it to me canceled along with my Certificate of Loss of Nationality (CLN) at some later date. He advised that if I needed to travel to the US I might be able to borrow the passport for a trip if the CLN hadn’t yet been processed. He also said that if I wanted to travel to the USA in the future, as a citizen of a Visa Waiver country, I should try to apply for permission online through the Electronic System for Travel Authorization (ESTA). If ESTA failed, I’d have to make an appointment to come back and apply for a US visa.

I left the consulate, visibly relieved and headed home for lunch. Here’s me after the process, 1 passport lighter:

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2020/11/IMG_8570.jpeg)

After lunch, I applied for an ESTA just to see if it would be approved. It was instantly approved. That evening, I had a small celebration with some close friends including one who had gone through the same process a year earlier.

A few weeks later, I received a call from the US Consulate telling me that my Certificate of Loss of Nationality (CLN) was ready for pick up along with my canceled passport. As soon as I picked up the CLN, I headed straight to a bank to try to open a bank account as a non-American. And it worked! The process was so much easier as a non-American.

Over the next few weeks, I updated my nationality at various financial institutions around the world and reorganized my financial life, enjoying my new found freedom from having to worry about tax consequences of transactions.

## Returning home as a foreigner

At the end of November 2018, I headed to the USA for the first time as a “non-resident alien.” I’d bought a flight on the famous Cathay Pacific flight CX888 that used to stop at Vancouver on the way to New York’s JFK. A couple hours before my flight, I tried checking in online for my flight and was told by Cathay’s website that I needed an Electronic Travel Authorization for Canada because of my stop in Vancouver. That was new to this newly non-American foreigner.

Arriving in JFK, instead of heading for the Global Entry line as I would have as an American, I headed for the empty Crew/Diplomat line thanks to my APEC Business Travel Card (ABTC). Fear-based adrenaline rushed through veins as it always has going through US borders where they aren’t known for their friendly, service-oriented demeanor. I had no idea what to expect.

I handed the officer my passport which he quickly scanned. As he prepared to stamp the passport, he said “Wait a second. We have a ghost passport here,” and directed me to the secondary examination room. “That’s it, it’s over,” I thought, I imagined that they were going not let me in or harass me for giving up on the nation for which my grandfather’s war friends had spilled their blood.

After 10 or 15 minutes, another officer called me to the front of the room and asked me if I had a US passport. I told him I had a canceled US passport because I had renounced US citizenship. I gave the canceled passport along with my Certificate of Loss of Nationality. It turns out that the Department of State hadn’t informed the Department of Homeland Security that I was no longer a citizen. The officer was very kind and said that he would make a note in my record so that they wouldn’t have to waste time asking about this again in the future. Minutes later, I was welcomed back to my former homeland.

## Final tax filings

Over the next few months, I filled out a lot of FATCA-related forms for financial institutions that took a while to figure out how I could be born in the USA but not be American. I’d no sooner fill in and deliver one set of forms when two more sets of the same forms would appear in my mail the next day like some sort of sick financial funhouse joke.

In March of 2019 made my final US tax and financial filings which was both expensive and time consuming. I sat at my desk for 4 or 5 days straight muttering line numbers and form codes like a crazy person as I filled out hundreds of pages of papers, both 1040 and 1040-NR forms and all the accompanying schedules, [form 8854](https://www.irs.gov/forms-pubs/about-form-8854?ref=larrysalibra.com) and the infamous [we’ll-take-half-of-your-money-if-you-don’t-fill-out-this-form Foreign Bank Account Report](https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employed/report-of-foreign-bank-and-financial-accounts-fbar?ref=larrysalibra.com). Finally, I was done! And that, my friends, is the story of how I got rid of US citizenship.

## Life as an Italian living Hong Kong

The past two years as a non-American have gone pretty smoothly. In the pre-Covid era, I travel to or transited the USA a half a dozen times or so. Each time the experience was the same as or better than the experience used to be as an American. US Border Officials would occasionally stop me when I was an American and interrogate me about why I live in Hong Kong. “What do you do? Why are you there?” Now they just ask me “business or pleasure” and send me on my way. And with the ABTC, I’m through even faster than Global Entry ever was.

While some friends and family questioned my decision, especially during the political unrest in Hong Kong last year, as 2020 began and the US devolved into pandemic and political chaos, I’ve heard a lot less of that.

Over the past two years, I’ve found out that a lot of people in Hong Kong have gone through same process as me. It turns out getting rid of US citizenship is pretty popular in this city. My dentist is a former American, as are some on my waterpolo team along with sailors in my club. They’re all successful business people, professionals or entrepreneurs who came to the same conclusion that being American wasn't for them.

Occasionally I find myself feeling sad that a nation founded on such revolutionary principles - life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness - has wandered so far from its roots and in its vindictiveness makes so many great people feel like it’s not worth staying. But then I remember that the future of the USA is no longer my problem to worry about. Others can take care of her. I’ve opted-out and exited.

## Why did I want to leave?

I didn’t really talk much about how or why US citizenship became something I actively didn’t want. I’ll save the story of *how* I went from a red-blooded American Patriot from the nation’s heartland to someone that wanted to be free of the burdens of the blue passport for another time ([Sign up](https://larrysalibra.com/newsletter/) to be notified). The *why* is a lot easier:

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2020/11/Screen-Shot-2020-10-27-at-5.31.05-PM.png)

I was tired of being rejected for accounts. Tired of being told with whom I can do business and where I can travel. Tired of being sucked into the national mental illness where the left and right which are largely the same in their desire to use state violence to force their views on others both at home and abroad argue with each other about silly issues to distract the electorate from the nation's real problems. Tired of the compliance paper work and asset reporting. Tired of a system that treats its citizens as property of the state and pawns in a massive geopolitical game.

In short, I was tired of a system and culture that was increasingly hypocritical as what it practices moved further and further away from what what it preached. I wanted the freedom and liberty to pursue my own happiness I was promised by the founding fathers and it was apparent that the nation-state that is their legacy wasn’t very interested in helping me with that.

These problems might be hard to notice if you’ve lived your entire life in the USA, but once you’ve lived abroad and compare your experience with those of peers from other countries, it becomes apparent what a bad deal Americans get.

## Voice vs exit

A younger me might have decided to involve myself in the political system to try to change it for the better. Older me realizes that the system itself is the problem. By funding and participating in the system, we give the system legitimacy and only make the system stronger and the problems worse. Exiting is the high leverage and most effective option. Older me just wants to be left alone.

I don't harbor any ill will to the country of my birth. I hope Americans can figure out the challenges they're going through and move closer towards the ideals their nation was founded on, because the world could really use a place like that. I wish her the best of luck. 

*Questions or comments? Email me at [exit@larrysalibra.com](mailto:exit@larrysalibra.com) or [tweet at me](https://twitter.com/larrysalibra/?ref=larrysalibra.com).*
### Stacking & PoX: Economically anchoring the STX ecosystem in Bitcoin
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/economically-anchoring-stx-in-bitcoin/
Last updated: 2020-10-06T03:56:11.000Z
Consensus is at the center of any blockchain network. The goal of consensus algorithms is to enable nodes to come to agreement on the global state of the network. This is easy if you can trust the nodes not to be malicious as is typically the case in a permissioned network where a human decides which nodes are allowed in. This is hard in the case of Bitcoin and other public blockchains where no one controls which nodes can join the network. In an open network, malicious nodes are expected.

There are a number of different consensus algorithms, from the gold standard: Bitcoin’s proof of work to proof of stake and others. Each have their pros and cons - efficiency gains, security tradeoffs and other compromises. What they don’t do is provide a clear, unambiguous indication of the market value of the tokens they secure.

In Bitcoin, we look at the hash power committed to the network by miners and try to estimate their costs: electricity and hardware and compare this to their income: network fees and block rewards to get an idea of what miners think about the value of bitcoin. If the value of network fees and the block reward is less than the amount of money they spend mining Bitcoin, one assumes a rational miner would not mine at a loss for any extended period of time.

At Blockstack, we learned through early prototypes that it makes sense to tie the security of your chain to the most secure chain, Bitcoin. Because of this, we built the Stacks 1.0 chain directly on Bitcoin using *OP\_RETURN*. In designing Stacks 2.0, our goal was to add additional functionality to Bitcoin by building on a layer above it and using the Bitcoin chain layer as an anchor. It was from this goal that [Proof of Transfer](https://github.com/blockstack/stacks-blockchain/blob/master/sip/sip-007-stacking-consensus.md?ref=larrysalibra.com) arose.

In Proof of Transfer, leaders, aka “miners,” are selected by spending Bitcoin, the more Bitcoin you spend, the larger your chance of becoming the leader. These Bitcoin are then distributed to holders of STX that participate in Stacking while the miners earn STX from the block reward along with transaction fees.

Unlike Proof of Work, Proof of Transfer provides a clear and publicly visible indication of a miner’s cost of mining. Their cost of mining is simply the Bitcoin they commit in the mining process. A miner that has committed 1 BTC in a mining cycle has a cost of 1 BTC. This 1 BTC cost is visible on the network. Again, this contrasts to mining in Proof of Work where we can only guess as to a miner’s cost to commit a certain amount of hash power. There’s no way to really know what a miner’s cost of hardware and electricity is.

In addition to providing more information about a miner’s price preferences, the clear cost information of Proof of Transfer will move competition among miners from cost to income. Miners will have an incentive to participate in Stacking as much as possible to maximize the percentage of BTC recovered that they committed to mining in addition to their STX rewards and fees.

I’m excited to see how markets will react to the information about preferences and future views that STX miners reveal through their mining commitments. I’m even more excited to grow the ecosystem of BTC-priced assets and income streams. Just like the Stacks 2.0 chain will be cryptographically anchored in BTC, the STX ecosystem will be economically anchored in BTC with Bitcoin as both the unit of account and store of value.
### Getting around Trump’s Tiktok & Wechat Bans
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/getting-around-trumps-tiktok-wechat-bans/
Last updated: 2020-09-20T07:54:56.000Z
A key plank of Donald Trump’s 2016 election campaign was building a Big Wall. Then Covid hit and everything went virtual. So now he's building a Great Big Firewall to [take away Americans' freedom to choose which dull chat apps and video dance apps they waste their time on.](https://www.commerce.gov/news/press-releases/2020/09/commerce-department-prohibits-wechat-and-tiktok-transactions-protect?ref=larrysalibra.com) Heaven forbid a foreign power threatens the national security of the self-declared “Land of the Free” by collecting the top secret dance moves of Americans. Freedom is slavery.

The first bricks in this new Freedom Firewall supposedly take effect today - September 20th. A number of reporters have reached out to me in the past 36 hours asking for my take on how users might be able to get around these blocks. So here it is: Let’s take a look at how this might work and what users might be able do to get around these bans.

In July, Tiktok decided it no longer wanted to service the Hong Kong market. It in essence banned itself from Hong Kong. It removed Tiktok from Hong Kong app stores and disabled existing installations of the app - in effect conducting on device self-censorship - when it detected a sim card issued by a Hong Kong carrier. [Getting around this is as easy](https://twitter.com/larrysalibra/status/1282473521650647040?ref=larrysalibra.com) as downloading the app from a non-Hong Kong app store and putting a non-Hong Kong sim card in your phone. You don’t even need to use the foreign sim card to go online. No VPN needed. Easy.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2020/09/IMG_8083-1.jpeg)

Unblocking Tiktok in Hong Kong is as easy as selecting a non-Hong Kong SIM card.

Trump’s September 18th order targets organizations enabling the distribution of Wechat and Tiktok (“The Apps”). It prevents Apple and Google from distributing The Apps in their app stores. It also prevents US firms from supplying services and infrastructure that might be needed to support the use of The Apps in the USA.

At the very least, this means users who have not already downloaded the apps will likely have to create accounts or change their existing account to a non-US App Store (Instructions: [Apple](https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201389?ref=larrysalibra.com) & [Google](https://support.google.com/googleplay/answer/7431675?hl=en&ref=larrysalibra.com)). This typically requires having access to a payment method issued in the new country and can be as easy as buying an [iTunes](https://www.bitrefill.com/buy/worldwide/?hl=en&q=itunes&ref=larrysalibra.com) or [Play Store](https://www.bitrefill.com/buy/worldwide/?hl=en&q=google%20play&ref=larrysalibra.com) gift card for a foreign app store with bitcoin. Apple’s platforms let you download apps from multiple country App Stores, so users could keep their main App Store account in the USA and use their foreign account to download one of The Apps.

It’s unclear at the moment if The Apps themselves will cooperate with the USA and introduce some sort of on-device kill switch that prevents their use on US-networks or with US-issues sim cards. If this happens, buying a second prepaid sim card or eSim from abroad might be an easy work around.

If network providers try to block traffic to servers that are required for the functioning of the apps, users could consider using VPNs to hop over the Trump Firewall and connecting to a VPN server in a place that still has internet app freedom like Canada or Hong Kong.

Ultimately, this whole Tiktok/Wechat situation shows us for the umpteenth time the dangers of centralized app stores and internet infrastructure. While app stores have provided a lot benefits to consumers, they’ve also made it trivial to control what apps users have access to. People with power will not hesitate to take this power by coercive force to use when it suits their political goals (like getting re-elected).

It also sends a clear message to the rest of the world that the USA wants internet hegemony to match its military & cultural hegemony. The success of Wechat and to larger extent Tiktok, is evidence that the USA is no longer the only technology and cultural game in town and it's certain not the only game on the internet. 

Finally, Trump's executive order is yet-another-reminder that, like other US import bans and financial sanctions, the real victims are ultimately Americans and American-owned businesses whose rights are taken away or restricted under the guise of being for their own-good. The rest of the world is going to keep on being able to use Wechat and Tiktok just like they can keep traveling to Cuba, North Korea and Iran if they want to. Americans won't even allowed the freedom to chose, even if they want to. Sad.

*Shameless plug: If you’re interested in the work we’re doing in this area at New Internet Labs, [sign up here for updates](https://www.newinternetlabs.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com)*
### On Blockstack Governance & the Stacks Foundation
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/on-blockstack-governance/
Last updated: 2020-06-08T13:00:12.000Z
I chatted with [Lane Rettig](https://twitter.com/lrettig?ref=larrysalibra.com) a couple months ago about Blockstack governance and how our project is doing so far. I wanted to flesh out some of my thoughts on governance and share them with you.

The ideal "amount" of governance for a decentralized project is none, zero, nil, zilch. But why is that? And how do we get there?

One of the things I think is helpful to do when thinking about a big picture problem like governance is to step back and look again at why we created Blockstack and the problems we are trying to solve.

Satoshi saw a world where 3rd party organizations could arbitrarily and coercively change the rules that govern your money. They could steal from you by changing the inflation rate and steal from you by preventing you from using your money to transact with whom you choose. Given a choice, he thought, people will prefer money whose rules can't be changed.

Likewise, many early bitcoiners saw that the problems theft of digital property that bitcoin solved for money exist for other digital property. These so-called trusted 3rd parties could take your domain name, delete your youtube channel, prevent readers from seeing your blog post or shadow-ban your tweets. Given a choice, we thought, people will prefer to build their digital livelihoods on technology whose rules can't be changed.

The problems that come from the rules of a game changing in mid-play arise from of systems of governance. Governance provides a mechanism for decision-making and decision-making is what results in change. The governance mechanism of the fiat financial system, the literal government, is who changes the rules controlling your money, stealing from you through inflation to bailout their friends or preventing from spending your money on whatever is politically incorrect on that day of the week. Likewise, the governance system of big tech companies - CEOs, boards of directors, shareholders and the jurisdictions they're subject to change the rules of the tech platforms on which we build our digital lives.

Change isn’t necessarily bad, the problem comes with unexpected change and change that we didn't agree to. A decentralized ecosystem needs to be resilient to change users of the system don’t want. Having a governance structure makes it clear how decisions are made and where someone looking to change the system needs to apply pressure to change it. While this makes it easier for noble-minded people to participate, it also makes the system a lot easier to attack. If we trusted others intentions, we wouldn’t need a decentralized system.

This leaves all projects including bitcoin with a dilemma. On the one hand, the value comes from knowing the rules in advance and being sure that the rules won't change unless everyone agrees. On the other hand, the world doesn't stand still - circumstances change all the time - and building anything requires a degree of flexibility and the ability to change the rules as new information becomes available.

The becomes even more apparent in the early days of a project as new information becomes available very quickly that necessitates changes to the rules. Failing to make the right changes will mean death.

We experienced this with Blockstack as we started by building on Namecoin and moved to virtual chain and finally proof of transfer technology as we learned more and technology progressed. Failing to make those moves would have meant the death of the project, like so many before it.

As projects grow though, change should become harder and slower. More stakeholders and users means that more people need to agree before any changes are made. Users agreeing on change, though, doesn't mean majority rules democracy, it means that changes shouldn't be made unless as close to everyone agrees.

The challenge for Blockstack, something that we realized early on, is how to move from a traditional startup - a traditional corporate legal entity registered in the USA, where the CEO and the board calls the shots to something much closer to bitcoin. We call this our [path to decentralization](https://blog.blockstack.org/a-path-to-decentralization/?ref=larrysalibra.com).

It envisions independent actors in the ecosystem. My company [New Internet Labs](https://newinternetlabs.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com) being one of the first. And a mechanisms baked into the Stacks v2 protocol to make it easy for users with an economic stake in the system to participate. Most recently, the [creation of the Stacks Foundation](https://decrypt.co/29731/blockstack-launches-non-profit-decentralize-network?ref=larrysalibra.com) served as another step to reduce the power and the spread out the funds of Blockstack PBC.

As any long term bitcoin HODLer worth their satoshis knows, Foundations often lead to [Trouble](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin%5FFoundation?ref=larrysalibra.com). They have a tendency to build up social capital trading on the public's trust in words such as "foundation" and "non-profit" and the reputations of those who sit on their boards and then spend this social capital on questionable endeavors. Since foundations hand out money, there's little incentive to criticize them or call them out. They can become systemically dangerous to a budding decentralizing ecosystem if their influence grows too much or if users start looking to them as the "official" or authoritative source of truth in an ecosystem.

While I wasn't involved in the discussions around or creation of the [Stacks Foundation](https://stacks.org/?ref=larrysalibra.com), I am confident Brittany and the team at the foundation are well-aware of the risks and will do their best play a supportive role in the ecosystem without becoming a trusted third party or a systemic risk. The fact that they have made clear that they will have no role in the technical protocol seems to be a good first step. I look forward to seeing how things develop.

A Stacks foundation is really just a short-term step in the path towards decentralization. Ultimately, we need to get as many people involved in the ecosystem as possible. The more financially independent they are the better. This can only happen as people build sustainable independent businesses that use the network. 

As time goes on, the less efficient the governance process the better. We want a world where someone looking to make a controversal change - a change that everyone using the network doesn't agree on - has a very difficult time forcing it through. If we build a Blockstack world where contentious changes can be pushed through by getting a few people in a room or on a video call, then we've failed to build something that's better than the ICANN/Big Tech-controlled internet we have today.
### A guide to sailing in Hong Kong
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/sailing-in-hong-kong/
Last updated: 2024-09-24T22:50:50.000Z
*This is a work in progress that I'm sharing in the hope that in its unfinished state it's still useful to some.*

At first glance Hong Kong seems like a giant mall stuck in a geopolitical tug of war. But you’ve discovered its natural beauties: mountains rising out of the South China Sea with dotted with dozens of bays inlets and channels. The sea calls you to take to the water and explore.

You take the public ferries to islands and hike around. You join junk boat parties and spend your weekends drinking anchored off of otherwise secluded beaches with a dozen other loud and obnoxious parties. But something’s missing. If you haven’t experienced Hong Kong through sailing, you’re missing something that makes this city a unique place to call home.

I grew up sailing on the [Great Lakes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great%5FLakes?ref=larrysalibra.com) with family in the 80s and 90s. I came to Hong Kong over a decade ago and recently re-discovered my love of sailing. This guide is my attempt to share with you the information I’ve uncovered and the lessons I’ve learned (and am learning!) joining the sailing community in Hong Kong.

If you have any questions, comments or feedback on this guide, please email me at [sailing@larrysalibra.com](mailto:sailing@larrysalibra.com) or [tweet at me on Twitter](https://twitter/larrysalibra?ref=larrysalibra.com)!

## Learning to sail in Hong Kong

The path you take to learn sailing in Hong Kong will depend on the type of boat you start learning on. You can start on any boat you want. In this section, I’ll tell you about the options you have and share my advice on how to proceed. The principles of sailing are the same no matter the type of boat, so don’t worry if you start with one type of boat and want to sail on another - the skills you learn will transfer over.

In this section, I’ll be talking about taking courses to learn sail. A large part of your learning will actually come from experience sailing with more advanced sailors. You should feel free at any point to join a friend their boat for racing or cruising. This will be a great supplement to structured courses and will help to round out your experience.

In Hong Kong, there are three types of boats you can learn sailing on dinghies, keelboats and sailing yachts (aka “Big boats”).

### Dinghies

Dinghies are small sailboats that have no keel and no cabin. They generally only fit 1 to 3 people. Without a heavy keel to counterbalance the force of the wind, they rely on bodyweight of the crew to prevent to the boat from capsizing. In Hong Kong, sailing dinghies typically do not have motors.

Since dinghies are small and light, the forces on the sails and rigging are relatively small. They also respond very quickly to changes in sail trim, sea and wind conditions.

### Keelboats

Keelboats (of which sports boats are one type) are larger than dinghies and have a weighted keel that helps to keep the boat upright. Some keelboats in Hong Kong, such as the J/80, use outboard motors. While they usually have cabins, the cabins are typically small and with minimal facilities and rarely used for overnight cruising in Hong Kong.

### Sailing Yachts

Sailing yachts - often called “Big Boats” in Hong Kong to differentiate them from their smaller cousins start at around 30 feet (9 meters) and go as big as your wallet can afford. Their cabins have facilities that range from spartan - enough for an occasional overnight coastal trip - to luxurious and suitable for weeks or months of cruising across oceans.

### How should I choose which type of boat to start learning on?

I recommend to those that are new to sailing start sailing dinghies. Because dinghies are light and forces are small, the amount of damage that you can do to yourself, the boat and others is a lot less than larger boats.

In the typical Hong Kong beginner dinghy sailing course, you’ll either be sailing in a boat on your own or with a classmate on day one of your first course. This will give you the opportunity to experiment with the boat and the wind and the sea and see how it performs. You’ll be wearing a helmet and a lifejacket and learning in calm, sheltered waters away from most marine traffic. This combined with the fact training dinghies are typically plastic and float even when full of water makes learning sailing in a sailing dinghy a relatively safe, consequence-free environment compared to learning on larger boats. As long as you stay away from other boats, the worst that can really happen is that you the boat will tip over and you’ll get wet.

![Larry during his beginner dinghy sailing course at RHKYC Middle Island](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2020/05/854c7c40-f140-45cb-b57c-e4ceb0c543bd.jpeg)

Because of this freedom to experiment and the fact that you will be in total control from day one, with no instructor on-board, you’ll be able to quickly build up your sailing sense and learn the different points of sail. Since sailing training dinghies are so light, you’ll quickly feel each change of the wind and sea and watch as the boat immediately responds to your adjustments to the sails and steering.

In comparison, learning to sail is a much different experience. Larger boats are much heavier and the forces on sails are intense. With flammable fuels, complicated equipment on-board and it is easy to cause a lot of expensive damage either to the boat, the crew on the boat or other vessels. Because of the size of the boat and the forces involved, you’ll need more people to operate the boat. This is makes learning to sail on a larger boat more a team activity.

You will spend a few days or more first learning how to serve as crew on a larger boat. The, skipper, the person in charge of the boat, will assign you a task: steering the boat, trimming the sails, etc. Since you’ll be responsible for only a small part of the things happening on the boat at a time, you might find it harder to get a big picture sense of what’s happening. You’ll eventually have to learn all of the jobs well enough before you can get to the point where you are competent enough to be in command of a larger sailing vessel and manage the boat and its crew.

You’ll lack some of the freedom to experiment and fail on a big boat. In a dinghy, you’ll be able to do things like overpower the boat with too much sail in strong winds and experience how the boat behaves (hint: you’ll probably end up in the water!). In contrast, on a big boat, doing things incorrectly can break expensive equipment or put the boat or its crew in danger, so the instructor will stop you before you make mistakes like that.

Because of this, I recommend starting your sailing journey in Hong Kong by completing a beginning dinghy sailing course even if you, like me, plan to move on to big boat sailing later. Having a good handle on the basics of sailing dinghies will put you in an excellent position to move into sailing other types of craft.

### Choosing a dinghy course

In Hong Kong, the national governing body for sailing, the Hong Kong Sailing Federation (HKFS), runs a dinghy sailing certificate scheme that awards certificates as you complete each level of the course. These certificates are recognized by the government-run LCSD water sports centers and Hong Kong’s private clubs as proof that you have the skills necessary to rent and operate various dinghies.

You’ll need to acquire the HKFS Level 1 and Level 2 certificates to rent basic dinghies. Hong Kong’s sailing clubs typically teach Level 1 and Level 2 as one five-day course while the LCSD water sports centers teaches offers separate Level 1 and Level 2 courses that are 2 days and 4 days in length respectively.

One of the goals of private sailing clubs in Hong Kong is to further interest in the sport. With that in mind, if you might want to join one of Hong Kong’s clubs, you should consider taking the courses offered by that club. That you learning sailing via the club’s training programs may be be looked upon favorably when one day you apply for membership. It will help you to start familiarizing yourself with the facilities, staff and members of the club and get you a head start on finding people you might be able to sail with in the future.

If cost is a concern, the cheapest option is to take courses through the LCSD because these are subsidized by the government. What you save in cost, however, you’ll make up in application complexity. LCSD course spots are handed out by lottery which can make it difficult to plan for if you have a busy schedule and frequently changing schedule.

- [LCSD dinghy sail training](https://www.lcsd.gov.hk/en/watersport/activities/acti%5Ftrain/acti%5Ftrai%5Fdinghy.html?ref=larrysalibra.com)
- [Royal Hong Kong Yacht Club dinghy sail training](https://www.rhkyc.org.hk/AdultSailTraining.aspx?ref=larrysalibra.com#HKSF%20BEGINNER%20COURSES)
- [Hebe Haven Yacht club dinghy sail training](https://www.hhyc.org.hk/page.php?page=page13%5F33.php&ref=larrysalibra.com)
- [Aberdeen Boat Club dinghy sail training](https://www.abcmiddleisland.com/adult-sailing?ref=larrysalibra.com)

### Practice after your Level 1 & Level 2 certificate

Congratulations! You are now a sailor! The next step is to get more time on the water to practice your skills. The cheapest way to do this is go to one of the government’s [LCSD water sports centers](https://www.lcsd.gov.hk/en/watersport/index.html?ref=larrysalibra.com) and hire a dinghy for half a day. Prices are roughly HK$54 for a morning or afternoon and include a lifejacket. You’ll need to bring your Level 1 & Level 2 certificates along with your Hong Kong ID each time you rent a dinghy. You’ll also want to bring the HKFS Dinghy Logbook that was given to you in your introductory course so that they can record each sailing session in your long. You’ll need the log book to show that you have the practice experience needed to move on to Level 3 and it will also come in handy if you join a club to demonstrate your participation in the sport.

### Level 3, keelboats or big boats?

After, completing your beginner dinghy sailing course and getting some practice, you’ll need to decide where to go next. As someone who really enjoys racing and cruising on larger boats, I’d encourage everyone to at least try sailing on big boats or keelboats early in their sailing careers.

### Big boat training

More on big boat training coming soon...

## Getting yourself licensed

As an individual who might buy a boat, there are two types of licenses issued by the Hong Kong Government that you'll need to think about. The most important is the Pleasure Vessel Operators Certificate of Competency (PVOCC) issued by the Marine Department. You - or someone else on the boat - will need to have this if you want to operate a Hong Kong-flagged pleasure boat that has an engine. Second, is a radio license issued by the Office of the Communication Authority. You'll need this to use marine radio equipment.

More details to come..

## Future additions

I’ll be adding more to this guide as time permits and as my sailing journey continues.

- Racing in Hong Kong
- Cruising the waters of Hong Kong
- Joining a club
- Buying a boat
- Safety while sailing
### 🇺🇳 WHO killed the digital nomads?
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/newsletter/who-killed-the-digital-nomads/
Last updated: 2020-04-26T16:44:52.000Z
Hi friends!

Life as nomad has always been a precarious existence. After all, when you have no home, that makes you...homeless? I think Covid-19 has killed the digital nomad as we know it. Here are some lessons that will help you find the home you crave while satisfying your wanderlust in a sustainable way:

🏝 [The digital nomad is dead](https://larrysalibra.com/the-digital-nomad-is-dead/)

Many countries have a public health disaster and a largely a self-created economic crisis on their hands. They're blaming everyone but themselves. See how things look from my part of the world:

😧 [It wasn't WHO, it was you!](https://larrysalibra.com/it-wasnt-who-was-you/)

In other news, [the Stacks 2.0 testnet has launched](https://blog.blockstack.org/stacks-2-testnet/?ref=larrysalibra.com). It promises web 3.0 built on bitcoin as the foundation. If you're a developer, give it a whirl!

Yours,  
Larry
### It wasn't WHO, it was you!
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/it-wasnt-who-was-you/
Last updated: 2020-04-27T03:31:22.000Z
The 2020 Coronavirus pandemic feels like it has consumed our lives. As I think back it seems like something that's been a part of my daily life since the Chinese New Year in late January.

There's a lot of finger pointing by politicians, political groups and individuals looking to avoid responsibility for the massive economic damage and hundreds of thousands of deaths that were likely entirely preventable.

From the media noise coming out of Western Europe & the USA, many of you could be forgiven for thinking that this novel coronavirus appeared sometime in February or March with little warning, released on an unsuspecting world by a supposedly evil China without so much as a warning. You might even be under the impression that Taiwan figured things out back in December but no one would listen to them. With so many groups out there shouting back and forth trying use this crisis to forward their personal and political causes, it can get hard to even remember the facts.

Take me as an example. This morning, I was searching for pandemic restaurant regulations in the Hong Kong Gazette and was shocked to see legislation regarding the novel coronavirus gazetted on January 6th. This was *weeks* before the Wuhan lockdown and a long time before I even remember the virus as A Thing (let alone when I started taking the virus seriously).

Curious as to what else I’d forgotten, I started digging through my chat logs, tweets and historical news sources to reconstruct a timeline of events from my vantage point. January 24th was when my first clear memory of coronavirus as Something Big occurring, so events in my timeline starting on the 24th are those I remember with dates verified by other sources. I backfilled events that happened before the 24th to really get a feel for what was happening while I wasn’t paying attention. While I went through this process for myself, I’ve shared the timeline at the bottom of the post for your reference. The process led me to a few conclusions, which I’ll share along with other observations in a moment. But first, let me update you on what’s going on in Hong Kong:

## What’s happening in Hong Kong

- Today (Sunday, April 26) was the 3rd day this week with no confirmed cases - imported or local.
- Anyone testing positive for the virus is put into a negative pressure hospital isolation room.
- All close contacts of anyone testing positive are put into government quarantine centers.
- Non-residents are banned from entry.
- All returning residents from overseas are tested for the virus. They have to wait in the testing center until they receive their results. Those who test negative undergo 14-day home quarantine. Those who test positive go into a hospital isolation room.
- All arrivals from mainland China, Taiwan and Macau are put under mandatory 14-day home quarantine. Those with entry permits valid for stays of less than 14-days are denied entry. Almost all mainland Chinese have only 7-day entry permits, so they are all denied entry resulting in border that is effectively closed for non-residents.
- Government civil servants are working from home and only essential government services are available.
- Many businesses have asked employees to work from home, but this is entirely voluntary on the part of the businesses.
- Bars, gyms and a number of other recreational businesses are closed.
- Stores and restaurants are open, but restaurants have to keep tables 1.5 meters apart, test customer temperatures and customers have to wear masks.
- Groups of four or more are banned in public places.
- Mask wearing is almost universal, a voluntary behavior that the vast majority people have been following since January.
- Masks are expensive, but not regulated and widely available.
- Even real estate agents and private clubs have started selling masks on the side.

## Observations & conclusions

- Anyone that’s trying to blame some other country or the WHO for their own response should grow up and take responsibility for their own actions. Yes, China has a censorship problem among its myriad of political and societal problems. Yes, the WHO doesn’t always give good advice and sometimes even spreads misinformation. However, countries around the world had plenty of time to take action on their own and plenty of other sources of information but instead sat around doing nothing. If they weren’t on friendly terms with China or didn’t trust the WHO, they could at least look at the very public actions taken by Hong Kong, Taiwan and Macau during the first week of January and take similar steps to protect their own populations.
- What’s even more frustrating is that places like the US and Italy took *some* actions - like evacuating their citizens from Wuhan, or preventing entry of people from Wuhan by plane - but they didn’t follow through with basic steps that should be obvious to *anyone* \- like making sure sick people are isolated from other people so they don’t get others sick and testing people coming across borders. Or making it easy to import masks or produce masks. Or letting their own companies make test kits that worked.
- Both leadership and populations in many countries ignored their fellow citizens trying to sound the pandemic alarm such as those in the tech world tweeting about the risk of a possible pandemic and forgoing hand shakes or American Airline pilots suing their employer to prevent them from flying to China.
- In many cases, places are *still* not taking basic steps like making sure people who test positive along with their close contacts are isolated from the public and from each other so that the chain of infection is broken.
- Almost all of the actions that places like Hong Kong and Taiwan took any country could have taken. Most of them don’t rely on the availability of any particular technology or skills. Just leadership and competence.
- Countries now suffering huge outbreaks could have taken action back in January, but they chose not to. Instead many even tried to dissuaded their populations from voluntarily acting by spreading misinformation.
- In Hong Kong, people were either calling for or voluntarily taking precautions well in advance of the government making something compulsory.
- Leaders can do a lot to change behavior without having to resort to laws, regulations and coercion. When the Hong Kong Government required their civil servants to work from home in late January, many other businesses followed their example. It was never compulsory.

## My novel coronavirus timeline

- **December 30, 2019** \- Rumors of pneumonia of unknown origin start circulating on social media
- **December 31, 2019** \- China and Taiwan both notify WHO of a new virus.
- **December 31, 2019** \- the Macau Health Bureau (Serviços de Saúde) was notified by China’s National Health Commission of an outbreak of an unknown pneumonia in Wuhan [\[1\]](#fn1)
- **December 31, 2019** \- Hong Kong Government holds urgent night-time meeting with official and infectious disease experts about mysterious outbreak of “viral pneumonia” in Wuhan. Increases temperature checks at borders, asks hospitals to report cases, asks that anyone one with fever and acute respiratory illness be put into hospital isolation, ask University of Hong Kong for help to speed up virus genetic tests. [\[2\]](#fn2)
- **January 1, 2020** \- Macau started temperature checks for all flights from Wuhan and alerted the public
- **January 3** \- Hong Kong raises infectious disease response level to “Serious,” widens reporting criteria to anyone who traveled to Wuhan in the past 14 days and sets
- **January 4** \- Hong Kong’s public hospital system shortens visiting hours, requires masks, reports a 3 month supply of personal protection equipment and starts working with suppliers to ensure a stable supply. [\[3\]](#fn3)
- **January 7** \- Scientists in China announced discovery of novel coronavirus
- **January 8** \- Hong Kong [gazetted a change to Cap 599 Prevention and Control of Disease Ordinance](https://www.gld.gov.hk/egazette/pdf/20202401e/es2202024014.pdf?ref=larrysalibra.com) adding “Severe respiratory disease associated with a novel infectious agent (嚴重新型傳染性病原體 呼吸系統病)” to the list of specified diseases to expand their authority to quarantine. It also [added the disease](https://www.gld.gov.hk/egazette/pdf/20202401e/es2202024013.pdf?ref=larrysalibra.com) to the list of disease reportable by medical practitioners to the Director of Health.
- **January 8** \- South Korea announces first possible case
- **January 10** \- Gene sequencing data of the virus is posted online
- **January 11** \- German scientist develops test kit and sends to Hong Kong and Taiwan where it is verified to work [\[4\]](#fn4)
- **January 13** \- Virus genome posted to USA’s NIH database
- **January 16** \- Hong Kong University develops a test kit, submits to WHO [\[5\]](#fn5)
- **January 17** \- USA’s CDC says it has its own test kit and doesn’t need WHO’s
- **January 20** \- China confirms the virus is human-to-human transmissible.
- **January 20** \- USA and South Korea announced first confirmed cases
- **January 22** \- Macau announced all residents & foreign workers could purchase 10 masks per person per day
- **January 23** \- Hong Kong announces first confirmed case
- **January 23** \- Local private clubs and many businesses voluntarily start increasing hygiene, requiring staff to wear mask and providing hand sanitizer. [\[6\]](#fn6)
- **January 24** \- Macau universities, schools and sports facilities were closed until the second week of Feburary
- **January 24** \- In my infinite wisdom, I buy a ticket to CryptoEcon on February 29 in Hanoi, Vietnam.
- **January 24** \- I see masks in a 7-11 by my home and buy all them for a friend who is returning to Shenzhen and wants them. This is the last time I see masks on sale at a normal price.
- **January 25** \- Chinese New Year's Day
- **January 25** \- Hong Kong’s Education Bureau closes schools [\[7\]](#fn7)
- **January 25** \- Macau’s main land border crossing with mainland China reduced opening hours
- **January 25** \- I arrived in Macau by sea as part of a sailing race
- **January 25** \- Hong Kong declares an infectious disease emergency. Announces closure all amusement parts and cancelation of concerts. [\[8\]](#fn8)
- **January 26** \- Macau quarantined all travelers that had entered Macaus between December 1 and January 26 from Hubei province- over 1000 people.
- **January 27** \- Anyone who had been to Hubei within the previous 14 days could no longer enter Macau without a doctor’s note proving they were free of the novel coronavirus
- **January 27** \- I departed Macau for Hong Kong by sea on the second leg of the sailing race
- **January 28** \- Macau announced closed border to mainland Chinese visitors
- **January 28** \- Hong Kong closes all public sports, recreational & cultural programs. [\[9\]](#fn9)
- **January 29** \- Hong Kong civil servants begin what ends up being a month of work-from-home arrangements. Many businesses follow the government’s example and ask their employees to work from home. [\[10\]](#fn10)
- **January 29** \- Macau announced that there was no timetable to resume classes
- **January 29** \- USA evacuates citizens from Wuhan. [\[11\]](#fn11)
- **January 30** \- Hong Kong suspends rail and ferry service to mainland China [\[12\]](#fn12)
- **January 30** \- American Airlines pilot union sues the airline to compel the carrier to stop flights to China [\[13\]](#fn13)
- **January 30** \- WHO declares global health emergency [\[14\]](#fn14)
- **January 31** \- Trump bans restricts entry to USA of non-citizens who had traveled to mainland China within the past 14 days. [\[15\]](#fn15)
- **January 31** \- Hong Kong Government issues a tender for more masks [\[16\]](#fn16)
- **January 31** \- Singapore Prime Minister advises against wearing masks. [\[17\]](#fn17)
- **January 31** \- Italy bans flights from China, Hong Kong and Taiwan[\[18\]](#fn18)
- **February 3** \- Thousands of Hong Kong medical personnel go on strike to protest the government’s failure to close the border with mainland China [\[19\]](#fn19)
- **February 8** \- Hong Kong starts compulsory quarantine of anyone who has traveled to mainland China in the past 14 days[\[20\]](#fn20) and makes a temporary regulation that makes it an offense to lie or give misleading to a medical practitioner and requires disclosure of information of information related to the public health emergency to health officers. [\[21\]](#fn21)
- **February 12** \- Balaji Srinivasan [talks about why the virus](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2I0diex5b8&ref=larrysalibra.com) is likely a serious threat at an Austin Blockstack meetup. He’s wearing a mask and rubber gloves.
- **February 14** \- Hong Kong Disneyland lends land to government to build more quarantine facilities [\[22\]](#fn22)
- **February 21** \- Italy starts lockdowns in the region near Milan
- **February 21** \- Ryan Selkis [says he’s going to wear a mask](https://twitter.com/twobitidiot/status/1230842704365531138?ref=larrysalibra.com) to raise awareness, fight xenophobia (that masks are only for Asians) and inspire people to prepare
- **February 22** \- I decide to risk the trip to Hanoi for CryptoEcon and buy a flight on Cathay Dragon to Hanoi, departing February 28 and returning March 4.
- **February 28** \- Hong Kong Government opens a HK$1.5 billion scheme to subsidy local mask production.[\[23\]](#fn23)
- **February 28** \- I fly to Hanoi, with a mask in my bag, but one of the few not wearing it on the plane. The people in the row behind me, also not wearing masks, are coughing and sneezing. I can feel it on my bald head. I suddenly I become a mask believer
- **February 29** \- Cathay Dragon cancels my return flight as demand has dropped off a cliff given the pandemic. I decide to not risk a quarantine and leave earlier.
- **February 29** \- US Surgeon General tells people to stop buying masks, they don’t work [\[24\]](#fn24)
- **March 1** \- First confirmed cause of Covid-19 announced in New York City [\[25\]](#fn25)
- **March 2** \- I fly back to Hong Kong, wearing a mask.
- **March 2** \- Hong Kong civil servants return to offices after a month of work-from-home and normal public services resume [\[26\]](#fn26)
- **March 3** \- New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio encourages New Yorkers to get out on the town despite the coronavirus pandemic. He provides a list of movie suggestions [\[27\]](#fn27)
- **March 16** \- I launch my [#WearAFuckingMask](https://twitter.com/larrysalibra/status/1239413831232716801?ref=larrysalibra.com) movement to convince friends and family in the US and Europe to wear masks.
- **March 17** \- Several private clubs in Hong Kong voluntarily introduce rules that prohibit entry of anyone who has been outside of Hong Kong in the past 14 days. [\[28\]](#fn28)
- **March 19** \- Hong Kong regulation requiring quarantine of people arriving from foreign countries takes effect [\[29\]](#fn29)
- **March 21** \- Hong Kong civil servants required to work-from-home again closing non-essential government services [\[30\]](#fn30)
- **March 23** \- Hong Kong closes sports and recreational facilities at clubs holding private recreational leases [\[31\]](#fn31)
- \_\_March 25 - Hong Kong bans entry of all non-residents arriving from overseas, ends transit and adds Macau and Taiwan to mandatory quarantine scheme. It implements mandatory saliva testing of asymptomatic arrivals from the US, UK and Europe.[\[32\]](#fn32)
- **March 28** \- Hong Kong requires restaurants to reduce capacity to 50%, separate tables by 1.5 meters, test temperature of patrons and requires customers to wear masks when not eating or drinking and closes gyms and some other recreational venues. [\[33\]](#fn33)
- **March 29** \- Hong Kong bans group gatherings of 4 or more persons in public places. [\[34\]](#fn34)
- **April 1** \- Hong Kong closes clubs & bars, beauty parlors, karaoke and additional recreational venues. [\[35\]](#fn35)
- **April 21** \- Hong Kong extends restrictions on businesses, but removes the 50% capacity restrictions on restaurants given improving situation.[\[36\]](#fn36)
- **April 24** \- Hong Kong secondary school students sit their long-delayed university entrance exams with temperature checks, mandatory masks and desks placed far apart in gymnasiums. [\[37\]](#fn37)
- **April 26** \- As of publication, Hong Kong has seen the 3rd day in a week of no new Covid-19 cases. Almost all other cases in recent days are imported.[\[38\]](#fn38)

---

1. [https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/long-reads/article/3081268/how-macaus-health-care-system-was-primed-beat](https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/long-reads/article/3081268/how-macaus-health-care-system-was-primed-beat?ref=larrysalibra.com) [↩︎](#fnref1)
2. [https://www.scmp.com/news/china/politics/article/3044050/mystery-illness-hits-chinas-wuhan-city-nearly-30-hospitalised](https://www.scmp.com/news/china/politics/article/3044050/mystery-illness-hits-chinas-wuhan-city-nearly-30-hospitalised?ref=larrysalibra.com) [↩︎](#fnref2)
3. [https://www.ha.org.hk/haho/ho/pad/200104Eng1.pdf](https://www.ha.org.hk/haho/ho/pad/200104Eng1.pdf?ref=larrysalibra.com) [↩︎](#fnref3)
4. [https://edition.cnn.com/2020/03/24/asia/testing-coronavirus-science-intl-hnk/index.html](https://edition.cnn.com/2020/03/24/asia/testing-coronavirus-science-intl-hnk/index.html?ref=larrysalibra.com) [↩︎](#fnref4)
5. [https://edition.cnn.com/2020/03/24/asia/testing-coronavirus-science-intl-hnk/index.html](https://edition.cnn.com/2020/03/24/asia/testing-coronavirus-science-intl-hnk/index.html?ref=larrysalibra.com) [↩︎](#fnref5)
6. [https://www.rhkyc.org.hk/upload/Atypical-Corona-Virus.pdf](https://www.rhkyc.org.hk/upload/Atypical-Corona-Virus.pdf?ref=larrysalibra.com) [↩︎](#fnref6)
7. [https://www.info.gov.hk/gia/general/202001/25/P2020012500583.htm](https://www.info.gov.hk/gia/general/202001/25/P2020012500583.htm?ref=larrysalibra.com) [↩︎](#fnref7)
8. [https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/society/article/3047672/china-coronavirus-forces-temporary-closure-hong-kong](https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/society/article/3047672/china-coronavirus-forces-temporary-closure-hong-kong?ref=larrysalibra.com) [↩︎](#fnref8)
9. [https://www.lcsd.gov.hk/clpss/en/webApp/NewsDetails.do?id=14683](https://www.lcsd.gov.hk/clpss/en/webApp/NewsDetails.do?id=14683&ref=larrysalibra.com) [↩︎](#fnref9)
10. [https://www.news.gov.hk/eng/2020/01/20200128/20200128\\\_114401\\\_545.html](https://www.news.gov.hk/eng/2020/01/20200128/20200128%5C%5F114401%5C%5F545.html?ref=larrysalibra.com) [↩︎](#fnref10)
11. [https://abcnews.go.com/US/us-chartering-evacuation-flight-wuhan-coronavirus-zone-california/story?id=68571310](https://abcnews.go.com/US/us-chartering-evacuation-flight-wuhan-coronavirus-zone-california/story?id=68571310&ref=larrysalibra.com) [↩︎](#fnref11)
12. <https://web.archive.org/web/20200131044557/https://www.theguardian.com/science/live/2020/jan/28/coronavirus-first-death-in-beijing-as-us-issues-new-china-travel-warning-live-updates?page=with:block-5e2ffdce8f08e133247383ac> [↩︎](#fnref12)
13. [https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2020-01-30/american-airlines-pilots-sue-to-halt-flights-to-china](https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2020-01-30/american-airlines-pilots-sue-to-halt-flights-to-china?ref=larrysalibra.com) [↩︎](#fnref13)
14. [ https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/01/30/798894428/who-declares-coronavirus-outbreak-a-global-health-emergency ](https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/01/30/798894428/who-declares-coronavirus-outbreak-a-global-health-emergency?ref=larrysalibra.com "WHO Declares Coronavirus Outbreak A Global Health Emergency") [↩︎](#fnref14)
15. [https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/31/business/china-travel-coronavirus.html](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/31/business/china-travel-coronavirus.html?ref=larrysalibra.com) [↩︎](#fnref15)
16. [https://www.gld.gov.hk/egazette/pdf/20202405/egn20202405720.pdf](https://www.gld.gov.hk/egazette/pdf/20202405/egn20202405720.pdf?ref=larrysalibra.com) [↩︎](#fnref16)
17. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRl6MnmZ6Ks](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRl6MnmZ6Ks&ref=larrysalibra.com) [↩︎](#fnref17)
18. [https://www.scmp.com/news/asia/east-asia/article/3048417/coronavirus-global-travel-restrictions-imposed-chinese](https://www.scmp.com/news/asia/east-asia/article/3048417/coronavirus-global-travel-restrictions-imposed-chinese?ref=larrysalibra.com) [↩︎](#fnref18)
19. [https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/politics/article/3048705/hong-kong-hospital-strike-kicks-top-doctor-backs-mainland](https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/politics/article/3048705/hong-kong-hospital-strike-kicks-top-doctor-backs-mainland?ref=larrysalibra.com) [↩︎](#fnref19)
20. [https://www.gld.gov.hk/egazette/pdf/20202406e/es22020240612.pdf](https://www.gld.gov.hk/egazette/pdf/20202406e/es22020240612.pdf?ref=larrysalibra.com) [↩︎](#fnref20)
21. [https://www.gld.gov.hk/egazette/pdf/20202406e/es22020240613.pdf](https://www.gld.gov.hk/egazette/pdf/20202406e/es22020240613.pdf?ref=larrysalibra.com) [↩︎](#fnref21)
22. [https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/health-environment/article/3050729/coronavirus-hong-kong-disneyland-lend-vacant](https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/health-environment/article/3050729/coronavirus-hong-kong-disneyland-lend-vacant?ref=larrysalibra.com) [↩︎](#fnref22)
23. [https://www.news.gov.hk/eng/2020/02/20200228/20200228\\\_160013\\\_539.html](https://www.news.gov.hk/eng/2020/02/20200228/20200228%5C%5F160013%5C%5F539.html?ref=larrysalibra.com) [↩︎](#fnref23)
24. [https://twitter.com/surgeon\_general/status/1233725785283932160](https://twitter.com/surgeon%5Fgeneral/status/1233725785283932160?ref=larrysalibra.com) [↩︎](#fnref24)
25. [https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/new-york-confirms-first-coronavirus-case-in-patient-who-recently-traveled-to-iran](https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/new-york-confirms-first-coronavirus-case-in-patient-who-recently-traveled-to-iran?ref=larrysalibra.com) [↩︎](#fnref25)
26. [https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/health-environment/article/3052335/coronavirus-hong-kong-civil-servants-set-return](https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/health-environment/article/3052335/coronavirus-hong-kong-civil-servants-set-return?ref=larrysalibra.com) [↩︎](#fnref26)
27. [https://twitter.com/BilldeBlasio/status/1234648718714036229](https://twitter.com/BilldeBlasio/status/1234648718714036229?ref=larrysalibra.com) [↩︎](#fnref27)
28. [http://www.abclubhk.com/upload/News/2020/March/Club-Notice---ABC-s-Self-Discipline-Policy---Compulsory-Travel-Declaration-Mar-2020.pdf](http://www.abclubhk.com/upload/News/2020/March/Club-Notice---ABC-s-Self-Discipline-Policy---Compulsory-Travel-Declaration-Mar-2020.pdf?ref=larrysalibra.com) [↩︎](#fnref28)
29. [https://www.gld.gov.hk/egazette/pdf/20202411e/es22020241124.pdf](https://www.gld.gov.hk/egazette/pdf/20202411e/es22020241124.pdf?ref=larrysalibra.com) [↩︎](#fnref29)
30. [https://hongkongfp.com/2020/03/21/breaking-civil-servants-work-remotely-school-exams-postponed-hong-kong-sees-spike-coronavirus-cases/](https://hongkongfp.com/2020/03/21/breaking-civil-servants-work-remotely-school-exams-postponed-hong-kong-sees-spike-coronavirus-cases/?ref=larrysalibra.com) [↩︎](#fnref30)
31. [https://www.news.gov.hk/eng/2020/03/20200324/20200324\\\_220412\\\_676.html](https://www.news.gov.hk/eng/2020/03/20200324/20200324%5C%5F220412%5C%5F676.html?ref=larrysalibra.com) [↩︎](#fnref31)
32. [https://www.info.gov.hk/gia/general/202003/24/P2020032400050.htm](https://www.info.gov.hk/gia/general/202003/24/P2020032400050.htm?ref=larrysalibra.com) [↩︎](#fnref32)
33. [https://www.info.gov.hk/gia/general/202003/24/P2020032400050.htm](https://www.info.gov.hk/gia/general/202003/24/P2020032400050.htm?ref=larrysalibra.com) [↩︎](#fnref33)
34. [https://www.gld.gov.hk/egazette/pdf/20202417e/es22020241732.pdf](https://www.gld.gov.hk/egazette/pdf/20202417e/es22020241732.pdf?ref=larrysalibra.com) [↩︎](#fnref34)
35. [https://www.gld.gov.hk/egazette/pdf/20202419e/es22020241933.pdf](https://www.gld.gov.hk/egazette/pdf/20202419e/es22020241933.pdf?ref=larrysalibra.com) [↩︎](#fnref35)
36. [https://www.dimsumdaily.hk/restriction-on-catering-business-extended-for-14-days-requirement-for-50-maximum-seating-capacity-removed/](https://www.dimsumdaily.hk/restriction-on-catering-business-extended-for-14-days-requirement-for-50-maximum-seating-capacity-removed/?ref=larrysalibra.com) [↩︎](#fnref36)
37. [https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/education/article/3081339/hong-kong-students-finally-begin-delayed-diploma-secondary](https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/education/article/3081339/hong-kong-students-finally-begin-delayed-diploma-secondary?ref=larrysalibra.com) [↩︎](#fnref37)
38. [https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/health-environment/article/3081600/coronavirus-hong-kong-records-no-new-cases-third](https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/health-environment/article/3081600/coronavirus-hong-kong-records-no-new-cases-third?ref=larrysalibra.com) [↩︎](#fnref38)
### The digital nomad is dead
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/the-digital-nomad-is-dead/
Last updated: 2020-04-25T09:57:05.000Z
Hong Kong, Singapore, Thailand, Canada, China, Vietnam, Switzerland, New Zealand, Indonesia…

The list of destinations closed to foreigners or non-residents in during the Covid-19 pandemic 2020 reads like a list of dream destinations on [NomadList](https://nomadlist.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com). If you’re a digital nomad today, you’re either stuck in lockdown back in the country you were born or stranded in a country that no longer wants you there, begging for a visa extension so that you don’t get deported. The tide went out and it turns out the digital nomads were swimming naked.

Digital nomads are temporary guests and when the party’s over, guests are the first ones asked to leave. They don’t have any right to stay and work…they are just visiting. If you like the party, you don’t want to be asked to leave.

## My story 

I’m often mislabeled as (accused of?) being a digital nomad - usually by friends with corporate office jobs they want to escape. They come to this conclusion when they see that I [never have to work in an office](https://larrysalibra.com/the-6-best-places-to-get-work-done-in-hong-kong/) and have the freedom and flexibility to travel when and where I want.

Truth is, I’ve never really been a digital nomad because I learned early that it wasn't sustainable. I was born in the USA and have lived and worked in both China and Hong Kong, running my own businesses in both. When I first moved to China, I considered doing what many others did, entering on a tourist visa and running a unregistered business under the table. Many recommended this path including the chief executive of the China subsidary of a famous US multinational.

The people I met who took this path led lives of frequent visa runs and lived with the uncertainty of when they'd be caught or if they'd even be allowed re-entry. At the time, this didn't seem sustainable to me and it seemed like one more risk that I as an entrepreneur already taking a bunch of risks didn't need to take. 

I decided to mitigate this risk by setting up a local legal entity for my business and sponsoring work and residence permits. A bit more effort up front for a lot less hassle down the road. Similarly, when I wanted to move to Hong Kong, I took advantage of their work visa for entrepreneurs and after multiple extension of stay applications and seven years, I was granted permanent residence. 

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2020/04/IMG_1084.jpeg)

Immigration entry stamp to Hong Kong when I first entered as an entrepreneur.

## Your story

This doesn’t mean you should give up your dream of traveling the world and finding the place that works best for you. Be a temporary digital nomad. Travel to places you think you might like and try working remotely from each for a few months. Try each place on for size. Pick the one that you think you might want to call home and do what you need to do to stop being a temporary guest and become a permanent member of the community.

Once you find a place you’d be happy to call home, start thinking like an immigrant. Check out the website of the agency or department responsible for issuing visas for your potential home. Many places are [desperate for smart, talented people](https://www.talentlist.gov.hk/?ref=larrysalibra.com) and welcoming to [startups](https://www.newzealandnow.govt.nz/investing-in-nz/visas/entrepreneur-visa?ref=larrysalibra.com) and [entrepreneurs](https://www.mom.gov.sg/passes-and-permits/entrepass?ref=larrysalibra.com). You might even be entitled to citizenship or residency because of the heritage of your ancestors. Take advantage of these programs. If you can't find something that works, try somewhere else. Go where you are treated best. You deserve it!

Being a digital nomad is like playing a game of musical chairs crossed with Russian roulette. It’s fun and exciting to play the game, but when the music stops like it has in this pandemic, you don’t want to be left without a place to sit. There can be serious consequences. Learn from the mistakes of today’s digital nomads and plan ahead so the next time the music stops, you end up in the place you want.
### 😷 Masks and owning our own data
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/newsletter/masks-and-owning-our-own-data/
Last updated: 2020-04-19T20:20:18.000Z
Hi lockdown friends!

I hope this email finds you and your family healthy and coronavirus-free.

In March, frustrated by the government misinformation friends and family in the US and Europe were being bombarded with about masks, I started a campaign to normalize mask wearing:

😷 [https://wearafuckingmask.com/](https://wearafuckingmask.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com)

It went viral, got a bunch of press, and reached millions.

We won that battle:

🏆 <https://larrysalibra.com/masks-mission-accomplished/>

On the tech front, last year, I experimented with some dapp tech on a temporary blog. I wasn’t happy with it:

💿 <https://larrysalibra.com/we-arent-ready-to-own-our-own-data/>

In case you missed it, my startup is experimenting with a new security model for the web:

🔒 [https://www.newinternetlabs.com/blog/cant-be-evil-sandbox/](https://www.newinternetlabs.com/blog/cant-be-evil-sandbox/?ref=larrysalibra.com)

Watch my Blockstack Summit talk about it:

📺 [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sYvT\_2A6ZKQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sYvT%5F2A6ZKQ&ref=larrysalibra.com)

Yours,

Larry

ps: if you can’t stay at home, remember to wear a mask!
### Masks Mission Accomplished!
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/masks-mission-accomplished/
Last updated: 2020-04-16T09:08:59.000Z
It's not often that you can get behind a social movement and declare victory all in one short month. The decentralized movement to get people to wear masks to prevent the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 did just that. Masks are now mainstream. The authorities have conceded that they were wrong. We've won.

---

In mid-March, I was sitting at lunch with a friend in largely virus-free Hong Kong, I shared my frustration that our weeks of warnings to family in friends in the USA and Europe that [it was time to leave](https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/health-environment/article/3075816/coronavirus-hong-kong-and-singapore-seen-safe-harbours?ref=larrysalibra.com) or at very least time to prepare defenses and change their daily behavior to get ahead of the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus had fallen on deaf ears.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2020/04/nyt-hk-strink.jpg)

After being surrounded for weeks by mask-wearing fellow Hong Kongers, I'd dug into the research behind the efficacy of masks as an infection-reduction mechanism and had become a convert. I'd watched as a Hong Kong saw a decentralized, community-led response such as mask wearing and social distancing combined with pushing the government to take obvious steps at borders to control imported cases and quick testing and quarantine of close contacts keep community transmission of the virus in check.

In contrast, concerned parties in other countries were fighting against government disinformation campaigns that were reassuring them it was safe to go about their lives as normal and telling them that our warnings to wear masks were best to be ignored. New York City's mayor told people to out to the movies, [Singapore was told people mask wearing wasn't necessary](https://www.theonlinecitizen.com/2020/01/31/singapore-government-no-need-to-wear-mask-if-you-are-well/?ref=larrysalibra.com), and the White House said it's just the flu - [all while buying masks for the leadership to wear](https://twitter.com/FordPrefect747/status/1250498045285933058?ref=larrysalibra.com).

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2020/04/wapo-masks.jpg)

All the time and effort arguing with friends and family being misled by "authorities" was frustrating. "Why can't they just Wear A Fucking Mask?" I asked my friend.

Instead of arguing one-on-one, the internet gives us to the power change behavior at scale. Inspired by the recently started [#StayTheFuckHome](https://staythefuckhome.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com) movement, I decided to start a [#WearAFuckingMask](https://wearafuckingmask.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com) to try to get people to change their mask wearing behavior.

I was been blown away by the response and enthusiasm. I'd originally hoped that the campaign would go viral in the US and Europe. Much to my surprise, however, it first [went viral](https://lihkg.com/thread/1928047/page/1?ref=larrysalibra.com) in Hong Kong as ethnic-Chinese Hong Kongers frustrated with much lower rates of mask-wearing among non-ethnic Chinese were very excited to see someone that looks different from them advocating mask wearing.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2020/04/Screen-Shot-2020-04-16-at-3.03.03-PM.png)

A photo from the Hong Kong Economic Times.

Of the dozens of people that reached out via email, almost every one was supportive. I received some hate on Twitter, mostly from people based in the US, UK or Singapore repeating the same information they heard from authorities.

The strongest non-mask related criticism was that the colorful language used on the site prevented people from sharing it with their family or work colleagues. Based on this feedback, I created a [safer-for-work](https://wearafuckingmask.com/sfw/?ref=larrysalibra.com) version and some enterprising [new internet friends](https://twitter.com/paul%5Fhammant?ref=larrysalibra.com) created an entirely fuck-free version called [#WearAFabulousMask](https://wearafabulousmask.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com).

Much as I was inspired by the #StayTheFuckHome movement, other mask movements such as [Masks4All](https://masks4all.co/?ref=larrysalibra.com) rose up as March progressed. 

One of my favorite parts has been watching everyone add masks to their profile pictures. I provided mask images but didn't create an easy way for people to add it to their profile pictures. A [talented Dartmouth grad student](https://twitter.com/jcheong0428?ref=larrysalibra.com) picked up where I left off and created the easy to use [MaskOnMe app](http://maskonme.herokuapp.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com) to fill this gap.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2020/04/mask-warrior-collage.jpg)

In the space of just a few weeks, the mask deniers - governments, individuals and the WHO alike - have given up on their mask misinformation campaigns and now recommend or even require wearing of masks by everyone in public.

Although we won the Battle of the Masks, it is a shame that it even had to be fought. The institutions that were funded by our money and entrusted with our societies' health and safety misled us. If they lied to us about masks, what else are they lying to us about? But that is another battle, for another day. Today, we savor our victory.
### Blockstack
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/blockstack/
Last updated: 2024-09-08T13:54:16.000Z
_No content available._
### #WearAFuckingMask
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/wearafuckingmask/
Last updated: 2020-05-18T06:46:56.000Z
I started the [#WearAFuckingMask](https://wearafuckingmask.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com) campaign in mid-March 2020, out of frustration that friends and family in the USA and Europe were not taking seriously the threat of the SARS-CoV-2 virus (aka "Coronavirus"). Authorities in much of the Western world were feeding their populations with misinformation telling them not to wear masks.

Previously, skeptical of masks myself, I created a single page site and social media graphics to explain my journey from mask denier to mask believer. The campaign used liberal quantities of profane language to shock viewers into action while also entertaining.

The campaign saw immediate traction in Hong Kong where there was brewing discontent among the majority ethnic-Chinese population over the perceived low rate of mask wearing by non-ethnic Chinese. The [initial Twitter thread](https://twitter.com/larrysalibra/status/1239413831232716801?ref=larrysalibra.com) saw well over 1/2 million impressions while the movement was seen by an estimated 5-8 million people on Facebook.
### We aren’t ready to own our own data...yet
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/we-arent-ready-to-own-our-own-data/
Last updated: 2020-03-10T02:42:25.000Z
We talk a lot about users owning their own data. Data ownership means control. Having control means taking responsibility. Responsibility is a lot of work! Let me explain…

For the past year, this blog made a temporary move over to [the salibra.com domain](https://salibra.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com). The reason for this move was that the previous Jekyll static site generator set up had become too hard to maintain. Previewing a post took a dozen seconds or know. Publishing a post and invalidating caches took even longer.

Instead of migrating content on this site to something more modern, something guaranteed to be a time consuming process, I decided that the time was better spent using the tools we built at Blockstack to [build a new blog built around a protocol](https://salibra.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com). My goal was to better understand the challenges and design constraints faced by the developers building real products and submitting them to the now paused [Blockstack App Mining](https://app.co/mining?ref=larrysalibra.com) program.

I can dig into the technical details of what I built and even share the code in the future if there’s interest. For now, suffice it to say, Blockstack's tools for user data ownership made building a simple blog was very easy, but delivering the experience that I’ve come to expect as a user was a lot more work.

As an example: In a traditional-server web app, data and code live together under app developer control. The developer takes on the responsibility of making sure that the data is quickly available to make the app work well. In a decentralized app where user data lives in a personal storage hub like Blockstack’s [Gaia](https://github.com/blockstack/gaia?ref=larrysalibra.com), the developer loses control of where or how data is stored. They can no longer guarantee that the data their app needs to function will show up in a reasonable time or even at all.

The vast majority of users aren’t in the position of taking on these responsibilities even if they wanted to. Without easy-to-use, user-friendly tools to make data ownership managable, it’s too hard and too much work without a clear value proposition. 

For now, I’ve paused my decentralized blogging exploration, moved back to this domain and migrated the old Jekyll set up to the modern self-hosted publishing platform Ghost. I still own my own data but I also own the code.
### Not in my backyard: a tool for living beyond your means
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/not-in-my-backyard/
Last updated: 2023-01-09T09:35:35.000Z
I was visiting family in Florida the past few days when I was told that some of the neighbors in their development were unhappy that a new higher density housing development was being built a few miles up the street next to the neighborhood supermarket. Their neighbors were concerned these town houses would "change the character of the neighborhood" by adding almost 500 additional families and their cars. The neighbors used terms like "low-income housing" to emphasize that these townhouses were not wanted.

This bothered me. It was bad enough that these euphemisms such as "change the character of the neighborhood" were probably being used as cover for racism or classism ie. a desire to not live within a 10 mile radius of "people that shop at Walmart" or (gasp!) "immigrants.” Even more worrying was the general sense of entitlement behind their words. For some reason, the neighbors felt that they had a right to tell the rightful owners of a piece of land what they could do with it and others where they could live solely by owning another piece of property in the same zip code. In their view, living in a neighborhood should give them a right to a veto over anything that happens in it.

If you asked the neighbors if they believed in private property, they’d surely tell you yes, after all they are patriotic Americans, not some sort of red commies!Well, private property, it turns out, provides a mechanism that will let the neighbors get what they want…if only they’d use it. We see the mechanism used in big cities all the time. Let’s take a look at how it works:

A developer wants to build a tall building with a beautiful view of the harbor but doesn't want someone to build another building in front and block their billion dollar view. To prevent this from happening, the developer will negotiate with the owners of adjacent plots of land to purchase the [air rights](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air%5Frights?ref=larrysalibra.com) \- the right to build over a certain height. In exchange for not building a tall building that will block the view, these owners are compensated by the developer in a voluntarily exchange of value.

If our not-so-friendly Florida neighbors don’t want these apartments-for-people-that-might-shop-at-Walmart (disclosure: I shop at Walmart) to be built, they are more than welcome to buy the land. As owners of this land, they could use or not use it as they please. But they didn't buy the land, someone else did. And that person bought it acquired the right to use it as he pleases. What pleased him was to build housing that he thought the marketed needed.

Presumably, these friendly Florida neighbors were either unwilling or unable to pay the market cost to own the land. Instead, they chose to complain to anyone who will listen while simultaneously trying to use the blunt tool of government - coercive force - to take what they can't afford to pay for. They want property rights over $100 million of land but they can only afford a $200k condominium. Instead of respecting the rights of owners or becoming owners themselves, they instead try to take those rights by force. And thus we see what [Not-In-My-Backyard-ism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NIMBY?ref=larrysalibra.com) (NIMBYism) really is: a highly incentivized tool for people who feel entitled to live above their means and at the cost of the property rights of others. It lets morally-questionable people leverage their $200k condos or $500k houses to take rights over millions or billions of dollars of other people’s property.

Unfortunately, the incentives are such that we’re unlikely to see the disappearance of this phenomenon any time soon. In the meantime, you’re welcome to tell me what to build in my backyard\*, but only if you buy it!

\*Just kidding! I live in Hong Kong where only decabillionaires can afford a backyard! Also, all land is owned by the state.
### The death of Jabber
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/the-death-of-jabber/
Last updated: 2023-01-09T09:32:10.000Z
In the late 1990s, when I was in high school, [“instant messaging”](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant%5Fmessaging?ref=larrysalibra.com) was all the rage. We would go home in the evenings after school or swim practice and “sign on” to one or more instant messaging services. In my community, the trend started with ICQ and quickly moved on to AOL instant messenger, but all the big platforms had their own version: Yahoo messenger, MSN messenger, QQ etc. The world very much resembled today’s messaging landscape with a half dozen or more apps on your computer and having to remember which person was on which network.

![jabber1](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2023/01/jabber1.jpg)

In my final year of high school, I became [interested in a project](https://mail.jabber.org/pipermail/jdev/2000-January/061113.html?ref=larrysalibra.com) called Jabber (and later acronym-ized as [XMPP](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMPP?ref=larrysalibra.com)) to make an instant messaging protocol that promised us a world with what we would now call “federated” chat. It looked a lot like email, anyone could run a chat server and hand out accounts. People registered on different servers could chat with each other. Jabber IDs looked exactly like email addresses.

The technology worked rather well and many of the more tech savvy users of the internet started moving to this chat protocol, running their own servers for themselves or their communities. Mainstream users, however, remained on the proprietary services.

![jabber2](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2023/01/jabber2.jpg)

## Google & Facebook support interoperability…or did they?

There was huge excitement in the community in 2006 when Google announced that it’s up and coming [Google Talk chat app would support XMPP federation](https://googletalk.blogspot.com/2006/01/xmpp-federation.html?ref=larrysalibra.com). Finally, Jabber was going mainstream! In 2010, Facebook chat also [added support for XMPP federation](https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook/facebook-chat-now-available-everywhere/297991732130), making millions upon millions more people available via XMPP Federation!

![jabber3](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2023/01/jabber3.jpg)

Hurray! Or so it seemed. Things went south as by 2015, both Google and Facebook removed support for XMPP moving back to 100% proprietary walled-garden chat.

Fast forward to today and even the hardcore among us who used Jabber since the early days have stopped using XMPP. What good is a chat server on a federated network where almost all the users have left? Jabber is dead.

![jabber4](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2023/01/jabber4.jpg)

## What went wrong?

One argument goes that XMPP was overly complicated and heavy protocol poorly suited to the smartphone world that emerged a decade after the protocol was born. While there’s something to be said about its complexity making interoperability a challenge, XMPP proved adequate enough on mobile for WhatApp to use it in non-federated mode to scale their service from zero to acquisition by Facebook for $19 billion users with less than 100 employees.

Another argument was that developing new services on top of this protocol was challenging because not all clients supported all features.

## What users don’t know about doesn’t exist

While I think there’s something to both of these arguments, the real reason for Jabber’s failure to build a global interoperable chat network and save us from a home screen full of siloed chat apps, is this that users didn’t know Jabber even know existed.

In the minds of of Google Talk or Facebook Chat users, they were using Google Talk or Facebook Chat. No one told them that Jabber existed and that there were people outside of Google or Facebook that they would chat with. Because orders of magnitudes of more people were using one of these two large platforms, when the companies removed XMPP federation support, very few people even noticed.

Compare this to email. Normal users have a concept of the existence of an abstract thing called email. They know that if you have an account on an email service provider and connect to that service provider either via their web site or an email app, that given another person’s email address, you can send them a message.

This concept of email exists separately from users’ concept of the apps or companies via which they **use** email. People sign up with Gmail because they **want email**. Gmail gives them an email address and access to email. There’s an expectation that if I sign up for an email account from a company that I can use that account to send and receive email to anyone else who has an email account no matter which company providers their email.

This understanding makes it much harder for a large email provider like Google to come along and say “Hey, from now on you can only send messages to other Gmail users.” Users would complain that service is now broken when they find that emails from their friends using Fastmail or colleagues using Office 365 are no longer received and they’d start shopping for another email provider that works.

## Lessons for our decentralization movement

There’s a lesson here for those of us interested in decentralizing power on the internet. While users may not care about the underlying technology or protocol of a network, it is absolutely critical for them to know that it exists and that it is working. The better their understanding of the essential concepts and fundamental principles, the harder it will be for a powerful player to come in and unilaterally change or destroy the network.

Email is both some technology and a shared belief that users have in how email should function. Jabber failed because it was only technology, too few users believed in how it should function.

To apply this lesson to [Blockstack](https://blockstack.org/?ref=larrysalibra.com), the project with which I am most familiar, users need to have an understanding of what a Blockstack ID is and what characteristics it has. They also need to have an understanding of what a Gaia storage hub is, that they have control over this data and what this gives them.

If the elements of ownership are hidden from the user so that they don’t know they exist, and can’t tell if they are working, then the app developer can take them way at any time and the user will be none the wiser. There is no ownership if you don’t know you own something and can’t tell when the thing you didn’t know you owned was taken way.

*Drawings in this post are based on work by [SiC/CYAN](https://www.weibo.com/silenthiker?ref=larrysalibra.com) released under [CC-BY-NC](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/?ref=larrysalibra.com).*
### Buying tea with WeChat Pay in a dystopian future
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/buying-tea-with-wechat-pay/
Last updated: 2023-01-09T09:26:11.000Z
I spent the past weekend hanging out in Shenzhen’s Nanshan district - the home of world headquarters of Chinese tech giants like Tencent, DJI and Huawei. [Xan](https://twitter.com/XanDitkoff?ref=larrysalibra.com) and [Anthony](https://twitter.com/anthonysyoon?ref=larrysalibra.com), a former colleague from Blockstack PBC and [Spartan Capital’s newest hire](https://twitter.com/anthonysyoon/status/1149326869323558918?ref=larrysalibra.com) were in town from the USA on the last stop of [Blockstack’s inaugural China tour](https://twitter.com/blockstack/status/1149030207313068033?ref=larrysalibra.com).

![blockstacktour-1](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2023/01/blockstacktour-1.jpg)

At a previous stop in Shanghai, they had been introduced to [Luckin Coffee](https://www.luckincoffee.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com), a coffee delivery startup that is one of the country's fastest growing and newest unicorns. As a non-coffee drinker, I also wanted to introduce them to my favorite Chinese beverage chain, purveyors of fine cheese-covered tea, the legendary [Heytea](https://www.heytea.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com). Off we went in search of sugar-infused goodness.

## No tea for you!

Our first stop was Heytea. I couldn't convince my fellow sucrose seekers to try cheese tea early in the morning. They wanted their tried and true caffeinated Luckin Coffee milkshake instead of what, to the uninitiated, must sound like a cup of earl gray with blocks of cheddar floating in it. Nevertheless, I still wanted a cup of Cheesy Four Seasons Spring tea (芝芝四季春).

I tried to order at the counter but it turns out that since this is the heart of China’s tech industry, you can only order through their WeChat mini app (小程序). I scanned the QR code and tried to place my order.

![heytea1](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2023/01/heytea1.jpg)

The mini app quickly allowed me to customize my drink. I could adjust the sugar or ice content and even ask for less cheese. I opted for the standard drink and clicked checkout. This is where I started to get a taste of the dystopian future where eating requires someone else’s permission.

The checkout form wanted me to enter a local phone number to notify me when my drink was ready for pickup. Strange - I was placing this order through a messaging app, you’d think they could just send me a message there. But there’s a catch, you can’t get a local Chinese phone number these days without registering an ID card and providing address proof. I used to have a number of Chinese phone numbers but they were canceled because I never provided identification information in the years after the policy was implemented. I put in a friend’s number instead.

Moving on, I tried changing the payment option, but the only other option besides the default of WeChat Pay was some sort of prepaid Heytea wallet I didn’t have.

![heytea2](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2023/01/heytea2.jpg)

In the past, I rarely use WeChat Pay because the Chinese version has never worked with the foreign-owned Chinese bank I bank with. That said, I did have 33.44 CNY in my WeChat wallet which came from someone paying me back sometime in the past few years for something when they didn’t have any cash. Since my drink was only 26 CNY, this would be enough.

I clicked pay and was promptly informed that my account was frozen and “protection mode” has been enabled. Interesting - protection from whom exactly? But never fear, the dialog promised solutions if I clicked forward.

I clicked view details where I was offered a lovely form asking for identity document photos, address and a selfie - the standard [AML/KYC](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Know%5Fyour%5Fcustomer?ref=larrysalibra.com) security theater dance. Apparently Tencent or the government was concerned that I might be building some sort of terrorist army or running a tea-based money laundering operation with my less than 5 US dollars.

By this time, my Blockstack colleagues were starting to get impatient with me - they were craving their morning coffee fix while I was fighting with my phone trying to get cheese tea to come out of this futuristic shop.

## Hey! gimme some tea!

Unwilling to admit defeat and still craving Heytea (it’s really good!), I decided to try another approach. Thanks to China’s complicated regulations around cross-border payments and [capital controls](https://www.safe.gov.cn/en/?ref=larrysalibra.com), WeChat Pay isn’t one company with one wallet in one currency, but multiple companies running wallets in different currencies in different jurisdictions. As a Hong Konger, I also have a WeChat Pay HK wallet. While it has gained little traction among Hong Kongers in Hong Kong, it is useful to make for certain types of payments in China. (Exactly which types of payments can be made with a WeChat Pay HK wallet is complicated and perhaps a topic for a future post.)

I started searching around WeChat’s everything-and-the-kitchen-sink interface for the setting that would let me switch from the China wallet to the Hong Kong wallet. It’s a setting that’s is hard to find and typically hidden unless your account meets a set of unpublicized conditions. I finally found the “Select region wallet” setting and switched over to my empty Hong Kong Dollar wallet before retracing my steps to the Heytea mini app and starting to place my order again.

By this time almost ten minutes had passed, and my caffeine-deprived friends had started wandering around searching for Luckin Coffee as I tried to follow them engrossed in solving my WeChat Pay tea problems.

![heytea3](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2023/01/heytea3.jpg)

This time around, when clicking pay, I was prompted with a Hong Kong dollar price and asked for my WeChat Pay passcode to confirm payment. But this wasn’t the end. Because I never added a bank card or money to my WeChat Pay HK wallet, purchases are processed through the Hong Kong-issued Visa credit card I’d linked to the account. This meant I was redirected to the Verified by Visa web page run by bank and forced to wait for a texted verification code which took a minute or two to appear while roaming. After entering the code and another redirect, I was rewarded with a successful payment screen. After almost 15 minutes of fighting with my phone, delicious Heytea was on my way.

As I was achieving this small victory in my battle against WeChat Pay and their war on my Heytea habit, we’d already walked into a nearby Luckin coffee and my friends were trying unsuccessfully to order Mandarin Orange Soda Coffee (it looked as horrible as it sounds, but they swear it tastes great). The cashier and our foreign visitors were having communication issues, so I stepped in to translate. It turns out this shop was just like the nearby Heytea - the only way to order coffee is through their app with payment via WeChat Pay. Neither cash nor ordering via humans was welcome here.

It turns out Anthony and Xan were a lot more creative than me at circumventing the great wall permissioned money had built in in front of their coffee. They suggested that the cashier use her personal app and WeChat Pay to place their order and that they would give her cash. Genius! Why didn’t I think of that?

The cashier not wanting to rip anyone off apologized that she didn’t have 2 yuan change - about 30 US cents - to give them for their 50 CNY bill. When she confirmed with me that they didn’t want the change, the coffees quickly appeared. In a few short minutes, they’d successfully overcome the same AML/KYC barrier to sugary drinks that took me, a long-time China resident and bitcoiner, 15 minutes to work around. Impressive!

## Is this the future we want?

![wechatcancel](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2023/01/wechatcancel.jpg)

I’m sharing this story because it is a glimpse into what is potentially a scary future where cash is dead and our only option is centralized, permissioned money where someone else decides how and when you can spend the fruits of our labor. In our story, we ran into some inconvenience while buying unhealthy beverages that we probably shouldn’t be drinking in the first place. It’s doesn’t take a small leap of the imagination to imagine this same situation in a supermarket. Imagine having your WeChat Pay account frozen because you said something someone with power doesn’t like. Imagine not being able to buy food to feed your family because this is the only payment option and cash no longer exists.

As a consumer, I love the convenience and benefits that cashless payments bring. As a merchant, I love the reduced payment friction and increased sales that cashless payments bring as they let me to do business with customers thousands of miles away. As supporter of individual sovereignty, cashless payments scare me. Unless we can turn Bitcoin or something like it into a [permissionless, trustless payment system](https://lightning.network/?ref=larrysalibra.com) that [people actually want to use](https://blog.keys.casa/announcing-sats-app-with-satsback/?ref=larrysalibra.com), the future looks like a dystopia where we give away a huge amount of control over our lives to people who have a historical track record of being unworthy of our trust.
### Names on plane tickets are for profit, not safety
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/names-on-plane-tickets-are-for-profit/
Last updated: 2023-01-09T09:17:38.000Z
I recently wrote about how I tried to [opt out of face scanning at Hong Kong's airport.](https://salibra.com/p/opting-out-of-face-scanning-at-hkg-c74f4813e722?ref=larrysalibra.com) In the post, I pointed out that the primary reason names are on airline tickets isn't for "security" or to enable government tracking, but to enable airlines' business models - aka "revenue protection."

Unlike most other forms of transportation, airlines sell the same ticket to different people at different prices. They do this because they're trying to capture as much value from each passenger as possible. They know that, in general, someone on an important last minute business trip to close a big deal is willing to pay a lot more than a family planning their trip to see the grandparents.

If airline tickets didn't have names on them, they could be sold and traded by passengers in a secondary market much as so-called ticket scalpers do for popular sports matches and performances.

## Secondary market for ferry tickets

To illustrate how this might look, let me tell you about the ferry from Hong Kong to Macau. These ferries cross borders and many of them are made by Boeing, so they're the closest you can get to an airliner without taking off.

![boeingferry](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2023/01/boeingferry.jpg)

If you go to the Macau Ferry Terminal in Hong Kong during a popular time such as a public holiday, you might find a few men standing at the top of the escalator in front of ticket counters. They'll have a stack of tickets in their hands and start yelling out departure times to you to see if you want to buy one.

If you're like me, you might decide you want to avoid the hassle of negotiation buy straight from the source. Unfortunately, the ticket counters don't have any more tickets for boats departing in the next 1 hour, because the men who were just shouting departure times at you bought all the tickets.

Your only option is to try to buy a ticket on the secondary market - from the men standing by the escalator - or buy a ticket for a much later ferry from the ticket counter and wait.

![IMG_6737](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2023/01/IMG_6737.jpeg)

The price you'll pay to the escalator men depends on your negotiating ability and the conditions of the secondary market. If they have a bunch of tickets for a boat that's leaving in 3 minutes and no other potential buyers are coming up the escalator, you'll probably be able to pick up a ticket at less than face value. After all, ferry tickets are expiring assets - after the ferry leaves, they're worthless. Better for the seller to get something for it instead of nothing. If there are only a few tickets left for the next few boats and lots of buyers, you'll probably end up paying a lot more than face value.

Escalator men run their business hoping for the second scenario - more buyers than tickets. That's how they make their profit.

Airlines make you put your name on your ticket to prevent this entire scenario. They want to capture the value that in Hong Kong-Macau ferry tickets goes to the escalator men.

It was only much later that governments came along under the guise of increasing air travel security - mostly in the ramp up of security theater in the years after 9/11 - that names on ticket started being pitched to the public as a security measure.
### Viral growth doesn’t mean writing viruses
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/viral-growth-doesnt-mean-writing-viruses/
Last updated: 2023-01-09T09:12:55.000Z
Popular video conferencing software Zoom [got caught installing an insecure web server](https://medium.com/@jonathan.leitschuh/zoom-zero-day-4-million-webcams-maybe-an-rce-just-get-them-to-visit-your-website-ac75c83f4ef5?ref=larrysalibra.com) on Mac users’ computer that let any website remotely execute software on the users’ Macs. This web server was designed to intentionally circumvent web browsers’ security sandbox for what Zoom product managers presumably thought would be an increase in meeting start-rate conversion.

If this wasn’t bad enough, this insecure web server - a backdoor into users’ computer - kept running both when users exited Zoom and when they uninstalled Zoom’s software.

## Your software is a guest

There’s a lesson here for product managers and software engineers. Your software is a guest running on a real human being’s computer. It should behave like a guest.

If a user says they don't want your software running anymore, it should stop running. This means when a user exits your app, it should stop running - all of it, unless you’ve clearly asked for their permission to have something keep running.

![quitting-arq](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2023/01/quitting-arq.png)

If the user uninstalls your app, all of your code should be removed from their computer. Even your backdoor web server.

## Don’t be a creepy house guest

In Zoom’s case, the user said "I don't want Zoom's software running on my computer” *TWICE*: when they exited the software and again when they explicitly uninstalled it. Both times Zoom ignored the user's instructions and left a backdoor running without their permission.

This is like being invited to a house party, installing video cameras in the host’s bathroom and leaving them there when the host kicks you out for being a creep.

Software that doesn’t do what the user intends, installs a backdoor and doesn’t leave when asked is a virus.

While we all want viral growth, writing a virus isn’t the way to get it.
### Opting out of face scanning at Hong Kong International Airport
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/opting-out-of-face-scanning-at-hkg/
Last updated: 2023-01-09T13:52:33.000Z
In the past half year, gates with cameras appeared in the departure area before security at Hong Kong International Airport. Previously, rent-a-cops - [private security “guards”](http://www.avseco.com.hk/?ref=larrysalibra.com) \- manually checked your boarding pass to make sure it matched your boarding pass.

![IMG_6467](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2023/01/IMG_6467.jpeg)

Initially, these face scanning “e-security gates” were pitched as a trial with one set of opt-in automatic gates constructed in the corner of the airport while most passengers were manually screened.

In the past couple months, the "trial" was apparently declared a success as gates appeared in all of the entrances to security. Signs were put up that described [the procedure to opt out](https://www.hongkongairport.com/en/passenger-guide/airport-security/e-security-gates-privacy-policy.page?ref=larrysalibra.com) of face scanning data collection.

![IMG_6465](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2023/01/IMG_6465.jpeg)

Given that there's no reason airports need to know who you are - names are on tickets solely to [enforce airline business models - aka "revenue protection" - by preventing a secondary market for tickets](https://travelsort.com/airline-ticket-name-change-or-transfer-to-another-person/?ref=larrysalibra.com), I thought I’d try to opt out.

The way the e-security gates are supposed to work is that you or an attendant scan your travel document and boarding ticket, the machine takes your photo and checks to see if your name matches the boarding pass and photo matches the photo electronically embedded in your travel document.

I queued up at an “assisted e-security gate” - an automatic privacy invading machine that comes with its own rent-a-cop. I started to get nervous at the thought of the stir I would cause by trying to opt out when no one else in line was doing it.

When I got to the front of the line, I told big brother’s sidekick that I wanted to exercise my right to opt out.

“We have to take a picture sir,” he protested.

Little brother tried to take a picture but I held my hand over the camera lens.

“I want to opt out of personal data collection as provided in the Airport Authority’s statement on collection of personal data.”

“Sure let me take a picture and I will delete the data. You can watch me,” he said, pointing to a green "del info" button on his screen.

“No, I'm opting out”

“But we need to take the picture”

“Why?”

“We need to take your picture to make sure you are the person in this passport,” he responded, impressed that he was able to recall the reason he stood at this gate all day.

“Can't you look at the passport and look at me and see that I am the same bald white guy as the one in the passport?” A flicker of understanding appeared momently in Little Brother's eyes as he realized that reasons Big Brother had given him for these surveillance procedures were a lie. He didn’t need this machine to carry out his stated task.

Why was he here? What was the point of this. Confusion quickly doused the flame of understanding and Little Brother called out for help from one of Big Brother's middle managers.

A manager came over, took one look at me and the growing line of frustrated passengers behind me, presumably thought that holding up the line would hurt his team’s performance metrics and told little brother to approve me, freeing me to move on to the next step in my airport security theater experience.

## Let’s do this again

A month later, I was back at the airport mentally prepared to go through the same stressful process. The adrenaline was flowing in my veins as I anticipated the upcoming confrontation between good and evil. Much to my surprise, as soon as I said that I wanted to opt out and not take a picture, I was immediately let through without a fuss.

## The power of defaults

I was surprised at how mentally and emotionally difficult opting out was for me. Opting out of privacy invading surveillance in an airport required that I ignored instincts developed from decades of training to "respect authority" and social pressure to not "cause problems." Given how much effort it was, it isn't surprising that more people don't do it.

In software product development, there's a saying that the power of defaults is strong. Most people will use the default option - defaults become the status quo and the *de facto* standard. The power of defaults is even stronger in social and political realms. People come to the airport to go on a trip, not to make a political statement. They take cues from the behavior of other people. If the default option is to have to have their privacy invaded, only a small minority will go through the trouble and emotional stress of opting out.
### Success by removing temptation
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/success-by-removing-temptation/
Last updated: 2023-01-09T08:41:09.000Z
Health and weight are something a lot of people - especially people in suburban American where I grew up - struggle with. Obesity rates are so high that you can tell where are you - in the suburbs and not in a city - just by looking at a random sample of a dozen people.

Every time I visit family in suburban Ohio and Florida where I grew up after living for over a decade in Hong Kong, I'm amazed at how the places seem to be structurally designed to make it so people have to use incredible amounts of will power to lead a healthy life.

- Portion sizes at restaurants are massive - two to three times the size one would get at a restaurant in Hong Kong.
- Drink sizes are huge and refilled for “free” without asking - you have beg them to stop giving you more to drink.
- You have to drive to get anywhere. Roads & buildings are designed to prevent you from walking between two points that are close together.
- Everyone shops at Costco where food is sold in village-sized portions - because it's cheap and “high-quality.”
- Exercise facilities - even the public ones - require long-term membership to use.

I feel like my entire day in American suburbs is spent sitting in a car, sitting in a chair or walking at most 10 meters to get into and out of the car. I saw the effects of this growing up as I watched family members and friends struggle with weight. Luckily, as a member of the swim team, I was somewhat insulated from negative health effects.

Going back with an Apple Watch after living my entire adult life in walkable cities really puts the lifestyle difference in perspective. On days I can’t make it to the gym or to the pool to swim or play waterpolo in Hong Kong, I typically burn around 500 active calories. When I’m visiting family and friends in the suburbs, a day without intentional exercise only clocks in at 200 or fewer active calories.

I’m a strong believer in structuring your life for success. I’ve written in the past about [the importance of systems vs goals and how I apply that to swimming](https://www.larrysalibra.com/blog/swimming-with-a-system/?ref=larrysalibra.com). I think this is also important when choosing where you want to live. It’s important chose a place to live and how you eat so that you don’t have to use your will power to overcome unhealthy temptations.

I live on a hill on Hong Kong Island that I walk up and down a few times I day. This means even when I can’t “exercise”, I’m still getting exercise. I never buy snacks and keep my fridge empty so that I’m never tempted to gorge on snacks. The restaurants in my neighbor generally serve small portions and charge you money for refills. This makes it easy for to avoid overeating. I live in [a city that provides world-class sports, recreation and park facilities that are reasonably priced or free and almost always open](https://www.lcsd.gov.hk/en/facilities/facilitieslist.html?ref=larrysalibra.com).

![IMG_6087](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2023/01/IMG_6087.jpeg)

I surround myself with friends that are physically active and concerned about healthy behavior. They’re more likely to message me to go to the gym or the pool than to go the bar. We even spend party time exercising as you can see from the photo from last weekend’s beach waterpolo team boat party.

By structuring my life so that will power is removed from the equation, the path of least resistance is a healthy life.

What choices have you made in your life to set yourself up for success by avoiding temptation?
### Building your business on digital quicksand
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/building-your-business-on-digital-quicksand/
Last updated: 2023-01-09T08:58:45.000Z
Yesterday, I had lunch with friend who founded a company that provides a service to crypto exchanges. He's been following Blockstack intently over the years and was keen to hear the latest. His interest in and enthusiasm about our project was flattering. I was curious as to what about the project excited him today and kept him excited over the years. Since he's a lawyer by training, I suspected that he would say that he was excited about Blockstack because of [Muneeb and the Blockstack PBC’s team groundbreaking regulatory and compliance work in the US](https://blog.blockstack.org/blockstack-publicly-files-regulated-token-offering-with-the-sec/?ref=larrysalibra.com).

Instead, to my surprise, he started talking about how excited he was about how we’re taking on ICANN and building an alternative to the legacy domain name system.

“It's insane that domain names expire,” he said. “You buy a domain name, build a business around it, and, then, if the name expires, you lose the name and your business.”

He saw a domain name as a piece of digital land in cyberspace that you should be able to own…free and clear…instead of lease at the pleasure of some self-appointed feudal lords.

There are a lot of strong arguments for the expiration of domain names. The rent collected can be used to fund the operation of the system. It’s a spam prevention mechanism, just like [burning Stacks tokens are in Blockstack](https://blog.blockstack.org/announcing-the-blockstack-whitepaper-2-0/?ref=larrysalibra.com).

There are also a lot of downsides. Since you are leasing a name owned and ultimately controlled by someone else, you’re exposed to the risk that the name could be taken away from you. You’re also exposed to the risk that the domain register could [significantly increase the price of the name](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/04/26/dot%5Forg%5Fprice%5Fincreases/?ref=larrysalibra.com) around which you’ve built your business. Wouldn’t it be unfortunate if the name you registered for $9.99 suddenly costs a percentage of your global revenue on renewal?
### New Internet Labs
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/newinternetlabs/
Last updated: 2020-04-10T17:10:11.000Z
_No content available._
### Bringing decentralized identity to traditional apps
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/adding-blockstack-auth-to-discourse/
Last updated: 2020-02-16T15:56:02.000Z
**TL;DR:* In this technical post for developers, I walk through how we added Blockstack ID support to the Discourse forum software.*

At [Blockstack](https://blockstack.org/?ref=larrysalibra.com), we're building a new internet for decentralized apps. A new internet implies new apps. But what if you've already built a current app?

You can still give your users ownership over their identity by integrating Blockstack Authentication in your centralized, client-server app.

This is exactly what we did with the [Blockstack Forum](https://forum.blockstack.org/?ref=larrysalibra.com). We really liked the [Discourse forum software](https://www.discourse.org/?ref=larrysalibra.com) and wanted to give users the option to sign in with their Blockstack IDs.

Enabling Blockstack Authentication on a centralized app potentially enables a range of functionality:

- **single sign on** \- users with a Blockstack ID don't have to register again or sign up for your app
- **an instant profile system** \- users can bring their existing profile to your app
- **client-side encryption** \- you can encrypt user data on your users' client devices before sending it to your server. This is great for user privacy and may offer legal and security advantages for your business. Both hackers and law enforcement aren't able to access user data that has been encrypted with keys generated from a Blockstack ID. Hopefully this means they leave you alone!

In this blog post, I'm going to walk through how we added Blockstack Authentication to our Discourse forum. I'll walk through the libraries I created and the ones I modified. If you just want to enable Blockstack Authentication in your Discourse instance, you can use the [Blockstack Discourse plugin](https://github.com/blockstack/discourse-blockstack?ref=larrysalibra.com) that was the result of the work described in this blog post.

By explaining the process I went through to enable decentralized authentication on Discourse, I hope to make it easier for you, the reader, to do the same for your favorite platform or development stack!

## Where we're going

Before we get started, let's look at where we're going. Blockstack Authentication works like most other authentication systems in that it gives you a unique identifier for an authenticated user. You'll store this identifier as a unique key on your app's `User` model and use it to look up the user.

If you're not already familiar with Blockstack Authentication, I'll review the high-level components in this post. For a more detailed look, take a look at my post on how [the Blockstack Token Sale App worked](https://larrysalibra.com/blog/blockstack-token-sale-voucher-registration-walkthrough/).

## Authentication Tokens

The first thing to understand is that Blockstack Authentication makes heavy use of [JSON Web Tokens (JWTs)](https://jwt.io/?ref=larrysalibra.com). A JWT is created by your app when it wants to authenticate and the user generates another JWT which is used to prove their identity to your app.

JWTs are JavaScript objects that are signed by a private key. The JWT standard specifies a couple different standard signature types. Unfortunately, the standard doesn't include ECDSA using secp256k1, the elliptic curve used by Bitcoin and most other cryptocurrencies, which is the the elliptic urve we use in Blockstack. This means we'll have to add support for this curve to a JWT library if the JWT library for our language doesn't already include it.

## Adding support for secp256k1

Discourse is written in ruby, so I had to add support for secp256k1 to the `jwt-ruby` library. To do this, I [modified the library](https://github.com/blockstack/ruby-jwt-blockstack?ref=larrysalibra.com) so that when it is presented with a JWT signed by an algorithm name `ES256K` that it uses the appropriate routines to verify the signature. You'll also want to add support for signing JWT using this signature type as well.

[ ![Killer app](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2018/09/jwt-generation.png) ](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2018/09/jwt-generation.png?ref=larrysalibra.com) 

Generating a signed JWT

As of the writing time of this blog, we have libraries that that support this signature type in both [JavaScript](https://www.npmjs.com/package/jsontokens?ref=larrysalibra.com) and [Ruby](https://rubygems.org/gems/jwtb?ref=larrysalibra.com).

## Verifying Blockstack authentication responses

Discourse is a traditional client-server app where code running on the server is trusted by both the app owner and users using the app. In such a client-server app, it is ultimately the server that decides who a user is and vouches for that user's identity to other users of the app.

Code running on the client can never be trusted by other users or the app developer because the client is in a position to change the code.

Because of this, in a traditional client-server app we want to verify Blockstack authentication responses on the server.

To do this, we need to write code that performs the function of the [verifyAuthResponse](https://github.com/blockstack/blockstack.js/blob/77f6ef6e3fd4f9db359bede548c1591937fb49a8/src/auth/authVerification.js?ref=larrysalibra.com#L271) function in blockstack.js.

This function decodes the following:

- Decodes the JWT token and extracts the payload
- Verifies the user's public key in the payload matches the issuer, which is the user's identity address.
- Verifies that the signature on the JWT matches the public keys
- Verifies that username that the user claims is owned by the identity address corresponding to the issuer by performing a lookup against the Blockstack Core node trusted by the app
- Verifies the expiration date and issuance dates are valid

In our Blockstack ruby library, we created a method [verify\_auth\_response](https://github.com/blockstack/blockstack-ruby/blob/e5a209c8ed37a2960b33ef5023ff69acb0fdee86/lib/blockstack.rb?ref=larrysalibra.com#L65) that performs these functions.

## Using the payload

Once you've verified that the authentication response token is valid, you can decode the payload and get to work. If you're only looking to verify that a certain user is who they say they are, you can read the `iss` value and use that as the unique key for the user in your database. You can also go beyond that and use other information in the payload, such as the `username` claimed by the user.

In our Discourse implementation, our next step is to integrate our [blockstack-ruby](https://github.com/blockstack/blockstack-ruby?ref=larrysalibra.com)'s [verify\_auth\_response](https://github.com/blockstack/blockstack-ruby/blob/e5a209c8ed37a2960b33ef5023ff69acb0fdee86/lib/blockstack.rb?ref=larrysalibra.com#L65) method and some client-side code from blockstack.js into a [Blockstack-specific strategy for the Omniauth authentication system](https://github.com/blockstack/omniauth-blockstack?ref=larrysalibra.com) used by Discourse.

Omniauth is a piece of middleware widely used in the Ruby on Rails ecosystem which means that our work adding support to this framework for Discourse can be easily reused by any app that uses Omniauth.

Omniauth defines two entry points into the strategy. The first is the request phase. This route gets loaded when a user starts to authenticate using the strategy. The second is the callback phase. The callback phase route gets loaded upon redirect after the user successfully approves or denies the authentication request.

### Request phase

In our [Omnifocus strategy's request phase](https://github.com/blockstack/omniauth-blockstack/blob/330f9db479414183c7563591fb15cd545069214d/lib/omniauth/strategies/blockstack.rb?ref=larrysalibra.com#L27), we want to generate a Blockstack authentication request token. Since Discourse is a web app, the easiest way for us to do this is by loading Blockstack's canonical library, [blockstack.js](https://github.com/blockstack/blockstack.js?ref=larrysalibra.com), into the request phase webpage, and [using the redirectToSignIn() method to initiate the authentication request in JavaScript](https://github.com/blockstack/omniauth-blockstack/blob/330f9db479414183c7563591fb15cd545069214d/lib/omniauth/strategies/auth-request.js?ref=larrysalibra.com#L2) the same as a truly decentralized app would do.

All Blockstack apps require a manifest file that includes information such as the name of the app and its icon. We're able to modify the callback request path so that when `?manifest=true` is appended to the path, it [serves a valid manifest file](https://github.com/blockstack/omniauth-blockstack/blob/330f9db479414183c7563591fb15cd545069214d/lib/omniauth/strategies/blockstack.rb?ref=larrysalibra.com#L38) generated from Omniauth configuration settings instead of running the callback request logic. This path is included in the authentication request.

### Callback phase

After the user approves authentication in their authenticator app (typically the Blockstack Browser), they are redirected back to the path defined by the [callback\_phase](https://github.com/blockstack/omniauth-blockstack/blob/330f9db479414183c7563591fb15cd545069214d/lib/omniauth/strategies/blockstack.rb?ref=larrysalibra.com#L64) of the Blockstack Omniauth strategy.

The authenticator appends the authentication response token to the callback phase URL in the `authResponse` query parameter. Our strategy reads this parameter and uses `blockstack-ruby`s `verify_auth_response` method to [verify and decode the token](https://github.com/blockstack/omniauth-blockstack/blob/330f9db479414183c7563591fb15cd545069214d/lib/omniauth/strategies/blockstack.rb?ref=larrysalibra.com#L70).

Going forward, we take the decoded tokens payload and load the various pieces of information into the pre-defined fields provided by Omniauth.

## Integrating this into Discourse

Now that we've created the parts that we'll need to get decentralized authentication working in our Discourse instance, it's time to put them together in a [Discourse plugin](https://github.com/blockstack/discourse-blockstack?ref=larrysalibra.com).

Our Discourse plugin configures the Blockstack Omniauth strategy and [adds it as middleware](https://github.com/blockstack/discourse-blockstack/blob/863eff3d4a3ee51505da595a4ffa7d46eb251cfe/plugin.rb?ref=larrysalibra.com#L21) to our Discourse instance.

[ ![Auth middleware](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2018/09/middleware.png) ](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2018/09/middleware.png?ref=larrysalibra.com) 

Adding Blockstack Authentication middleware

After a user is authenticated by the middleware, the plugin looks for an existing user in the database with decentralized id of the authenticated Blockstack user and signs them in. If a user doesn't exist, it creates a new user and pre-populates some of the `User` fields with existing Blockstack ID profile information.

## Future steps

Blockstack Authentication provides an app-specific private key that we can use to encrypt data only for the user. In our Discourse plugin implementation, we don't do anything with key.

The app private key is encrypted in the authentication response token with a randomly generate private key, the transit private key, that is generated and stored in the users' browser at the start of authentication.

This means that the server never has access to the app private key even though we send the authentication response token to the server for verification because it doesn't have the key to decrypt it.

Imagine we wanted to extend Discourse so that users could make posts or send messages encrypted for certain users in the community. We could extend our Discourse plugin so that it decrypts the app private key in the user's browser and then uses that to encrypt posts and messages before they're even sent to the server. This would allow users to have discussions and share information without the forum operating being privy to the actual content.

Another idea would be to use the app private key to [create a cryptocurrency wallet](https://larrysalibra.com/blog/building-ethereum-wallet-on-blockstack/) for the user. This might be a way to enable tipping for all users in your community.

How can decentralized authentication change your app? Leave your comments or questions in [this forum thread](https://forum.blockstack.org/t/adding-blockstack-authentication-to-a-centralized-app/6252?u=larry&ref=larrysalibra.com).
### Product/Market Fit in Crypto Token Projects
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/product-market-fit/
Last updated: 2018-08-19T16:00:00.000Z
[Product/Market fit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product/market%5Ffit?ref=larrysalibra.com) is the degree to which a product satisfies a strong market demand. Before product/market fit is like playing the game of business on hard mode, acquiring users and making sales goes very slowly. After product/market fit is like playing on easy mode, users are banging down your door to get their hands on your product. When you find product/market fit, you know you have a killer app.

In traditional, non-crypto startups, once you find product/market fit for a product, you can optimize the business model and grow the business towards success.

In the crypto world, things are a bit different. Crypto token projects need to find product/market fit **twice** to be successful. They need to find both product/market fit both for their **vision** and a **use case** of the ecosystem they're building. These projects are selling two things, vision and use cases.

## The token road to killer app

Let's take a look at how this works. In a crypto token project, there is a group of people...the founders...that has a vision. Their vision is of a future where lots of people use their decentralized, permissionless technology and creating a world with certain desirable characteristics. They aren't able to execute on their vision alone but require many people and entities all working together to realize the vision. To get other people involved in the project so that it can have any hope of developing an ecosystem with useful use cases, they need to achieve vision product/market fit.

The founding group writes a whitepaper outlining their vision and how it might work. Next they create a token that is instrumental in the execution of the vision and distribute the token to people who share the vision.

These people that buy into the vision (sometimes by literally paying money for a token) are incentivized to find use case product/market fit and well-suited to continue selling the vision to bring new people into the ecosystem. As more people participate and experiment in the ecosystem, the hope is that there will be a higher chance of finding the right formula for use case product/market fit, otherwise known as the killer app.

[ ![Killer app](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2018/08/killerapp.png) ](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2018/08/killerapp.png?ref=larrysalibra.com) 

Wanted! Killer App.

## Product/Market fit in Bitcoin

Bitcoin is the first and best example of this. [Satoshi had a vision](https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf?ref=larrysalibra.com) of "a purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash \[that\] would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution."

This vision wasn't something that one could execute on without the involvement of many other people, so Satoshi created the block reward incentive scheme as a way to distribute bitcoins to people investing in the project by mining. Early users also gave away bitcoins as they spread the vision.

Satoshi's vision meant (and means!) different things to different people. Some saw Bitcoin as a censorship-resistant currency with fixed supply that will change the balance of power between rulers and the ruled. Others saw a future where machines could easily exchange value amongst themselves. Still others saw in Bitcoin a world free of the problems they found with banks.

Because they were sold on the vision, whatever it meant to them, and wanted to make it happen, people mined Bitcoins and accepted them for payment, helping to build the Bitcoin product as much as Satoshi did by writing the code. Without the Bitcoin vision, there would be no Bitcoiners and no Bitcoin product. Without a product, the Bitcoin's technology's use cases wouldn't find product/market fit.

Bitcoin's first use case found product/market fit when people realized that they could use Bitcoin for payment when other payment methods were blocked or prohibitively expensive. They didn't need to care or even know about the larger vision but only that Bitcoin let them make a payment when nothing else would. Bitcoin's first killer app was permissionless payments.

## Product/Market fit in Ethereum

Ethereum is the other leading example of the vision and use case product/market fit duality. The Ethereum founders had a vision for a shared world computing platform where code could be run outside of the control of any person. Again, this grand vision was such that it couldn't be successful without the participation of a large number of independent actors. Technology needed to be built and people needed to be convinced to run and build on the network otherwise there would be no shared world computer.

The Ethereum founders created tokens and distributed them to people who bought in to that vision. In a twist on Bitcoin's approach, much of the early token distribution was done through a sale in exchange for money (Bitcoin!) instead of mining and give aways. This money was to be used to support the development of the technology and building of the ecosystem.

Ethereum's vision found product/market fit when it executed a successful token sale.

The community then spent time building technology and the ecosystem and trying to find its killer. They tried general purpose smart contracts and DAOs (decentralize autonomous organizations) without much success. The use case of Ethereum that finally found product/market fit was creating tokens to raise money. We know it found product/market fit because of huge rush to create tokens and the billions of dollars raised by them. Token creation to raise money was Ethereum's first killer app.

## No other projects have use case product/market fit

Many other crypto token projects have achieved vision product/market fit: [Filecoin](https://filecoin.io/?ref=larrysalibra.com) for its vision of a decentralized Amazon S3, [Aragon](https://aragon.org/?ref=larrysalibra.com) for its vision of unstoppable organizations, and, I like to think, [Blockstack](https://blockstack.org/?ref=larrysalibra.com) for our vision of a new internet for decentralized apps.

However, besides Bitcoin and Ethereum, none of these projects have yet found use case product/market fit. They're still building technology and ecosystems trying to come up with the exact formula that will bring users banging on their cryptographic doors wanting to use the killer app. There's nothing wrong with that - it's to be expected. After all, the granddaddy of crypto token projects, Bitcoin, took years to move from vision to use case product/market fit.

In a crypto token project, product is both technology and ecosystem, machine and people. The community around Bitcoin are just as much a product of the Bitcoin project as is the `bitcoind` code.

A project's vision is the story that both attracts people to the ecosystem and the mental programming that along with token incentives helps to align their actions so that the ecosystem succeeds. Stories take time to spread and are slow to change. But once successful, they can last for generations. It's important that projects that have achieved vision product/market fit not ignore their vision product as they race to find their killer app.

Unlike a private company which has the freedom to tell a different story internally than it does to the public, a crypto token project needs to constantly sell its long-term vision to the outside world. This vision sales process both attracts new members to the ecosystem, informs them what they can do to help realize the vision without centralized control and ultimately greatly improves chances of finding the killer app.

People need to know where the project is going, why its going there and some plausible ways of getting there. So tell your story and share your vision over and over. Sold on the vision, armed with direction and the incentives of token HODLing, strangers turn into neighbors and form bands of motivated pioneers, foraging a path towards the new world.
### Larry's Newsletter - Issue #23
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/newsletter/larrys-newsletter-issue-23/
Last updated: 2021-10-20T09:21:54.000Z
Long time no see faithful subscribers! Happy Chinese New Year!

Since we last talked, a lot has happened. I joined Blockstack full time and the past year we reached a lot of milestones. We shipped a developer preview of our platform for decentralized apps, raised a series A, completed a $50 million token sale and saw the first batches of apps ship on Blockstack. Lots more coming up this year...stay tuned!

## My Blog Posts

😎 [A Guide to Slack Identity Theft](https://www.larrysalibra.com/blog/slack-identity-theft/?ref=larrysalibra.com) \- I show you how a security bug Slack doesn't plan to fix let's impersonate your colleagues. Nonsense like this is exactly what motivates us to build a new ecosystem of decentralized apps where users own their own identities and aren't subject to the whims of 3rd parties like Slack.

👛 [Building an Ethereum wallet on Blockstack with only a few lines of code](https://www.larrysalibra.com/blog/building-ethereum-wallet-on-blockstack/?ref=larrysalibra.com) \- Blockstack gives every app easy to use cryptography. This post goes along with talk I gave the the Ethereum Classic Summit. [Watch here](https://youtu.be/mpW1EEfbpR0?t=41m17s&ref=larrysalibra.com)

👩‍🔬[Proof of Humanity - A deep-dive into the Blockstack token sale app and how we make sure only real humans registered](https://www.larrysalibra.com/blog/blockstack-token-sale-voucher-registration-walkthrough/?ref=larrysalibra.com)

## Bitcoin/Blockchain

The past year has been quite the rollercoaster across the crypto space. What's up is down and down is now up. Despite whatever people tell you, no one knows how things will play out. One thing the past year has shown us is the power of tokens incentives to create action. Here's my current thinking on tokens in response to a "why not bitcoin/lightning for everything" tweet:

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2021/10/Screen-Shot-2021-10-20-at-5.16.39-PM.png)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2021/10/Screen-Shot-2021-10-20-at-5.16.57-PM.png)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2021/10/Screen-Shot-2021-10-20-at-5.17.15-PM.png)

## Europe

I'm in Europe through March 5th for the [Blockstack Berlin](https://www.eventbrite.com/e/blockstack-berlin-a-signature-fund-event-tickets-39425916979?aff=larrysalibra-newsletter&ref=larrysalibra.com) event where Edward Snowden and Nick Szabo will be speaking. We've got a hackathon, learning sessions and more. Hope to see you!

Wishing you good health and prosperity in the year of the dog!

Until next time!
### A Guide to Slack Identity Theft
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/slack-identity-theft/
Last updated: 2020-03-09T07:31:56.000Z
**TL;DR:* Slack removed usernames enabling easy theft of other users' identities. Read on to learn how...*

Around the world teams everywhere spend their days (and too often nights) glued to a tool that has done more to enable remote first, distributed collaboration than anything since the advent of the iPhone.

Colleagues make important decisions that will mean fortunes won or lost based on messages exchanged in this tool.

Slack revolutionized distributed teams and communities by freeing team members from endless meetings and inbox hell. Instead, Slack replacing getting to inbox zero with more of an endorphin-fueled unread message, threaded conversation purgatory. Not ideal, but a vast improvement over what came before.

## Slack at Blockstack

Slack is an amazing tool for building communities. We have used Slack at [Blockstack](https://blockstack.org/?ref=larrysalibra.com) starting in the early days as a way to build a real-time interactive sense of community between the full time team and supporters of our movement.

As someone who started as an early supporter of Blockstack before it was called "Blockstack", Slack was how I formed my bond with fellow Blockstackers.

At some point we decided it would make sense to change the usernames of the core team to be their first name so that it was easy to interact. Unfortunately, for Blockstack co-founder `@ryanshea`, a community member named Ryan had already joined and taken `@ryan`, so he was stuck with `@ryanshea`. Slack wouldn't let there be two `@ryan`s.

All was well and good and our Blockstack Slack universe . `@ryan` was not Ryan Shea and `@ryanshea` was Ryan Shea Each Ryan had his own unique username. Until one day in the fall of 2017, when I woke up and those familiar usernames could no longer be trusted.

[ ![Is this the real Ryan?](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2018/02/slack-ryan.png) ](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2018/02/slack-ryan.png?ref=larrysalibra.com) 

Will the real Ryan please stand up!?

## Identity in meatspace

To really understand what's going on here, we need to take a brief look at identity. Say you're my best friend. How do you know who I am? If we're friends in the physical world, answering that question is pretty easy. You probably recognize my face, my distinctively bald head, my height and other physical characteristics. You might recognize the sound of my voice or the way I walk.

Your mind subconsciously uses these physical cues to build up your concept of Larry and uses them to determine whether or not the human being in front of you is in fact your Larry.

## Identity in cyberspace

Identity on the internet is a similar yet different beast. Depending on the app or platform you're using, you have different pieces of information available that your mind uses as the puzzle pieces that build your mental model of person or company's online identity.

On Twitter, you have a person's Twitter username, profile picture, their name and other profile info.

On WhatsApp, you have a phone number, name and profile picture which allow you to make sure you're sending your funny jokes to your sister and not the hiring manager of a company you interviewed at last week.

On the web, domain names, logos and website design give us reassurance that we've ended up at our favorite search engine company and not some second-rate imposter.

In all of these instances, there is at least one piece of information that is one of a kind that allows you to uniquely distinguish the entity from the rest of world.

On the web, this is the domain name. There is only one google.com.

On Twitter, this is the username. There is only one `@realDonaldTrump`.

On WhatsApp, this is the phone number. There is only one phone number that is `+1 (212) 555-1212`.

These unique identifiers need to be human-meaningful so that they can be easily remembered. If Alice can't remember Bob's username, it isn't very useful to us as an anchor for identity.

Well-chosen Twitter usernames and domain names are human meaningful, but what about a WhatsApp phone number? Who remembers anyone's phone numbers these days?

WhatsApp and other smartphone apps that use phone numbers in their identification systems make them human meaningful by tying them to the name you entered for the number in your phone's contact book.

## Changing your digital identity

The owner of a digital identity can change these pieces of information whenever they want. I can change the name on my Twitter account, change my username and upload a new profile pic. This will hurt my personal brand and the reputation I've built as people who follow me or look to interact with me will be unable to find me.

What can't happen, unless Twitter allows, is someone changing their Twitter username to the same one as mine. If they could do that, they could [steal my digital Twitter identity](https://twitter.com/larrysalibra?ref=larrysalibra.com).

[ ![Larry on the menu](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2018/02/slack-menu.jpg) ](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2018/02/slack-menu.jpg?ref=larrysalibra.com) 

Steal my Twitter identity and you’ll end up on the menu in Shenzhen.

A digital identity that is easily stolen isn't useful as an anchor of trust.

## Slack creates chaos

This brings us back to Slack.

Prior to September 2017, Slack operated similar to Skype, IRC, Twitter or your run of the mill internet forum. Each user in a team had a unique username. If you wanted to find a certain person, you could do so by looking them up by username.

On September 11, 2017, Slack made a change to their user management system which [removed usernames](https://api.slack.com/changelog/2017-09-the-one-about-usernames?ref=larrysalibra.com) and turned them into display names. Display names aren't unique which means now a team can have as many `@larry`s as the users like. Everyone can be `@larry`! It's up to you to figure out which one is which.

## Steal a Slack identity in 3 easy steps.

Let's take a look at how easy it is to take advantage of this change to impersonate someone else by having some fun with my colleagues in the Blockstack Slack.

**Step 1: Download a copy of your colleague's profile pic**

You'll need a copy of your colleague's profile picture.

In this example, I'm going to impersonate fellow Blockstacker [Aaron Blankstein](https://explorer.blockstack.org/name/blankstein.id?ref=larrysalibra.com), because he's a good sport.

I can get a copy of his profile pic in a number of ways. Slack makes it hard to get a high resolution image from their app without digging around in web page source. In this case, the easiest way for me to acquire Aaron's photo is by saving the one from his Twitter profile.

[ ![Downloading profile pic from Twitter](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2018/02/slack-grabbing-pic.png) ](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2018/02/slack-grabbing-pic.png?ref=larrysalibra.com) 

Twitter is an convenient source of profile pics.

**Step 2: Change your profile to match**  
Next, I'm going to update my profile information to match Aaron's. I want to make sure things match as closely as possible otherwise it makes it easier to be discovered.

You'll want to click edit profile and change your display name, name, and time zone to match the person you're trying to impersonate. Replace your profile pic with the photo you downloaded in step 1.

[ ![Busted!](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2018/02/slack-newlook.png) ](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2018/02/slack-newlook.png?ref=larrysalibra.com) 

Busted!

If you leave some information the same, like I did in the photo above, you'll make it easier for observant colleagues to notice that something fishy is going.

**Step 3: Use your new identity wisely**

[ ![Confuse your colleagues!](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2018/02/slack-yes-im-aaron.jpg) ](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2018/02/slack-yes-im-aaron.jpg?ref=larrysalibra.com) 

Why are there two Aarons?

That's it! You're done. You've become your colleague. Use your new stolen identity wisely!

If I was really trying to steal Aaron's Slack identity and use it for nefarious purposes, I wouldn't want to start sending messages in a channel where the real Aaron can see them. As you can see from the screenshot above, that's a pretty fast way to blow your cover.

[ ![Confuse your colleagues!](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2018/02/slack-confused.png) ](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2018/02/slack-confused.png?ref=larrysalibra.com) 

Why are there two Aarons?

Instead, someone really looking to cause problems would use his stolen identity when the real person isn't around or in direct messages where the victim wouldn't have any reason to suspect that this wasn't the real.

## Exposing Slack imposters

Now that usernames are gone as unique identifiers in Slack. How can we tell who's who? There are two ways to tell Slack users apart.

You can chose to make email addresses public. This requires each person to know which email address the person they think they're talking to used to register. It means you also have to get in the habit of clicking the view profile link and checking to make sure the person you think you're chatting with has the right email. This is done regularly by no one ever.

[ ![Display emails in Slack.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2018/02/slack-show-emails.png) ](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2018/02/slack-show-emails.png?ref=larrysalibra.com) 

No one checks emails before chatting.

The only other sure-fire way to tell Slack users apart is by checking their Member ID. This is a 9 character, random, impossible-to-memorize-unless-you're-super-human, alphanumeric sequence hidden deep in layers of menus. Slack never tells users about it and won't let you view it on mobile devices. Useless.

[ ![Slack member id](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2018/02/slack-member-id.png) ](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2018/02/slack-member-id.png?ref=larrysalibra.com) 

Do you know your Slack member ID? I didn't think so.

## Slack during a token sale

We noticed this Slack security problem in the Blockstack Slack in the run up to our token sale last fall. When we discovered it, the Blockstack core team spent a few minutes playing around with our Slack profile settings and impersonating each other.

As we prepared to handle crypto and fiat assets in our upcoming token sale, this new Slack "enhancement" created a huge new security risk. It isn't that hard to imagine how a bad actor in our 5000+ person Slack could do some serious damage. For example, the bad actor might impersonate Blockstack co-founders Ryan or Muneeb in Slack direct messages and pretend to offer preferential access to the token sale in exchange for Bitcoin transfers to an address controlled by the imposter.

Another nightmare scenario was a bad actor impersonating a trusted Blockstack team member and taking advantage of that trust to obtain valuable credentials or permissions from a colleague.

## Our response

Bad people like to impersonate good projects during token sales because they see it as an easy way take advantage of trusting investors and make a quick buck.

At Blockstack, we took a number of operational steps to remove Slack from the trusted role it had had in organizing our team and coordinating our community:

- We disabled automatic registration for new users and asked users who wanted to join the Slack to go through an application process and manual review.
- We announced to our community that the they should not trust messages from anyone on Slack.
- We instituted a process where sensitive requests are verified out-of-band through a alternate secure channel.

We lucked out in that the mitigation steps we took worked and our nightmare Slack scenarios didn't occur. This freed up our time to [deal with bad actors elsewhere on the internet](https://www.coindesk.com/blockstack-phishing-counterattack/?ref=larrysalibra.com).

## Reaching out to Slack

We reached out to Slack's CEO, Stewart Butterfield, to make sure he was aware of the problem:

[ ![Slack CEO responds.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2018/02/slack-twitter-1.png) ](https://twitter.com/stewart/status/918681591143997440?ref=larrysalibra.com) 

Slack CEO: We won't give you your identities back.

[ ![Slack CEO responds.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2018/02/slack-twitter-2.png) ](https://twitter.com/stewart/status/918683091471777792?ref=larrysalibra.com) 

Trust & identity is a problem for users to solve, not Slack.

Stewart seems to be more focused on Slack’s ability to be a developer platform than it’s role as a trusted communications tool where teams can be sure that the team member they’re interacting with is who she claims to be.

Even if Slack cared deeply about this problem, no single person or company should have this much control over trust and identity online.

## Our Blockstack chat bounties

[ ![Blockstack Chat Bounties](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2018/02/slack-bounty.png) ](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2018/02/slack-bounty.png?ref=larrysalibra.com) 

Communications tools where users own their own identities are the future.

At the end of 2017, we launched the [$50,000 Signature Bounty to Decentralize Communication](https://blockstack.org/blog/50-000-signature-bounty-to-decentralize-communication?ref=larrysalibra.com) through the [Blockstack Signature Fund](http://blockstack.org/funding?ref=larrysalibra.com). This competition is for two decentralized chat tools, a peer-to-peer encrypted chat and a community messaging Slack replacement. These apps will be built on Blockstack so that users, not platform CEOs, own their own identity and control their own reputations.

## Don't trust middlemen

We, along with many other organizations and communities, invited Slack into our professional lives, offices and communities, and trusted them with some of our most valuable relationships.

Slack violated that trust when they changed their platform to make it so that anyone can impersonate anyone else. More importantly, Slack showed us how trusted third parties can quickly turn in to security holes for your organization and represent real business risk for your company.

---

Want to join us in building a world where you can use apps without trusting third parties? [We're hiring!](https://jobs.lever.co/blockstack?lever-source=larrysalibra.com&ref=larrysalibra.com)

*Thanks to [Muneeb Ali](https://explorer.blockstack.org/name/muneeb.id?ref=larrysalibra.com), [Aaron Blankstein](https://explorer.blockstack.org/name/blankstein.id?ref=larrysalibra.com), [Xan Ditoff](https://explorer.blockstack.org/name/xan.id?ref=larrysalibra.com), [Sebastian Dunkel](https://explorer.blockstack.org/name/sebastiandunkel.id?ref=larrysalibra.com), [Yukan Liao](https://explorer.blockstack.org/name/yukan.id?ref=larrysalibra.com), [Jude Nelson](https://explorer.blockstack.org/name/judecn.id?ref=larrysalibra.com), and [Jack Zampolin](https://explorer.blockstack.org/name/jack%5Fzampolin.id?ref=larrysalibra.com) and everyone else that provided feedback on drafts of this post.*
### How I built an Ethereum wallet on Bitcoin with 3 lines of code
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/ethereum-wallet-on-blockstack/
Last updated: 2017-11-13T16:00:00.000Z
*This post is a companion to [a talk I did at the Ethereum Classic Summit in Hong Kong](https://youtu.be/mpW1EEfbpR0?t=41m17s&ref=larrysalibra.com) on November 13, 2017.*

Cryptocurrency and token wallets are pretty simple. You generate a private key that only the owner of the wallet knows and a public key that's shared in some form with people who want to send the owner money.

If you just want to make a wallet than can receive money, that's all you need. If you want to display the wallet balance and send transactions, you'll make some calls to remote APIs and use the private key to sign some transactions. However, distilled to its essence, a crypto wallet is just a private key.

Much of the challenge of writing cryptocurrency wallet apps for developers is figuring out how to get users to actually store their key so they don't lose it and lose their money.

Similarly, the most annoying part of using crypto wallets for users is being nagged by wallets to write down your private key. It's also the most dangerous - ignore the nagging and you potentially lose your coins! Write it down in the wrong place and you also lose your coins!

## MyEtherWallet's on-boarding process

Just look at the process of getting started with [MyEtherWallet](https://myetherwallet.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com):

[ ![Blockstack Ether Wallet sign in process](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2017/11/myetherwallet-onboarding.png) ](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2017/11/myetherwallet-onboarding.png?ref=larrysalibra.com) 

MyEtherWallet has so many on-boarding screens I had trouble fitting them in one image.

No fewer than **six** on-boarding screens, with a password, a private key, and a file to keep track of to boot! Madness!

What if I told you, there's a **better way** for both users and developers?

## Blockstack's per-application private key

[Blockstack is a new internet for decentralized apps](https://blockstack.org/?ref=larrysalibra.com) that is a layer 2 protocol on top of Bitcoin. One of the really cool things about Blockstack as both a user and developer of applications is that users are on-boarded with a hierarchical keychain. Each of the user's Blockstack IDs is uniquely identified by a bitcoin address, known as the identity address, derived from this keychain. Each application that a user signs into receives a unique key, the application private key, derived from the private key of the *identity address*. All of these keys are backed up by a single keychain phrase.

We can use application private keys for rapid development of all sorts of apps that use cryptography. Let's take a look at how we can use the app private key to make a receive-only Ethereum wallet in only 3 lines of code:

First, we load the user's data which is sent over by the Blockstack Browser as part of the sign in process and retrieve the app private key. ([Read my walkthrough of the sign in process here](https://larrysalibra.com/blog/blockstack-token-sale-voucher-registration-walkthrough/)) Next, we wrap the private key in a buffer. Finally, we use [ethereumjs-util](https://github.com/ethereumjs/ethereumjs-util?ref=larrysalibra.com) to generate our wallet's Ethereum address.

**With [Blockstack](https://blockstack.org/?ref=larrysalibra.com), you outsource the key generation and on-boarding process, so you can focus on your wallet's unique value proposition.** Developers win by having to write less code and design fewer interfaces. Users win with a one-click on-boarding process and no more additional private keys to remember.

With a bit more code, we can display our new wallet's address as an easy to use QRcode and even personalize it a bit with profile information that the user has shared as part the Blockstack authentication process adding their name and photo.

[ ![Blockstack Ether Wallet sign in process](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2017/11/blockstack-ether-wallet-sign-in.png) ](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2017/11/blockstack-ether-wallet-sign-in.png?ref=larrysalibra.com) 

The Blockstack Ether Wallet sign in process

## Creating multiple wallets

With this code, the user gets the same Ethereum address generated each time she signs in. This makes it easy to restore her wallet if she ever loses her computer by entering her 12-word keychain phrase the Blockstack Browser. But what if we want more than one wallet?

Blockstack gives us a couple options. One option is to use the app private key as the root of a hierarchical deterministic wallet and derive more addresses from it. Another option is to generate cryptographically random wallets and use \[BlockstackJS\]'s storage routines to client-side encrypt the secrets of each wallet and store them in the user's storage provider.

So that's it! We've created a two-click Ethereum wallet on Blockstack in only a few simple lines of code.

Next steps:

- [Fork the code on Github](https://github.com/larrysalibra/blockstack-ether-wallet?ref=larrysalibra.com)
- [View the slides from the talk this post was based on](https://etcsummit.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Salibra.pdf?ref=larrysalibra.com)
- [Watch video of the talk](https://youtu.be/mpW1EEfbpR0?t=41m17s&ref=larrysalibra.com)
- [Read "Proof of Humanity: a Deep Dive into the Blockstack Token Sale Registration App", my semi-technical walkthrough of Blockstack ID creation and sign with Blockstack](https://larrysalibra.com/blog/blockstack-token-sale-voucher-registration-walkthrough/)
- [Do your duty](https://www.xkcd.com/386/?ref=larrysalibra.com) and [angrily tweet at me because I used 5 lines of code and not 3 like the headline said.](https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?text=Larry+lied!+He+used+5+lines+of+code+to+build+an+Ethereum+wallet+on+@blockstack+and+not+3+like+the+headline+said!&url=https://www.larrysalibra.com/blog/building-ethereum-wallet-on-blockstack/&via=larrysalibra&ref=larrysalibra.com).

*Thanks to [Aaron Blankstein](https://explorer.blockstack.org/name/blankstein.id?ref=larrysalibra.com), [Jude Nelson](https://explorer.blockstack.org/name/judecn.id?ref=larrysalibra.com), [Patrick Stanley](https://explorer.blockstack.org/name/patrick%5Fstanley.id?ref=larrysalibra.com) and everyone else that provided feedback on drafts of this post.*
### Proof of Humanity: a Deep Dive into the Blockstack Token Sale Registration App
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/blockstack-walkthrough/
Last updated: 2021-05-13T09:20:58.000Z
**TL;DR:* The [Blockstack Token Sale Voucher Registration App](https://blockstack.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com) uses decentralized Blockstack IDs and social media account proofs to make sure registrants are real humans. Read on for a behind-the-scenes look into how it works...*

It's the middle of the [Blockstack Token Sale Registration period](https://blockstack.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com), where users have the opportunity to register for a voucher to purchase tokens, which will used on the Blockstack network. In this post, I'm going to do a technical walkthrough of the entire registration process for token sale vouchers from creating your Blockstack ID through the post-registration processing of submissions. Along the way, I'll share some code examples and shed some light on the behind the scenes magic that goes into this process.

## Token sale registration

[ ![Two registration options](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2017/11/registration-1.png) ](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2017/11/registration-1.png?ref=larrysalibra.com) 

Options for participation in the Blockstack Token Sale

There are two registration paths for the Blockstack Token Sale. Accredited investors and qualified purchasers register through [Coinlist](https://coinlist.co/blockstack/apply?ref=larrysalibra.com). This happens through a traditional username and password form-based sign up much the same as any website you've used in the past decade or two. After creating an account, users verify their identity and accreditation by uploading a scans of government documents and other materials.

In contrast, [individuals interested in obtaining a voucher for an opportunity to purchase tokens in the future after the network goes live](https://blockstack.com/sale-registration?ref=larrysalibra.com) register using their Blockstack ID via a Blockstack app. With one click, the voucher registration app receives cryptographic proof that the person owns the Blockstack ID they claim and proof of social media account ownership.

Now let's take a look at how this voucher registration process works under the hood.

## Create your Blockstack ID

The first step of the voucher registration process is to create your own Blockstack ID. This is a one-time process that happens when you first [install Blockstack](https://blockstack.org/install?ref=larrysalibra.com).

[ ![Welcome to Blockstack](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2017/11/blockstack-first-run.png) ](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2017/11/blockstack-first-run.png?ref=larrysalibra.com) 

The Blockstack Browser securely stores your Blockstack IDs and money on your computer.

Your Blockstack ID is like a driver's license issued by a government or a student id from your school and includes information that describes you such as your name and photo. You use a Blockstack ID to identity yourself to other users and sign in to apps much like I can say I am [@larrysalibra](https://twitter.com/larrysalibra?ref=larrysalibra.com) on Twitter and use my Twitter account to sign in to apps that offer sign in with Twitter.

[ ![Larry's Blockstack ID](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2017/11/larry-blockstack-id.png) ](https://explorer.blockstack.org/name/larry.id?ref=larrysalibra.com) 

Larry's Blockstack ID

With traditional IDs, a third-party issuer decides what information goes on your ID and in turn use their reputations to attest to the validity of that information. When I show someone my Hong Kong ID card, they trust that my birthday is what's written on the card because the Hong Kong Government doesn't have a reputation for making up birthdays.

In contrast, you decide what information goes on your Blockstack ID. You can offer proof of some of your claims such as ownership of a Twitter account. You can also ask third parties to attest to claims made in your Blockstack ID - for example, a government could sign your Blockstack ID to indicate that it has verified your name is the legal name they have on record.

Think of your Blockstack ID as your digital passport on the new internet for decentralized apps. Let's go through the process of creating a Blockstack ID step-by-step.

## Create your keychain

Unlike traditional IDs which are created by institutions such as governments, schools, companies, or clubs, Blockstack IDs are created by the people who own them.

The first step of creating a Blockstack ID to generate a secure keychain that will own your Blockstack IDs. This happens once during the Blockstack on-boarding process.

This keychain is consists of a private key which is [generated from a cryptographically-secure source of random data](https://github.com/blockstack/blockstack-browser/blob/96d77a1bf5347d0513e0816956c8104b98d24114/app/js/account/store/account/actions.js?ref=larrysalibra.com#L382). It is represented as a 12 word mnemonic phrase called a keychain phrase.

[ ![Keychain phrase](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2017/11/keychain.png) ](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2017/11/keychain.png?ref=larrysalibra.com) 

Be sure to write down your keychain phrase!

All of your Blockstack IDs, wallet addresses and their private keys are generated from this phrase, so it is important to **write down this keychain phrase** and keep it in a safe place.

After generating the private key of the keychain and corresponding keychain phrase, Blockstack creates the first Blockstack ID. This uses the same methods used in Bitcoin wallets to derive a private key from a tree of keys whose root is the private key represented by your keychain phrase.

Each branch of the tree at a given level is represented by an index. The first Blockstack ID of your wallet is 0th index child of the identity keychain, code for the derivation of which is in the image below.

[ ![Keychain phrase](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2017/11/identity-keychain-derivation.png) ](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2017/11/identity-keychain-derivation.png?ref=larrysalibra.com) 

This code derives the Blockstack ID at a given index when provided with your keychain. [View on Github](https://github.com/blockstack/blockstack-browser/blob/96d77a1bf5347d0513e0816956c8104b98d24114/app/js/utils/account-utils.js?ref=larrysalibra.com#L192)

This process results in the private key of your Blockstack ID and a bitcoin address that uniquely identifies your Blockstack ID. This identity address is displayed with the `ID-` prefix in the browser and is how apps tell you apart from another user. It also is the address that owns a username should you choose to add one.

[ ![Larry's identity address](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2017/11/identity-address.png) ](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2017/11/identity-address.png?ref=larrysalibra.com) 

My identity address

## Fill out your profile

After creating a Blockstack ID, the next step is to add public information to your Blockstack ID that helps other to identity you. This information such as your name, photo and bio and your social media accounts makes up your profile and is stored as a \[JSON\](link to JSON wikipedia) object payload encoded in a signed [JSON web token](https://jwt.io/?ref=larrysalibra.com) in a file on your storage provider.

On Gaia Hubs like that used by the default storage provider option in Blockstack, the location of this profile file is deterministic. Given the web address of the Gaia Hub, the identity address of the first Blockstack ID in the keychain and the index of the Blockstack ID whose profile file you want to find, you can create the web address of the profile file by using this template:

`<gaia-hub-address>/<0th-identity-address>/<identity-index>/profile.json`

For example, the identity address of my Blockstack ID [larry.id](https://explorer.blockstack.org/name/larry.id?ref=larrysalibra.com) is `1fHF3QADKT62js8BqHXmF31CFA1KUcTud` and since that also happens to be the first Blockstack ID on my keychain, the index of the Blockstack ID is 0\. Knowing that I use the default storage option whose location is `https://gaia.blockstack.org/hub/`, we know that we can find the profile for my Blockstack ID at the URL [https://gaia.blockstack.org/hub/1fHF3QADKT62js8BqHXmF31CFA1KUcTud/0/profile.json](https://gaia.blockstack.org/hub/1fHF3QADKT62js8BqHXmF31CFA1KUcTud/0/profile.json?ref=larrysalibra.com).

[ ![Profile signature](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2017/11/profile-signature.png) ](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2017/11/profile-signature.png?ref=larrysalibra.com) 

The cryptographic signature in a Blockstack ID's profile lets readers verify that no one but the owner has modified the profile.

Each time we add information to the profile, a new JSON web token object is created holding the new profile payload and signed by private key of the Blockstack ID's identity address. This signature let others verify was updated by the owner of Blockstack ID and prevents third parties from tampering with it.

## Verify social media accounts

You can also add social media accounts to your Blockstack ID and prove that they are accounts you own. These proofs show that the person who controls a given Blockstack ID also controls the social media accounts on other services they've verified in their Blockstack ID. In my case, social media accounts proofs in my Blockstack ID, [larry.id](https://explorer.blockstack.org/name/larry.id?ref=larrysalibra.com) give others confidence that larry.id is the same person that owns the Twitter account [@larrysalibra](https://twitter.com/larrysalibra?ref=larrysalibra.com), not someone attempting to impersonate me by entering my name and uploading my photo.

[ ![larry.id's verified social media accounts](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2017/11/social-proofs.png) ](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2017/11/social-proofs.png?ref=larrysalibra.com) 

A blue check indicates that the social media account proofs linked in a profile still exist and are valid.

Social media account verifications on Blockstack are simple and elegant. They include two pointers - links - that together securely demonstrate common control. One pointer is securely stored in your Blockstack ID's profile and points from your Blockstack ID to the username on the social media service you claim. The second pointer points from your user account on the social media platform to your Blockstack ID. This link takes the form of a message in a post on the social media service that only your username could create.

The process of adding a social media account to your Blockstack ID and verifying it consists of 3 steps:

### 1\. Add account identifier to profile

First, you add your identifier on the social media service, typically your username or handle, to your Blockstack ID's profile. This adds an entry to the array stored in `account` key in your profile. In the following example, I've added my Twitter handle, [larrysalibra](https://twitter.com/larrysalibra?ref=larrysalibra.com) as an account in my profile:

```
"account": [
            {
              "proofType": "http",
              "identifier": "larrysalibra",
              "@type": "Account",
              "service": "twitter",
              "proofUrl": ""
            }
]

```

As you can see above, the object for a social media account includes a few properties. The `@type` and `service` entries indicate that this is an entry for a Twitter account. The `proofType` entry indicates that the proof will be a link that can be verified by making an a request to a web site using the HTTP protocol.

At this point in the process, if someone looks up my Blockstack ID, they will see that while I claim the Twitter handle [@larrysalibra](https://twitter.com/larrysalibra/?ref=larrysalibra.com), the claim is unverified.

[ ![Unverified Twitter account](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2017/11/unverified-twitter.png) ](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2017/11/unverified-twitter.png?ref=larrysalibra.com) 

This Blockstack ID is making an unverified claim to this Twitter account.

Social media accounts that are unverified are clearly indicated as such with a red warning. You should not trust accounts as being owned by the owner of the Blockstack ID if that are not verified. While anyone can claim to own a social media account in a Blockstack ID, only the person who controls the social media account can post the matching proof on the account and make the claim verified. This makes it more difficult for someone to impersonate another by adding their social media accounts to a random Blockstack ID - they would all appear "broken".

### 2\. Add a proof to the social media account

The next step of process is to add a post to your social media account that proves you control that account. You do this by posting a message to your account that include your identity address, the bitcoin address that uniquely identifies your Blockstack ID.

Blockstack helps you generate the proof message for you. Below is [the message I posted on my Twitter](https://twitter.com/larrysalibra/status/924291925884092421?ref=larrysalibra.com):

> Verifying my Blockstack ID is secured with the address 1fHF3QADKT62js8BqHXmF31CFA1KUcTud [https://explorer.blockstack.org/address/1fHF3QADKT62js8BqHXmF31CFA1KUcTud](https://explorer.blockstack.org/address/1fHF3QADKT62js8BqHXmF31CFA1KUcTud?ref=larrysalibra.com)

After posting this proof, you need to get a direct link to it - a URL that when opened opens directly to the single post containing the proof. For my Twitter proof, the direct link to the proof is [https://twitter.com/larrysalibra/status/924291925884092421](https://twitter.com/larrysalibra/status/924291925884092421?ref=larrysalibra.com).

You then add this link to the social media account object created in the first step of this process. After adding the proof link to my Twitter account in my Blockstack ID, the new `account` object looks like this:

```
"account": [
            {
              "proofType": "http",
              "identifier": "larrysalibra",
              "@type": "Account",
              "service": "twitter",
              "proofUrl": "https://twitter.com/larrysalibra/status/924291925884092421"
            }
]

```

### 3\. Verify that social media proofs are valid

This final step is entirely automatic and is performed by software each time someone wants to make sure that the social media accounts claimed by a Blockstack ID have matching proofs.

The software, typically the [validateProofs()](http://blockstack.github.io/blockstack.js/index.html?ref=larrysalibra.com#validateproofs) function in our [blockstack.js](https://github.com/blockstack/blockstack.js?ref=larrysalibra.com) library, fetches the contents of the page in each link and searches through the contents of the page for proof message. The message can't be in just any location in the page, but must be in an area that is known to be editable only by the owner of the account. This is usually a user post area or a specific metadata tag. This prevents a would-be impersonator from posting a comment on your Facebook post that has a verification message for a Blockstack ID created by the impersonator in it.

[ ![Verified Twitter account](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2017/11/verified-twitter.png) ](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2017/11/verified-twitter.png?ref=larrysalibra.com) 

This Twitter account is verified as owned by the same person who owns this Blockstack ID.

Once the message is found, the software verifies that the address listed in the proof matches the identity address of the Blockstack ID that is claiming ownership. If the address matches, the social media account is displayed as valid with a checkbox. If the address doesn't match, the verification message can't be found or the proof URL can't be loaded, the social media account is displayed as unverified.

## Add a username (optional)

The final step of creating a Blockstack ID is an optional one, adding a username. Adding a username to your Blockstack ID means using bitcoin to "buy" a human-friendly name that is owned by identity address your Blockstack ID. I use quotes around the term buy because you're not really buying the username from anyone. Instead, you're creating the name by burning bitcoin - sending the bitcoin to an unspendable address

Adding a username to your Blockstack ID has a number of benefits. It gives you an easily rememberable name to give to other people so that they can find you. Saying "Hi, I'm [larry.id](https://explorer.blockstack.org/name/larry.id?ref=larrysalibra.com)!" is a lot easier to remember than saying "Hi, I'm [ID-1fHF3QADKT62js8BqHXmF31CFA1KUcTud](https://explorer.blockstack.org/address/1fHF3QADKT62js8BqHXmF31CFA1KUcTud?ref=larrysalibra.com)!"

Adding a username also gives you control of where your data is stored. Without a username you can only use the default Gaia storage hub provided by [Blockstack Public Benefit Corporation](https://blockstack.org/?ref=larrysalibra.com). With a username, you can point your Blockstack ID to a profile file and other data stored on other storage providers by updating the username's zone file.

[ ![Blockstack zone file](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2017/11/zone-file.png) ](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2017/11/zone-file.png?ref=larrysalibra.com) 

larry.id's zone file points at a profile file. Zone files are backwards compatible with the legacy domain name system.

In the future, adding a username to your Blockstack ID will also enable things like multi-device support, the ability to interact with other users on the Blockstack network, and the ability to host websites and other services accessible via your name.

## Register for the Token Sale Voucher

Now that you've created a Blockstack ID, you can sign into apps including the [Blockstack Token Sale Voucher Registration App](https://blockstack.com/sale-registration?ref=larrysalibra.com).

[ ![Sign in with Blockstack](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2017/11/sign-in-button.png) ](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2017/11/sign-in-button.png?ref=larrysalibra.com) 

Once you've [downloaded the latest Blockstack Browser](https://blockstack.org/install?ref=larrysalibra.com), click "Sign in with Blockstack" to get started.

The registration process consists of two steps with three clicks in total. The first is signing in to the registration app with your Blockstack ID. Once you've signed in, you can fill out your legal name, email and address to finish registration for the token sale voucher. While this three-click process - one click on the "Sign in with Blockstack" button, one click to approve the sign in request in your Blockstack Browser and one more click to submit your registration - takes only a minute, there's a lot going on in the background.

The token voucher registration app cryptographically verifies your ownership of your Blockstack ID and then independently verifies that you are the owner of the social media accounts you've claimed in your Blockstack ID. It also pre-populates the registration form with your name and email address.

Let's take a deeper look at what's going on here.

## Click sign in button

When you click the sign in button, the voucher registration app starts the process of generating an authentication request that will be sent to your local installation of Blockstack which will ask you whether or not you want to approve sign in to the app.

This process starts when the app, calls the [redirectToSignIn](http://blockstack.github.io/blockstack.js/index.html?ref=larrysalibra.com#redirecttosignin) method of [blockstack.js](https://github.com/blockstack/blockstack.js?ref=larrysalibra.com). This convenience method calls the [makeAuthRequest](http://blockstack.github.io/blockstack.js/index.html?ref=larrysalibra.com#makeauthrequest) which does the heavy lifting by generating an authentication request [JSON web token](https://jwt.io/?ref=larrysalibra.com). It then redirects the user's web browser to the Blockstack Browser to ask the user to approve the sign in.

The first step in creating an authentication request is  
create a temporary private key called the transit private key. This key is stored in your browser in the [local storage](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Window/localStorage?ref=larrysalibra.com) of the app. The public key of this private key is calculated and provided to Blockstack as part of the authentication request. Blockstack uses the transit key's public key to encrypt sensitive information destined for the app in the authentication so that only the app can read it.

The authentication request is a JSON web token that is signed by the transit private key of the app. The payload of the token includes information about the origin of the app, the location of the app's `manifest.json` file, the types of access or scopes that the app is requesting and information about where the user should be sent if she chooses to approve the app's request to sign in.

[ ![Payload of an authentication request.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2017/11/auth-request-payload.png) ](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2017/11/auth-request-payload.png?ref=larrysalibra.com) 

This is an example of the authentication request payload generated by the Blockstack Token Sale Voucher Registration App.

Finally, the app calls the [redirectToSignInWithAuthRequest](http://blockstack.github.io/blockstack.js/index.html?ref=larrysalibra.com#redirecttosigninwithauthrequest) method to send the user to Blockstack to approve the request. This method redirects the user's web browser to an address that is the `blockstack:` custom protocol handler followed by the encoded authentication request token. Blockstack configures the user's operating system to handle `blockstack:` requests. When Blockstack receives an open request for a `blockstack:` address, it reads the authentication request token and redirects the user to the Blockstack Browser authentication endpoint which is `http://localhost:8888/auth?authRequest=`.

## Approve sign in request

On receiving an authentication request token at the authentication endpoint, the Blockstack Browser decodes the token, verifies its contents and displays an approval dialog much like you'd see when you try logging in to an app that uses login in with Facebook.

[ ![Sign in approval dialog](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2017/11/approval.png) ](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2017/11/approval.png?ref=larrysalibra.com) 

The Blockstack Browser asks me if I want to approve the app's request to sign in.

As we discussed above, the payload of the authentication request token includes a variety of data about the app requesting sign in and the type of access it would like. As part of loading the authentication request, the Blockstack Browser downloads the `manifest.json` file which provides metadata about the app including the app's icon and name which are displayed to the user.

All apps get basic information about the user when they approve a sign in. This basic information includes the information in their public profile - name, profile photo, etc, their decentralized identifier, and a unique app private key. The user's decentralized identifier is a string generated from their Blockstack ID's identity address and is used to uniquely identify the user at sign in. Below is the decentralized identifier for my `larry.id` Blockstack ID:

```
did:btc-addr:1fHF3QADKT62js8BqHXmF31CFA1KUcTud

```

The app private key is a private key that is deterministically generated from the private key of user's Blockstack ID identity address. Each app gets a unique key. This app private key is incredibly powerful and makes it very easy for Blockstack Apps to build in cryptographic features without having to worry about key management. The process of generating and backing up keys is outsourced to the Blockstack Browser. As long as the user keeps her keychain phrase in a safe place, any app's private key can be calculated from the keychain phrase.

The app private key makes it simple to build apps such as secure cryptocurrency or token wallets with only a few lines of code. It also makes it possible for apps to encrypt and decrypt files and other information client side, in the app in a way that only the copy of the app running on a user's computer can read the files.

In addition to these three pieces of information, apps are currently able to request two additional permissions or scopes in their authentication request. The first is the `store_write` scope which allows the app to write files to the user's Gaia storage in a partitioned area, or datastore, designated for that app. Each app requesting this permission gets their own datastore.

The second is the `email` scope. This permission, currently limited to a whitelisted series of apps, asks the Blockstack Browser to include the user's email address as part of the authentication response.

In the future, apps will be able to request a number of additional fine-grained permissions from users such as reading from or writing to shared collections such as the user's photos or friends list.

When the user approves the app's sign in request, the Blockstack Browser uses the [makeAuthResponse](https://github.com/blockstack/blockstack.js/blob/ddadc8926de7dfe1afd78443033b5fa65a55d1cc/src/auth/authMessages.js?ref=larrysalibra.com#L88) method from [blockstack.js](https://github.com/blockstack/blockstack.js?ref=larrysalibra.com) to generate an authentication response token. Like the authentication request token, this response token is a signed JSON web token with a JSON object payload. The token includes the information we discussed above along a core session token if the app requested access to storage and the Blockstack ID's claimed username. The token is signed by the private key of the Blockstack ID's identity address.

[ ![Authentication response payload](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2017/11/response-payload.png) ](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2017/11/response-payload.png?ref=larrysalibra.com) 

A typical Blockstack authentication response payload.

After generating the authentication response token, the Blockstack Browser redirects the user back to the app adding the authentication response token to the redirect address so that the voucher registration app can read it.

## App verifies sign in authentication response

When the app receives an authentication response, it decodes the authentication response, verifies the signature, decrypts the private payload items, and verifies that the username claimed by the user is owned by her Blockstack ID.

This is all done by the [handlePendingSignIn](http://blockstack.github.io/blockstack.js/index.html?ref=larrysalibra.com#handlependingsignin) method of [blockstack.js](https://github.com/blockstack/blockstack.js?ref=larrysalibra.com).

Signature verification ensures that the private key of Blockstack ID the user claims via the `iss` field containing the user's decentralized identifier did in fact sign the authentication response token.

Private payload items, including the app private key and core session token (if provided), are decrypted using the transit private key and [the same cryptographic routines that are used by blockstack.js for encrypted file storage](https://github.com/blockstack/blockstack.js/blob/ddadc8926de7dfe1afd78443033b5fa65a55d1cc/src/encryption.js?ref=larrysalibra.com#L38).

Username verification happens via a name look up from a Blockstack Core node. This look up returns the identity address that owns the name and the code makes sure that this identity address is the same address as the Blockstack ID that generated the authentication response.

Apps are free to choose which [Blockstack Core](https://github.com/blockstack/blockstack-core?ref=larrysalibra.com) node the use to perform username verification. This choice is made in part by their trust model. A entirely decentralized app running entirely on a user's computer could choose to use that user's preferred Blockstack Core node since no one but the user needs to trust the result. A partially decentralized app such as the token sale voucher registration app or the Blockstack forum would choose to do the look up against a Blockstack Core node that it trusts to prevent users from using names they don't own.

Assuming these verifications pass, this data along with the user's profile data is stored in a user data object in [local storage](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Window/localStorage?ref=larrysalibra.com). This data is available to the app via the [loadUserData](http://blockstack.github.io/blockstack.js/index.html?ref=larrysalibra.com#loaduserdata) function.

The token sale voucher registration app uses the user data from the authentication response to pre-populate email and name fields of the registration form to make life easier for users.

[ ![Registration form](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2017/11/pre-populated.png) ](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2017/11/pre-populated.png?ref=larrysalibra.com) 

The Blockstack authentication response is used to pre-populate the token sale voucher registration form with name and email. The registrant's name will be checked against her government ID before any purchase.

This entire process can happen either client side for a fully decentralized web app such as the Blockstack Todos app or on the server of a partially centralized app such as the [Blockstack Forum](https://forum.blockstack.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com).

Typical Blockstack apps would stop at this point, but the [Blockstack Token Sale Voucher Registration App](https://blockstack.com/sale-registration?ref=larrysalibra.com) does additional processing on the authentication response data.

## App verifies claimed social accounts

The Blockstack token sale voucher registration app is unique compared to typical Blockstack apps in that it not only uses sign in to authenticate a user is who they claim to be, but also as spam and [sybil attack](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybil%5Fattack?ref=larrysalibra.com) protection mechanism to make it harder for both people and bots to create multiple accounts.

The app does this by requiring that the Blockstack ID used to sign in to the app have one or more verified social media account.

The app sends the authentication response token to its server where the server stores and verifies the response token. It then proceeds to verify each of the social media accounts the Blockstack ID claims to own using the process described earlier. Users whose Blockstack IDs have no valid social media accounts are asked to add one.

The app stores the authentication response token and the Blockstack ID's profile at time of registration in its database to give us the opportunity to perform more sophisticated analysis before token vouchers are issued. We could potentially look at a number of metrics such as the age of the verified social accounts, the account's social graph, activity or other characteristics to help us make a determination of whether or not the Blockstack ID used to make the registration is an unique, individual human. This, combined with a government ID check before purchase significantly reduces the chance that people will be able to receive multiple vouchers.

[ ![Successful registration](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2017/11/registration-success.png) ](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2017/11/registration-success.png?ref=larrysalibra.com) 

I've successfully registered for the Blockstack Token Sale Voucher using my decentralized Blockstack ID and a Blockstack app.

## Conclusion

Blockstack provides a set of tools that allow developers to quickly and easily build powerful decentralized apps. An app like the [Blockstack Token Sale Voucher Registration App](https://blockstack.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com) would have taken significantly more time to write with traditional tools. A traditional approach would have required signing up for developer accounts with each of the social media platforms, agreeing to terms of service and applying for API access tokens. It would have required learning and integrating multiple social media platform software developer kits and the development and testing of multiple redirect flows. It would have meant the developer taking responsibility for securely handling sensitive user access credentials that if lost could compromise the user's online identities. It also would have meant third party dependencies and additional points of failure.

By building a Blockstack app, we were able to neatly side step all of these problems. With Blockstack, we were able to build an app using one simple API, no third party dependencies, one single, easily tested user flow, all without having to handle valuable user credentials. It is the difference building a bug-prone, hard-to-test, honeypot-for-hackers, devops monstrosity versus an elegant, easy-to-test app that handles the least amount of user data possible.

Blockstack Apps are a win for users as well. Had we written the Blockstack Token Sale Voucher Registration app with traditional tools instead of Blockstack, the resulting process would be much more painful and invasive for users. The user would be forced to go through a back-and-forth redirect to each social media account, in the process, granting us access to each of their accounts. They would have had to trust that we wouldn't abuse that access or get hacked and lose the credentials that gave that access. Instead, they got a three-click process that doesn't require that they give us privileged access to their personal accounts.

The initial version of the Blockstack Token Sale Voucher Registration app took only hours to write. It takes less than 60 seconds for user to go from clicking to the sign in button to finishing registration for the token sale. A traditional app would have taken days to write and much longer for a user to complete.

Blockstack empowers developers to write decentralized apps that are both simple and powerful and to do so without anyone else's permission. It also enables a new class of apps that not only deliver a superior user experience through speed and simplicity but does so in a way where users don't need to trust unknown third parties.

Want to see Blockstack in action? [Download Blockstack](https://blockstack.org/install/?ref=larrysalibra.com) and [try out the Blockstack Token Sale Voucher Registration App](https://blockstack.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com).

Are you a developer? [Let me know](https://twitter.com/larrysalibra/?ref=larrysalibra.com) what you want to build on Blockstack and how we can help you!

*Thanks to [Yukan Liao](https://explorer.blockstack.org/name/yukan.id?ref=larrysalibra.com), [Aaron Blankstein](https://explorer.blockstack.org/name/blankstein.id?ref=larrysalibra.com) and everyone else that provided feedback on early versions of this post.*

Disclaimer: The Blockstack Tokens are a crypto asset that is currently being developed by Blockstack Token LLC, a Delaware limited liability company, whose website can be found at www.blockstack.com. This post does not constitute an offer or sale of Blockstack Tokens (“the Tokens”) or any other mechanism for purchasing the Tokens (such as, without limitation, a fund holding the Tokens or a simple agreement for future tokens related to the Tokens). Any offer or sale of the Tokens or any related instrument will occur only based on definitive offering documents for the Tokens or the applicable instrument.
### Larry's Newsletter - Issue #22
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/newsletter/larrys-newsletter-issue-22/
Last updated: 2021-10-20T09:30:39.000Z
Happy New Year! We’re still in the midst of the holiday season here in South China with two weeks to go until the Chinese New Year. 

2017 is going to be an exciting year for decentralization - and with a US president coming to power that least half the world is very unhappy with, a great time for it as well!

## My Blog Posts

[Use systems instead of goals](https://www.larrysalibra.com/blog/swimming-with-a-system/20?utm%5Fcampaign=Enter%20email.%20Exit%20Twitter.&utm%5Fmedium=email&utm%5Fsource=Revue%20newsletter)

## Blockstack

MIT Technology Review did an interesting piece on Blockstack talking about [our vision for the future](https://www.technologyreview.com/s/603352/one-startups-vision-to-reinvent-the-web-for-better-privacy/?utm%5Fcampaign=Enter%20email.%20Exit%20Twitter.&utm%5Fmedium=email&utm%5Fsource=Revue%20newsletter). ****Must read**.  
  
[Blockstack Inc.](https://blockstack.com/?utm%5Fcampaign=Enter%20email.%20Exit%20Twitter.&utm%5Fmedium=email&utm%5Fsource=Revue%20newsletter) [raised $4mm](https://blockstack.org/blog/funding-the-new-decentralized-internet?utm%5Fcampaign=Enter%20email.%20Exit%20Twitter.&utm%5Fmedium=email&utm%5Fsource=Revue%20newsletter) to fund continuing development of the new decentralized internet. **Kudos** to Ryan & Muneeb for their hard work.  
  
Jude wrote a detailed overview post about [how names, profiles and apps all fit together](https://forum.blockstack.org/t/blockstack-onename-and-future-applications/529?u=larry&utm%5Fcampaign=Enter%20email.%20Exit%20Twitter.&utm%5Fmedium=email&utm%5Fsource=Revue%20newsletter) in the ****grand Blockstack plan**.

I [built a native macOS app that will get you on the decentralized internet with one click](https://forum.blockstack.org/t/blockstack-for-mac-alpha/528?u=larry&utm%5Fcampaign=Enter%20email.%20Exit%20Twitter.&utm%5Fmedium=email&utm%5Fsource=Revue%20newsletter). Right now it lets you use the Blockstack Browser without having to install a bunch of developer tools.

I added ability to [self-host your Blockstack ID profile and avatar on your dropbox account](https://forum.blockstack.org/t/browser-development-diary/474?u=larry&utm%5Fcampaign=Enter%20email.%20Exit%20Twitter.&utm%5Fmedium=email&utm%5Fsource=Revue%20newsletter). One more tiny small step toward complete self-sovereign identity.

We launched Guy’s mouth-watering, cutting edge new Blockstack brand across the Blockstack community’s web and social media properties. It incorporates 3d elements and is VR ready. (see below)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2021/10/image.png)

Blockstack's new logo

## Bitcoin

Bitcoin ended 2017 at or near all time highs well post US$1000\. People blame India’s war on cash and China’s foreign currency flight for the price rises. No one knows the real reason - even so, BitMex CEO Arthur Hayes’s [explanation of Chinese currency issues in relation to the Bitcoin price](https://blog.bitmex.com/big-door-in-small-door-out/?ref=larrysalibra.com) is well worth which will be an entertaining read. Rumors about the People’s Bank of China cracking down on China-based exchanges caused the price to come down. 

## China

WeChat, the world’s largest mobile messaging platform, [launched what it’s calling “mini apps”](http://www.sixthtone.com/news/WeChat-Sends-Little%20Apps-Into-Battle-for-Mobile-Domination?ref=larrysalibra.com) inside of its chat app. Further centralization in the Chinese Internet isn’t going to be good for anyone but Tencent and the government.
### Swimming with a System
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/swimming-with-a-system/
Last updated: 2017-01-15T16:00:00.000Z
> "goals are for losers." -Scott Adams

I became familiar with Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams during the past year's Presidential election - familiar with him outside of his signature on Dilbert cartoons that is. One of his blog posts about the election came across my Twitter feed. Of all the people pontificating on the election, what he was saying seemed to make a lot of sense to me in explaining what we were seeing.

I started following Adams's [blog posts](http://blog.dilbert.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com) and eventually was intrigued enough by his writing - especially regarding psychology and persuasion - that I reserved a copy of his book *How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life* from my [local public library](https://webcat.hkpl.gov.hk/lib/item?id=chamo:3299938&theme=WEB&ref=larrysalibra.com).

My biggest takeaway from the book was his theory of systems versus goals.

# Goals

When you have a goal, you're constantly failing until you reach the goal. If you do reach the goal, the thing that has kept you going is suddenly gone and where once was a goal is now an empty space.

Constant failure and emptiness punctuated by brief moments of success is hardly the way I want to go through life.

Luckily, there's a better way.

# Systems

Instead of focusing on a goal, develop a system that you can apply every day that moves your life in the direction you want. Every time you apply your system, you're succeeding. It feels much better to go through your days winning than it does coming up short of your lofty goals. The positive mental attitude this creates helps you perform a higher level and do better than had you focused on goals instead of systems.

Adams writes:

> “Goal-oriented people exist in a state of continuous presuccess failure at best, and permanent failure at worst if things never work out. Systems people succeed every time they apply their systems, in the sense that they did what they intended to do. The goals people are fighting the feeling of discouragement at each turn. The systems people are feeling good every time they apply their system.”

# A system in action

Until I read Adams, I hadn't realize that I'd already subconsciously started applying systems in certain areas of my life. Take swimming, for example:

I was a competitive swimmer throughout my adolescence, high school and college. We'd train six days a week sometimes twice a day, much of the year. After leaving the world of competitive swimming, I found the lack of exercise left me feeling lethargic, without much appetite.

Around 2008, I had recently moved to Guangzhou to build out a team after raising a seed round. The stress of hiring and building a product in a foreign country left me with many sleepless nights. I found that if I exercised, I could sleep well, so I made it a goal to find a swimming pool and go 3 times a week.

This goal of swimming 3 times a week was challenging. At the beginning of each week, I felt like I was already failing - I needed to swim 3 times and on day 1 I was already failing to meet the goal. It was like a bunch of homework hovering over my head. I needed to use some of my limited willpower to make sure it got done. Some weeks I'd meet the goal, which was good and other weeks, I didn't feel like going or could only make it 2 days...which felt like a failure.

Whatever I was doing, my approach to swimming outside of the structure of a competitive swim team wasn't working.

Fast forward several years, and I know apply a systems approach to swimming instead of a goal-oriented approach.

My system is this:

1. Wake up
2. Put on swim suit
3. Put on clothes
4. Walk across the street to pool
5. Put clothes in pool locker
6. Put on goggles
7. Jump into pool

I execute this system every day I'm in Hong Kong except for Saturdays when I swap the pool for the ocean with [a group of open water swimming friends](http://owshk.weebly.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com). (they're in the picture at the top of this post!)

Once or twice a month, I'll get to the end of the pool and won't feel like getting it. That's okay. I'm still winning because I'm applying my system.

People are shocked to learn that I swim *every day*. And it doesn't take willpower any more than brushing my teeth. In fact, it's *easier* to swim and **win every day** than it was for me to try to swim just 3 times a week.

[ ![An Open Water Swim](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2017/01/open-water.png) ](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2017/01/open-water.png?ref=larrysalibra.com) 

An open water swim in Hong Kong.

That's the power of systems versus goals.

Since realizing that I'm already enjoying the success of systems in some areas of my life, I'm working on applying them in others.

What do you think about systems versus goals? What systems do you use?
### Larry's Newsletter - Issue #21
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/newsletter/larrys-newsletter-issue-21/
Last updated: 2021-10-20T09:35:31.000Z
Hi y'all! Welcome back after an extra, extra long summer hiatus! I Hope you enjoyed your summer (and fall!). I just got back from a month long \~13,500 km roadtrip across the USA 🇺🇸 and back again with a week long hiatus to help with [Scaling Bitcoin in Milan](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLX1jlrc%5FKO1cMWE2HagT51gjEB9p7cAw3&ref=larrysalibra.com) 🇮🇹.

Besides enjoying many of the great natural wonders of North America's second biggest country, I had the opportunity to spend some much needed time with friends and family. You can check out some highlights from my trip on my [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/larrysalibra/?ref=larrysalibra.com).

Questions or comments? Reply to this email or [tweet at me](https://twitter.com/larrysalibra?ref=larrysalibra.com)!

Referred by a friend? [Sign up](https://www.larrysalibra.com/newsletter/?ref=larrysalibra.com)!

## Happy Hard Fork 🍴Week!

🎃 Happy Hard Fork Week! Version 0.14 of Blockstack Core is coming out this week. We're hard forking the consensus rules just in time for Halloween at Bitcoin block #436650 (originally #436363). Learn what's new in 0.14 in [Jude's announcement post](https://blog.blockstack.org/blockstack-core-v0-14-0-release-aad748f46d?ref=larrysalibra.com#.1x5cwhyvp).

## Exploring Blockstack

🔭 As some of you know, I've been working more working more closely with the Blockstack team over the past few months. One of the things I've been working on is building a [block explorer for Blockstack](https://explorer.blockstack.org/?ref=larrysalibra.com).

The Blockstack Explorer has yet to be officially announced while I work on additional features, mobile support and some scaling issues, but as a loyal newsletter reader, you get a sneak peak:

In Blockstack, Bitcoin addresses own names. Here you can see that the Bitcoin address [15kxt5aboFnBuJseR6cHNxMG7Tn6tfkrQZ owns my name larry.id](https://explorer.blockstack.org/address/15kxt5aboFnBuJseR6cHNxMG7Tn6tfkrQZ?ref=larrysalibra.com). You can [learn more about my name and its history here by looking up larry.id](https://explorer.blockstack.org/name/larry.id?ref=larrysalibra.com). From this, you can see that the zone information for larry.id was last updated in Bitcoin blockchain [in block #428902](https://explorer.blockstack.org/nameops/428902?ref=larrysalibra.com).

Here you can see an example of someone who has bought multiple Blockstack names with the single Bitcoin address [1MH74mNXSustf2zpFiFvPdcUwnfFk4r2j8](https://explorer.blockstack.org/address/1MH74mNXSustf2zpFiFvPdcUwnfFk4r2j8?ref=larrysalibra.com).

## Links & More

😱 "[Toasters are breaking the Internet](https://blog.blockstack.org/toasters-are-breaking-the-internet-c1d153c33f78?ref=larrysalibra.com)" - Muneeb Ali weighs in on the recent IoT powered DDoS attack on a large DNS provider that brought down a large portion of the Internet and talks about what we can do to fix it.

🤑 [TechCrunch: "Zcash, Blockstack, and appcoins, oh my!](https://techcrunch.com/2016/10/29/zcash-blockstack-and-appcoins-oh-my/?ref=larrysalibra.com)"

💡[Video: Ryan Shea's "Decentralized, Server-less Applications with Blockstack" talk at AllThingsOpen](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WveXpldGGa8&ref=larrysalibra.com)

🔧[Video: Muneeb at the Internet Archive on how trust on the Internet is broken](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmWIMiED9cE&ref=larrysalibra.com): "Something is wrong with the picture when you are trusting people that don't exist" ****SHORT, MUST WATCH**

## Lessons from history

🇨🇳 "[Why the Industrial Revolution didn’t happen in China](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/10/28/why-the-industrial-revolution-didnt-happen-in-china/?ref=larrysalibra.com)" - Answer: Centralization prevents competition. Competition is good for progress. History makes strong arguments for decentralization of technology and power. ****GOOD READ**

## Final Photo

🌄 I leave you with one of the dozens of amazing sunsets from my past month. Until next time!

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2021/10/IMG_5154.jpg)
### Blockstack in Asia Meetup Marathon Recap
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/recap-blockstack-in-asia-meetup-marathon/
Last updated: 2020-03-09T07:37:38.000Z
From July 8th to 10th, I co-hosted [Asia’s first three Blockstack meetups](https://larrysalibra.com/blockstack-meetups-come-to-asia/) with [Blockstack Labs](https://blockstack.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com) co-founder [Ryan Shea](https://onename.com/ryan?ref=larrysalibra.com) in Hong Kong, Shenzhen and Taipei.

At each meetup, Ryan presented an introduction to [Blockstack](https://blockstack.org/?ref=larrysalibra.com) after which we moved into demos and discussion. Each meetup saw a demographically unique group of attendees with different backgrounds and interests. The meetups were a lot of fun and provided lots to think about. In this post, I'll try to recap some of my thoughts and observations from each of the meetups and finish up with some lessons and ideas for the future.

## [Hong Kong Meetup, Friday, July 8, 2016](http://www.meetup.com/Blockstack-HK/events/232194750/?ref=larrysalibra.com)

Our meetup marathon kicked off in former British colony turned semi-autonomous Chinese territory Hong Kong on Friday night in the heart of the Causeway Bay shopping district. Armed with supermarket sushi and drinks, a mix of finance professionals, developers, Bitcoin & Ethereum enthusiasts and local reporters intently listened to Ryan’s introduction to Blockstack. Several attendees were developers with long careers in the banking industry. Other attendees were non-technical individuals that have been struggling to understand the concept of blockchain. Still others were interested to learn about how Blockstack fits into the current blockchain hype.

[ ![First Blockstack Meetup in Hong Kong.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2016/07/blockstack-recap-hong-kong.jpg) ](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2016/07/blockstack-recap-hong-kong.jpg?ref=larrysalibra.com) 

First Blockstack Meetup in Hong Kong.

Ryan’s presentation differed from many of the other blockchain events we’ve seen in Hong Kong in that he was upfront and honest about the constraints and limitations of Blockstack that come from the constraints of the underlying public blockchain. This stood in stark contrast to other blockchain events where vague promises were made that the technology is applicable to anything and everything.

One attendee who has done [significant work on smart contracts](https://github.com/joequant/bitquant/tree/master/smart-contracts?ref=larrysalibra.com), [Joseph Wang](https://bitquant.wordpress.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com), wrote to us after the meetup that he has been frustrated with “the disconnect between hype and application in blockchain” and that he was “very pleasantly impressed” by what Blockstack has to offer.

## [Shenzhen Meetup: Saturday, July 9, 2016](http://www.meetup.com/Blockstack-Shenzhen/events/232194813/?ref=larrysalibra.com)

20 kilometers north across the China border, the second meetup was held deep in the heart of a suburban technology park near the world headquarters of technology giants Huawei and Tencent.

Unlike the Hong Kong event, we promoted the Shenzhen in both Chinese and English on multiple platform instead of on the meetup.com which isn’t widely used in the country. As a result, we didn’t have a clear idea of who would be attending or which languages they would be most comfortable speaking.

[ ![First Blockstack Meetup in Shenzhen.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2016/07/blockstack-recap-shenzhen.jpg) ](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2016/07/blockstack-recap-shenzhen.jpg?ref=larrysalibra.com) 

First Blockstack Meetup in Shenzhen.

We ended up with an enthusiastic group of mainly Chinese-speaking attendees with three or four bilingual people. Our Shenzhen was a diverse group of mechanical engineers, teachers, business people and lawyers. A large portion of the attendees had little prior exposure to blockchain and wanted to understand what it was all about. One enthusiastic attendee flew almost 3 hours from Shanghai to Shenzhen to attend our Blockstack Shenzhen Meetup.

Ryan started out his talk, which I translated to Chinese in real time, by making sure everyone in the room had a common understanding of blockchain. Building upon his experience from his earlier analogy of [blockchain as a journal](https://blog.blockstack.org/the-blockchain-as-a-journal-dc1715ffa8a1?ref=larrysalibra.com), he described blockchain as a set of public libraries with special characteristics. Anyone can start a public library and each public library has the same books in the same order. A book represents a block of transactions. Anytime a book is added to a library, all other libraries get a copy of the book in the same order. Anyone can add a page to a book by creating a transaction and paying the appropriate fee and an algorithm periodically appoints a person to create books out of all available pages. Once a page is included in a book and the book is published and accepted into the library, neither the page nor the book can be changed, removed or placed on a different place on the shelf.

[ ![Ryan Shea delivering his intro to Blockstack talk](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2016/07/blockstack-recap-ryan-intro.jpg) ](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2016/07/blockstack-recap-ryan-intro.jpg?ref=larrysalibra.com) 

Blockstack Labs co-founder Ryan Shea introducing Blockstack in Shenzhen, China.

This blockchain as a public library analogy translated very well into Chinese and was great for helping blockchain newbies get a basic idea of some of the unique properties and behaviors of blockchains. Most people don’t keep journals and aren’t accountants, however most educated people (over a certain age) have a used a public library at some point or another.

Our bilingual meetup ran overtime as each slide and question took twice as much time as usual and as such we were unable to dive much into demos and hands on.

## [Taipei Meetup: Sunday, July 10, 2016](http://www.meetup.com/Blockstack-Taipei/events/232194801/?ref=larrysalibra.com)

Two hours of flying and 800 kilometers to the northeast we finished off our series of meetups in Taipei which had just narrowly escaped the effects of super typhoon Nepartak two days earlier. We filled the office of Taiwanese blockchain startup [DTCO](https://dtco.co/?ref=larrysalibra.com)…an amazing turnout for an event held on a rainy Sunday evening.

After our bilingual meetup in Shenzhen, it was a relief to find our Taipei audience was comfortable with an English only presentation. This also allowed us more time for demos and hands on installing the Blockstack client.

[ ![First Blockstack Meetup in Taipei.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2016/07/blockstack-recap-taipei.jpg) ](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2016/07/blockstack-recap-taipei.jpg?ref=larrysalibra.com) 

First Blockstack Meetup in Taipei.

The Taipei audience was the most technical of the three meetups with technical cofounders of local blockchain startups and other developers in attendance. In comparison to the Hong Kong and Taipei meetups, attendees at the Blockstack Taipei were more interested in the practical application of Blockstack technology and how it could be used to solve the business needs of their clients. The local startups seemed particularly interested as to why Blockstack choses to use the Bitcoin blockchain over Ethereum for its production network.

[ ![After the Taipei Meetup](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2016/07/blockstack-recap-taipei-group.jpg) ](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2016/07/blockstack-recap-taipei-group.jpg?ref=larrysalibra.com) 

Several hardcore Taipei Blockstackers stayed late Sunday evening talking decentralization.

## Takeaways

- Given the option, it probably makes more sense to have language specific meetups. (eg. separate English and Chinese meetups) Bilingual meetups take a lot of time, move slowly and are tiring for both attendees and those speaking.
- When bilingual meetups are inevitable, asking different bilingual audience members to translate for their monolingual colleagues is a great way to give translators a rest and check to make sure the audience is understanding the content.
- Ask meetup participants to explain concepts in their own words.
- Two hours is a great amount of time to go through a detailed intro to Blockstack for a mixed (technical/non-technical) audience without a good handle on blockchain technology. It doesn’t leave time to do anything hands on or to talk much about specific attendee’s projects.
- Follow up meetup ideas:  
  - Hands on: Registering your own Blockstack ID
  - Hands on: Installing and Using the Blockstack CLI
  - Hands on: Set up your own Blockstack Node
  - Hands on: Building your first Blockstack app
  - Talk: How Blockstack’s Virtualchain works
  - Talk: How Blockstack can add decentralization to your app
  - Talk: Decentralized architecture: what to decentralize and why

## Thanks

Thanks to [Ovey Yeung](https://twitter.com/oveyyeung?ref=larrysalibra.com), Kristian Man and Karen Wan of [Tuspark Global Network](https://tgnglobal.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com) for providing the meetup venues in Hong Kong and Shenzhen and their help in getting word out about the meetups!

Thanks to blockchain startup [DTCO](https://dtco.co/?ref=larrysalibra.com), [DTCO CEO Jacob Lee](https://twitter.com/jacobapo?ref=larrysalibra.com) and DTCO CTO Brady Liu for opening their office to us for the Taipei meetup and keeping everyone fed with pizza and drinks. A special thanks to [Thomas Hu](https://twitter.com/epoquehu?ref=larrysalibra.com) of [Kyber Capital](http://www.kybercap.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com) for his help in arranging the Taipei event.

Thanks to [Ryan Shea](https://onename.com/ryan?ref=larrysalibra.com) of [Blockstack Labs](https://blockstack.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com) for making the long trip out from New York City to Asia.

## Get involved

Want to be notified of the next Blockstack meetup in your area? [Join a Blockstack meetup group!](http://www.meetup.com/topics/blockstack/all/?ref=larrysalibra.com)

Ideas for a feature, suggestions for a future meetup or questions about why your code isn’t work? [Join the Blockstack Slack!](http://chat.blockstack.org/?ref=larrysalibra.com)
### Blockstack meetups come to Asia!
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/blockstack-comes-to-asia/
Last updated: 2016-07-07T16:00:00.000Z
The great [Bitcoin halvening](http://www.thehalvening.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com) is upon us in less than 2 short days. To celebrate, [Blockstack](https://blockstack.org/?ref=larrysalibra.com) meetups are coming to Asia!

I’m delighted to be organizing three meetups in Hong Kong, Shenzhen and Taipei this coming weekend. [Ryan Shea](https://onename.com/ryan?ref=larrysalibra.com), co-founder of [Blockstack Labs](https://blockstack.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com) will be in attendance and we’ll be talking about building applications with blockchains, decentralization and hearing about projects everyone is working on. We’ll also get a sneak peek at some things that are coming down the pipeline.

If you’re a developer, designer, or simply interested in learning more about Blockstack and building decentralized applications with blockchains and in Hong Kong, Shenzhen or Taipei this weekend, come by one of the meetups and say hi!

[**Blockstack Hong Kong Meetup - Friday, July 8th**](http://www.meetup.com/Blockstack-HK/events/232194750/?ref=larrysalibra.com)

[**Blockstack Shenzhen Meetup - Saturday, July 9th**](http://www.meetup.com/Blockstack-Shenzhen/events/232194813/?ref=larrysalibra.com)

[**Blockstack Taipei Meetup - Sunday, July 10th**](http://www.meetup.com/Blockstack-Taipei/events/232194801/?ref=larrysalibra.com)
### Larry's Newsletter - Issue #20
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/newsletter/larrys-newsletter-issue-20/
Last updated: 2021-10-20T09:52:09.000Z
Hello happening readers! There's been lots of Bitcoin drama the past few weeks.

Before we start with the drama, first, some good news. Bitcoin 0.12.1 was released and the Segregated Witness [pull request was submitted](https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/7910?ref=larrysalibra.com), holding to [the schedule the community negotiated here in Hong Kong in late February](https://medium.com/@bitcoinroundtable/bitcoin-roundtable-consensus-266d475a61ff?ref=larrysalibra.com#.ypl9owvfh).

Despite a lot of the extraneous noise and distractions, real work is getting done and code shipped thanks to the quiet and diligent work of many members of the community. Thank you to everyone hard at work building the future!

## 🙄 Mr. Wrong

Monday's big "news" was that the man in Australia "outed" as Satoshi [this past December](https://www.wired.com/2015/12/bitcoins-creator-satoshi-nakamoto-is-probably-this-unknown-australian-genius/?ref=larrysalibra.com), Craig Wright, is back in the news again. This time he convinced the BBC and The Economist that he might be Satoshi to the point where they were willing to do a coordinated release. Within minutes of the story breaking, many pointed out on Twitter and other places that it didn't pass the smell test. Within an hour or so, Wright's so-called "proof" was found to be fake.

[🔍 Excellent point by point summary of evidence for and against Wright being Satoshi](https://www.nikcub.com/posts/craig-wright-is-not-satoshi-nakamoto/?ref=larrysalibra.com) by Nik Cubrilovic.

[✏️ Explanation of how Wright created his "proof"](https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/4hhreq/how%5Fcraig%5Fconstructed%5Fthe%5Fmessage%5Fthat%5Fhe%5Fsigned/?ref=larrysalibra.com)

## ✂️ Cutting through the Hype

📦🔗 ThoughtWorks has a multi-part series that does a decent job of cutting through the ****blockchain**\-hype: [Parts 1](https://www.thoughtworks.com/insights/blog/blockchain-grown-ups-cutting-through-hype?ref=larrysalibra.com) and [Part 2](https://www.thoughtworks.com/insights/blog/blockchain-for-grown-ups-part-two?ref=larrysalibra.com) are worth a read.

Smart Contacts are being pushed as the solution for anything and everything. Much of the hype is nonsense. CoinDesk has two posts examining some of the problems with smart contracts:

😒 [Why many smart contract use case don't make sense](http://www.coindesk.com/three-smart-contract-misconceptions/?ref=larrysalibra.com)

💰 [Costs associated with smart contracts on public blockchains](http://www.coindesk.com/turing-complete-smart-contracts/?ref=larrysalibra.com)

If you want to learn more, check out [the discussion surrounding these two posts](http://blockstack.slackarchive.io/articles/-/1458744213/1461102044/?ref=larrysalibra.com) on the [Blockstack](https://blockstack.org/?ref=larrysalibra.com) slack from April 20.

## 🐱 ShapeShift Hack

[ShapeShift](https://shapeshift.io/?ref=larrysalibra.com) is a digital asset exchange that lets you trade one digital asset for another without having to register, create an account or undergo any sort of paperwork. Imagine a bank account number where you could could transfer US dollars and it would magically send you back Euros a few minutes later. ShapeShift does this for cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ether.

🐶 Like so many exchanges before it, ShapeShift was hacked. [As the CEO tells the story, it was an inside job](https://news.bitcoin.com/looting-fox-sabotage-shapeshift/?ref=larrysalibra.com) involving a disgruntled IT guy with a dog.

😱 A well-known Cornell profession wrote a post [explaining the problems with the admitting rather outrageous story](http://hackingdistributed.com/2016/04/25/shapeshift-hack-simply-incredible/?ref=larrysalibra.com).

## 🏀 Something Fun

If you've made it this far, congratulation and thanks for reading!

Take a break from the excessive amounts of drama in this issue with this [cool animation of Bitcoin blocks and transactions in real time](http://bitbonkers.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com).

Until next time!
### Live Photos on the Web
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/live-photos-on-the-web/
Last updated: 2020-03-09T07:40:36.000Z
\_**Update March 2020**: After migrating this blog post, the code on this page no longer works. I'm leaving it here for historical reference. Mealwhile, if you want to display Live Photos on the web, Apple has [tools for you](https://developer.apple.com/documentation/livephotoskitjs?ref=larrysalibra.com).

**TL;DR:* I made Live Photos work on the web and it brought my computer to a grinding halt. Just here for the demos? [Skip ahead!](https://larrysalibra.com/live-photos/#safe-demo)*

## What are Live Photos?

Live Photos, Apple's flagship iPhone photo party trick arrived on the scene with the 6s in the fall of 2015\. The concept is simple, each time you take a picture, you get a high quality photo and 1.5 seconds of less-than-high quality video before and after the moment you snapped the shutter.

Live Photos brings this magical Disney fountain to life.

Apple implements this as a 12 megapixel, 4032 pixels wide by 3024 high JPEG image file and an up-to-three-seconds-long Quicktime MOV video file. As long as you stay within Live Photos approved areas of the Apple ecosystem, the technical details of this is all transparent to you. At the swipe of your wand…err…mouse, your Live Photos spring to life on command like they were straight off the front page of Harry Potter’s Daily Prophet.

## Dead outside of the Apple ecosystem

As soon as you step out of these Live Photo friendly zones, by exporting your Live Photos from Photos, you’re left with two unwieldily source files and no way to recreate the Live Photo experience you know and love.

![Live Photo source files](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2016/04/live-photo-source-files.png) 

Each Live Photo is actually two files: an image and a video.

Half a year after launch, Live Photo support isn’t very widespread outside of the iOS apps of some large services. While some people can share Live Photos on Facebook (I’m not one of them), viewing them is limited to others on iOS.

Even within Apple’s Ecosystem, iCloud Photo Sharing’s public website and iCloud.com’s Photos app ignore remove the life from your Live Photos, showing only still images.

![iCloud Photos](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2016/04/icloud-photos.jpg) 

iCloud.com Photos ignores Live Photos.

There’s also no good way to share your beautiful Live Photos with your Android or Windows using friends. You can either send them the still photo or convert the video to an animated GIF or a video clip. Either way, you lose the flavor that makes Live Photos magic.

## Making photos live on the web

I decided to take a stab at recreating the Live Photos magic in a webpage. This webpage to be precise. After all, how hard could it be?

My approach would be to use a combination of the HTML `img` and `video` elements, displaying the still photo in the `img` tag and briefly displaying the `video` element over the `img` tag when the Live Photo is activated. I’d also make the code self-contained and reusable so that it could easily be used on any website, not just my own. Simple in theory…in practice not so simple.

## Problem: Web Components only work in Chrome

The obvious approach was to use a technology called Web Components, which makes it easy to make self-contained reusable building blocks out of HTML and Javascript, to create a custom `live-photo` HTML tag. Unfortunately, as of April 2016, [Chrome is the only browser that supports the technology out of the box](http://caniuse.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com#search=web%20components). So I was stuck using slow, buggy, Javascript polyfills to emulate the functionality in other browsers. These polyfills have some negative side effects, including breaking Twitter javascript in Safari.

## Problem: Only Safari on Mac can play Quicktime

The video container format used by Live Photos won’t play on most browsers and platforms. This means, the Quicktime MOV files we exported from Apple Photos need to be converted to a container format that works on most browsers, like MP4\. To make matters more complicated, while the video format used by Live Photos will play in most browsers, the audio format, PCM, won’t. So besides changing video container formats, we also have to transcode the audio into a format that will play. No worries, our friend `ffmpeg` saves the day:

```bash
$ ffmpeg -y -i IMG_0008.MOV -vcodec copy -acodec libfaac IMG_0008.mp4

```

## Problem: iPhone can’t play inline videos

The next problem I ran into is that the device that creates Live Photos, the iPhone, can’t play videos inline in its web browser. This restriction on iOS Safari on the iPhone and iPod (but not iPad), while ostensibly to save users from excessive battery and bandwidth usage, is really a holdover from the earlier days of the platform.

Our best option for iOS is to turn the video into an animated GIF. This loses a lot of quality and the audio, but will let us appear to play video in web page. It’s the best we can do.

## Problem: Caching videos uses up a lot of bandwidth and memory

To get the magical effect of Live Photos, the photo needs to spring to life as soon as the user interacts with it. Achieving that magical “spring” means having the video downloaded and ready to play before the user interacts with it.

An average Live Photo takes up about 10 megabytes including the image, video and animated GIF. By conditionally loading both the animated GIF and video only on platforms where it was necessary, I was able to reduce that size down to about 6 or 7 megabytes. 7 megabytes for one asset is a lot even for a high speed connection.

However, put dozens of these on one page and it’s easy to create a web page that requires hundreds of megabytes to load and even more in memory to render. I learned this the hard way as Safari repeatedly made my Mac grind to a halt during development when I tried to load almost 200 Live Photos on one page.

![Safari using lots of ram](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2016/04/safari-ram.png) 

Safari tries to display almost a gigabyte of Live Photos.

iPhone, with its limited RAM, fares even worse. A page with 60 or Live Photos is enough to bring iOS Safari to a halt as it maxes out memory on the latest iPhone 6s Plus hardware.

![Safari runs out of RAM on iOS](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2016/04/safari-crash.jpg) 

Safari runs out of memory on my iPhone 6s Plus.

## Lessons

It’s difficult to deliver a magical Live Photo experience in a web browser a way that is both simple and doesn’t put large demands on the user’s bandwidth and computing resources. A really robust Live Photos on the web solution (which this is not) requires a lot of processing, converting and rendering on both the server side and complicated client side logic to select the right combination of video and photo for the user’s situation.

## Enough talk, I want to see Live Photos!

I thought you’d never ask! I’ve put together a collection of more than 150 of my favorite unedited, taken-with-my-phone Live Photos.

## Safe Demo

These demos are relatively safe. You’ll see scaled down thumbnails of each Live Photo and need to click visit each photo’s page to load the Live Photo.

{% for category in site.data.photos\_by\_category %}[{{ category\[0\] }}](https://larrysalibra.com/live-photos/%7B%7Bcategory[0]%7D%7D-lite/) {% endfor %}

## Dangerous Demo

Instead of scaled down thumbnails, this demo puts multiple real, living Live Photos on each category page. You’ll regret clicking on these links if you’re on a metered connection or something much slower than 100 megabit. Memory constrained devices might also crash. You have been warned!

{% for category in site.data.photos\_by\_category %}[{{ category\[0\] }}](https://larrysalibra.com/live-photos/%7B%7Bcategory[0]%7D%7D/) {% endfor %}

## How can I get this on my site?

If you’re interested in using this commercially or have other questions about this, email me at [livephotos@larrysalibra.com](mailto:livephotos@larrysalibra.com).

If you’d like to be notified if I publish the code and tools I used to enable Live Photos on my blog, submit your email below.

{% include mailing-list-live-photos.html %}

## I’ve found a problem

Please accept my apologies! I’m not surprised! If you’re so inclined, [open an issue on Github describing the problem](https://github.com/larrysalibra/live-photos/issues?ref=larrysalibra.com). Thanks!

*Found a better way to make Live Photos work on the web? [Tweet at me](https://twitter.com/larrysalibra/?ref=larrysalibra.com) or [get in touch](https://larrysalibra.com/invitation/)!*
### 2015: The Year the Great Firewall went Global
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/2015-the-year-the-great-firewall-went-global/
Last updated: 2020-03-09T07:41:02.000Z
**TL;DR:* 2015 marked a changing point in China’s relationship with the global Internet. This post takes a look back at 2015 and 16 events in which the effects of China’s Internet control and censorship regime started being felt outside of its borders.*

I spent much of the past week on holiday in Mainland China…my longest stint behind [the Great Firewall (GFW)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great%5FFirewall?ref=larrysalibra.com) in a couple years. Even after living behind the Great Firewall for the better part of a decade, I was surprised at how cut off the Chinese internet has become from the rest of the world compared to how it was just three years ago when I ended my residence in Guangzhou.

It used to be that you had to turn on your VPN to access certain websites. Now the censorship, website blocking, and deliberate interference with encrypted protocols has gotten to the point where a computer or phone normally configured for use outside of the country doesn’t really work properly in China.

## Life behind the Great Firewall

Life online behind the Great Firewall is like life anywhere else, except:

- You can’t search for things.
- Your email doesn’t arrive.
- You can’t communicate with friends, family and business colleagues.
- Your calendar and contacts won’t sync.
- Your phone or computer won’t back up.
- It’s slow, hard or impossible to download or update apps.
- You won’t get any likes on your selfie because you can’t even share it.
- You can’t even figure out where you are.

You can’t really do much of anything unless you use services provided by local, government approved companies like Tencent, Baidu or Sina.

[ ![Permits required](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2016/01/china-permits-required.jpg) ](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2016/01/china-permits-required.jpg?ref=larrysalibra.com) 

In China’s vision of the Internet, permits are always required.

Back in the good old days of Chinese internet censorship, you could leave your VPN always on and have a relatively “normal” uncensored Internet experience. These days, you can still try to use a VPN and it will sometimes work…for a while. But more than likely, you’ll connect just long enough to get started doing whatever you need to do only to have the connection die ten minutes or 20 megabytes into your session. Frustrating.

It used to be that leaving Mainland China let you escape the effects of China’s internet censorship and control policies. In 2015 that changed. China’s economic importance and global political ambitions have grown to the point that the effects of its Internet policy are now regularly felt outside of its geographic borders. No longer is China content to exercise its Internet sovereignty by controlling technology and its use within its own borders, but like our favorite red, white, blue superpower, China sees no problem in taking actions with extraterritorial consequences to achieve its goals.  


[ ![Bridge across Shenzhen River at Futian](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2016/01/china-futian-bridge-thumb.jpg) ](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2016/01/china-futian-bridge.jpg?ref=larrysalibra.com) 

This short bridge across the Shenzhen River between Shenzhen and Hong Kong also spans the Internet chasm created by the Great Firewall.

Let's take a look back at 2015 and 17 events that marked the year the Great Firewall went global.

## January 2015

### 1\. [As WeChat gained traction overseas, users found themselves subject to Chinese censorship](http://www.slate.com/blogs/future%5Ftense/2015/01/06/tencent%5Fs%5Fwechat%5Fworldwide%5Finternet%5Fusers%5Fare%5Fvoluntarily%5Fsubmitting%5Fto.html?ref=larrysalibra.com)

WeChat is a messaging that has the *de facto* monopoly on mobile messaging in China. It also happens to be very well designed and a lot of fun to use. Unsurprisingly, the friendly design and features that make it attractive to Chinese users are also appreciated in many non-Chinese communities. Since other messaging apps are blocked in China, it’s also the only choice for communities that span both sides of the Great Firewall. [\[1\]](#fn1)

A well thought out user interface doesn’t help, however, when your posts are censored, blocked, deleted or silently not delivered because they’ve run afoul of the censor’s sensibilities.

It also doesn’t help activists, like those pushing for rights for women, whose WeChat messages are read by [Chinese authorities before ending up in jail](http://chinachange.org/2015/04/12/detention-of-five-chinese-feminist-activists-at-the-juncture-of-beijing20-an-interview-with-professor-wang-zheng/?ref=larrysalibra.com).

[ ![Censored WeChat post](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2016/01/china-wechat-censored.jpg) ](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2016/01/china-wechat-censored.jpg?ref=larrysalibra.com) [ ![Uncensored WeChat post confirming censorship](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2016/01/china-wechat-confirmation.jpg) ](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2016/01/china-wechat-confirmation.jpg?ref=larrysalibra.com) 

In the first post I thank Xi Dada for China Immigration’s kind birthday wishes. Notice how there are no comments or likes. The second post, a post of a screenshot of the first, censored post, asking if anyone saw the first post, has immediate engagement and everyone replies they can’t see the first post.

### 2\. [Apple gives Chinese government access to its source code](http://qz.com/332059/apple-is-reportedly-giving-the-chinese-government-access-to-its-devices-for-a-security-assessment/?ref=larrysalibra.com)

[Chinese state media reported](http://www.bjnews.com.cn/news/2015/01/21/350845.html?ref=larrysalibra.com) that Apple agreed to let the Chinese government inspect its products for 3rd party backdoors and to make sure it protects user data. Many media sources interpreted this to mean that Apple was providing China with access to its source code.

### 3\. [GFW upgrade fail causes attack on Korean Government website and porn sites](https://en.greatfire.org/blog/2015/jan/gfw-upgrade-fail-visitors-blocked-sites-redirected-porn?ref=larrysalibra.com)

[DNS poisoning](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNS%5Fspoofing?ref=larrysalibra.com) is a censorship technique used by the Great Firewall where visitors to blocked domain names are sent to the wrong servers. For a period of time, the GFW was sending users trying to visit blocked sites like Facebook to a site owned by the Korean government causing a distributed denial of service attack (DDOS attack) .

I had a first hand view of these attacks in action here in Hong Kong when a [popular, independent English language news site](https://thenanfang.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com) targeted by the GFW came to me for assistance in mitigating the crippling GFW directed DDOS attack that they were experiencing.

## February 2015

### 4\. [China Considers Banning Western Tech from Banking](http://www.ibtimes.com/china-cites-security-crackdown-western-tech-it-protectionism-or-prudence-1831180?ref=larrysalibra.com)

As usual, the excuse for excluding Western firms is “security”, but the motivation appears to protectionism. Either way, foreign companies, their customers and shareholders pay the price.

## March 2015

### 5\. [CNNIC certificates found to be used for MITM attack on Google, Apple, Microsoft, others](https://en.greatfire.org/blog/2015/mar/evidence-shows-cnnic-and-cac-behind-mitm-attacks?ref=larrysalibra.com)

The China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC), a Chinese government organization is also holder of a SSL root certificate that up until now was trusted by major web browsers and operating systems. This meant that they could create SSL certificates that let any website pretend it’s another website and these would be trusted by almost all phones and computers worldwide.

The temptation to use this power to impersonate popular sites like Google and Apple’s iCloud in order to spy on otherwise private communication was too much. [Google caught CNNIC compromising security of customers worldwide and outed them.](https://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.com/2015/03/maintaining-digital-certificate-security.html?ref=larrysalibra.com)

[ ![Don’t trust CNNIC's root certificate](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2016/01/china-cnnic.png) ](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2016/01/china-cnnic.png?ref=larrysalibra.com) 

You can configure your computer to never trust CNNIC.

### 6\. [China’s Great Cannon attacks Github](https://larrysalibra.com/why-baidu-was-hijacked-to-attack-github/)

A new offensive set of capabilities in the Great Firewall came to light in an attack against Github. These capabilities became known as the [Great Cannon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great%5FCannon?ref=larrysalibra.com). In this attack, Baidu’s network was hijacked by the Great Firewall and malware was injected in their analytics code, which turned unsuspecting overseas visitors to Chinese sites into a giant bot network programmed to attack Github.

This wasn’t the first attack on Github, which is seen as largely unblockable by China because of its importance in the tech industry because many widely used open source projects and libraries are hosted on it. Because of its economic importance and unblockable status, dissidents have taken to hosting information China finds unacceptable on the site. The Great Cannon attack on Github can be interpreted as a way to put economic pressure on the site to stop hosting content China finds objectionable.

It’s important to note that this was [not China’s first attempt to compromise Github](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5124784&ref=larrysalibra.com) and it probably won’t be the last.

## April 2015

### 7\. [Great Firewall blocks Login with Facebook](https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2015/04/29/great-firewall-of-china-blocks-facebooks-login-system/?ref=larrysalibra.com)

Build your app or website so that users have to login with Facebook (or Google)? Congratulations! Your app doesn’t work in China! The future is decentralized - [next time, better use the Blockchain!](https://blockstack.org/?ref=larrysalibra.com).

## June 2015

### 8\. [Google, Firefox, Apple block CNNIC certificate](https://en.greatfire.org/blog/2015/sep/apple-blocked-cnnic-ca-months-after-mitm-attacks?ref=larrysalibra.com)

Google, Firefox, and Apple block CNNIC root certificate…but instruct their software to continue [trusting a list of domain names that have SSL certificates signed by CNNIC](https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204938?ref=larrysalibra.com).

## September 2015

### 9\. [XCodeGhost malware infects popular Chinese iOS apps](http://arstechnica.com/security/2015/09/apple-scrambles-after-40-malicious-xcodeghost-apps-haunt-app-store/?ref=larrysalibra.com)

The Great Firewall makes downloading apps from outside of China a slow and frustrating experience. Apple’s developer tool XCode, required for creating and building iOS and Mac apps, is a very large download, with a size in the many gigabytes. It also is updated very frequently, with a new version appearing every time a Mac OS X or iOS beta version is released. Apple developers in China were quickly frustrated by the hours of time it would take to download each new version of XCode from Apple’s servers and searched for other domestic sources of the software.

It turned out that the versions of XCode downloaded by these developers in China were infected with code that inserted malware into the apps that they made and submitted to Apple’s App Store. This malware cause apps downloaded by users to connect to a command and control server - like one used in a bot net - and send back personal information.

Many apps used by people both inside and outside of China were affected including WeChat, Angry Birds 2 and Uber competitor Didi Kuaiche.

## October 2015

### 10\. [XYZ Domain Registry to automatically censor domains for China](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/10/accepting-chinese-censorship-domains-registry-xyzcom-invites-more?ref=larrysalibra.com)

The XYZ Domain Registry [submitted a proposal to ICANN](https://www.icann.org/en/system/files/files/request-2014154-multiple-09oct15-en.pdf?ref=larrysalibra.com) that was interpreted by the EFF and others as being a statement that they will prohibit registration of words banned by China on top level domains that they control. The [CEO eventually denied the allegation](https://ceo.xyz/freedom/?ref=larrysalibra.com) but that it seemed so plausible and would be technically trivial to implement, indicates how fragile current Internet infrastructure is to resisting censorship.

[ ![XYZ's ICANN proposal](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2016/01/china-icann-xyz.jpg) ](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2016/01/china-icann-xyz.jpg?ref=larrysalibra.com) 

Proposal submitted to ICANN by XYZ for a Chinese gateway that would maintain compliance with Chinese law.

## November 2015

### 11\. [China Eastern installs inflight Wifi that censors Internet outside of China](https://www.runwaygirlnetwork.com/2015/11/16/whats-the-wifi-use-case-for-non-chinese-flying-china-eastern/?ref=larrysalibra.com)

If it wasn’t bad enough that US and other airlines disable inflight wifi while flying over Mainland China, now passengers on China Eastern flights outside of Mainland China will be able to enjoy the behind the Great Firewall experience without even needing a China Visa!

[ ![China Eastern 777](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2016/01/china-eastern-777300.jpg) ](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2016/01/china-eastern-777300.jpg?ref=larrysalibra.com) 

You can access all of the Internet from this China Eastern 777 except for most of sites and apps you want to use.

### 12\. [Apple News censored in China](https://larrysalibra.com/how-apple-censors-news-in-china/)

I discovered that Apple includes code in iOS that disables Apple News whenever it detects a Chinese mobile network signal. This China Kill Switch also disables the global version of Apple Maps and replaces it with a version approved by the Chinese government. The China Kill Switch is present in versions of iOS included on all iPhones, iPod Touches and iPads, including those sold outside of China.

[ ![Apple News Censored](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2016/01/china-news-blocked.jpg) ](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2016/01/china-news-blocked.jpg?ref=larrysalibra.com) 

No news is not good news. It’s censored news.

## December 2015

### 13\. [GFW makes Chinese Bitcoin miners unable to support large block sizes](http://www.coindesk.com/chinas-miners-heat-up-blocksize-debate-at-scaling-bitcoin-hong-kong/?ref=larrysalibra.com)

At Phase 2 of the [Scaling Bitcoin conference in Hong Kong](https://scalingbitcoin.org/?ref=larrysalibra.com), a major concern of the Chinese mining community was that larger block sizes would put them at a disadvantage because of how the Great Firewall slows down connections to the rest of the world. Empirical research was presented that showed that the Great Firewall quickly throttles encrypted data, like a Bitcoin block, when it is sent out of the country.

[ ![The Scaling Bitcoin Genesis Block](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2016/01/china-genesis-block-front-thumb.jpg) ](https://larrysalibra.com/the-genesis-block/) 

The technical constrains imposed by the Great Firewall present a problem even for stateless Bitcoin.

### 14\. [China Passes Antiterrorism Law That Critics Fear May Overreach](http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/28/world/asia/china-passes-antiterrorism-law-that-critics-fear-may-overreach.html?ref=larrysalibra.com)

Opponents who had seen a draft version said it grants broad new powers that could be abused to monitor peaceful citizens and steal commercial secrets. The US and UK governments want similar legislation and by doing so have given the Chinese government credibility in taking the same actions.

[ ![Chinese counterterrorism police vehicle](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2016/01/china-anti-terror-thumb.jpg) ](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2016/01/china-anti-terror.jpg?ref=larrysalibra.com) 

In recent years, counterterrorism police vehicles are a common sight outside Chinese railway stations and border crossings.

### 15\. [Microsoft failed to warn victims of Chinese email hack: former employees](http://www.reuters.com/article/us-microsoft-china-insight-idUSKBN0UE01Z20160101?ref=larrysalibra.com)

Microsoft’s hotmail email service was hacked by purported Chinese state actors and the company decided not to tell the victims and allowed the hackers to continue their campaign.

Microsoft’s China business is far from what one would call “successful” since most of their products in Chinese are pirated, not purchased. One has to wonder how a large company that depends on China for much of their revenue and growth (perhaps a certain fruit company?) would behave under similar circumstances. Perhaps something like this has already happened to other large foreign tech companies and we just haven’t yet found out.  


## January 2016

Mere hours into the new year, the long arm of Great Firewall was already in action...this time affecting Microsoft’s search engine.

### 16\. [Bing Goes Full-on Censorship in English Search Results Within China](https://thenanfang.com/search-engine-bing-com-featuring-skewed-results-china/?ref=larrysalibra.com)

Some internet users in China using Microsoft's Bing search engine found skewed results that reflected only a positive perspective of China.

## Questions for 2016

China under Xi Jinping has seen internal crackdowns on both corruption and dissent over the past few years. It has also been much more assertive in its foreign policy. China’s Internet policy of control and censorship will increasingly affect users outside in China as the country follows US lead in extraterritorial policy enforcement. As we’ve already seen with Apple products and [Hollywood movies](http://www.thestar.com/news/world/2015/12/26/is-american-film-industry-pandering-to-chinese-censors.html?ref=larrysalibra.com), design decisions for products, software, and services sold globally will be heavily influenced by a desire to maintain access to and succeed in the Chinese market.

How will this influence play out? Will companies take the Apple Maps approach and build with two versions of their product, a China and a global one? Will companies leave out functionality and content Beijing doesn’t approve, like Hollywood?

Will we see more offensive attacks like the Great Cannon attacks and hacking of consumer services? Will China play a larger roll in Internet regulatory agencies? Will [decentralization and censorship resistant technologies like those built on the Bitcoin blockchain](https://blockstack.org/?ref=larrysalibra.com) gain traction? If so, how will the Chinese government react?

Now that [Hong Kong booksellers have started disappearing](http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jan/03/hong-kong-politicians-call-beijing-comment-lee-po-editor-abduction?ref=larrysalibra.com) will owners of VPNs and creators of GFW circumvention technologies outside of Mainland China start to have [the same pressure their Mainland counterparts already face](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10101469&ref=larrysalibra.com)?

*Want answers? You’ll have to wait until 2017! In the meantime, [subscribe to my newsletter](https://larrysalibra.com/newsletter/) or [get in touch](https://larrysalibra.com/invitation/)!*

---

1. For example, the Bitcoin community makes heavy use of WeChat despite its anti-establishment tilt since most Bitcoin mining and trading happens in Mainland China [↩︎](#fnref1)
### The Genesis Block
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/the-genesis-block/
Last updated: 2020-03-09T07:41:43.000Z
While cleaning up after the Scaling Bitcoin workshops in Hong Kong on Monday, Bitcoin Association of Hong Kong co-founder Leonhard Weese had the forethought to save the podium’s logo from the trash. His idea was that we could collect signatures of workshop attendees and staff and create a token of the event to be passed down in the [Hong Kong Bitcoin community](https://www.bitcoinhk.org/?ref=larrysalibra.com).

[ ![Original location of the Scaling Bitcoin Genesis Block](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2015/12/genesis-origin-thumb.jpg) ](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2015/12/genesis-origin.jpg?ref=larrysalibra.com) [ ![Hong Kong-based members of the planning committee](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2015/12/genesis-scaling-bitcoin-hong-kong-planning-thumb.jpg) ](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2015/12/genesis-scaling-bitcoin-hong-kong-planning.jpg?ref=larrysalibra.com) 

Creation of The Genesis Block was the brainchild of Leo Weese (yellow shirt, right)!

First, we marked the block with the [most recently mined Bitcoin block number](https://live.blockcypher.com/btc/block/000000000000000000f9ad0c82d163bb4560724e9502e21477e961a4fe1e84ed/?ref=larrysalibra.com) before asking local members of the organizing team who working hard to clean up the venue to sign the block. Next, we took the block to the closing reception at Cyberport’s The Podium and took turns carrying it around and asking workshop attendees to sign.

[ ![Workshop attendee signs The Genesis Block](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2015/12/genesis-block-signing-thumb.jpg) ](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2015/12/genesis-block-signing.jpg?ref=larrysalibra.com) [ ![Larry and Jimmy pose with the Block and some orange juice](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2015/12/genesis-block-orange-juice-thumb.jpg) ](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2015/12/genesis-block-orange-juice.jpg?ref=larrysalibra.com) 

Asking conference attendees to sign The Genesis Block was a lot of fun. Who do you spot in these photos?

## Video of The Genesis Block

## Photos of The Genesis Block

[ ![Front of The Genesis Block](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2015/12/genesis-block-front-thumb.jpg) ](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2015/12/genesis-block-front.jpg?ref=larrysalibra.com) [ ![Back of The Genesis Block](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2015/12/genesis-block-back-thumb.jpg) ](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2015/12/genesis-block-back.jpg?ref=larrysalibra.com) 

Front & back of The Genesis Blocks. Whose names do you recognize?

[ ![The Genesis Block by The Podium](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2015/12/genesis-block-at-the-podium-thumb.jpg) ](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2015/12/genesis-block-at-the-podium.jpg?ref=larrysalibra.com) [ ![The Scaling Bitcoin sign](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2015/12/genesis-sign-thumb.jpg) ](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2015/12/genesis-sign.jpg?ref=larrysalibra.com) 

Signing of The Genesis Block happened at the Scaling Bitcoin closing reception at The Podium in Hong Kong.

*Want to learn more about Bitcoin in Hong Kong? [Join us](https://www.bitcoinhk.org/?ref=larrysalibra.com) or [get in touch](https://larrysalibra.com/invitation/)!*
### Blockstore & Blockchain ID
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/blockstack-talk/
Last updated: 2021-11-17T09:32:11.000Z
A 30 minute introduction to [Blockstore](https://github.com/blockstack/blockstack-server?ref=larrysalibra.com) and [Blockchain ID](https://github.com/blockstack/blockchain-id?ref=larrysalibra.com)  
given at Tuspark’s Causeway Bay location as part of [The Bitcoin Association of Hong Kong](https://www.bitcoinhk.org/?ref=larrysalibra.com)’s [Decentralize All Things event on November 18, 2015](https://www.bitcoinhk.org/2015-tuspark-bitcoin-decentralize/?ref=larrysalibra.com).

Please note, Blockstore is [now called Blockstack Server](https://www.getrevue.co/profile/larry/archive/12927?ref=larrysalibra.com).

## Video

[Watch on Youtube](https://youtu.be/bksQmltKmHQ?ref=larrysalibra.com) [Watch on Youku](http://v.youku.com/v%5Fshow/id%5FXMTM5MTc5Mjk4OA==.html?ref=larrysalibra.com)

## Slides

[View slides as HTML](https://larrysalibra.com/keynotes/2015-11-18-blockstore-blockchain-id/) [Download slides as PDF](https://larrysalibra.com/keynotes/2015-11-18-blockstore-blockchain-id.pdf)

## Photos

[ ![Arriving guests](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2015/11/blockstack-talk-arriving-guests.jpg) ](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2015/11/blockstack-talk-arriving-guests-full.jpg?ref=larrysalibra.com) [ ![Full house](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2015/11/blockstack-talk-full-house-full.jpg) ](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2015/11/blockstack-talk-full-house-full.jpg?ref=larrysalibra.com) [ ![Speakers Filipe, Larry, and Leo take a selfie.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2015/11/blockstack-talk-speakers-selfie.jpg) ](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2015/11/blockstack-talk-speakers-selfie-full.jpg?ref=larrysalibra.com) 

I joined Filipe Farinha and Leonhard Weese in front of a standing room only audience to talk about decentralization.

[ ![BAHK logo](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2015/11/blockstack-talk-bahk.jpg) ](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2015/11/blockstack-talk-bahk-full.jpg?ref=larrysalibra.com) [ ![Blockstack logos](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2015/11/blockstack-talk-blockstack-logos-1.jpg) ](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2015/11/blockstack-talk-blockstack-logos-1-full.jpg?ref=larrysalibra.com) [ ![Blockstack logos](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2015/11/blockstack-talk-blockstack-logos-2.jpg) ](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2015/11/blockstack-talk-blockstack-logos-2-full.jpg?ref=larrysalibra.com) 

Great looking logos.

*Want to learn more about Blockstack? [Join us](https://blockstack.org/?ref=larrysalibra.com) or [get in touch](https://larrysalibra.com/invitation/)!*
### Tantan Responds - Promises Encryption
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/tantan-responds-promises-encryption/
Last updated: 2015-11-16T16:00:00.000Z
Wow! I am shocked and humbled by the positive reaction to my [post last Friday about how Tantan doesn't use encryption](https://larrysalibra.com/how-chinese-tinder-clone-screws-you/). The [overwhelming](https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/3sz5jq/how%5Fchinese%5Ftinder%5Fclone%5Fscrews%5Fyou/?ref=larrysalibra.com) [interest](https://www.reddit.com/r/China/comments/3sxbev/how%5Fchinese%5Ftinder%5Fclone%5Ftantan%5Fscrews%5Fyou/?ref=larrysalibra.com) [on reddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/netsec/comments/3szwqz/how%5Fchinese%5Ftinder%5Fclone%5Ftantan%5Fscrews%5Fyou/?ref=larrysalibra.com) and across Facebook and Twitter along with the interest from the mainstream media showed that many people understand the value of encryption and expect privacy.

I was also surprised to receive a polite email from [Tantan](http://tantanapp.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com) CEO and Co-founder Yu Wang taking responsibility for their security problems and pledging to fix them. Eight months after I reached out to Tantan to report these problems is a bit long, but better late than never!

With his kind permission, I’ve republished his email below. I have inserted my own responses and comments inline in blue.

> Dear Larry,
> 
> First of all, thank you for taking the time to look through the technical side of our app and highlighting issues you found. The issues of turning on HTTPS/SSL and turning off debugging are definitely correct and we are working on releasing a version that fixes these two issues within the week. Thank you.
> 
> We also want to clarify a few points.
> 
> - Due to the nature of the app, users fill in profile information on Tantan to make them available publicly for all other users. Profile information "exposed" through the API are available through the app anyway, especially since you need to be on the same network and thus close by to "listen in".  
>    
> Users use Tantan with the expectation that information about who they like and don’t like and who they match with is private. They expect that a person will only know they like them if they swipe right. They also expect that the only person who can read their conversation with a person with whom they have matched is that match.
> Before any contact list information is sent we encrypt it using a one way hash function. This means that it is not possible for anyone else to see your contact list information. In fact we do not ourselves have access to their contact list information in clear text to protect user privacy.  
>  
> ~~Great!~~  
>  
>  
> *Update:* Several reached out to me to point out I was giving Tantan a pass on this point. One way cryptographic hashes are **not** encryption. It is very easy to generate (or buy/download) a list of hashes even with a laptop for all possible Chinese mobile phone numbers. Once you have this list, you can simply look up which hash.   
>  
> To show how easy it is, I've [included code below.](#appendix-generate-sha256-hashes-for-all-chinese-mobile-phone-numbers)
> 
> - It would be impossible and pointless to sniff someone's location. Pointless because you would need to physically follow them around and impossible because as soon as someone “moves” they will stop using the wifi network you are both on and you would no longer be able to “sniff” them. Aside from this we have also taken special steps to prevent others from being able to pinpoint your location through triangulation of the data you get from the API.  
>    
> Not true. Data sent through the internet passes through a number of computer systems on its route from the user’s phone to your service. Anyone with access to those systems could track your users. They wouldn’t need to physically follow the user. Very possible.
> - Lack of SSL on our API makes us vulnerable to traffic listening (by people who are in the same network as you) but this is radically different from a full database breach like the one Ashley Madison had.  
>    
> User data is vulnerable to interception by people on the same network or *any of the multiple public networks through which data passes on the way to reach your servers.*
> - We have a list of sensitive words in the app which we use to remind users to behave in a civilized way. Unfortunately some guys do not know how to talk to girls and need some friendly reminders.
> 
> With all this said not having HTTPS/SSL really IS a bad idea in general and we are working on releasing it ASAP. Thank you for bringing this to our immediate attention.
> 
> Excellent!
> 
> In order to handle such issues with more diligence we have created the mailbox [security@tantanapp.com](mailto:security@tantanapp.com) If there are any other issues you have found or if you have any questions you are welcome to contact us there or to contact me directly on [ y@tantanapp.com](mailto:y@tantanapp.com)
> 
> This is great. Thank you very much!
> 
> It would be even better if you could provide a public PGP key for your security team, so that people reporting security vulnerabilities in your app can report them to you securely with encryption. To see examples of how to do this, you can refer to security pages at [Apple](https://www.apple.com/support/security/pgp/?ref=larrysalibra.com) or [Google](https://www.google.com/about/appsecurity/?ref=larrysalibra.com).
> 
> Yu Wang  
> CEO and Co founder  
> Tantan
> 
> After asking Yu for permission to publish his email, he replied:
> 
>> Hi Larry,
>> 
>> You're much too kind. We try to respond to all question/issues raised by users. Unfortunately when you reached out before your message never reached our engineers.
>> 
>> You're totally welcome to publish my email. Tell me if there's anything I can help with.
>> 
>> Best,  
>>  
>> Yu
> 
> ## Appendix: Generate SHA256 hashes for all Chinese mobile phone numbers
> 
> The ruby code below creates a (really large) CSV file with SHA256 hashes of all Chinese mobile phone numbers.
> 
> {% highlight ruby %}
> 
> require "csv"  
> require "digest"
> 
> # store phone numbers and hashes here
> 
> CSV.open("chinamobilephonehashes.csv", "wb") do |csv|
> 
> # write headers on the first line of the file
> 
> csv << \["Number", "SHA256 Hash"\]
> 
> # Chinese mobile numbers are 11 digits
> 
> # with prefixes from 13x to 18x
> 
> # loop through each number
> 
> for number in 13000000000..19000000000 do
> 
> # turn the number into text
> 
> number\_string = number.to\_s
> 
> # calculate the SHA256 hash of the number
> 
> number\_hash = Digest::SHA2.new << number\_string
> 
> # add a line to the file with number and hash
> 
> csv << \[number\_string, number\_hash.to\_s\]
> 
> # display the number and hash
> 
> p number\_string + ": " + number\_hash.to\_s
> 
> # start the loop again with the next number
> 
> end
> 
> # close the file. we're done!
> 
> end
> 
> {% endhighlight %}
> 
> On a normal computer, this very inefficient code would take a long time to create the whole list. However, a real attacker would:
> 
> 1. use more efficient code
> 2. run this code on a graphics card other specialized hardware
> 3. use an existing [rainbow table](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbow%5Ftable?ref=larrysalibra.com)
> 
> *Want to talk more about how to properly use encryption? [Tweet at me](https://twitter.com/larrysalibra/?ref=larrysalibra.com) or [get in touch](https://larrysalibra.com/invitation/)!*
### How Chinese Tinder clone screws you
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/how-chinese-dating-app-tantan-screws-you/
Last updated: 2015-11-12T16:00:00.000Z
**Update:* Tantan CEO and Co-founder Yu Wang reached out to me via email to acknowledge these issues. [Read his email and my response](https://larrysalibra.com/tantan-responds-promises-encryption/).*

**TL;DR:* Chinese Tinder clone Tantan is *endangering* young women and men by failing to use encryption and *exposing private data* like that made public in the Ashley Madison hack.*

{% include toc.html %}

It’s no surprise that dating apps like Tinder that open up new ways to reduce risks of dating have been taking the world by storm. China is well ahead of the curve when it comes to social acceptance of meeting people online. Conditioned by three decades of incredibly fast-paced social change, normal, every day folks have been making friends and meeting future spouses online since the early days of [QQ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tencent%5FQQ?ref=larrysalibra.com).

Dating apps are particularly interesting from an information security perspective because of the sensitivity of the behavior they protect. People are secretive about who they’re dating or hooking up with. Publicly broadcasting your latest love adventures can get you in trouble with friends and family.

Behavior changes when using dating apps. Offered the possibility of meeting a cute new boy or girl, people who otherwise care about their privacy or security of their online accounts throw their good senses to the wind.

![Tantan Logo](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2015/11/tantan-logo.png) ![Tantan slogan](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2015/11/tantan-special.png) 

Helping you to meet someone special isn’t all Tantan does!

Early this year, a new player arrived on the Chinese dating app scene called [Tantan](http://tantanapp.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com). A friend, who will remain nameless, excitedly told me about the app and the cute people that were on it. I had to check it out, I was told.

## China clone army strikes again

Tantan is ~~essentially~~ a Tinder clone. On the surface, the iPhone app seems to be smoother and more refined then the app it copies. However, as we’ll soon find out, **looks can be deceiving**.

Unlike Tinder, which uses Facebook to log in, Tantan asks you for a phone number to verify you and then has you select a password. As part of the on-boarding process, it asks for the usual social network profile information and asks for permission to use your location so that it can find people to match you with nearby.

Next, it offers to hide you from people you already know if you’re willing to share your contact book with them. I’m not married or sneaking around behind anyone’s back, but I’m certainly not in the business of giving my contact book to an unknown Chinese startup. Later, I would find out that I was very glad I made that decision.

I was impressed by how well Tantan functioned compared to Tinder. It was smoother and more user-friendly. Also happily missing was the poor user experience of jumping between apps that comes from Tinder being built on Facebook.

![Tantan chat](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2015/11/tantan-chat-1.jpg) ![Tantan chat](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2015/11/tantan-chat-2.jpg) 

Chat in Chinese dating apps is just as boring as Tinder. I must be doing it wrong. Perhaps I should ask about Bitcoin? 

One thing I was a bit disappointed about was that being in Hong Kong instead of the mainland, the app’s target market, there were few people nearby to meet. The nearest users seemed to be in Shenzhen. Oh well. If I couldn’t explore the beauty of the people on the app, I could always explore the beauty of the app!

## Behind the scenes

After playing around with the app for a few minutes, I decide to investigate if the beauty of the app was for real or only skin deep. My first step was to plug my phone into my laptop while running Apple’s Xcode developer tool. This is the tool developers use to build apps for Apple’s products.

One of Xcode’s features allows you to view the console log of your phone. The console log is a scrolling window of text - think of it as a Twitter feed for the apps running on your phone. It lets you know what your phone and the apps on it are doing and helps you track down and fix software bugs.

Apple’s own apps give periodic updates that help developers know what the operating system is doing as it periodically wakes up and puts to sleep various parts of the iPhone that manage power and radio conditions and could otherwise affect developer’s apps. However, professionally written apps usually turn off many these messages when they submit their app to the App Store for performance reasons and to prevent possibly sensitive information from ending up in logs and potentially escaping the device.

## Dirty talk

Much to my surprise, Tantan’s developers hadn’t turned off their debug messages and tons of interesting information was being sent into console. One of the first things I noticed was that Tantan loads a list of “foul” words that it censors.

![Tantan banned words](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2015/11/tantan-bad-words.png) 

No meeting for sex (*约炮*) or nude chatting (*裸聊*) allowed on Tantan! 

The list of the words is written in a code called [Unicode](http://www.unicode.org/?ref=larrysalibra.com) which makes it very easy to [look up](http://unicodelookup.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com).

![Tantan banned words](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2015/11/tantan-lookup-words.png) 

Looking up `0x804a` shows us that it is the Unicode code for the character “*聊*” which means “chat”. 

I’ll leave deciphering the entire list of words as an exercise for you, my loyal reader (*Update: [Quartz deciphered them for you!](http://qz.com/551867/chinas-tinder-is-trying-to-teach-men-looking-for-hookups-better-manners/?ref=larrysalibra.com)*), but a random sampling  
shows that many of the words have to do with hookups and casual sex. Only platonic or marriage-bound relationships to see here.

## Superficial beauty

Looking up bad words is fun and all, but there were better, more exciting things to see. Scrolling on, I saw the names and addresses of their servers and information about the requests the app was making flashing by.

It seemed strange that an app that appeared so well-written on the surface would be so sloppy underneath. I was interested to look deeper and see if, like so many of the people you meet on dating apps, **Tantan’s initial beauty was only mirage**.

## Intercepted

Next up, I decided to see what sort of information the app was sending and how well it was protected.

I used the `ssh` to connect to my home router and fired up the `tcpdump` program to see what sort of data was flying around between the Tantan running on my phone and Tantan’s server. I looked up the IP address of Tantan’s server and then started watching and collecting traffic using this command:

```
tcpdump -i ppp88 host 223.203.222.15 and port 80 -n -s 0 -vvv -w tantan

```

Data sent between an app and a server should be encrypted so that the dozen or more computers it passes through on its journey through the Internet can’t read it. So, naturally, I expected to see a bunch of encrypted, unreadable data passing through my router between my phone and Tantan’s server.

Much to my surprise, the information sent between my phone and Tantan’s server somewhere on the other side of the Great Firewall deep in Mainland China was completely readable. I could see the password I had just entered, my phone number and all the people I was being matched with. And if I could read it, that means any number of other people could as well.

My next step was to fire up [Wireshark](https://www.wireshark.org/?ref=larrysalibra.com) to get a better view of what was happening.

![Wireshark analysis](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2015/11/tantan-wireshark-1.png) 

The Tantan app is asking the server for more people to swipe. Will *The One* be in this request?

Seeing all this nicely structured information flowing back and forth piqued my interest in learning more about just what types of data Tantan was collecting from its users and then leaking to the world.

## When your shared secret isn't secret

Usually when reverse engineering an undocumented API to figure out how it works, you’d have to take a few minutes to set up some tools to decode the encrypted content. However, Tantan’s security failings made it trivial to see how their app and server interact and talk to each other.

The first thing I noticed was they stored a fixed password in the app that the app must provide to its server before the app is even allowed to connect to sign up a new user or log in an existing user. This password, or shared secret, is static and stored in every copy of Tantan downloaded from the App Store.

![Shared secret uncovered](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2015/11/tantan-shared-secret.png) 

We can see the username to connect to Tantan’s authentication server, `100002`, and the matching password. If you want to keep something secret, you need to use encryption.

Ostensibly, the purpose of this shared secret is to prevent third party apps from connecting to the Tantan server, but without encryption the secret wasn’t very secret.

## Tantan shares you with the world

Next, I went the process of creating a new user. Tantan asked me to share my country and phone number before it sent me a code by  
text message allowing me to continue.

![Creating a new user](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2015/11/tantan-new-user.jpg) 

Tantan uses your phone number as a username like WhatsApp.

After entering the code, it prompted me to select a password and enter information about:

- My gender
- Sexual orientation
- Partner age preferences
- Interests
- Hobbies

All of this information was sent in **cleartext, unencrypted, across the Internet**.

![Your dating preferences](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2015/11/tantan-prefs.jpg) 

Congratulations! Your sexual preferences are now public information! Isn't transparency great?

## Selling out your friends

During the sign up process, after creating an account, new users are prompted to share their contacts with Tantan. Tantan promises to hide you from the people in your contacts list. One imagines this is to avoid the potential, umm, social awkwardness, of showing up as a potential match to a coworker, ex-boyfriend or current wife. Think Ashley Madison meets Tinder.

![Tantan contacts settings](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2015/11/tantan-contacts.jpg) 

Your friends and business associates trust you with their personal contact information. Have you sold them out by sharing it with an untrustworthy app?

I’m pretty cognizant of permissions I grant apps and hadn’t shared my contact book with Tantan when I originally signed up. Boy was I glad that I made that decision when I found out that sharing your contact book with Tantan results personal details of all the people stored in your phone flying around the Internet for all to see.

## The perfect match

Once we’re signed up and we’ve told Tantan (and the world) our gender and age interests, the Tantan app starts asking its server for possible matches. These are the people we’ll be able to swipe left or swipe right, just like on Tinder.

By continuing to look at the unprotected data Tantan is sending us with `tcpdump`, we can see that the service sends our phone several possible matches with request. With each potential match comes a lot of fun data about the user. We are sent their age and interests and all of the pictures and videos they’ve added to the service. There’s also a number telling how far the our potential Juliet (or Romeo as your case may be) is away from us.

![Tantan match](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2015/11/tantan-wireshark-match.png) 

We’ve matched with 26 year old Lele!

We can then like or dislike a user and see how the app sends a request to the server with that user’s user id to indicate our preference.

![Tantan match](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2015/11/tantan-match.jpg) 

Who knows if I swipe left or right? Because there’s no encryption, everyone!

Once we’re matched with a user, that is to say the other person also liked us, we’re able to access this information anytime we want instead of waiting until the person is suggested. And since our connection is not encrypted, **so can anyone else!**

## Location fun

When you first download Tantan, the app asks for permission to track your location. This is because it matches you with people who are nearby. But what does this really mean? What does it do with your location?

![Tantan requests location](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2015/11/tantan-location.jpg) 

This should read: “In order to broadcast your location to the world, Tantan requires access to your phone’s location.“

Since we know everything Tantan sends is out in the open, visible to anyone who cares to look to see, we know that it certainly doesn’t treat it with the confidentially one would expect of a close friend with intimate knowledge of your dating life. But still…it probably just asks for you location once in a while?

![Tantan location header](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2015/11/tantan-location-header.png) 

Tantan leaks your location with every swipe!

**Wrong.** In reality, the app sends your location to Tantan’s server **every time** it talks to the server…which could be **several times a minute**.

When an app or web browser connects to a server to ask for some information, it sends metadata along with the request called “headers“. Headers are named as such because they are at the very top, or head, of the request.

In Tantan, your location is sent via a header in each request called `Geolocation`. As you can see, our latitude and longitude is sent along with a number indicating how certain of the location your phone is. For example, someone using Tantan on an iPhone in Shenzhen might send the `Geolocation` header `geo:22.8,114.0;u=165` while someone in Shanghai would send `geo:31.2,121.5;u=160`.

By plugging these numbers into a mapping application such as Google Maps, someone looking at your Tantan connection can tell not only where you are but also make a reasonable guess of where you’re headed.

![Shanghai](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2015/11/tantan-map.png) 

Welcome to Shanghai!

The fun doesn’t stop there though. Since the connection is unencrypted, we or anyone on the Internet between our phone and Tantan can change our location. This is useful as a way to meet people in other places. In fact, Tinder actually sells this ability as a premium feature on its service.

## Stalking Romeo and Juliet

While spoofing your location to meet people in another location is fun, it is also useful for less noble pursuits. You can use it to find the location of and track anyone that matches with you.

Remember how I showed you earlier how matches also include a number that tells us far the match is from our current location? You can use that information, location spoofing, and some [basic high school math](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangulation?ref=larrysalibra.com) to pinpoint the location of your Romeo or Juliet.

You simply need to take note of the how far Juliet is from you at three different places and calculate her location. This makes Tantan incredibly handy if you want to show up outside of her balcony in the middle of the night…creepy might be a better word.

## Responsible disclosure

I originally noticed Tantan’s lack of encryption **8 months ago** in March 2015\. I reached out to the company via both email and Weibo to get in touch with someone with whom I could report these security and privacy problems. I only decided to publish this post after no indication by the company that they either acknowledged the problem or plan to fix it.

[ ![Email 1](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2015/11/tantan-disclosure-email-1.png) ](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2015/11/tantan-disclosure-email-1.png?ref=larrysalibra.com) [ ![Weibo message](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2015/11/tantan-disclosure-weibo.png) ](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2015/11/tantan-disclosure-weibo.png?ref=larrysalibra.com) 

[![Email 2](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2015/11/tantan-disclosure-email-2.png)](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2015/11/tantan-disclosure-email-2.png?ref=larrysalibra.com)

Some of my attempts to reach out to Tantan.

After 8 months and numerous app updates, Tantan still doesn’t use the basic security of HTTPS  
to protect users' privacy or **even their passwords** despite [being told by Apple](https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/ios/releasenotes/General/WhatsNewIniOS/Articles/iOS9.html?ref=larrysalibra.com#//apple%5Fref/doc/uid/TP40016198-SW14) that they should.

## Why should anyone care?

Thanks to the Ashley Madison hack, we’ve all seen what happens when dating services get compromised and information assumed to be private leaks out into the open: relationships suffer, people get stalked or blackmailed and [some even feel the need to end their lives](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/08/24/death%5Ftoll%5Fashley%5Fmadison/?ref=larrysalibra.com).

Tantan’s negligence in not using basic, industry standard, **easy to deploy** HTTPS encryption means that their service doesn’t even need to be hacked for this same information to make it out into the public. Destroying your own business from your irresponsibility is your problem. Destroying the lives of your unsuspecting and trusting users is both **immoral and unethical**. It is everyone’s problem.

*Want to talk more about how to properly use encryption? [Tweet at me](https://twitter.com/larrysalibra/?ref=larrysalibra.com) or [get in touch](https://larrysalibra.com/invitation/)!*
### How Apple Censors News in China
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/how-apple-censors-news-in-china/
Last updated: 2015-10-07T16:00:00.000Z
The release of iOS 9 saw the launch of [Apple’s attempt to revolutionize the news industry](http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2015/06/08Apple-Announces-News-App-for-iPhone-iPad.html?ref=larrysalibra.com), [Apple News](https://www.apple.com/news/?ref=larrysalibra.com). While Apple has been pretty clear that News is launching first in the United States, users typically haven’t had any problem using it in other countries as long as your iPhone's [region is set to the United States](http://www.imore.com/how-get-apple-news-uk-australia-canada-and-more?ref=larrysalibra.com). I’ve used Apple News for months in Hong Kong and ~~really enjoy~~ *am addicted to* using it to keep up with my favorite publications. But what if Apple decided to take News away from me? Why would Apple ever do that?

## Apple’s China Risk

As someone who has run a business in China for the better part of a decade, Apple’s increasing sales, marketshare and dependence on China for growth gives me mixed feelings. The larger Apple gets in China, the more power and leverage the Chinese government has over the company.

As Apple’s hardware products become more and more dependent on cloud services and content the company moves deeper into politically sensitive waters. There is the risk that a sudden policy change from Beijing could cut off their services. Or Beijing could force Apple to make decisions unpalatable to their customers in other parts of the world, squeezing them out of the market [much like what happened to Google](https://larrysalibra.com/googles-china-lessons-forbidden-fruit-face-saving-retreat/).

> Apple China Risk [$AAPL](https://twitter.com/search?q=%24AAPL&src=ctag&ref=larrysalibra.com) [#AppleEvent](https://twitter.com/hashtag/AppleEvent?src=hash&ref=larrysalibra.com) [pic.twitter.com/OEpl6d2RNx](http://t.co/OEpl6d2RNx?ref=larrysalibra.com)
> 
> — Larry Salibra (@larrysalibra) [September 9, 2015](https://twitter.com/larrysalibra/status/641679199086899200?ref=larrysalibra.com)

## Beats 1 not on device

Control over the media is very important to the Chinese Communist Party and is a tool it uses to maintain what it calls a ["harmonious society."](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmonious%5Fsociety?ref=larrysalibra.com) It wasn’t surprising when [Apple Music launched in China along with iBooks and iTunes Movies](http://www.apple.com/cn/pr/library/2015/09/30Apple-Brings-Apple-Music-iTunes-Movies-iBooks-to-Customers-in-China-Starting-Today.html?ref=larrysalibra.com) that the most revolutionary part of Apple Music, the 24 hour live radio station Beats 1, was conspicuously absent. No way a foreign company would be permitted to run a live radio station in China even if the content is only [Zane Lowe](https://twitter.com/zanelowe?ref=larrysalibra.com) helping us discover new music. Music is subversive.

![GFW is here.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2015/10/news-hyatt.jpg) 

The Great Firewall of China keeps your vacation Facebook, Twitter and Google free!

Despite not offering Beats 1 to Chinese Apple Music subscribers, the station works fine in China for subscribers like me traveling from other countries as long as [you’re roaming](https://larrysalibra.com/hop-over-the-great-firewall-with-government-help/) or using a VPN. Beats 1 blocks countries by IP address at the server and not on device.

## No News for You!

The fact that Beats 1 had been working fine for me during my short trips north across the border led me to assume that Apple News would work as well. I was wrong.

Last week during a short holiday in Mainland China, I was surprised to find that the News App refused to work from my hotel in Dongguan even though I was using [uncensored roaming internet](https://larrysalibra.com/hop-over-the-great-firewall-with-government-help/).

![News won't refresh](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2015/10/news-fu-er-dai.jpg) 

This Bloomberg piece criticizing the spoiled children of China's power elite China is exactly the type of story the Party wants to censor.

Strange. Could it be that Apple was tracking my location and using geofencing to disable the News app in the Mainland? I resolved to do some testing next time I was near the border.

## Divided by a River

I selected the [Lok Ma Chau](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lok%5FMa%5FChau%5FStation?ref=larrysalibra.com#Lok%5FMa%5FChau%5FSpur%5FLine%5FControl%5FPoint)\-[Futian](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futian%5FPort?ref=larrysalibra.com) border crossing for my investigation because it is an area where Hong Kong and Mainland China are separated by the Shenzhen River which is only a few hundred meters wide. There is also a pedestrian bridge which isn’t as crowded as the one at Lo Wu.

I would conduct my trials as I headed north from Hong Kong’s Lok Ma Chau MTR station.

### In Hong Kong connected to a Hong Kong network

Upon entering the Lok Ma Chau immigration facility in Hong Kong, I was conducted to my home carrier [China Mobile Hong Kong’s (CMHK)](http://www.hk.chinamobile.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com) LTE network. Apple News worked normally as it does everywhere else in Hong Kong.

![View of Lok Ma Chau MTR](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2015/10/news-view-of-lok-ma-chau-mtr.jpg) 

View of Lok Ma Chau MTR Station in Hong Kong from across the border at Futian Port.

### In Hong Kong connected to a China network

I manually searched for other networks using the carrier setting on my iPhone and tried connecting to the China Mobile’s Mainland network (CMCC). As soon as I connected to the network, the Apple News App would refuse to refresh or open any of the articles already displayed on the screen, showing the message “News isn’t supported in your current region”.

![News won't refresh](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2015/10/news-while-connected-to-cmcc-in-hong-kong.jpg) 

Can't refresh or *won't* refresh?

### In China connected to a China network

I reconnected to the Hong Kong network and News behaved normally again. After going through Hong Kong Immigration, crossing the bridge and passing through China Immigration, I lost the Hong Kong signal (because I was indoors) and my phone connected automatically to the China network. Unsurprisingly, the News App would no longer refresh.

I checked my IP address to make sure it hadn’t changed. It was still the same CMHK IP address that Duckduckgo said was located in Central, Hong Kong.

![CMHK IP address](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2015/10/news-ddg-ip.jpg) 

To computers on the Internet, your phone appears to be accessing the Internet from your home country even when you are roaming abroad.

### In China connected to a Hong Kong network

I exited the Futian Checkpoint Immigration building and walked over to an area in a parking lot near the edge of Shenzhen River a few hundred meters from Hong Kong and with a view of the bridge I had just crossed.

![Bridge from Futian Port](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2015/10/news-bridge-at-futian.jpg) 

Networks from both sides of the border are very strong.

From here, I was able to manually reconnect to the Hong Kong network. After reconnecting to the CMHK across the river in Hong Kong, I was immediately able to use the News App again.

![Network selection screen](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2015/10/news-net-selection.jpg) 

3 networks from China; 6 networks from Hong Kong 

## The China Kill Switch

At this point, it was pretty obvious that Apple isn't using location tracking and geofencing to shut down the News App, but is doing so based on the mobile network the phone connected. This behavior points to the mechanism Apple uses to disable normal Apple Maps and replace it with [Beijing-approved maps provided by the Chinese company Autonavi](http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2012/09/26/apple-built-special-version-of-maps-for-china/?ref=larrysalibra.com).

![CMHK Network Info](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2015/10/news-cmhk-net-info.jpg) ![CMHK Network Info](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2015/10/news-cmcc-net-info.jpg) 

Mobile networks have country and network codes. Hong Kong's code is 454; China's is 460\. 454-12 is CMHK; 460-0 is China Mobile.

## Balancing privacy and pragmatism

One can speculate that someone in Apple, understandably, decided that it was better to simply disable the News app within China than be force to get into the business of censoring content article by article to comply with Beijing’s wishes. They probably didn’t have a choice given the importance of the China market to their bottom.

What worries me, is that the mechanism Apple uses to disable the News app and Apple Maps uses the location of the user to change the behavior of their device *without their permission*, *even if the location service is *disabled** in the privacy settings.

This “China Kill Switch” is currently limited to disabling the News App and Apple Maps, but it is easy to imagine a Chinese government official asking Apple to extend that ability to other Apps and services on our iPhones.

![Story unavailable](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2015/10/news-feature.jpg) 

News and Maps are unavailable in China even using a VPN. What will be next?
### Can Apple Notes replace Evernote?
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/can-apple-notes-replace-evernote/
Last updated: 2015-09-30T16:00:00.000Z
*Update: iCloud Notes's CloudKit got corrupted after moving a few hundred notes from Evernote - I contacted Apple on September 29th & have been promised that I will hear back from their engineering team within 10 business days. On October 5th, Apple support called me to let me know that they hadn't yet heard back. I will update this post when I get a response.*

When iOS 9 and OS X 10.11 El Capitan were announced, I, like many, was excited about their updated Notes App. I was looking forward to moving my digital brain to iCloud. I'd read that [Evernote is going to be the first Unicorn to perish](https://syrah.co/joshdickson40/55e1beac15970d6c01395d9d?ref=larrysalibra.com) which made me really question whether it is a good idea to trust my important data to a business with such poor underlying fundamentals. I also really like [Apple's privacy policy](http://www.apple.com/privacy/?ref=larrysalibra.com) and want to minimize the number of companies I have to trust. It's also getting tiring sorting through the random features Evernote adds to its app that have nothing to do with notes.

![Notes now in iCloud](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2015/09/notes-new.jpg) 

I can now store my beautiful drawings in iCloud. If only I could draw!

I decided I'd take the plunge, [write an AppleScript to move notes from Evernote to Apple Notes](https://larrysalibra.com/evernote-to-apple-notes/) and migrate my 2000+ Evernote notes over to iCloud to help us all answer the question:

## Can Apple Notes replace Evernote?

Follow along with my ~~clear and descriptive~~ vague and not very informative screenshots as I find out...

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2015/10/broken-notes-mac-frozen.png) 

Hmm. This isn't a great way to start.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2015/10/broken-notes-icloud-frozen.png) 

Umm. Web apps can freeze?

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2015/10/broken-notes-icloud-black.png) 

Is this a new Jony Ive design? Black is the new white!

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2015/10/broken-notes-icloud-crashed.png) 

Wait. Web apps can crash just like Mac apps?!?

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2015/10/broken-notes-toggle-notes.jpg) 

My iPhone's Notes app made the phone really hot and then crashed after a few hundred notes & won't sync anymore. Maybe toggling this will solve it!

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2015/10/broken-notes-deletion.png) 

Or maybe not...

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2015/10/broken-notes-migration.png) 

Ummm. I already migrated to the new Notes! That's how we got into this mess!

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2015/10/broken-notes-support.jpg) 

Migrated a few hundred notes, iCloud Notes web app and iOS Notes both broke. Called support and they had no idea what to do.

## Can Apple Notes replace Evernote?

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2015/10/broken-notes-no.jpg) 

## So what really happened?

I originally tried writing out a play-by-play of the problems I encountered trying to move  
my small collection of \~2200 notes[\[1\]](#fn1), but it came off sounding whiny and complaining.  
Not much went smoothly. It was frustrating.

Instead of re-living the ~~experience~~ nightmare in blog narrative form, here's a list of the Apple Notes problems I encountered:

- There is very little documentation for the Notes AppleScript  
API and Apple Notes HTML converter seems to throw away most HTML styling. Specifically,  
there's no documentation for adding attachment. There is however a hidden work around  
that I discovered by trial and error: you can link to a file stored in the Note's HTML  
Converter sandbox using an HTML image tag and Notes will add it as an attachment.
- Apple's Mac, iOS and web Notes become incredibly slow and crash with only  
a few hundred notes. Their developers apparently couldn't be bothered to do resource intensive things  
in the background so that it doesn't make the user interface unresponsive or at  
least add a progress indicator.
- The syncing process seems to designed in a non-scalable way that  
syncs your entire history of note creations and deletions instead of syncing the  
current state. When I created 100 notes and deleted them 5 times in a row on Mac,  
opening the iOS app a half hour later resulted in it freezing up while creating and deleting 100 notes  
5 times in a row instead of simply syncing the 100 that were currently stored in iCloud.
- The syncing process corrupted the data on my iOS Notes app in such a way that  
the app would no longer sync. Logging in and out of iCloud, toggling Notes, deleting  
notes data and restoring from a backup wouldn't solve it. If this was a 3rd party app,  
one could fix the problem by deleting the app. Since Apple doesn't let us delete  
built-in apps, the only way to fix the app, is to restore my iPhone as a new phone  
losing months of HealthKit and other years of other data that can't be migrated  
independently of the backup/restore process.
- Folders deleted in iCloud Notes via the Mac app periodically reappear whack-a-mole style.

## Now what?

I really like the minimalism of Apple Notes. The small feature set has everything I need  
to replace Evernote. Unfortunately, I need those features to actually work for them to be  
useful. Let's hope someone at Apple tries to use their own Notes product and it  
gets fixed.

Want to try for yourself? Grab my [Evernote to Apple Notes migration scripts](https://larrysalibra.com/evernote-to-apple-notes/) and get started!.

Tweet me at [@larrysalibra](https://twitter.com/larrysalibra/?ref=larrysalibra.com) and let me know how Apple Notes is working out for you!

---

1. I've only used Evernote for about 2 year and am a light user. I know hardcore Evernote users that have bought special scanners to digitize their entire lives and have tens of thousands of notes. [↩︎](#fnref1)
### How to move notes from Evernote to iCloud Notes
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/moving-from-evernote-to-icloud-notes/
Last updated: 2020-11-23T11:42:50.000Z
*Update #2: You should use the built in import feature in macOS to move your notes from Evernotes to Apple Notes. This script is no longer supported.*

*Update: I was able to resolve and workaround the problems I originally encountered and am happily Evernote-free. Your notes will probably be fine. [Many](https://twitter.com/Pogue/status/654853718630862848?ref=larrysalibra.com) [others](https://twitter.com/KevinCWoo/status/6548632628660101122?ref=larrysalibra.com) successfully migrating their notes with this script.*

You’ve just updated to iOS 9 and OS X 10.11 El Capitan. You read that Apple’s updated its Notes app and are excited about moving your digital brain to iCloud. Perhaps you [read that Evernote is going to be the first Unicorn to perish](https://syrah.co/joshdickson40/55e1beac15970d6c01395d9d?ref=larrysalibra.com). Or you prefer to minimize the number of [companies you trust](http://www.apple.com/privacy/?ref=larrysalibra.com).

![Notes now in iCloud](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2015/09/notes-new.jpg) 

I can now store my beautiful drawings in iCloud. If only I could draw!

Whatever the reason, you’ve got a lot of Evernote notes and you want to move them to to Apple Notes and you don’t want to do it by hand.

You’re in luck! I’ve got just the AppleScript for you.

## Great! What do I do?

1. [Download the latest script.](https://github.com/larrysalibra/evernote-to-apple-notes/releases?ref=larrysalibra.com)
2. Open Evernote.
3. Select the Evernote notes you want to export to Apple Notes.
4. Open the file `Export Evernotes notes to Apple Notes.applescript`.
5. Click the play button.
6. Cross your fingers.

![Notes migrated!](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2015/09/notes-success.png) 

Your notes are now in Apple Notes. Hopefully.

Attachments of a few notes may fail to migrate. You'll get a list of all the notes that have this problem at the end of the migration  
so that you can move the attachments manually.

## Got it?

~~Now before you do this, [go read my post that examines the question “Can Apple Notes replace Evernote?”](https://larrysalibra.com/can-apple-notes-replace-evernote/) to learn why you probably don’t want to actually use this AppleScript. Really. Go read it. You'll thank me. about the problems I encountered migrating to Apple Notes.~~

*Update: I was able to resolve and workaround the problems I originally encountered and am happily Evernote-free.*

Tweet me at [@larrysalibra](https://twitter.com/larrysalibra/?ref=larrysalibra.com) and let me know if Apple Notes is working out for you!
### Hop over the Great Firewall with Government Help
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/cmhk/
Last updated: 2015-09-21T16:00:00.000Z
Ask someone to make a list of [#ChinaProblems](https://twitter.com/search?q=%23chinaproblems&src=typd&ref=larrysalibra.com) and the Great Firewall is going to be close to the top.

The Great Firewall, usually referred to online as GFW, is a system of network hardware, software and policies that work together to wreak havoc on everyone’s favorite non-Chinese apps and websites.

To someone used to living outside of the country, using the Chinese Internet is an exercise in masochism. You get Facebook notifications on your iPhone, but Facebook can’t connect. You hear your "you’ve got mail notification"[\[1\]](#fn1) but Gmail won’t open. A friend tries to share a file on Dropbox with with you, but that doesn’t work either. It's enough to make you want to throw your expensive smartphone off a bridge and stab yourself with a chopstick.

![Not sure if Facebook is down or my vpn is broken.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2015/09/fry-vpn.jpg) 

Much great! So firewall! Amaze!

The unspoken purpose of the GFW is to control citizens’ access to information possibly critical of or embarrassing to the government, thus removing a threat to Party rule. A secondary benefit is to provide a competitive advantage to local Internet companies by protecting the from outside competition.

Whatever the reasons for GFW, people who find themselves visiting or living in China need to access services blocked by it. There are many techniques, tools, and services that purport to get you over the wall: `hosts` file hacks, proxy servers, switching DNS servers, Tor bridges, and, yes, the well-know VPN service. All of these methods worked at one point or another and continue to be useful for unblocking specific sites or services.

These days, most people climbing over the GFW have migrated to one or more VPN services which are generally better at unblocking all blocked sites. However, the Chinese government hasn’t been oblivious to the rise of the VPN and has been in an ever escalating arms race with VPN providers, blocking certain servers or VPN technologies only to have VPN services switch to new ones.

It’s frustrating, costly, and time consuming for both VPN providers and consumers who can never be sure if and when something will work. Connections can and do break at anytime.

What if I told you that not only is there a much easier way to hop over the Great Firewall, but that it’s endorsed and even sold by the Chinese government? A no-questions-asked, no-name-registration-required, passport-not-needed, leave-your-address-proof-at-home censorship avoidance method available in plain view for anyone to use?

{% blockquote %}  
“Impossible!” you say, “The Chinese government would never help subvert its own censorship regime, and if they had I would have heard about it!”  
{% endblockquote %}

I’m sorry to say, you’ve been out of the loop. Don’t worry though, I’ll fill you in!

## The power of 3

The three big Chinese telecom companies, China Mobile, China Unicom and China Telecom, are all owned by the Chinese government.[\[2\]](#fn2) Despite having free reign over the domestic Chinese market, these firms also have ambitions that stretch outside of the Great Firewall. Two of these companies, China Unicom and China Mobile are relatively active here in Hong Kong. China Unicom sells phone service in Hong Kong as a virtual mobile network and China Mobile has its own physical network and airwaves licenses.

![China's Big 3 Telecoms](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2015/09/mobile-unicom-telecom.jpg) 

China's big three telecommunications companies control all data traffic in and out of the country. They are owned by the government.

Both compete aggressively in the highly competitive Hong Kong mobile market and are always looking for a leg up on the competition. One of the ways they’ve achieved this, is using the fact that they own huge networks north of the Shenzhen River to create attractive phone service bundles targeted at Hong Kongers who travel frequently to China. Because these companies own the networks in China and cross-border fiber, they can offer inexpensive cross border roaming services that undercut the other Hong Kong competition.

Because of the way mobile networks and data roaming works, when you travel abroad or connect to a network that isn’t your home provider, the data is sent back to that home provider through an private, encrypted tunnel so that your home phone company can keep track of and bill you for the data that you use. A beautiful side effect of this system is that it allows your data to sneak over the Great Firewall. Which means you’re able to get on Facebook and Google just like you can at home. In fact, as far as Facebook and Google know, the addresses on your data still appear as if you’re at home.

## Great! So I can just use my home phone roaming in China?

That’s one option! Most people try this but find out that it’s super slow and/or expensive. This is because your home provider also needs to buy very expensive connections in and out of China and most aren’t willing to spend that much.

The good news is that both China Mobile and China Unicom will sell you phone cards or phone plans in Hong Kong that let you get over the Great Firewall while you’re in the Mainland! Since China Mobile and China Unicom own big fat cross border Internet pipes, their data roaming doesn’t suffer from the same speed constraints as other companies. Of the two, China Mobile is the better option since it owns physical networks on both sides of the border.

## Wow! Cool! How do I get started?

The first thing you have to do is make sure your phone supports the right technology to get the fastest speeds on China Mobile. Right now, China Mobile uses TDD-LTE on bands 38, 39 and 40 in the mainland and FDD-LTE bands 3, 7 and TDD-LTE band 38 in Hong Kong. Very few phones support both of these - most Android phone support either TDD-LTE or FDD-LTE, not both, so you many end up with two phones. If you’re an iPhone user, the iPhone 6s supports all of these bands as do certain models of the iPhone 6 and 5s.[\[3\]](#fn3) If you end up with a phone that doesn’t support the right LTE bands, you’ll end up with slow almost unusable Internet that will make you wish you never even tried.

![China Mobile Hong Kong 4G/3G 1-Card-2-Number Prepaid SIM Card](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2015/09/4G3G-1-Card-2-Number-Prepaid-SIM-Card_495x550.png) 

CMHK's cross-border roaming sim gets you fast, uncensored LTE data in the Mainland

Next, you’ll need to acquire a [China Mobile Hong Kong 4G/3G 1-Card-2-Number Prepaid SIM Card](https://www.hk.chinamobile.com/en/prepaid%5Fservices/outbound%5Ftravelers%5Fmainland%5Fchina/prepaid-services-1c2n-3g4g.html?ref=larrysalibra.com) in Hong Kong and activate it **before you leave the city**. You can buy it with cash or credit card at any China Mobile Hong Kong (CMHK) location in Hong Kong. There’s even one on the departure level of Hong Kong International Airport so you can grab it right before your flight to Shanghai. No ID, registration or proof of address is necessary.

Like its name suggests, this sim card will give you two phone numbers, one Hong Kong number and one number in the Mainland (usually a Guangzhou number). Your friends on both sides of the border will be able to call either to reach you.

You’ll then need to decide which data plan or plans you’d like to subscribe to. If you do nothing, LTE data in Hong Kong or the Mainland will cost you HK$48 (\~US$6.20) per day for an unlimited amount. Despite claims on the website that your data will be slowed down to a crawl after 1 GB each day, I have been able to use well in excess of that with no throttling.

The HK$48 per day option is pricey for extended use, but well worth if fast, reliable, low latency Internet is important for your job or your sanity. At HK$1440 a month, it is significantly cheaper than the cost of a commercial leased line in a Chinese city and is GFW-free.

![China Mobile Hong Kong China/HK Data Packages](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2015/09/cn-hk-data-packages.png) 

Monthly cross-border prepaid data bundles

A more wallet friendly option is the HK$198 per month plan which gives you 2GB of data to use in Hong Kong or China. While this is marginally more expensive than current local plans offered in the Mainland, it is worth freeing yourself from the battery sucking frustration of VPNs on your phone.

You can [top up your prepaid card online at CMHK’s website](https://www.hk.chinamobile.com/en/prepaid%5Fservices/prepaid%5Fonline%5Frefill%5Fand%5Fsales/prepaid-services-online-refill.html?ref=larrysalibra.com) using your Visa or Mastercard. They even give you an over 30% bonus, so reloading HK$300 gets you HK$400 of credit, effectively lowering the data prices.

![China Mobile Hong Kong Online Refill Deals](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2015/09/cmhk-reload-deals.png) 

The more you refill, the cheaper your effective cost.

## But I’m not in Hong Kong or visiting Hong Kong, what do I do?

Glad you asked! I was considering setting up a site to sell already activated sim cards to people who can’t stop in Hong Kong, but realized doing so would be more complicated than I had imagined. I wanted to accept credit card payment, but my favorite payment processing service, Stripe, lists prepaid phone cards as a prohibited item. This is understandable as prepaid phone cards are in many parts of the world as good as cash, so there would be a high risk that a fraudster would order them with a stolen credit card.

![Stripe prohibited businesses](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2015/09/stripe-prohibits-prepaid-phone-cards.png) 

Prepaid phone cards are attractive to fraudsters looking to monetize stolen credit cards.

This would usually be the end of the story. If something is too risky to sell by credit card, PayPal and to a lessor extend banks are even less of an option. One complaint from the consumer or owner of the stolen credit card and, if I was lucky, I'd only be out the money I spent on the phone plus stuck with a chargeback fees. If I was unlucky, my merchant account or bank account and its funds would be frozen.

If only there was something that could solve this problem...

## Bitcoin!

Selling the phone cards for Bitcoin is the solution! Bitcoin eliminates the risk of nonpayment or chargeback for the merchant and shifts the risk of the transaction to the customer. This is usually a bad thing, but in high risk product categories like prepaid phone cards, this characteristic of Bitcoin enables the opportunity for a sale and creates markets where they otherwise would not exist.

After getting this far into my analysis of the problem, I decide I really don’t have time for another side project.

I immediately thought of my friend +liongrass and his [Too Free to Fail](https://toofreetofail.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com) store that sells items for Bitcoin.

> We just made our first sale after being online for two hours! Thank you [@larrysalibra](https://twitter.com/larrysalibra?ref=larrysalibra.com)! Your keychain is on the way as soon as the post opens
> 
> — Too Free To Fail (@toofreetofail) [August 23, 2015](https://twitter.com/toofreetofail/status/635433217919713280?ref=larrysalibra.com)

Prepaid phone cards that help users circumvent the Great Firewall of China seemed like a perfect fit for a store focused on freedom. Leo agreed and [CMHK prepaid phone cards arrived in his store today](https://toofreetofail.com/collections/frontpage/products/uncensored-and-free-3g-4g-internet-in-mainland-china?ref=larrysalibra.com)!

## Prepaid seems expensive and a hassle. Any better options?

Subscribing to a [CMHK 4GPro postpaid plan](https://www.hk.chinamobile.com/en/services%5Fplan/4G3G/4gpro.html?ref=larrysalibra.com) will get you fast, uncensored data in Hong Kong China at a marginal cost of HK$30 (US$3.87) per gigabyte of data. If you’re not a Hong Kong resident and/or don’t have a Hong Kong company, subscribing might be a hassle and involve large deposits.

The postpaid option is what many cross-border business people in Hong Kong and foreigners living right across the border in Shenzhen select.

What’s your favorite way to get online in the Mainland? Any tips or tricks? Let me know in the comments or [on Twitter](https://twitter.com/larrysalibra?ref=larrysalibra.com)!

---

1. Showing my age. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGOgSPVBmIE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGOgSPVBmIE&ref=larrysalibra.com) [↩︎](#fnref1)
2. That’s why they’re called State Owned Enterprises (SOE). [↩︎](#fnref2)
3. To learn which bands your iPhone supports, check out [Apple’s LTE page](https://www.apple.com/iphone/LTE/?ref=larrysalibra.com). [↩︎](#fnref3)
### #StartupThisSunday: Part 5 - The Final Stretch
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/startup-this-sunday-part-5-the-final-stretch/
Last updated: 2015-07-22T16:00:00.000Z
*This is Part 5 of my [5 part series sharing my 24 hour #StartupThisSunday cross Asia adventure](http://startupthissunday.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com) building the [human powered website monitoring service wpFlight](https://wpflight.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com).*

*In [Part 1](https://larrysalibra.com/startup-this-sunday/part-1-preflight/), [Part 2](https://larrysalibra.com/part-2-singapore-bound/), [Part 3](https://larrysalibra.com/startup-this-sunday/part-3-singapore/) and [Part 4](https://larrysalibra.com/startup-this-sunday/part-4-hong-kong-bound/) we got off to a great start creating [wpFlight](https://wpflight.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com). We rejoin the story having just landed in Hong Kong.*

## June 15, 2015 - 9:56am: Back in Hong Kong

> I'm back [#HongKong](https://twitter.com/hashtag/HongKong?src=hash&ref=larrysalibra.com) \- logo & more copy completed on flight [#StartupThisSunday](https://twitter.com/hashtag/StartupThisSunday?src=hash&ref=larrysalibra.com) [https://t.co/cWz9zMEfFt](https://t.co/cWz9zMEfFt?ref=larrysalibra.com)
> 
> — Larry Salibra (@larrysalibra) [June 15, 2015](https://twitter.com/larrysalibra/status/610264626807353345?ref=larrysalibra.com)

After landing, I buzzed through Hong Kong immigration and customs and headed outside into the bright sunshine to catch the bus home.

> Waiting for E33 airport bus driver - eating up valuable time! Hurry up & open the bus! [#StartupThisSunday](https://twitter.com/hashtag/StartupThisSunday?src=hash&ref=larrysalibra.com) [pic.twitter.com/NLL3zxawQm](http://t.co/NLL3zxawQm?ref=larrysalibra.com)
> 
> — Larry Salibra (@larrysalibra) [June 15, 2015](https://twitter.com/larrysalibra/status/610272315654340610?ref=larrysalibra.com)

After waiting a while in the hot and humid air for the bus driver to show up, I was able to board the bus and get back to work.

> Okay. I'm on. Enough tweeting. Back to work! [#StartupThisSunday](https://twitter.com/hashtag/StartupThisSunday?src=hash&ref=larrysalibra.com) [pic.twitter.com/vVjyT5ovE6](http://t.co/vVjyT5ovE6?ref=larrysalibra.com)
> 
> — Larry Salibra (@larrysalibra) [June 15, 2015](https://twitter.com/larrysalibra/status/610273651959566336?ref=larrysalibra.com)

## 10:32am - Back to work!

My first priority, now that I was back online, was to get frontend deployment set up properly. If you recall, wpFlight’s frontend is statically generated via the Jekyll framework. This creates a bunch of webpages and folders with assets that we can simply copy to a webserver…any webserver…no database or other complicated configuration needed. I already had a [DigitalOcean server](https://www.digitalocean.com/?refcode=dfae04e9eaf4&ref=larrysalibra.com) set up with nginx used to serve my blog, so I was able to simply create another folder and the corresponding virtual server configuration for wpflight.com. I pointed Cloudflare’s DNS to the server and made sure it was loading.

![Working on the bus](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2015/07/working-on-the-bus.jpg) 

Working on the airport bus.

To copy the webpages and other assets to the server, I would use a tool call [rsync](https://rsync.samba.org/?ref=larrysalibra.com)…short for “remote sync”…which allows you to quickly ensure a remote folder has exactly the same data as a local folder. This makes it quick to push any changes because it only copies data that has changed. I was reusing a script that I use with my blog, so getting it to work for wpFlight was as easy as changing some a few variables to point to the new folder.

Next, I went through all of our Cloudflare settings to make sure they were properly set. Since this site is entirely static, I set up Cloudflare to cache all our page content at the edge of their network. This means a visitor from Hong Kong will load wpflight.com from Cloudflare’s server in Hong Kong instead of from the DigitalOcean server in San Francisco.

![Cloudflare Page Rules](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2015/07/cloudflare-page-rules.png) 

Cloudflare is configured to store all of our pages on local edge servers. And to always use encryption.

I put up a placeholder page just to make sure everything was working.

> Frontend deployment & [@CloudFlare](https://twitter.com/CloudFlare?ref=larrysalibra.com) page rules setup on bus - can see logo [https://t.co/uOko7nlNCc](https://t.co/uOko7nlNCc?ref=larrysalibra.com) [#StartupThisSunday](https://twitter.com/hashtag/StartupThisSunday?src=hash&ref=larrysalibra.com) [pic.twitter.com/VLO8tUXnO2](http://t.co/VLO8tUXnO2?ref=larrysalibra.com)
> 
> — Larry Salibra (@larrysalibra) [June 15, 2015](https://twitter.com/larrysalibra/status/610290769912549376?ref=larrysalibra.com)

## 11:31am - End of the line

> Hi Castle Peak! Miss me? [#StartupThisSunday](https://twitter.com/hashtag/StartupThisSunday?src=hash&ref=larrysalibra.com) 4.5 hours to go! Home stretch! [https://t.co/QGWWvsb4LS](https://t.co/QGWWvsb4LS?ref=larrysalibra.com) [pic.twitter.com/9bbzxGN1XR](http://t.co/9bbzxGN1XR?ref=larrysalibra.com)
> 
> — Larry Salibra (@larrysalibra) [June 15, 2015](https://twitter.com/larrysalibra/status/610288587964325888?ref=larrysalibra.com)

When the bus arrived, I jumped off and started the short walk home. In Hong Kong, walking home means walking through several malls and air conditioned walkways suspended above the road. I stopped by a restroom in one of the malls and got a glance of myself in the mirror after being awake for over a day. I needed rested and a shower.

Upon arriving home, I plugged in all of my gadgets, hopped in the shower to freshen up after a day on the road. By this time it was 12:30pm and I had been awake for almost 27 hours. I decided to take a risky hour nap…risky because I knew I would find it very difficult to wake up after only an hour of sleep and continue working. I set a couple alarms and took the plunge.

## 1:32pm: Final stretch

> I'm back. Snuck in an hour nap. 2.5 hours to go (it's still Sunday on the west coast!) Back to work! [#StartupThisSunday](https://twitter.com/hashtag/StartupThisSunday?src=hash&ref=larrysalibra.com)
> 
> — Larry Salibra (@larrysalibra) [June 15, 2015](https://twitter.com/larrysalibra/status/610319055535247360?ref=larrysalibra.com)

After I woke up, I cracked open a Coke Zero and got to work on pulling this project together and getting it out the door. First, I spent some time adding meta data to the site so that search engines and social media would pick it up.

Next, I moved on to fixing AngularJS bugs in the checkout process. I noticed that I hadn’t considered certain situations such as a user deciding to cancel and go back part way through the checkout process so had to add some ui elements and code for that to work properly.

> Coming along! Will be close. Regret taking the 1 hour nap :-P [#StartupThisSunday](https://twitter.com/hashtag/StartupThisSunday?src=hash&ref=larrysalibra.com) Sunday ends in Cali in 5m. 1h to go! [pic.twitter.com/Djy9dSgBCi](http://t.co/Djy9dSgBCi?ref=larrysalibra.com)
> 
> — Larry Salibra (@larrysalibra) [June 15, 2015](https://twitter.com/larrysalibra/status/610339793336012800?ref=larrysalibra.com)

## 2:55pm: Last minute bugs leading to schedule slip

With around an hour left, I managed to totally break the layout of the page with a missing tag. It was difficult to track down the problem with a tired brain. Typically, I would use the built in diff visualization in the GitHub mac client to compare the current code with the most recently copy in version control. However, I had made a particularly large number of changes since last commit and also had auto-intended the code to match my style instead of the original template author’s indentation style so diff was showing almost everything had changed.

As time ticked down with only 8 minutes remaining before the 4pm deadline, I committed some final copy changes and deployed the frontend and redeployed the api with live Stripe keys.

> 8 min - deploying site w/ live [@stripe](https://twitter.com/stripe?ref=larrysalibra.com) keys. also need to submit [@stripe](https://twitter.com/stripe?ref=larrysalibra.com) application. [#StartupThisSunday](https://twitter.com/hashtag/StartupThisSunday?src=hash&ref=larrysalibra.com)
> 
> — Larry Salibra (@larrysalibra) [June 15, 2015](https://twitter.com/larrysalibra/status/610354378529091584?ref=larrysalibra.com)

With 7 minutes remaining, I had to still fill out the Stripe application and hope that it would be approved for for live credit card processing. Things went smoothly until they wanted me to connect our corporate bank account and I couldn’t find the routing number. After some digging I found the routing number and with a 1 minute to go the application was approved and we were live!

> Panic as I couldn't find bank routing number. [@stripe](https://twitter.com/stripe?ref=larrysalibra.com) application approved! [#StartupThisSunday](https://twitter.com/hashtag/StartupThisSunday?src=hash&ref=larrysalibra.com) [pic.twitter.com/3SyFVdg3l2](http://t.co/3SyFVdg3l2?ref=larrysalibra.com)
> 
> — Larry Salibra (@larrysalibra) [June 15, 2015](https://twitter.com/larrysalibra/status/610356154296762368?ref=larrysalibra.com)

> And we're live! On time - 24 hours later [#StartupThisSunday](https://twitter.com/hashtag/StartupThisSunday?src=hash&ref=larrysalibra.com) [https://t.co/uOko7nlNCc](https://t.co/uOko7nlNCc?ref=larrysalibra.com)
> 
> — Larry Salibra (@larrysalibra) [June 15, 2015](https://twitter.com/larrysalibra/status/610356565326098432?ref=larrysalibra.com)

> A bit rough around the edges - still, I'm proud [https://t.co/uOko7nDotK](https://t.co/uOko7nDotK?ref=larrysalibra.com) [#StartupThisSunday](https://twitter.com/hashtag/StartupThisSunday?src=hash&ref=larrysalibra.com) [pic.twitter.com/M9c4Fmh9is](http://t.co/M9c4Fmh9is?ref=larrysalibra.com)
> 
> — Larry Salibra (@larrysalibra) [June 15, 2015](https://twitter.com/larrysalibra/status/610357177782398977?ref=larrysalibra.com)

*If you made it this far, thanks so much for joining me on Part 5 of my [5 part series sharing my 24 hour #StartupThisSunday cross Asia adventure](http://startupthissunday.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com) building the [website monitoring service wpFlight](https://wpflight.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com). Something you'd do differently? Let me know in the comments or [hit me up on Twitter](https://twitter.com/larrysalibra?ref=larrysalibra.com)!*
### #StartupThisSunday: Part 4 - Hong Kong-bound
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/startup-this-sunday-part-4-hong-kong-bound/
Last updated: 2015-07-21T16:00:00.000Z
*This is Part 4 of my [5 part series sharing my 24 hour #StartupThisSunday cross Asia adventure](http://startupthissunday.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com) building the [human powered website monitoring service wpFlight](https://wpflight.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com).*

*In [Part 1](https://larrysalibra.com/startup-this-sunday/part-1-preflight/), [Part 2](https://larrysalibra.com/part-2-singapore-bound/) and [Part 3](https://larrysalibra.com/startup-this-sunday/part-3-singapore/) we got off to a great start creating [wpFlight](https://wpflight.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com). We rejoin the story at Singapore's Changi Airport parked at gate B8 just prior to takeoff.*

## June 15, 2015 - 6:00am: Goodbye Singapore!

I find early morning flights when I’ve already been traveling for hours fascinating. They throw together a people with a bunch of different perceptions of reality in a tin can and do so in a way that makes it incredibly obvious. As the person who has been on the road for hours, I usually want to get a bit of sleep. Today, it was no different. I was too tired to be very productive in the 45 minutes between the time I boarded and when breakfast would be served, so why not try to get some shut eye. In my reality, I’d been awake twenty hours, so now was time for quite and sleep.

The woman seated next to me was asleep when I arrived and didn’t so much as move until the flight attendant woke her up for breakfast. In her perception of reality, 6am Singapore time was clearly a time to be asleep. One row ahead, was a woman from whose accent I can only assume must be from Texas was very excited about being a morning person. In the reality she perceived, 6am was already well into her day, so she was talking loudly and excitedly about interesting things she’d noticed during her stay in Singapore to her neighbor. Much to the dismay of fellow travelers trying to sleep, she would also periodically open her shades to catch a peak of the rising sun allowing piercing sunbeams to spill into the eggshell white cabin.

Needless to say, I wasn’t that successful in getting any proper sleep. I did, however, spend some time relaxing while listening to music and realized that Apple Watch is very useful as remote control for the music on your phone when you’re stuck in an economy class seat.[\[1\]](#fn1)

After United’s surprisingly pleasant flight attendants served something called “breakfast” but seemingly bearing no relationship to the word, I was ready to get back to work. I had copy to write and a logo to create. Since the logo was a discrete project that that involved creating one thing, I decided to tackle that first before working more on potentially endless copy writing.

## 7:00am: Creating a logo

As I've mentioned earlier in our adventure, artistic design isn’t my strength. In the past, I’ve always had other people create my brand’s logo whether it be my co-founder or a staff designer. There are lots of great service like 99designs that help you get something that looks good for a reasonable price. The problem is all of these methods take time. Even 99design’s ready made logos take at least 24 hours to be customized. Time isn’t something I had…I needed to launch by 4pm.

I had a couple of goals in creating the logo:

- **Simple**: Anything complicated would take too long and make my the limitations of my artistic ability painfully obvious.
- **Scalable**: It needed to look good at small and large sizes and both regular and high density Retina screens.
- **Logo & Text**: I wanted a logo and text that could be either used together or separately.
- **Good enough**: I wanted something that is good enough to launch with my MVP. It’s always possible to have a professionally designed logo created later.

The obvious logo for a name like wpFlight is an airplane…obvious both because of the word “flight” in the name and the fact I was making a logo on an airplane. Time and energy was running low, so I decided to go with the obvious.

Next I had to figure out how to draw an airplane or come up with an airplane image I could use. Drawing an airplane wasn’t going to happen but I remembered that the Unicode character standard that all modern devices use to represent characters in different languages has a few airplane characters.

Unicode has at least two airplanes - there’s a solid color airplane character number #2708 and the emoji airplane. The emoji airplane is always represented by the built in emoji font, but changing fonts between different unicode fonts lets you change the shape of the solid airplane. I played around and decided that Arial’s airplane looked best - sleek and with out engine pods.

The next step was to fire up my favorite vector graphics program, Inkscape. It’s less complicated to use than Adobe Illustrator and also free and open source.

![Airplane in Inkscape](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2015/07/inkscape-airplane-character.png) 

Inkscape is a free and open source alternative to Adobe Illustrator that's also easier to use!

I rotated the airplane so that it’s pointing to the right and up sort like a rocket to represent my hope that we will help customer’s businesses will move forward and reach new heights.

I originally planned to write wpFlight with the first three letters capitalized. However, this combined with an airplane made the left side appear too cluttered and heavy. It was at this point that I decided to write the “wp” in “wpFlight” in lowercase and capitalize the “F” in the word “flight.” This improved the balance situation and made it easier to read.

Next, I spent about 15 minutes trying out different fonts for the logo.

I had selected [Oxygen](https://www.google.com/fonts/specimen/Oxygen?ref=larrysalibra.com) earlier as our font for the site copy and headlines, so I wanted to pick something that looked good both with that and the airplane logo. Oxygen is a modern looking sans-serif font without the little “feet” that come with a serif font like Times New Roman. My first thought was to try using Oxygen for the text in the logo.

![wpFlight logo with Oxygen](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2015/07/wpflight-logo-oxygen.png) 

My first try at the wpFlight logo using the Oxygen font.

This didn’t look that bad, except for the fact that it didn’t look very “logoy” - it looked like I had typed some words next to an airplane.

I fired up Mac OS X’s excellent Font Book app and spent some time browsing through the few hundred other options I had. I narrowed it down to a few sans-serif fonts and one serif font, American Typewriter.

![wpFlight Futura Medium](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2015/07/wpflight-logo-futura-draft.png) 

Futura Medium

![wpFlight American Typewriter](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2015/07/wpflight-logo-american-typewriter-draft.png) 

American Typewriter

![wpFlight Gill Sans Normal](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2015/07/wpflight-logo-gill-sans-draft.png) 

Gill Sans Normal

![wpFlight Roboto Normal](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2015/07/wpflight-logo-roboto-draft.png) 

Roboto Normal

![wpFlight Oxygen Bold](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2015/07/wpflight-logo-oxygen-bold-draft.png) 

Oxygen Bold

I liked the font Futura the most. I particularly liked the way the it appears square and conformist on first glance, but on closer inspection it becomes apparent that the font is subtly rebellious. The center tip of the “w” is higher than the left and right sides of the character in stark contrast to typical fonts where all three tips are the same height or the left and the right are higher. To me this font said we’re business-like yet do things differently and stand out in the crowd.

Once I selected the font, I tweaked the airplane size and alignment. Originally I had rotated the airplane at a 45 degree angle, but now I adjusted it so that the plane’s starboard wing (pretend we’re looking at the plan from above) was parallel with the slope of the “w”.

When I was happy with my results, I was ready to create the Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) files we’d use in the final site. To do this, I converted the text and the airplane from characters to paths. This would store the shape of the words and plane in the file and ensure that it would look exactly as I intended even if a visitor to wpFlight doesn’t have the Futura or Arial fonts installed on her computer. Finally, I exported all black and all white versions of the logo in plain svg format.

![wpFlight final logo](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2015/07/wpflight-logo-black.svg) 

The final wpFlight logo in Futura Medium in Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) format.

90 minutes into the more than 3 hour flight back to Hong Kong, I was ready to add the logo and graphics to the top of the site. I first picked a great picture I had taken on a previous flight of the sun rising in the distance with the airliner’s wing in the foreground. Next I spent some time playing around the adjusting the sizing of the logo. This turned out to take more time than I anticipated because the template I’d chosen had custom css settings know as media queries for many more browser sizes than your typical bootstrap theme.

![Adjusting header](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2015/07/adjusting-header.png) 

Responsive CSS means testing and adjustments for each screen size. One change quickly turns into ten changes.

## 7:40am: Copy

With about two hours remaining before landing, I could focus on figuring out the rest of the site copy, at least as much as someone who has been awake for almost 21 hours and traveling and working for 15 hours of them.

If you recall, I had already outlined the different sections of the website on a panel by panel basis:

1. **Interactive**: Welcome banner with input box for customer website
2. **Static**: Overview of the service
3. **Static**: Benefits
4. **Static**: How wpFlight delivers benefits
5. **Static**: Description of deliverables (What the customer gets)
6. **Interactive**: Plans + signup call to action
7. **Static**: Contact info

I started working on the benefits panel. Originally, I wanted to focus on the benefits that wpFlight delivers customers, Instead, I decided to change the focus of this panel to the critical components of their website that deliver the most value to their business and how wpFlight can protect them. I came up with four important features of business sites in our target market and wrote copy that invited customers to think about the cost to their business if any of these stopped working without them knowing about it.

Next, I moved one panel up and wrote up a brief description of what wpFlight is for the overview panel. To accompany the overview, I selected a picture of the Singapore Changi Airport control tower I had taken a couple hours before.

Then I skipped down to the 4th panel where I described how leverage the power of a worldwide network of thousands of human testers to deliver the wpFlight service and protect their business website.

After that, it was time to explain to customers the wpFlight deliverables, or what they get when they sign up. Customers would get a weekly or month report telling them what we tested and that everything was either problem free or that problems where found. If we found problems, testers would receive a link to a detailed bug report with screenshots or videos and instruction that would allow them and their development team to quickly replicated and fix the problem. We would be using the [Pay4Bugs Report](https://report.pay4bugs.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com) system to deliver bug reports, so I was sure to include a button that I could link to a real bug report once I landed and regained Internet access.

Before I revisited the plans panel, I jumped down to the contact panel and added our support email address which I had hooked up hours earlier while I was on the bus to the airport.

## 8:35am: Plans revisited

Finally, I revisited the plan panel to see how I could improve copy or layout. If you recall, I had put the plans panel together on our previously flight. It was a bit rough and felt more complicated than it needed to be.

![wpFlight plans as they looked on the plane](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2015/07/plans-on-plane.png) 

First draft of wpFlight plans as they looked on the plane with no internet.

I first tried to make the differences between the plans easier to see by bolding the items that were different. I also spent some time tweaking font size and margins to make things clearer and easier to read.

![wpFlight plans bolded](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2015/07/plans-bolded.png) 

Looking a lot better.

Finally, I removed the email support bullet item since it was the same between all the different plans.

![wpFlight plans bolded with no email support](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2015/07/plans-bolded-no-email.png) 

Removing email support reduces complexity. Big improvement.

You can see from this screenshot taken at 8:42am, an hour or so before landing back in Hong Kong, that while things were starting to come together, our menu still didn’t match up with the content on the site. Besides the menu, there were I needed to spend more time adjusting layout constraints for each of the many different screen widths supported by this template, proof and edit copy, set up site header meta data, set up frontend deployment and clear up a few other loose ends before I’d be able to launch. We were scheduled to land in Hong Kong shortly before 10am, so that would give me 6 more hours before our launch deadline. But now, I was physically and mentally exhausted. It was time to try to take a nap.

## Nap failure

![United WiFi available](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2015/07/united-wifi-online.png) 

I could have been online the entire trip!

I wasn’t very successful napping.

After thirty minutes or so, I gave up and started playing with my phone and noticed several thousand miles too late that this flight had wifi on it! I had seen the United Wifi logo on the 777 while boarding but assumed it was only available over the continental USA like it was last time I flew United. Oops. Oh well.

I closed my eyes again and listened to music, drifting in and out of something close to but not quite sleep. My mind kept going back to all the remaining items I had to finish before our launch deadline. After landing, I'd have to hit the ground running.

*If you made it this far, thanks so much for joining me on Part 4 of my [5 part series sharing my 24 hour #StartupThisSunday cross Asia adventure](http://startupthissunday.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com) building the [website monitoring service wpFlight](https://wpflight.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com). Something you'd do differently? Let me know in the comments or [hit me up on Twitter](https://twitter.com/larrysalibra?ref=larrysalibra.com)!*

**[Continue reading Part 5 - The Final Stretch](https://larrysalibra.com/startup-this-sunday/part-5-the-final-stretch/)**

---

1. Using Apple Watch to control your iPhone's music app saves you the effort of having to unbuckle your seat and do a sort of contorted hip thrust towards the seat in front of you to wiggle your phone out of your pocket each time you want to select another song. Now that’s progress! [↩︎](#fnref1)
### #StartupThisSunday: Part 3 - Singapore
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/startup-this-sunday-part-3-singapore/
Last updated: 2015-07-20T16:00:00.000Z
*This is Part 3 of my [5 part series sharing my 24 hour #StartupThisSunday cross Asia adventure](http://startupthissunday.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com) building the [human powered website monitoring service wpFlight](https://wpflight.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com).*

*In [Part 1](https://larrysalibra.com/startup-this-sunday/part-1-preflight/) and [Part 2](https://larrysalibra.com/startup-this-sunday/part-2-singapore-bound/) we got off to a great start creating [wpFlight](https://wpflight.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com) with working payment code, a partially working frontend interface and plan for website copy. We rejoin the story at Singapore's Changi Airport on the eastern tip of the small island nation.*

## June 15, 2015 - 12:20am: Hello Singapore!

We landed in Singapore on time around 12:20pm. I didn’t enable roaming on my phone because it’s expensive and slow with Hong Kong sim cards and Singapore’s Changi Airport has (usually) excellent free wifi. That meant I couldn’t get online for a 10 more minutes after landing.

Singapore [doesn’t enjoy Internet freedom](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet%5Fcensorship%5Fin%5FSingapore?ref=larrysalibra.com) like we do in Hong Kong and the USA, so the airport requires you to provide a phone number to register for free wifi or register with your ID at an information desk.

> Hi Singapore! Why does your airport wifi ask for my #? Thx. [#StartupThisSunday](https://twitter.com/hashtag/StartupThisSunday?src=hash&ref=larrysalibra.com) [pic.twitter.com/H9LjdADK4N](http://t.co/H9LjdADK4N?ref=larrysalibra.com)
> 
> — Larry Salibra (@larrysalibra) [June 14, 2015](https://twitter.com/larrysalibra/status/610121693160468480?ref=larrysalibra.com)

## 12:30am: Stay in or go out?

Now that I was back online, I had to decide where and how I would spend the next 5.5 hours before my return flight to Hong Kong.

![Singapore departures](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2015/07/singapore-return-flights.jpg) 

My return flight to Hong Kong was UA896 and left in 5.5 hours.

I considered going through immigration and finding a place to work near the airport. However, I wasn’t familiar with the area outside the transit area. I didn’t know where or even if wifi was available or what was in or near arrivals or departures. From a previous trip, I recalled difficulty getting online in the arrivals section of the airport. On top of this, the flight connection monitor indicated that the check in desk for my return flight wouldn’t open until 3:30 am — another 3 hours! I checked with a woman at the information desk and she confirmed that I would be unable to re-enter the secure area of the airport until my flight’s checkin desk opened.

> If I leave transit & go through immigration now I can't get back in airport till [@united](https://twitter.com/united?ref=larrysalibra.com) check in counter opens at 3:30\. [#StartupThisSunday](https://twitter.com/hashtag/StartupThisSunday?src=hash&ref=larrysalibra.com)
> 
> — Larry Salibra (@larrysalibra) [June 14, 2015](https://twitter.com/larrysalibra/status/610125929466073088?ref=larrysalibra.com)

This meant if I left the transit area and couldn’t quickly find a suitable place to work, I’d potentially kill a lot of precious time.

> So transit terminal it is - getting my [@tomhanks](https://twitter.com/tomhanks?ref=larrysalibra.com) on [#StartupThisSunday](https://twitter.com/hashtag/StartupThisSunday?src=hash&ref=larrysalibra.com)
> 
> — Larry Salibra (@larrysalibra) [June 14, 2015](https://twitter.com/larrysalibra/status/610126198434217984?ref=larrysalibra.com)

Instead, I decided to channel my inner Tom Hanks[\[1\]](#fn1) and spend the night in the international transit terminal. Next up was to find a place to work. I was hungry and had a craving for donuts which aren’t that readily available in Hong Kong, so the sitting area outside Changi Airport’s 24 hour Dunkin Donuts seemed like a good bet!

![Singapore Dunkin Donuts](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2015/07/sin-ddonuts.jpg) 

Need your morning donut fix? Changi Airport has got you covered.

## 12:50am: Craving for a charge

After I picked up a surprising inexpensive donut and some water, I set myself up at the bar-style seating area and plugged in my laptop, phone and headphones for a quick power injection.

The wife of a retired State Department official once offered me the following travel advice: “Never pass up the opportunity to eat, sleep or go to the bathroom, because you’ll never know when you’ll next have the opportunity.” In this day and age, I’d add never passing up the opportunity to charge your gadgets to that list. Electricity is more important than sleep!

Once I finished my donut surrounded by charging cables, I went about connecting my laptop to the airport’s privacy-unfriendly wifi. I expected the process to be as easy as getting my iPhone online, enter my phone number, receive a quick SMS confirmation code and off we’d go. Unfortunately, it was not meant to be.

![Singapore wifi problems](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2015/07/singapore-wifi-bug.jpg) 

Changi Airport's captive wifi fails with cryptic errors if you're not using their DNS servers.

I was seeing a “A problem has occurred” error messages whenever my computer tried to display the Changi Airport wifi sign in page. Well that’s (not) helpful. I tried turning wifi off and on and even restarting my computer to no avail. Then I thought, perhaps there’s something wrong with the wifi access point in this area. I packed up my spider web of equipment and charging cables and moved a few hundred meters down the transit hall and up to the second floor to a Disney-like cafeteria area.

Same problem. Shit. By now I’d already spent 15 minutes just trying to connect my laptop to wifi. Suddenly it occurred to me to check out my network settings. I, like many others, had my DNS server manually set to use Google’s DNS server `8.8.8.8`, likely because I’d used a network recently that had a poorly functioning DNS server. After deleting the setting, I was able to get my laptop hooked up to the Internet.

> Worst part of coding is when other products' bugs start stealing your time. Software is a disaster - this is why we test [#StartupThisSunday](https://twitter.com/hashtag/StartupThisSunday?src=hash&ref=larrysalibra.com)
> 
> — Larry Salibra (@larrysalibra) [June 14, 2015](https://twitter.com/larrysalibra/status/610130164362522624?ref=larrysalibra.com)

The irony of being unable to work on my product that let’s people know when their product has a show stopper bug because some combination of Mac OS, the Singapore Airport Wifi and a DNS causes a show stopper bug was not lost on me. This type of frustration is something most people that have used any sort of technology, but happens very often to programmers who end up spending time that should be spent writing their code troubleshooting bugs in their tools.

![Singapore Airport food court](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2015/07/changi-food-court.jpg) 

I ended up working most of the night in Singapore Food Street.

After wasting almost an hour (not 30 minutes like I tweeted) solving travel and internet problems, I was ready to get back to work.

> Wasted 30min w/ getting on internet nonsense - aren't we beyond this yet? 15+ hours to go for [#StartupThisSunday](https://twitter.com/hashtag/StartupThisSunday?src=hash&ref=larrysalibra.com) \- back to work!
> 
> — Larry Salibra (@larrysalibra) [June 14, 2015](https://twitter.com/larrysalibra/status/610133154939060225?ref=larrysalibra.com)

## 1:10am: Back to work!

My goal for this short stay in Singapore was to get the API deployed and hooked up to the front end. I started by recording the plans that I had come up on the flight over in a static hash in the api code.

> Statically coding plans into the grape (ruby) api - look ma no database! Fast & dirty. [#StartupThisWeekend](https://twitter.com/hashtag/StartupThisWeekend?src=hash&ref=larrysalibra.com) [pic.twitter.com/M5f0gZq4qO](http://t.co/M5f0gZq4qO?ref=larrysalibra.com)
> 
> — Larry Salibra (@larrysalibra) [June 14, 2015](https://twitter.com/larrysalibra/status/610136453406961664?ref=larrysalibra.com)

Next, I worked more on coding the frontend code, adding in the parts I wasn’t able to do on the plane because of no internet.  
First up was the [Stripe Checkout](https://stripe.com/checkout?ref=larrysalibra.com)\-related code. Getting Stripe Checkout up and running is pretty easy. You need to include some Stripe-hosted Javascript, create a function that is called once the customer has entered her email and payment method and then open Stripe Checkout with your desired settings when it’s time to pay.

When the customer entered her payment information, Stripe Checkout securely processes and stores the info so that we don't ever have to handle sensitive credit card data. In place of the credit card, it gives us a code which we use as a token to respresent the card. This token gets sent to a function or method that we create that makes the request to the api we developed earlier in the Hong Kong Airport. In addition to the payment token, the function also is sent the selected plan, the customer's email and the customer's website.

## 2:30am: Deploying the API

Once the frontend purchase logic was working in my locally-hosted test environment, it was time to deploy the api code to our production server so that we can test in a live environment. Since I cheated a bit to save time and wrote the code in an existing project that has long had its devops bugs and deployment issues worked out, deployment was simple. It was just a matter of merging the wpFlight api code into the project’s stable git branch and running `cap production deploy` to deploy with [Capistrano](http://capistranorb.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com). Capistrano would automatically updated the server’s code and restart our unicorn application server.

My first attempt at deployment succeeded, but I immediately found a logical operator problem in the code I wrote to temporarily force the production server to use the Stripe test environment instead so that I could test without making live charges to a real credit card.

> That || should be a && - good thing live mode isn't enabled on this [@stripe](https://twitter.com/stripe?ref=larrysalibra.com) account yet! [#StartupThisSunday](https://twitter.com/hashtag/StartupThisSunday?src=hash&ref=larrysalibra.com) [pic.twitter.com/EdjD5sYkIT](http://t.co/EdjD5sYkIT?ref=larrysalibra.com)
> 
> — Larry Salibra (@larrysalibra) [June 14, 2015](https://twitter.com/larrysalibra/status/610153369391357953?ref=larrysalibra.com)

As physical fatigue began to set in, I had typed the logical OR operator `||` that means either this or that must be true instead of the logical AND operator `&&` which means both this **and** that must be true. A quick fix, `git commit`, `git merge`, and `cap production deploy` and we were good to go.

> This is me waiting for API to redeploy at 2:39am in mobile office #4 - [#AppleWatchSelfie](https://twitter.com/hashtag/AppleWatchSelfie?src=hash&ref=larrysalibra.com) [#StartupThisSunday](https://twitter.com/hashtag/StartupThisSunday?src=hash&ref=larrysalibra.com) [pic.twitter.com/6ZkTx7Uc9s](http://t.co/6ZkTx7Uc9s?ref=larrysalibra.com)
> 
> — Larry Salibra (@larrysalibra) [June 14, 2015](https://twitter.com/larrysalibra/status/610154721752420352?ref=larrysalibra.com)

## 3:30am: Immigration

I spent the next hour or so improving some of the front end logic and smoothing out the checkout process before I decided to take a break, enter Singapore and find some breakfast before check in for my return flight.

![Singapore Immigration](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2015/07/singapore-immigration.jpg) 

ProTip: Singapore immigration at terminal has free candy.

On approaching the Singapore immigration counters, I found the agent I approached had dozed off. She was quite startled when I said “Hi!” - perhaps worried that I might be one of her supervisors. I handed her my passport and entry card upon which I had entered my address as “Airport” and length of stay 6 hours. She looked confused. “You’re stay is so short?” “Yes! I’m going back to Hong Kong in a couple hours! It’s fun!”, I said not wanting to explain that I was actually on a 24 hour product building journey. She asked to see my return ticket and spent some time filling in the address for the Changi Airport into my entry card and then stamped my passport with a permission to stay for 90 days entry stamp.

![Singapore arrival stamp](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2015/07/singapore-arrival-stamp.jpg) 

90 days is a long time to visit a country less than four times the area of Washington, DC.

## 3:40am: Breakfast?

Next up was to survey the arrival area to see what my breakfast options are. There was a 24 hours McDonalds and a couple other shops open. I ended up picking a local shop that had amazing looking toast where I enjoyed an amazing traditional Singaporian breakfast of kaya butter toast, soft-boiled eggs and washed it down with a glass of cold milk tea. The breakfast amazing and only a few dollars…totally worth checking out next time you’re in Singapore’s Terminal 3 arrival area!

> Traditional Singaporian Kaya butter toast breaskfast set w/ soft-boiled egg & hot milk tea. [#StartupThisSunday](https://twitter.com/hashtag/StartupThisSunday?src=hash&ref=larrysalibra.com) [pic.twitter.com/9JuNgieVcT](http://t.co/9JuNgieVcT?ref=larrysalibra.com)
> 
> — Larry Salibra (@larrysalibra) [June 14, 2015](https://twitter.com/larrysalibra/status/610174370900619264?ref=larrysalibra.com)

> This Kaya butter toast set is like 100x better than toastbox in HK - worth the trip just for the breakfast! [#StartupThisSunday](https://twitter.com/hashtag/StartupThisSunday?src=hash&ref=larrysalibra.com)
> 
> — Larry Salibra (@larrysalibra) [June 14, 2015](https://twitter.com/larrysalibra/status/610174637335445504?ref=larrysalibra.com)

## 4:30am: Upstairs for check in

After breakfast, I headed upstairs to the departures level. I popped outside for a quick look around - it was past 4am and still dark out. I was halfway into 24 hour product building journey…over the halfway. As I walked around on the sideway, I thought about the progress I’d made over the past 12 hours. It certainly felt like things were going well and that I was more than 50% of the way to being able to launch wpFlight in 12 more hours. However, I’ve been around the block of few times though and know how easy it is for the small details at the end of a development cycles to consume a lot of time. On top of this, we were quickly approaching the 5am mark when I typically start feeling very tired if I’m still awake. I snapped a couple of pictures and headed inside to check in so I could get back inside the airport, back to work and maintain my lead in the race against the clock…no time to be a tourist!

![Singapore departures level](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2015/07/singapore-outside.jpg) 

Not much to see outside Changi Airport at 4:30am.

## 4:45am: Picking perfect colors

I flew through check in and departure immigration in about 10 minutes and found a seat in the lounge to continue working on the front end and copy.

I spent about 45 minutes selecting fonts and colors for the website. I tried playing around with my own color schemes but nothing looked good. I’m definitely not a designer and it shows. In the end, I decided to borrow the color scheme our designer selected for Pay4Bugs. I replaced the highlight colors in the theme - mostly blue - with Pay4Bugs orange and changed text font colors to match. In my experience, the best way for someone who doesn’t have a lot of artist talent to make a custom website is to start with something that looks good and make small adjustments to give you a look you desire.

By this time, it was closing in on 5am I had already been awake for almost 20 hours and working in overdrive for 13 of those hours. It was incredibly tempting to shut my eyes for a ten minute cat nap, but resisted knowing it was better to do that on the flight home rather than risk sleeping through boarding. The walk across the terminal to the gate really made my body’s fatigue apparently. My limbs felt weak and fragile while my light backpack started feeling like a rock. I found a small luggage cart, placed my bag into it and pushed it weakly in the direction of gate B2.

> Body getting tired w/ 10.5 hours to go [#StartupThisSunday](https://twitter.com/hashtag/StartupThisSunday?src=hash&ref=larrysalibra.com) \- 13in MacBook Pro retina + assorted chargers feeling heavy [pic.twitter.com/BfTXkOsWSY](http://t.co/BfTXkOsWSY?ref=larrysalibra.com)
> 
> — Larry Salibra (@larrysalibra) [June 14, 2015](https://twitter.com/larrysalibra/status/610196786762747905?ref=larrysalibra.com)

I was the last one to board the flight - apparently everyone else arrived early for this 6am flight to continue their interrupted sleep on the plane. I had almost all of the programming already completed for this MVP with 8 hours remaining in our journey. The website copy still needed a lot of work and we also needed a logo. These would be my projects for the flight UA896 back to Singapore.

> Hong Kong bound - [#StartupThisSunday](https://twitter.com/hashtag/StartupThisSunday?src=hash&ref=larrysalibra.com) (@ Singapore Changi Airport (SIN) in Singapore) [https://t.co/mJfWMZe6Qj](https://t.co/mJfWMZe6Qj?ref=larrysalibra.com) [pic.twitter.com/SnfwQ2DHV5](http://t.co/SnfwQ2DHV5?ref=larrysalibra.com)
> 
> — Larry Salibra (@larrysalibra) [June 14, 2015](https://twitter.com/larrysalibra/status/610199428079689730?ref=larrysalibra.com)

*If you made it this far, thanks so much for joining me on Part 3 of my [5 part series sharing my 24 hour #StartupThisSunday cross Asia adventure](http://startupthissunday.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com) building the [website monitoring service wpFlight](https://wpflight.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com). Something you'd do differently? Let me know in the comments or [hit me up on Twitter](https://twitter.com/larrysalibra?ref=larrysalibra.com)!*

**[Continue reading Part 4 - Hong Kong-bound](https://larrysalibra.com/startup-this-sunday/part-4-hong-kong-bound/)**

---

1. Tom Hanks plays a traveler stranded in JFK's international arrivals terminal in the movie [The Terminal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The%5FTerminal?ref=larrysalibra.com) [↩︎](#fnref1)
### #StartupThisSunday: Part 2 - Singapore Bound
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/startup-this-sunday-part-2-singapore-bound/
Last updated: 2015-07-19T16:00:00.000Z
*This is Part 2 of my [5 part series sharing my 24 hour #StartupThisSunday cross Asia adventure](http://startupthissunday.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com) building the [human powered website monitoring service wpFlight](https://wpflight.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com).*

*In [Part 1](https://larrysalibra.com/startup-this-sunday/part-1-preflight/), we talked about why I decided to create a [monitoring product](https://wpflight.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com) on top of [Pay4Bugs](https://www.pay4bugs.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com) and why I decided to strictly timebox the creation of the MVP. We also got off to a great start on the MVP while waiting in the airport: our domain and email services were set up, we'd planned out the MVP system architecture, selected our tools, implemented most of the server and selected a website template that I'd use to create the site. We rejoin the story in seat 21J of Singapore-bound flight UA895 as it begins its climb over the South China Sea.*

> Mobile office #3 is seat 21J [@united](https://twitter.com/united?ref=larrysalibra.com) economy+ - havent sat in middle seat in >10y - full flight [#StartupThisSunday](https://twitter.com/hashtag/StartupThisSunday?src=hash&ref=larrysalibra.com) [pic.twitter.com/ICJcgkIu9y](http://t.co/ICJcgkIu9y?ref=larrysalibra.com)
> 
> — Larry Salibra (@larrysalibra) [June 14, 2015](https://twitter.com/larrysalibra/status/610060387325599744?ref=larrysalibra.com)

## June 14, 2015 - 8:40am: Climbing to 40,000 feet over the South China Sea

Once of my goals when building [wpFlight](https://wpflight.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com) while traveling was to try to minimize downtime spent doing travel-related things. I had only spent 15 minutes walking from home and waiting for the airport bus. I was able to get through check in, security, immigration in Hong Kong and walk to an airport lounge at my gate in an additional 20 minutes. By showing up towards the end of boarding, I was able to avoid the inevitable downtime waiting around for boarding to begin and avoid wasted time sitting in the cabin waiting for others to board.

![Economy plus](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2015/07/economy-plus.jpg) 

The extra space provided by Economy Plus allows you to keep using a laptop while your tray table is full.

Due to my last minute ticket purchase on what turned out to be a full flight, I ended up with a middle seat in Economy Plus. It turned out to be only a minor inconvenience as the row ahead was only two across which made it easy to get in and out. The extra space in Economy Plus is very useful when you have lots of work to get done. It allows you to use your laptop on your lap while the tray table is open and in use. This means you can productively put to use the half hour between when you finish eating your meal and the cabin staff comes around to collect trash. On our adventure, this meant more than an extra hour of work time.

I had already downloaded local copies of the template I had selected and javascript libraries I would need before boarding so I could get straight to work planning the site. My goal was to create a simple site that could explain the benefits of wpFlight, what it does, how it works and the plan options.

The first priority was to determine the constraints of what I was selling. wpFlight would initially offer a human-powered monitoring service that periodically makes sure a Wordpress-powered website is working properly. I spent a bit of time brainstorming ways to differentiate plan options so we could offer something for businesses at different points along the value curve.

Questions I considered:

- What are the important parts of Wordpress powered websites businesses would want to monitor?
- How often should they be checked?
- Should we stop checking when a problem is found or continue checking for additional problems?

### Important parts of website

Wordpress sites, if they’re not used as blogs, are often used as marketing sites or for ecommerce. A shopping cart site's purpose is to convert a visitor into a customer. A business's sales and marketing site aims to at the very least turn a visitor into a lead if not a paying customer.. With that in mind I came up with a list of things a customer might want to check.

- Shopping cart/check out process
- Sign up or registration process
- Newsletter form (Mailchimp, etc)
- Contact form
- Feedback form

![Broken shopping cart](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2015/07/broken-shopping-cart.jpg) 

Would you want to know if your shopping cart is broken?

### How often should a customer’s site be checked?

In ideal world we can check a customer’s site continuously and notify as soon as a problem arises. Automated services and tools that check to make sure a server is still running and not completely broken simulate continuous monitoring by checking very frequently: several times an hour or even a few times a minute. However, these services won’t tell you if something on your website stops working, only if the server completely died because of a hardware or network failure.

Manually checking a website to make sure it is still working is also a time consuming procedure compared to simply pinging the server. At minimum, it takes a couple minutes for one person to test a relatively simple page and we would want each page to be tested by multiple people to increase accuracy. Also, since my goal was to make a MVP that initially wouldn’t automated, each test cycle would take even longer.

I also gave some thought to how problems arise in these types of sites. Often the developer or digital agency hands off a completed site to the business with everything working at launch time. Problems occur as changes are made: pages rearranged, plugins added or removed, software updated. Some businesses don’t change their websites that frequently. For them, checking things once a month to make sure everything is still working is probably good enough. Others make changes day in and day out. For those companies, we could make sure their site is working once a week.

### Should we continue testing after a problem is found?

Do customers want to simply know that their site has a problem so that they can have their development team review the site, or do they want to know that there’s a problem and receive a list of all of the problems that we’ve found?

It’s obviously much more valuable to receive a list of all problems that you can hand off to your team so that expensive developer time isn’t spent time looking for more problems. On the other hand, stopping testing after the first problem is found reduces our cost and allows us to offer a much lower entry point for customers that prefer to just be notified when a problem exists.

## Four plans inspired by my flight

Based on this analysis I came up with four plans with names quite obviously inspired by my surroundings.

![wpFlight plans as they looked on the plane](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2015/07/plans-on-plane.png) 

First draft of wpFlight plans as they looked on the plane with no internet.

The next step was to work on page layout and copy. I wanted to make it braindead easy to sign up.

## 9:30pm: Site content

My next priority was to determine what information and components I wanted on the websites. The goal of the site was to provide information about what the [wpFlight service](https://wpflight.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com) does and the benefits it provides customers and provide an easy, low friction way for them to sign up.

## Minimizing signup friction

When thinking about taking a potential customer and turning her into a paying customer, we need to think about our sales funnel. To do this, we think about what happens when a customer arrives at our site and where we want her to go. We want leads that enter our sales funnels when they hear about our product to end up at the bottom of the funnel converted into paying (and happy!) customers.

Since wpFlight is intended to bring the benefits of crowdsourced testing to people without having to understand anything about testing or even software development, I wanted to pair this simplicity with an equally low friction sign up and on-boarding process.

To convert, leads would need to complete the following steps:

- Enter their business website
- Select a plan
- Enter payment information

I imagined that potential customers visiting the site would fall into two general categories:

1. those already sold on the wpFlight value proposition before they arrived at the site *or*
2. those not yet sold.

To make it super easy to for the first group, I wanted to try the idea of putting a simple input box call to action at the top of the site before the fold. This would allow people to enter their business web site’s address and immediately get started.

For the visitor not yet sold, I would explain the features and benefits in marketing copy before presenting plan options further down on the page with corresponding calls to action.

## Integrating the template

Once I decided what interactive functionality corresponding to the calls to action would be on the site, I spent some time adding the template I selected pre-flight to the Jekyll framework I had copied over from my blog. This consisted of integrating the template’s assets into the [borrowed-from-Rails asset pipeline](https://github.com/jekyll-assets/jekyll-assets?ref=larrysalibra.com) that the framework uses. The benefit of spending \~10-15 minutes on this is that it would give me a few benefits in this race against the time. It would allow me to use faster to write [scss syntax](http://sass-lang.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com) to modify template styles. It would also enable cache busting for static assets so that I could quickly push successive updates when it was time to deploy without having to spend time clearing the browser cache and Cloudflare’s edge caches.[\[1\]](#fn1) Integrating the template into the asset pipe also had the side benefit of combining a dozen or so css and javascript files into two files for much faster loading time.

## 9:45pm: Thinking about single page site content

Once the template was integrated into our Jekyll framework and up and running on our localhost 40,000 feet somewhere over the South China Sea, I was ready to start adding content and components to the website. I had selected a single page style template made up of multiple rectangular panels. Each panel would serve the role of a different page on a more traditional site. I first came up with a list of what content each panel would contain:

1. *Interactive*: Welcome banner with input box for customer website
2. *Static*: Overview of the service
3. *Static*: Benefits
4. *Static*: How wpFlight delivers benefits
5. *Static*: Description of deliverables (What the customer gets)
6. *Interactive*: Plans + signup call to action
7. *Static*: Contact info

Static panels would be text and graphics. Interactive panels would require programming.

## 10:00pm: Designing interfaces

Next, I got started creating the interfaces for the interactive panels. The welcome panel would need a box in to which customers could input their website and a button with a call to action.

For the input box, I decided to use the HTML5 URL element which is like a text box but only allows input of URLs. It is written `<input type="url">` instead of `<input type="text">` and allows us to use browser’s built in validation which (ie. HTML5 form validation) which is supported by the vast majority of browsers currently in use. Good enough for our MVP. By adding the `required` attribute, we can also tell the browser that users need to enter a URL before clicking on the button will work.

For the plans panel, the interactive part would be the sign up buttons below each plan. So, to get started, I simply filled in the plan info that I had come up with earlier.

After the interactive interface elements were complete, the next step was to add AngularJS libraries to the project and start planning out interface logic. Since I had forgotten to download those pre-flight, I instead copied versions from another project.

I created the AngularJS boilerplate: one `ng-app` and `ng-controller` for page. We’d only need one controller for this wpFlight MVP. Next, I added `ng-click` handlers to each of the interactive buttons on the page. These would be triggered to run specific code when a button was clicked. Then I hooked up the url input box to AngularJS using the `ng-model` attribute. This would make it so whatever was typed in the box would stored in the variable specified by `ng-model`.

Then, I went on to think through what should happen when each button was clicked and documented that in comment pseudocode within the controller. Since customers could start the signup process at one of two places, that resulted in two logical flows:

### Welcome button flow

1. Customer enters url in input box
2. Customer clicks button
3. Customer is presented with page to select plan
4. Customer selects plan
5. Customer enters email
6. Customer enters payment information
7. Order is processed

### Plan signup button flow

1. Customer selects plan
2. Customer is prompted to enter website url
3. Customer enters email
4. Customer enters payment information
5. Order is processed

These flows were a bit more complicated than I’d hope given that I only had a bit over an hour before we’d land in Singapore when I hoped to be able to deploy our API to the live server and hook up this barely started frontend to the backend. How could we simplify?

One immediately obvious place for simplification was to combine the steps collecting email and payment information. Stripe’s Checkout tool also gave us the ability to collect a user’s email so there was no need to do it ourselves.

![Stripe Checkout](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2015/07/checkout-email.png) 

Stripe Checkout let's us collect email and payment information at the same time. While this is great for simplifying our implementation, it means we lose the ability to follow up with potential customers that haven't converted. We won't have their contact information.

I could also avoid creating another “please select a plan” signup page by directing users who started at the welcome panel to the plan panel by hiding other elements of the page. I also decided to avoid creating another “please enter your url” page by using a quick and dirty Javascript input box. Ugly, but fast.

### Welcome button flow

1. Customer enters url in input box
2. Customer clicks button
3. Customer is shown plan panel (hide rest of page)
4. Customer selects plan
5. Customer enters payment information & email via Stripe Checkout
6. Order is processed

### Plan signup button flow

1. Customer selects plan
2. Customer is prompted to enter website url
3. Customer enters payment information & email via Stripe Checkout
4. Order is processed

## 10:30pm AngularJS coding begins

Now that I had a simplified flow that didn’t require me to create any additional pages, I could start filling in code. I was able to write everything but the code that uses [Stripe Checkout](https://stripe.com/checkout?ref=larrysalibra.com) since I was offline. This, however, wasn’t a problem. Stripe Checkout requires information about the plan selected, cost and other setting information and returns a token representing the customer’s payment information and the customer’s email address. I could skip this with a comment and hardcoding in values for the email address and token. This enabled me to even able to craft the order creation ajax call using anjularjs’s `$http`. (the call would fail of course because I didn’t have time to set up the tools to simulate, aka “mock”, Stripe’s API offline.

## 11:00pm: #FirstWorldProblems - Coding without Internet

![United Wifi](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2015/07/united-wifi.jpg) 

Despite this very obvious United Wifi logo next to the cabin door, I assumed (incorrectly) that wifi was only available on flights within the Continental United States.

Programming without Internet access is an interesting exercise that I encourage every developer to try periodically. The only major problem I encountered was remembering the exact names or signatures of certain API calls while high over the South China Sea and disconnected from normal universe of programmer aids. It’s amazing how dependent we programmers are on search engines, online api documentation and tools like Stackoverflow. One solution I used was to use other projects I had worked on as reference when I couldn't remember the exact syntax of a particular function

Another offline programming trick is hidden inside of Chrome. In one instance, I couldn’t remember the javascript function to open an input box. I knew that `alert()` lets you display a message and `confirm()` lets you display a confirmation dialog, but for the life of me could remember how to open an input dialog in Javascript. Then I realized that Chrome’s Javascript console has a great autocomplete feature that lets you essentially view all of available methods. It was called `prompt()`.

![Chrome's Javascript console](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2015/07/chrome-lookup.png) 

Using Chrome's Javascript console as a language and runtime quick reference.

## 11:35pm: Expanding marketing copy notes

I had about 20 minutes before I had to turn off my computer for landing when I could finally start outlining some marketing copy. I didn't have enough time to really get into proper writing mode. Instead, I went through each of static panels made some notes in Evernote about what I envisioned in each panel. In some cases those notes were a list of bullet points, for others I wrote a sentence or two I hoped would appear in the copy.

## 11:55pm: Descent

Once I turned my computer off for landing, I tried to grab a bit of shut eye.

I knew that I had a good 16 hours of work left ahead of me, and despite being only 8 hours into this adventure, I had already been awake over 16 hours. I needed any rest I could get. Unfortunately, my pumping adrenaline and brain in overdrive made it impossible to sleep.

*If you made it this far, thanks so much for joining me on Part 2 of my [5 part series sharing my 24 hour #StartupThisSunday cross Asia adventure](http://startupthissunday.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com) building the [website monitoring service wpFlight](https://wpflight.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com). Something you'd do differently? Let me know in the comments or [hit me up on Twitter](https://twitter.com/larrysalibra?ref=larrysalibra.com)!*

**[Continue reading Part 3 - Singapore](https://larrysalibra.com/startup-this-sunday/part-3-singapore/)**

---

1. The last thing you want is for on old version of a script or stylesheet to be stuck in a visitor's browser cache with no way to clear it but waiting hours or days until it expires. It's a great way to have difficult to track down problems that your customers experience but that you can't replicate. [↩︎](#fnref1)
### #StartupThisSunday: Part 1 - Pre-flight
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/startup-this-sunday-part-1-preflight/
Last updated: 2015-07-14T16:00:00.000Z
*This is Part 1 of my [5 part series sharing my 24 hour #StartupThisSunday cross Asia adventure](http://startupthissunday.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com) building the [human powered website monitoring service wpFlight](https://wpflight.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com).*

My [#StartupThisSunday](http://startupthissunday.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com) trip of building and launching a product in 24 hours really was a spur of the moment decision. I’d had the idea for a [no software development knowledge needed automated testing product](https://wpflight.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com) to open up the power of [crowdsourced testing](https://www.pay4bugs.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com) to a less technical audience for a few months, but found myself constantly searching for the right time to get started.

A month or so ago, during one of my weekly GTD[\[1\]](#fn1) review sessions, I considered promoting my "Build automated crowdsourced testing minimal viable product[\[2\]](#fn2) task item from "someday" to one of my "next action" items. I imagined that completing the task would take roughly a week including my normal weekly obligations and ongoing products. However, I felt the dread of impending feature creep and schedule slip that can so easily occur when perfectionist software engineers are building products. I already imagined unplanned events, unforeseen technical problems and the hundreds of tiny details that are the 20% that takes 80% of the time.

I originally planned to create a series of five niche crowdsourced monitoring products similar to wpFlight over the course of five days, but after a couple false starts (ie. I’m going to do five products in five days *this* week) and discussing the plan with several people I was left unhappy with that plan. As to why I decided against that approach, I’ll save that for another post.

## June 14, 2015 - 10:00am: Wake up

I had spent Saturday visiting with fellow South China entrepreneur [Mike Michelini](https://twitter.com/michelini?ref=larrysalibra.com) and his family at his home in Shenzhen. It was a relaxing day of swimming followed by baby back ribs, fish and chips and tall pints of cider. I woke up the next morning back in Hong Kong with a case of good-food-and-good-company-induced Sunday morning lethargy, so I pulled myself out of bed and headed off to the pool to wake up and plan my Sunday.

![South China entrepreneurs](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2015/07/crafthead-with-michelini.jpg) 

Enjoying pear & apple cider with fellow South China entrepreneurs.

Like many tech entrepreneurs, I’m most productive in afternoon, evening and overnight hours. After my late Sunday morning swimming, GTD inbox review and lunch, I noticed that I had no high priority items and could finally get started on creating a MVP of a crowdsourced monitoring product. Having experienced the schedule slip and scope creep of new development projects time and time again, I really wanted to get something done and out in front of users as fast as possible.

## The perfect time is now

As life long entrepreneur, I constantly encounter wannabepreneurs…people who say they have an idea and want get started, but they just need time or money or proper alignment of the moon to get started. I know many of the excuses because I’ve made many of themselves - I’ve also been very lucky to have [very successful people shout some sense into me early on](https://larrysalibra.com/just-fucking-do-it/).

If you’ve decided to do something, **now** is a great time to get started.

## Making a public commitment

I decided while swimming that I wanted to get the [wpFlight](https://wpflight.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com) MVP designed, built and launched today. Post swimming, however, I was still feeling a bit of the Sunday blues. I had slight headache from the night before (I don’t do well with beer or beer-like-products…cider I’m looking at you!) and the sun was shining on another day of perfect Hong Kong summer weather. The idea of sitting around my home office designing, coding and testing for 24 straight hours seemed like a recipe for a nap, followed by another nap, followed by failure. I needed to get out and needed a race to keep me going.

What better way to make a race and get out of the house than traveling somewhere? I decided to create a one man race against the clock by buying a roundtrip ticket from Hong Kong to a nearby country and back. Many of people spend days each week on the road yet complain they never have any time. Yet if you see these same people in airports or train stations, they’re rarely working. Despite the talk of mobile offices and road-warriors, planes and airports are more often a place to take a nap, watch a movie or talk to the person next to you on your employer’s dime. Spend any time in an airport lounge and you’ll see what I mean.

The rules were simple, I would have 24 hours from when I started to buy a ticket, travel to another country and back all while designing and building a new product that would be launched at the end of the time period.

I was worried about going forward with this plan. The idea of making a public commitment to do something I had never done before was risky. I had a pretty idea of what I wanted to build and was familiar with all of the tools I would use to build it, but what if I couldn’t finish it? How would people react? Would people think I’m just screwing around?

In the end, I decided that any reaction from people was better than the most likely case, that **no one would even notice**. I also took discomfort of going through with this public process as a positive indication that it was something I should do even if the only thing it did was push me outside of my comfort zone

## Building a product is not building a business

It's very easy for someone with an engineering background such as myself to confuse building a product with building a business. It's so easy for a week building a product to turn into a few weeks which then turns into fews months...all without focusing on the core essence of a business, solving customer problems. That's why I thought it would so valuable to timebox building the MVP of the wpFlight from first code to launch to 24 hours. No feature creep, no distractions from shiny new engineering tools, no premature optimization. Build and launch in 24 hours...**no excuses**.

## 3:00pm: False start

I decided on this plan a few minutes before 3pm on Sunday. 3pm would have been the perfect time to start the journey since 3pm Sunday is exactly midnight on the West Coast US. Unfortunately, I’m not the fastest writer, so it took me longer than it should have to [write my announcement blog post](https://larrysalibra.com/startup-this-sunday/). Instead, I posted my public commitment at 4pm and got started.

## 4:00pm: And we're off!

> I'm building a new product in 24 hours - starting now - while on the road. [#StartupThisSunday](https://twitter.com/hashtag/StartupThisSunday?src=hash&ref=larrysalibra.com) Join me for the ride! [https://t.co/loOjTvJ0nt](https://t.co/loOjTvJ0nt?ref=larrysalibra.com)
> 
> — Larry Salibra (@larrysalibra) [June 14, 2015](https://twitter.com/larrysalibra/status/609994289821667328?ref=larrysalibra.com)

My first step was to quickly find and purchase a reasonably priced roundtrip plane ticket leaving that evening and returning the next day. Tools like Expedia and Kayak are great if you know where you’re going, however they completely fail when your destination is simply “anywhere but here.” Fortunately, there are a couple great tools specifically designed for those of us who aren’t particular about destination. My favorite is [Adioso](http://www.adioso.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com) which lets you search for flights to anywhere and is beautifully designed. Result show up in a beautiful grid of destinations and lowest prices.[\[3\]](#fn3)

Excluding destinations in mainland China since they’re technically the same country as Hong Kong and Taipei (because it’s too close by to be interesting for this), Singapore, Philippines and Thailand usually top the list of cheap countries to fly to from Hong Kong. For this adventure, Singapore was the cheapest and had flights that fit into my schedule. United Airlines has a flight that originates in Chicago and continues on to Singapore after a stop in Hong Kong. This is a great flight for many reasons. The schedule let’s you leave Hong Kong late in the evening, arrive in Singapore around midnight, spend the night in Singapore and arrive back in Hong Kong around the start of the next business day. It’s also cheap because they want to fill up the empty Singapore to Hong Kong seats left when people are only traveling between Hong Kong and Chicago.

I checked the official airline site and the same price, US$166.90, was available on their site. It briefly warned me that that I would not be able to purchase a same day ticket with a Hong Kong-issued credit card. I’m not sure what their reason for that is, but no matter, Hong Kong credit cards are relatively bad deals compared to US cards, so I wouldn’t be using one anyways.

> Just bought a roundtrip ticket Hong Kong to Singapore - it's real! let's do this! [#StartupThisSunday](https://twitter.com/hashtag/StartupThisSunday?src=hash&ref=larrysalibra.com) [pic.twitter.com/ucenKrKySz](http://t.co/ucenKrKySz?ref=larrysalibra.com)
> 
> — Larry Salibra (@larrysalibra) [June 14, 2015](https://twitter.com/larrysalibra/status/609995763360382976?ref=larrysalibra.com)

Buying the ticket took me only about 8 minutes the only trouble came from United’s creaky old website that they inherited from their Continental merger. Like Adioso, it doesn’t use industry https encryption properly and Safari warns you that searching for a flight on their encrypted page sends data in an insecure method negating the value of their encryption.

I always print a copy of my ticket receipt when I’m traveling outside of the US - too often immigration officials will want to see your “ticket” and won’t be impressed by something on your mobile phone. After printing the receipt, I threw a few items into my \[trusty gray L.L. Bean Stowaway Daypack\][\[4\]](#fn4). 13 inch Macbook Pro Retina, JayBird BlueBud bluetooth headphones, two external batteries (all charged of course), a hooded sweatshirt & winter hat (to protect against aggressive air conditioning), passports, wallets[\[5\]](#fn5), contact solution, a toothbrush and toothpaste.

I left home and rushed over to catch the airport bus which is roughly a 15 minute walk away. The walk was a great time to start to think through how I would plan the next 24 hours.

This is how I thought about the next 24 hours. My flight to Singapore would leave in four and a half hours and take a bit less than four hours. I would have five hours of time in Singapore before another four flight back to Hong Kong. This left me four built in milestones and five blocks of time I could use to further timebox tasks and check my progress. I also assumed that I wouldn’t have Internet access on the plane, so I would need to further arrange tasks so that work that could be done without Internet could be done grouped together and assigned to one of the two flights.

> Made it to airport bus E33 - mobile office number 1 - will do planning for the next 23.5 hours [#StartupThisSunday](https://twitter.com/hashtag/StartupThisSunday?src=hash&ref=larrysalibra.com) [pic.twitter.com/M8yyXfoVXe](http://t.co/M8yyXfoVXe?ref=larrysalibra.com)
> 
> — Larry Salibra (@larrysalibra) [June 14, 2015](https://twitter.com/larrysalibra/status/610001573519867904?ref=larrysalibra.com)

## 4:31pm: On the bus, Airport-bound

Once I boarded the bus, my first step was to flesh out a generic create new website Omnifocus project task list I had previously created. I’d created this list to remind myself of the various social media and third party services one needs to register for when setting up a new domain. Once I came up with a plan, I would complete the boilerplate work.

![Omnifocus task list](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2015/07/omnifocus-tasks.png) 

Omnifocus is a personal productivity manager great for use with the Gettings Things Done organization framework.

## Thinking about rapid MVP development

When thinking about how to build and launch a product as quickly as possible, it is important to **pick tools you are already familiar with and avoid anything that has a lead or turnaround time**. Working under a 24 hour time constraint, unless you already have team members with you and ready to go or an Odesk staff that you’ve used before, you’re going to be doing everything yourself. Most of the excellent tools and services that let entrepreneurs outsource or enlist the on-demand assistance of remote experts have at minimum a lead time in the hours or more to get going.

Even if you have a team member you’ve worked with for years, the two of you never share the exact same vision out the door. It may be one person has a vision that gets communicated to the other person or the two of you have different ideas and discussion arrives upon a common vision. This applies for both product vision and the vision for how to implement the product. This back and forth can be great, but it’s easy for that back and forth to take what one person could do in a day and extend it out to days or weeks with theoretical discussions about things that may or may not happen. By timeboxing your MVP into 24 hours, you’ll have plenty of time to have these discussions while you’re seeing how the market reacts to your initial ideas.

## Selecting my tools

Since I’ve been building and leading teams that build software for much of my adult life, it made sense for me to pick programming languages and developer tools to create this MVP. For me, that meant picking the [Ruby-based API creation framework Grape](http://intridea.github.io/grape/?ref=larrysalibra.com), [Stripe](https://stripe.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com) for payment processing and [AngularJS](https://angularjs.org/?ref=larrysalibra.com) in the browser. For the site and templating, I’d use the [Jekyll static website generating framework](http://jekyllrb.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com) and the same custom scripts I use to build and deploy my blog. This would let me keep the site entirely static and avoid moving parts which would allow it to be completely cached by and served from [Cloudflare](https://www.cloudflare.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com). I could also get away with using the same US$5/month [DigitalOcean](https://www.digitalocean.com/?refcode=dfae04e9eaf4&ref=larrysalibra.com) server I used for this blog.

![South China entrepreneurs](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2015/07/grape.png) 

Grape is a tiny API framework for Ruby that has a deliciously purple logo.

If I was a non-technical founder, I could considered tools like Shopify, Squarespace, Google Forms or WuFoo that don’t require programming knowledge and allow you to replicate much of the user visible functionality.

For [wpFlight](https://wpflight.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com), I was going to be building it as a service that sits on top of our existing [Pay4Bugs](https://www.pay4bugs.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com) service, however I wanted to avoid time consuming and complicated API integration until we were sure this is something that customers want.

My rough plan was to complete this boilerplate on the hour bus ride and plan out the rest of the work among the five time blocks.

## Boilerplate

I already knew what the service would do and who it would target. It would let customers monitor their site with real people to let them know when something critical stopped working. I decided to focus on Wordpress users because companies who use Wordpress are demanding of their websites yet often don’t have formal software engineering training or a defined testing process. Despite the focus on Wordpress, the service would work for any marketing or ecommerce site.

Prior to starting [#StartupThisSunday](http://startupthissunday.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com), I had given some thought to what I would call the service. I found the \[method and spreadsheet suggested by 7-day-startup\]\[6\] useful in brainstorming names and came up with five choices.

- funnelguard
- wpflight
- successflight
- solidflight
- flyblast

[wpflight.com](https://wpflight.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com) was my favorite both because of its simplicity and of the social indicator "wp" which shows this product works great with Wordpress. Your business website is a lot like flying an airplane. You want it to get off the ground safely and to go fast, but the number one rule is that it should not fall out of the sky.

Plowing through the boilerplate stuff was quick and easy. I bought the domain through [Google’s new domain registration service](http://domains.google.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com), added it to Cloudflare, registered social media accounts and created a new Github repository.

To save time, I pointed the wpFlight support email to our existing Pay4Bugs [Groove powered ticketing system](https://www.groovehq.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com). Groove makes it super easy to add another email box so we could keep wpFlight tickets separate from our Pay4Bugs tickets yet handle them as part of one support process.

The trickiest thing of the whole process was making sure the anti-spam DKIM and SPF DNS records were set up properly for all of the services that will be sending email using your domain. Messing this up means that email meant for customer will end up going straight to their junk box. I quickly tested this by sending test emails to an external domain and manually verifying the message headers to make sure SPF and DKIM verification was passing.

![Setting up DKIM & SPF](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2015/07/wpflight-dkim-spf.png) 

Setting up DKIM and SPF can be tricky.

After setting email, I could move on to setting up a new Github repository. I would be using the git version control system for this project. Version control makes it possible for me to keep track of the changes that I make to code and quickly revert to an earlier version of code if a problem occurs.

> On \~50 min bus ride to HKG finished boilerplate stuff - using Omnifocus + [#GTD](https://twitter.com/hashtag/GTD?src=hash&ref=larrysalibra.com) to keep organized [#StartupThisSunday](https://twitter.com/hashtag/StartupThisSunday?src=hash&ref=larrysalibra.com) [pic.twitter.com/EnprsZmcDt](http://t.co/EnprsZmcDt?ref=larrysalibra.com)
> 
> — Larry Salibra (@larrysalibra) [June 14, 2015](https://twitter.com/larrysalibra/status/610013331634544640?ref=larrysalibra.com)

## 5:18pm: Planning the rest of the journey

Next, I came up with my development plan for the rest of the day. The first step was deciding what I wanted to build. I wanted to build a system that let customers submit one or more website URLs and subscribe to a plan where the URLs they submitted would be tested periodically to make sure there were no problem. If there were problems, customers would receive an email report indicating the problem that were found and if there were no problems, they would receive an all clear email.

We would start by [doing things that don’t scale](http://paulgraham.com/ds.html?ref=larrysalibra.com) and manually running each test on the Pay4Bugs platform. However, we needed a system that let customers sign up and pay for the service on their own.

To do that, I needed to build a system to collect the following information:

- Contact info
- URL(s) to be tested
- Payment info
- Service plan

This information would need to be stored in a way that was accessible to the people doing support and running the projects who aren't developers. Payment information would also need to be verified, stored and charged periodically for the service subscription.

I could have simply put up a landing page that asks people interested the service to fill out a contact form or simply email us if they’re interested in such a service. I didn’t choose this route for a couple reasons. It’s a bad idea to handle your customers’ payment details directly both because there’s a good chance you’ll lose them and it’s a violation of credit card association rules to do so unless you’re certified PCI compliant at a certain level. I also wanted to make the sign up process as frictionless and easy to use as possible.

My requirement to collect data from customers and also make it available to non-technical internal staff had the potential to really increase complexity in a way that could make it difficult to complete the MVP in 24 hours. If the data only needed to be accessible by me personally or another trusted technical team member, storing the data in database would have been a reasonable option. It’s not that difficult for a programmer to ssh into a server and type in some SQL commands to see whatever data he needs to see.

Non-technical users would have a lot of trouble with that. I would need to create some sort of interface: a set of internal use webpages, for example, so that users could much up customer subscriptions with contact info and websites to be tested. To do that, I’d probably need a user system, with logins and all of that fun stuff, or at the very least, I’d need to set up some whitelist rules so that the whole world couldn’t access customer information. Complicated. With only a bit over 23 hours remaining and no code written, I didn’t have time for more complexity.

Instead, I wanted to come up with a way where I didn’t have to have my own database or user system and complexity that comes with it. There are no shortage of third party services such as Parse or Firebase that allow you to outsource your database through an API, but adding an additional third party dependency increases complexity and I didn’t have time to spend time evaluating the different services and then learn their APIs.

What’s a programming entrepreneur to do? I turned to the developer platform that’s done more for Internet commerce than any company since PayPal, [Stripe](https://stripe.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com)! Stripe is famous for providing an amazing API and toolkit for collecting and processing customer payment information and an easy to use dashboard to manage those payments. What isn’t well-known is that in a pinch, you can use it as a (time)poor man’s database. Everytime you create a customer or payment, you can optionally store arbitrary key-value data with the record. This data, which Stripe refers to as “metadata” is then visible through its point and click dashboard. This meant that I could store information customers enter about their website directly with their payment information and our non-technical team members could access it. Perfect!

Now that I knew what I wanted to build, I divided up the tasks among the five different time blocks:

- *Block 1 - 4:00pm to 8:25pm:* Pre-flight: Design and implement backend API
- *Block 2 - 8:25pm to 12:20am* HKG—SIN flight: Page layout, marketing copy, design
- *Block 3 - 12:20am to 6:00am:* Singapore stay: Implement client-side page logic and connect to backend
- *Block 4 - 6:00am to 9:55am:* SIN-HKG flight: Create logo, finalize copy, more layout work
- *Block 5 - 9:55am to 4:00pm:* Post-trip: Whatever was leftover, testing, launch!

## 5:44pm: At HKG

> Checked in, cleared immigration - heading to gate area to get started on business logic [#StartupThisSunday](https://twitter.com/hashtag/StartupThisSunday?src=hash&ref=larrysalibra.com) [pic.twitter.com/PFkNRKJrF2](http://t.co/PFkNRKJrF2?ref=larrysalibra.com)
> 
> — Larry Salibra (@larrysalibra) [June 14, 2015](https://twitter.com/larrysalibra/status/610019901252612096?ref=larrysalibra.com)

As nice as Hong Kong buses are, after thirty minutes of using my phone or computer as the double-decker bus winds around Hong Kong’s hilly roads, I started feeling motion sick. I took a break for the last fifteen minutes of the ride as the bus, intended more for airport and airline employees than travelers, drove around the airport grounds dropping off and picking workers. The bus ride finally ended at the Terminal 1 departure checkin hall one hour and twenty-five minutes into my adventure.

Check in went quickly except for comments about the brevity of my trip.

> “Wow! You’re coming back in the morning!”

> “Yep! It’s going to be fun!”

The Hong Kong resident immigration almost never has a line and this time was no different. It went smoothly until I tried to take pictures of the eChannel automated immigration gates (for this blog). An officer make a weak attempt to chase me down and instead gave up and yelled in my direction that I needed to delete them.

I found a seat with a view in a lounge near gate to plug in and get to work. My first step was to create a new Stripe account so that I could get started on the API. For those that haven’t used Stripe before, creating an account is easy. You don’t even need to enter a username or password if you don’t want to save the account. You also don’t need to enter any business or personal info until you’re reading to start accepting live payments. Once you’ve created the account, you’re all set up to build on top of it in the test mode which comes with a [handy list of test credit card numbers](https://stripe.com/docs/testing?ref=larrysalibra.com#cards) you can use to simulate payments.

![HKG Mobile office](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2015/07/hkg-mobile-office.jpg) 

Make sure your mobile office has a view.

Once that was out of the way I started thinking about how I wanted my API to look. What actions would it need to perform and what information would it need to perform? My goal when thinking about this was to distill the API requirements down to absolute minimum necessary. It was already over two hours into #StartupThisSunday and less than two hours until boarding for my Singapore flight.

## Reducing feature scope

One obvious critical action was the ability to place an order or start a subscription. That would require the same information we discussed above:

- Contact info
- URL(s) to be tested
- Payment info
- Service plan

It also seemed like I would want [wpFlight](https://wpflight.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com) to have a mechanism for users to log in and access their account. I’d thought about this aspect of projects in the past. I knew I didn’t want develop this myself. I also didn’t have time to deal with 3rd party login options such as Facebook Connect which are still complicated because they involve users getting redirected off site and back. I’d also thought doing a login by email system that fakes an account management system by using information in Stripe.[\[6\]](#fn6) However, all of these options seemed like more work than necessary for an MVP. Having a way to log in would just make it so that I would have to create ways for people to change their subscriptions. A lot of work for a MVP and feature creep that would definitely make it hard to make our deadline.

Instead, I could avoid all of this hassle by asking customers who bought into wpFlight’s value proposition and signed up to email customer support if they wanted to make changes to their account. Problem solved.

It was settled, I would build an API with exactly one action: creating a subscription.

The next step was outline the API call. I like to do this with pseudo code and comments, writing a comment for each step I think will need to be taken.

{% highlight ruby %}

post "order" do

# validate input

# create stripe subscription

# send welcome email

end

{% endhighlight %}

## Collecting customer information

Next, I would need to think about the information we already have decided to collect from customers and action that the API call will take and how we will get that information from the webpage to the API.

### Contact info

Contact info can simply be an email address. We might collect this with a `type=email` input field on the client side or perhaps we can have Stripe’s Checkout payment code collect it. Either way, we can send to the API as a String.

### URLs to be tested

Initially, I wanted to collect multiple website addresses from customers, but given our time constraints, it seemed like this added unnecessary complexity. Instead, we would simply collect one URL from the customer and pass that as a String to the API.

### Payment Info

Stripe has an amazing javascript library that called [Checkout](https://stripe.com/checkout?ref=larrysalibra.com) that makes it easy to collect a customer’s credit card information in a way that allows you to avoid having to touch sensitive information. It also allows you to avoid spending time creating complicated payment entry forms with only a couple of lines of Javascript. Since we’ve used this before, I knew that it would provide a token, essentially a serious of random looking letters and numbers, that we could send to the API as a String and use to start the customer’s subscription.

> Creating new [@Stripe](https://twitter.com/stripe?ref=larrysalibra.com) account so I can start on API - going to cheat & use Stripe as a database. [#StartupThisSunday](https://twitter.com/hashtag/StartupThisSunday?src=hash&ref=larrysalibra.com) [pic.twitter.com/v7tgAku9HI](http://t.co/v7tgAku9HI?ref=larrysalibra.com)
> 
> — Larry Salibra (@larrysalibra) [June 14, 2015](https://twitter.com/larrysalibra/status/610028431082958848?ref=larrysalibra.com)

### Service Plan

I would assign each service plan a short name and send that code to the API to let it know which plan the customer had selected.

After creating the API signature, I would need to decide where to put this code. I could create a new server for this one API action, but this would create extra deployment work. Instead, it made since to add this the existing Pay4Bugs API which also is written in Grape and already has the appropriate Stripe code.

Writing up the API code and making sure it worked in Stripe’s test mode went pretty quickly. The biggest challenge was figuring out how to send a different secret key than the default key with [Stripe's Ruby library](https://github.com/stripe/stripe-ruby/?ref=larrysalibra.com) for each request since I would be including this in an already deployed project. Stripe's documentation was vague about the proper syntax, but a few minutes of browsing the library source code and trial and error gave me the correct answer. I finished with a few minutes before boarding and could get a head start on my upcoming inflight design tasks by picking a template.

## Picking a template

I’m a huge fan of the importance of design. That’s why I’m so excited about the thousands of amazing free templates that are available on the Internet. They are perfect for putting together an MVP or as a starting place for a custom design. They let people like myself with little artistic ability come up with something that is unique and looks great with very little work.

When selecting templates for #StartupThisSunday, I considered templates that were built in ways that would be easy for me to work with and according to conventions with which I am familiar. In this case, this meant looking at templates based on [Bootstrap](http://getbootstrap.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com). By sticking to templates based on Bootstrap, I could almost eliminate the time that would be spent trying to understand how the author has structured the template when I wanted to make changes.

![Backyard template](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2015/07/backyard-thumbnail.png) 

Backyard Bootstrap template.

When I'm building a project on my own, I like to pick templates that make heavy use of background photographs. I am a better photographer than I am graphic artist which makes it easy for me to change the way a page looks using photographs I’ve taken instead of having to try to draw myself. For wpFlight, I selected the [Backyard](https://shapebootstrap.net/item/1524948-backyard-high-converting-landing-page-template?ref=larrysalibra.com) template.

## 8:00pm: Off to catch my flight

I'd made a great amount of progress in a mere 4 hours since getting started. Now it was time for me to pack up my (fully charged) things and rush off to the gate to catch my flight to Singapore.

> API & payments working - picked a template and going into marketing copy mode for 4 hour flight to Singapore [#StartupThisSunday](https://twitter.com/hashtag/StartupThisSunday?src=hash&ref=larrysalibra.com) <20h 2go
> 
> — Larry Salibra (@larrysalibra) [June 14, 2015](https://twitter.com/larrysalibra/status/610059320672264192?ref=larrysalibra.com)

> US airlines have secondary security check even on a flight that's 100% outside USA - why? [#StartupThisSunday](https://twitter.com/hashtag/StartupThisSunday?src=hash&ref=larrysalibra.com) [pic.twitter.com/q1sTj0i5jX](http://t.co/q1sTj0i5jX?ref=larrysalibra.com)
> 
> — Larry Salibra (@larrysalibra) [June 14, 2015](https://twitter.com/larrysalibra/status/610060885579554816?ref=larrysalibra.com)

*If you made it this far, thanks so much for joining me on Part 1 of my [5 part series sharing my 24 hour #StartupThisSunday cross Asia adventure](http://startupthissunday.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com) building the [website monitoring service wpFlight](https://wpflight.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com). Something you'd do differently? Let me know in the comments or [hit me up on Twitter](https://twitter.com/larrysalibra?ref=larrysalibra.com)!*

**[Continue reading Part 2 - Singapore-bound](https://larrysalibra.com/startup-this-sunday/part-2-singapore-bound/)**

---

1. GTD is a personal productivity system called Getting Things Done. Things that you haven't committed to doing but may want to do some day in the future get put into a "Someday" category. [↩︎](#fnref1)
2. Minimal viable product [↩︎](#fnref2)
3. My only complaint is that their site isn’t great for privacy because it doesn’t use encrypted https by default so my searches are visible to anyone who bothers to look. [↩︎](#fnref3)
4. I bought this backpack in 2009 in Guangzhou for around 200 CNY at an L.L.Bean in mall store and killed it after a couple years of heavy use. I shipped it off to Maine via Hong Kong Post’s super cheap (and super slow) surface mail and the kind folks at L.L.Bean happily honored their lifetime warranty and sent me a new bag at their cost. [↩︎](#fnref4)
5. I like carrying as few things in my pockets as necessary, so I keep separate wallets for China and traveling. The China wallet is always stocked with Chinese Yuan and Renminbi denominated credit cards and bank cards. The travel wallet is where I store whatever leftover local currency I have when I leave a country. People laugh at me for carrying dozens of currencies when I travel, but it has saved me and my travel buddies more than once when last minute travel decisions left us needing certain currencies to pay cash for visas on arrival. [↩︎](#fnref5)
6. Expert programming buddy Peter Compernolle confirmed that he’s seen this done before. You can use the Stripe customer ID as a password recovery token. Not very secure, but if your goal is appearance, it works. [↩︎](#fnref6)
### Security Researchers Claim Internet Standards are Apple Security Flaws
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/security-researchers-claim-internet-standards-are-apple-security-flaw/
Last updated: 2015-06-16T16:00:00.000Z
There is a [research paper](https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BxxXk1d3yyuZOFlsdkNMSGswSGs/view?usp=sharing&ref=larrysalibra.com) entitled [Unauthorized Cross-App Resource Access on MAC OS X and iOS](https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BxxXk1d3yyuZOFlsdkNMSGswSGs/view?usp=sharing&ref=larrysalibra.com) announced by [The Register](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/06/17/apple%5Fhosed%5Fboffins%5Fdrop%5F0day%5Fmac%5Fios%5Fresearch%5Fblitzkrieg/?ref=larrysalibra.com) and picked up by [Macrumors](http://www.macrumors.com/2015/06/17/ios-osx-cross-app-keychain-security-flaw/?ref=larrysalibra.com) claiming that  
security researchers have totally pwn'd Apple's sandbox security.

They are quoted as saying:

> "We completely cracked the keychain service - used to store passwords and other credentials for different Apple apps - and sandbox containers on OS X, and also identified new weaknesses within the inter-app communication mechanisms on OS X and iOS which can be used to steal confidential data from Evernote, Facebook and other high-profile apps." 

"Completely cracked" is a pretty lofty and broad claim. I examined their paper to  
better understand flaws they claimed to have found.

## Four claims

They make four claims:

1. Malicious apps can create keychain entries that are the same as the entries for other apps  
and steal their passwords.
2. Apple's review process doesn't verify "subtarget" bundle naming.
3. There's no authentication in Websocket for a server running on the local machine.
4. There's no registration or authentication mechanism for which apps register URL scheme handlers.

The researchers say items 1 and 2 affect OS X but not iOS. While items 3 and 4 affect both OS X and iOS.

I don't know enough about claims 1 and 2 beyond saying that if what they described is true, it sounds  
worrying, but contrary to the headlines, it's not the end of the world for Keychain.  
It's also important to understand that most apps on OS X (unlike iOS) aren't  
installed through the App Store and don't need to be sandboxed, which is why it's  
still so important that users only install apps from trusted sources *AND* trusted publishers.

Their paper also acknowledges that Apple has already resolved some of the Keychain  
account name issues.

## The world outside your app is untrusted

Their claims about the remaining issues are troubling, not because they are flaws,  
but because they're obviously (to your average developer) not flaws. They are activities  
happening in the untrusted world outside of the app sandbox and as such the app is responsible for  
validating data received by such IPC method and protecting (ie. encrypting) data  
sent via them.

Regarding websockets, (#3) a client should always have a mechanism for  
making sure the port it's connecting to is running the server it expects to be there.  
To blindly assume a port with a certain number is your app's server is a problem  
with the app, not the operating system.

To assume a given url scheme handler, something that the app has *no control over*  
is being handled by a friendly app is a problem with the app. Apps should use  
mechanisms to ensure that data sent via schemes is only readable by approved apps  
using standard protection mechanisms. (ie. encrypting with a shared secret, etc.)

That the researchers would point to these two behaviors which well-known, outlined  
in Internet standards documents and shared across Internet connected devices and  
say: "we identified...new weaknesses within the inter-app communication mechanisms on OS X and iOS which can be  
used to steal confidential data from Evernote, Facebook and other high-profile apps.",  
which are standard across the Internet, makes me question their competence.
### #StartupThisSunday
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/startup-this-sunday/
Last updated: 2015-06-13T16:00:00.000Z
*TL;DR: ~~I'm building a new product today~~ I built a new product, [wpFlight.com](https://wpflight.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com), in 24 hours from start to launch, and ~~doing~~ did it all while on the road!* 

*WPFlight was a fun project and example of how a v0 MVP can be put together in only a day. We’ve decided to sunset the product, but that doesn’t mean you can’t still enjoy the journey and the lessons I learned!*

*I've put together [a series of posts detailing the journey and my experience](https://larrysalibra.com/startup-this-sunday/part-1-preflight/) that I'll be sharing over the next few days.*

- [Part 1 - Pre-flight](https://larrysalibra.com/startup-this-sunday/part-1-preflight/)
- [Part 2 - Singapore-bound](https://larrysalibra.com/startup-this-sunday/part-2-singapore-bound/)
- [Part 3 - Singapore](https://larrysalibra.com/startup-this-sunday/part-3-singapore/)
- [Part 4 - Hong Kong-bound](https://larrysalibra.com/startup-this-sunday/part-4-hong-kong-bound/)
- [Part 5 - The Final Stretch](https://larrysalibra.com/startup-this-sunday/part-5-the-final-stretch/)

---

We launched [Pay4Bugs](https://www.pay4bugs.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com) a number of years ago to bring the power of crowdsourced testing to teams far and wide. In short, the product works for businesses that live and breathe software engineering.

However, our industry has failed the hundreds of thousands of businesses that depend on custom software but don’t have software engineering in their DNA. A business is someone’s hopes and dreams. It pains me immensely when I see a business with a great value proposition, that cares about its customers spend good money on a custom site or app only to have it break and not even know about it. It’s a lose-lose situation for all involved and it needs to stop!

I have an idea I think will fix this problem and I invite you to join me as I build and launch it in the next 24 hours.

## Rules of the game

People are always making excuses about why they don't build their product: it's not the right time, I'm too busy. I've occasionally made the same excuses myself and want to inspire others to get out there and do it.

- **24 hours:** I'll start building the product this Sunday afternoon at 4pm Hong Kong Time (midnight Pacific) and will launch it 24 hours later, 4pm in the afternoon in Hong Kong on monday, an hour after midnight on Sunday night in California. I'm a nightowl. Stay up with me!
- **Open & Transparent:** I’ll be sharing everything about the process: the tools I use, the though process I use, and the problems I encounter.
- **On the Road:** I’m going to do it on the road. I’ll buy a roundtrip ticket from Hong Kong to somewhere and build the product on the road from airports & on planes as I fly there and back. No more excuses from those of you who are always too busy because you're traveling. You can get stuff done on the road. I'll prove it.
- **Just me:** My team is off today...it's just me: teams are amazing, but coordination, communication and working together takes time...it's possible to launch something yourself and launch it now. I'll show you how.

I'll be [live tweeting on Twitter](https://twitter.com/larrysalibra?ref=larrysalibra.com) with hashtag [#StartupThisSunday](https://twitter.com/hashtag/StartupThisSunday?ref=larrysalibra.com), so be sure to follow along! I'll share how I did things, ongoing revenue numbers and what I learned in series of posts after the product launches. You can [subscribe to my blog by email](https://www.larrysalibra.com/subscribe/?ref=larrysalibra.com) so you don't miss a post!

This is going to be a great learning experience and a lot of fun! I hope you'll join me! Let's get going!

---

## Tweet by Tweet

> I'm building a new product in 24 hours - starting now - while on the road. [#StartupThisSunday](https://twitter.com/hashtag/StartupThisSunday?src=hash&ref=larrysalibra.com) Join me for the ride! [https://t.co/loOjTvJ0nt](https://t.co/loOjTvJ0nt?ref=larrysalibra.com)
> 
> — Larry Salibra (@larrysalibra) [June 14, 2015](https://twitter.com/larrysalibra/status/609994289821667328?ref=larrysalibra.com)

## Sunday 4:08 HKT

> Just bought a roundtrip ticket Hong Kong to Singapore - it's real! let's do this! [#StartupThisSunday](https://twitter.com/hashtag/StartupThisSunday?src=hash&ref=larrysalibra.com) [pic.twitter.com/ucenKrKySz](http://t.co/ucenKrKySz?ref=larrysalibra.com)
> 
> — Larry Salibra (@larrysalibra) [June 14, 2015](https://twitter.com/larrysalibra/status/609995763360382976?ref=larrysalibra.com)

> Round trip HKG-SIN leaves tonght, back in HKG in the morning cost US$167 purchased 15 min ago [#StartupThisSunday](https://twitter.com/hashtag/StartupThisSunday?src=hash&ref=larrysalibra.com) [pic.twitter.com/ndq3lNrODb](http://t.co/ndq3lNrODb?ref=larrysalibra.com)
> 
> — Larry Salibra (@larrysalibra) [June 14, 2015](https://twitter.com/larrysalibra/status/610000283654090753?ref=larrysalibra.com)

> Made it to airport bus E33 - mobile office number 1 - will do planning for the next 23.5 hours [#StartupThisSunday](https://twitter.com/hashtag/StartupThisSunday?src=hash&ref=larrysalibra.com) [pic.twitter.com/M8yyXfoVXe](http://t.co/M8yyXfoVXe?ref=larrysalibra.com)
> 
> — Larry Salibra (@larrysalibra) [June 14, 2015](https://twitter.com/larrysalibra/status/610001573519867904?ref=larrysalibra.com)

> On \~50 min bus ride to HKG finished boilerplate stuff - using Omnifocus + [#GTD](https://twitter.com/hashtag/GTD?src=hash&ref=larrysalibra.com) to keep organized [#StartupThisSunday](https://twitter.com/hashtag/StartupThisSunday?src=hash&ref=larrysalibra.com) [pic.twitter.com/EnprsZmcDt](http://t.co/EnprsZmcDt?ref=larrysalibra.com)
> 
> — Larry Salibra (@larrysalibra) [June 14, 2015](https://twitter.com/larrysalibra/status/610013331634544640?ref=larrysalibra.com)

> Passing by Cathay's HQ - cool old plane outside - these E airport buses are intended for airport employees [#StartupThisSunday](https://twitter.com/hashtag/StartupThisSunday?src=hash&ref=larrysalibra.com) [#HongKong](https://twitter.com/hashtag/HongKong?src=hash&ref=larrysalibra.com)
> 
> — Larry Salibra (@larrysalibra) [June 14, 2015](https://twitter.com/larrysalibra/status/610013903532134401?ref=larrysalibra.com)

> Double decker buses make me slightly nauseous when using computer - glad that part of [#StartupThisSunday](https://twitter.com/hashtag/StartupThisSunday?src=hash&ref=larrysalibra.com) is over! [pic.twitter.com/L3zv4NUkEk](http://t.co/L3zv4NUkEk?ref=larrysalibra.com)
> 
> — Larry Salibra (@larrysalibra) [June 14, 2015](https://twitter.com/larrysalibra/status/610015143456419840?ref=larrysalibra.com)

> Checked in, cleared immigration - heading to gate area to get started on business logic [#StartupThisSunday](https://twitter.com/hashtag/StartupThisSunday?src=hash&ref=larrysalibra.com) [pic.twitter.com/PFkNRKJrF2](http://t.co/PFkNRKJrF2?ref=larrysalibra.com)
> 
> — Larry Salibra (@larrysalibra) [June 14, 2015](https://twitter.com/larrysalibra/status/610019901252612096?ref=larrysalibra.com)

> This is going to be static site w/ angularjs - want to minimize moving parts - aka things that could go wrong [#StartupThisSunday](https://twitter.com/hashtag/StartupThisSunday?src=hash&ref=larrysalibra.com) 22.25h 2go
> 
> — Larry Salibra (@larrysalibra) [June 14, 2015](https://twitter.com/larrysalibra/status/610020628012208128?ref=larrysalibra.com)

> Plan: do api (ruby/grape) [https://t.co/UzK5ULnORo](https://t.co/UzK5ULnORo?ref=larrysalibra.com) pre-flight; working on page layout/marketing copy/design in the air [#StartupThisSunday](https://twitter.com/hashtag/StartupThisSunday?src=hash&ref=larrysalibra.com)
> 
> — Larry Salibra (@larrysalibra) [June 14, 2015](https://twitter.com/larrysalibra/status/610023511420043266?ref=larrysalibra.com)

> Plan: Wire up the frontend w/ angularjs and connect to backend after HKG-SIN flight during \~5 hour singapore layover [#StartupThisSunday](https://twitter.com/hashtag/StartupThisSunday?src=hash&ref=larrysalibra.com)
> 
> — Larry Salibra (@larrysalibra) [June 14, 2015](https://twitter.com/larrysalibra/status/610023978489372672?ref=larrysalibra.com)

> Creating new [@Stripe](https://twitter.com/stripe?ref=larrysalibra.com) account so I can start on API - going to cheat & use Stripe as a database. [#StartupThisSunday](https://twitter.com/hashtag/StartupThisSunday?src=hash&ref=larrysalibra.com) [pic.twitter.com/v7tgAku9HI](http://t.co/v7tgAku9HI?ref=larrysalibra.com)
> 
> — Larry Salibra (@larrysalibra) [June 14, 2015](https://twitter.com/larrysalibra/status/610028431082958848?ref=larrysalibra.com)

> 30 min til boarding - overhear 2 passengers talking about startups: fund raising, product market fit. less talk, more do! [#StartupThisSunday](https://twitter.com/hashtag/StartupThisSunday?src=hash&ref=larrysalibra.com)
> 
> — Larry Salibra (@larrysalibra) [June 14, 2015](https://twitter.com/larrysalibra/status/610048455176687616?ref=larrysalibra.com)

> API & payments working - picked a template and going into marketing copy mode for 4 hour flight to Singapore [#StartupThisSunday](https://twitter.com/hashtag/StartupThisSunday?src=hash&ref=larrysalibra.com) <20h 2go
> 
> — Larry Salibra (@larrysalibra) [June 14, 2015](https://twitter.com/larrysalibra/status/610059320672264192?ref=larrysalibra.com)

> This was mobile office #2 at HKG [#StartupThisSunday](https://twitter.com/hashtag/StartupThisSunday?src=hash&ref=larrysalibra.com) [pic.twitter.com/2wBwifTCHV](http://t.co/2wBwifTCHV?ref=larrysalibra.com)
> 
> — Larry Salibra (@larrysalibra) [June 14, 2015](https://twitter.com/larrysalibra/status/610059696142094336?ref=larrysalibra.com)

> Mobile office #3 is seat 21J [@united](https://twitter.com/united?ref=larrysalibra.com) economy+ - havent sat in middle seat in >10y - full flight [#StartupThisSunday](https://twitter.com/hashtag/StartupThisSunday?src=hash&ref=larrysalibra.com) [pic.twitter.com/ICJcgkIu9y](http://t.co/ICJcgkIu9y?ref=larrysalibra.com)
> 
> — Larry Salibra (@larrysalibra) [June 14, 2015](https://twitter.com/larrysalibra/status/610060387325599744?ref=larrysalibra.com)

> US airlines have secondary security check even on a flight that's 100% outside USA - why? [#StartupThisSunday](https://twitter.com/hashtag/StartupThisSunday?src=hash&ref=larrysalibra.com) [pic.twitter.com/q1sTj0i5jX](http://t.co/q1sTj0i5jX?ref=larrysalibra.com)
> 
> — Larry Salibra (@larrysalibra) [June 14, 2015](https://twitter.com/larrysalibra/status/610060885579554816?ref=larrysalibra.com)

> 3h 11m flight time: I need to draft copy & layout frontend in 3h. Usually have ppl to do this for me. Wish me luck! [#StartupThisSunday](https://twitter.com/hashtag/StartupThisSunday?src=hash&ref=larrysalibra.com)
> 
> — Larry Salibra (@larrysalibra) [June 14, 2015](https://twitter.com/larrysalibra/status/610061489035067392?ref=larrysalibra.com)

> Hi Singapore! Why does your airport wifi ask for my #? Thx. [#StartupThisSunday](https://twitter.com/hashtag/StartupThisSunday?src=hash&ref=larrysalibra.com) [pic.twitter.com/H9LjdADK4N](http://t.co/H9LjdADK4N?ref=larrysalibra.com)
> 
> — Larry Salibra (@larrysalibra) [June 14, 2015](https://twitter.com/larrysalibra/status/610121693160468480?ref=larrysalibra.com)

> Ok: good flight - came up w/ pricing: 4 plans \~25ish to 320/month. Wrote a bunch of copy. Looks horrible w/o Internet [#StartupThisSunday](https://twitter.com/hashtag/StartupThisSunday?src=hash&ref=larrysalibra.com)
> 
> — Larry Salibra (@larrysalibra) [June 14, 2015](https://twitter.com/larrysalibra/status/610122726662012928?ref=larrysalibra.com)

> Now find my SIN mobile office #4\. It's 30 min after midnight - flight back to HKG leaves in 5.5h [#StartupThisSunday](https://twitter.com/hashtag/StartupThisSunday?src=hash&ref=larrysalibra.com) [pic.twitter.com/sTvkq9PCo3](http://t.co/sTvkq9PCo3?ref=larrysalibra.com)
> 
> — Larry Salibra (@larrysalibra) [June 14, 2015](https://twitter.com/larrysalibra/status/610123118871384064?ref=larrysalibra.com)

> If I leave transit & go through immigration now I can't get back in airport till [@united](https://twitter.com/united?ref=larrysalibra.com) check in counter opens at 3:30\. [#StartupThisSunday](https://twitter.com/hashtag/StartupThisSunday?src=hash&ref=larrysalibra.com)
> 
> — Larry Salibra (@larrysalibra) [June 14, 2015](https://twitter.com/larrysalibra/status/610125929466073088?ref=larrysalibra.com)

> So transit terminal it is - getting my [@tomhanks](https://twitter.com/tomhanks?ref=larrysalibra.com) on [#StartupThisSunday](https://twitter.com/hashtag/StartupThisSunday?src=hash&ref=larrysalibra.com)
> 
> — Larry Salibra (@larrysalibra) [June 14, 2015](https://twitter.com/larrysalibra/status/610126198434217984?ref=larrysalibra.com)

> Computer can't join Singapore airport wifi - anyone seen this bug before? [#StartupThisSunday](https://twitter.com/hashtag/StartupThisSunday?src=hash&ref=larrysalibra.com) [pic.twitter.com/s7gzXIUl3O](http://t.co/s7gzXIUl3O?ref=larrysalibra.com)
> 
> — Larry Salibra (@larrysalibra) [June 14, 2015](https://twitter.com/larrysalibra/status/610129628846403585?ref=larrysalibra.com)

> Worst part of coding is when other products' bugs start stealing your time. Software is a disaster - this is why we test [#StartupThisSunday](https://twitter.com/hashtag/StartupThisSunday?src=hash&ref=larrysalibra.com)
> 
> — Larry Salibra (@larrysalibra) [June 14, 2015](https://twitter.com/larrysalibra/status/610130164362522624?ref=larrysalibra.com)

> Worst part of coding is when other products' bugs start stealing your time. Software is a disaster - this is why we test [#StartupThisSunday](https://twitter.com/hashtag/StartupThisSunday?src=hash&ref=larrysalibra.com)
> 
> — Larry Salibra (@larrysalibra) [June 14, 2015](https://twitter.com/larrysalibra/status/610130164362522624?ref=larrysalibra.com)

> My DNS-manually-set-to-8.8.8.8 was breaking airport's captive wifi - good guess Larry. [#StartupThisSunday](https://twitter.com/hashtag/StartupThisSunday?src=hash&ref=larrysalibra.com) [pic.twitter.com/NJhbKrC20p](http://t.co/NJhbKrC20p?ref=larrysalibra.com)
> 
> — Larry Salibra (@larrysalibra) [June 14, 2015](https://twitter.com/larrysalibra/status/610132673483288576?ref=larrysalibra.com)

> Wasted 30min w/ getting on internet nonsense - aren't we beyond this yet? 15+ hours to go for [#StartupThisSunday](https://twitter.com/hashtag/StartupThisSunday?src=hash&ref=larrysalibra.com) \- back to work!
> 
> — Larry Salibra (@larrysalibra) [June 14, 2015](https://twitter.com/larrysalibra/status/610133154939060225?ref=larrysalibra.com)

> Tenantive pricing & how it looked on plane: webfonts & external assets dont load w/o internet [#StartupThisWeekend](https://twitter.com/hashtag/StartupThisWeekend?src=hash&ref=larrysalibra.com) [pic.twitter.com/swDiwjE0uA](http://t.co/swDiwjE0uA?ref=larrysalibra.com)
> 
> — Larry Salibra (@larrysalibra) [June 14, 2015](https://twitter.com/larrysalibra/status/610134100117204992?ref=larrysalibra.com)

> Statically coding plans into the grape (ruby) api - look ma no database! Fast & dirty. [#StartupThisWeekend](https://twitter.com/hashtag/StartupThisWeekend?src=hash&ref=larrysalibra.com) [pic.twitter.com/M5f0gZq4qO](http://t.co/M5f0gZq4qO?ref=larrysalibra.com)
> 
> — Larry Salibra (@larrysalibra) [June 14, 2015](https://twitter.com/larrysalibra/status/610136453406961664?ref=larrysalibra.com)

> One of the reasons I'm doing [#StartupThisSunday](https://twitter.com/hashtag/StartupThisSunday?src=hash&ref=larrysalibra.com) is to demonstrate power of timeboxing & cutting scope to fit time constraints
> 
> — Larry Salibra (@larrysalibra) [June 14, 2015](https://twitter.com/larrysalibra/status/610137202337685504?ref=larrysalibra.com)

> Cant adjust scope on the fly w/ 1 day time constraint when u outsource. [@joelgascoigne](https://twitter.com/joelgascoigne?ref=larrysalibra.com) is right. Build ur startup urself! [#StartupThisSunday](https://twitter.com/hashtag/StartupThisSunday?src=hash&ref=larrysalibra.com)
> 
> — Larry Salibra (@larrysalibra) [June 14, 2015](https://twitter.com/larrysalibra/status/610137661521526785?ref=larrysalibra.com)

> If ur just joining: I'm 9.5 hours into [#StartupThisSunday](https://twitter.com/hashtag/StartupThisSunday?src=hash&ref=larrysalibra.com) launch a product in a day. Read more -> [https://t.co/loOjTw0Bf1](https://t.co/loOjTw0Bf1?ref=larrysalibra.com) Back to work
> 
> — Larry Salibra (@larrysalibra) [June 14, 2015](https://twitter.com/larrysalibra/status/610138299978493953?ref=larrysalibra.com)

> API deploying to live server in testing mode - capistrano, unicorn, grape...fingers crossed. Don't need devops issues! [#StartupThisSunday](https://twitter.com/hashtag/StartupThisSunday?src=hash&ref=larrysalibra.com)
> 
> — Larry Salibra (@larrysalibra) [June 14, 2015](https://twitter.com/larrysalibra/status/610152379812483072?ref=larrysalibra.com)

> That || should be a && - good thing live mode isn't enabled on this [@stripe](https://twitter.com/stripe?ref=larrysalibra.com) account yet! [#StartupThisSunday](https://twitter.com/hashtag/StartupThisSunday?src=hash&ref=larrysalibra.com) [pic.twitter.com/EdjD5sYkIT](http://t.co/EdjD5sYkIT?ref=larrysalibra.com)
> 
> — Larry Salibra (@larrysalibra) [June 14, 2015](https://twitter.com/larrysalibra/status/610153369391357953?ref=larrysalibra.com)

> This is me waiting for API to redeploy at 2:39am in mobile office #4 - [#AppleWatchSelfie](https://twitter.com/hashtag/AppleWatchSelfie?src=hash&ref=larrysalibra.com) [#StartupThisSunday](https://twitter.com/hashtag/StartupThisSunday?src=hash&ref=larrysalibra.com) [pic.twitter.com/6ZkTx7Uc9s](http://t.co/6ZkTx7Uc9s?ref=larrysalibra.com)
> 
> — Larry Salibra (@larrysalibra) [June 14, 2015](https://twitter.com/larrysalibra/status/610154721752420352?ref=larrysalibra.com)

> Backend api deployed - and it works! Time for a celebratory snack before more front-end work. [#StartupThisSunday](https://twitter.com/hashtag/StartupThisSunday?src=hash&ref=larrysalibra.com)
> 
> — Larry Salibra (@larrysalibra) [June 14, 2015](https://twitter.com/larrysalibra/status/610155258585591808?ref=larrysalibra.com)

> Time to enter Singapore - I scared the immigration official - I think she'd fallen asleep [#StartupThisSunday](https://twitter.com/hashtag/StartupThisSunday?src=hash&ref=larrysalibra.com) [pic.twitter.com/S1NQsNhQ77](http://t.co/S1NQsNhQ77?ref=larrysalibra.com)
> 
> — Larry Salibra (@larrysalibra) [June 14, 2015](https://twitter.com/larrysalibra/status/610170078869372928?ref=larrysalibra.com)

> Traditional Singaporian Kaya butter toast breaskfast set w/ soft-boiled egg & hot milk tea. [#StartupThisSunday](https://twitter.com/hashtag/StartupThisSunday?src=hash&ref=larrysalibra.com) [pic.twitter.com/9JuNgieVcT](http://t.co/9JuNgieVcT?ref=larrysalibra.com)
> 
> — Larry Salibra (@larrysalibra) [June 14, 2015](https://twitter.com/larrysalibra/status/610174370900619264?ref=larrysalibra.com)

> This Kaya butter toast set is like 100x better than toastbox in HK - worth the trip just for the breakfast! [#StartupThisSunday](https://twitter.com/hashtag/StartupThisSunday?src=hash&ref=larrysalibra.com)
> 
> — Larry Salibra (@larrysalibra) [June 14, 2015](https://twitter.com/larrysalibra/status/610174637335445504?ref=larrysalibra.com)

> Another 1h gone to travel stuff - well-fed & ready for more frontend work b4 5:20 boarding [#StartupThisSunday](https://twitter.com/hashtag/StartupThisSunday?src=hash&ref=larrysalibra.com) [pic.twitter.com/9wHtcBcLQ6](http://t.co/9wHtcBcLQ6?ref=larrysalibra.com)
> 
> — Larry Salibra (@larrysalibra) [June 14, 2015](https://twitter.com/larrysalibra/status/610186135596236800?ref=larrysalibra.com)

> Body getting tired w/ 10.5 hours to go [#StartupThisSunday](https://twitter.com/hashtag/StartupThisSunday?src=hash&ref=larrysalibra.com) \- 13in MacBook Pro retina + assorted chargers feeling heavy [pic.twitter.com/BfTXkOsWSY](http://t.co/BfTXkOsWSY?ref=larrysalibra.com)
> 
> — Larry Salibra (@larrysalibra) [June 14, 2015](https://twitter.com/larrysalibra/status/610196786762747905?ref=larrysalibra.com)

> Spent last 45m on font & colors. I have artist talent of a tree... [#StartupThisSunday](https://twitter.com/hashtag/StartupThisSunday?src=hash&ref=larrysalibra.com)
> 
> — Larry Salibra (@larrysalibra) [June 14, 2015](https://twitter.com/larrysalibra/status/610198726951370752?ref=larrysalibra.com)

> ...so 1) use colors from our existing products 2) keep things simple! [#StartupThisSunday](https://twitter.com/hashtag/StartupThisSunday?src=hash&ref=larrysalibra.com)
> 
> — Larry Salibra (@larrysalibra) [June 14, 2015](https://twitter.com/larrysalibra/status/610198817946730496?ref=larrysalibra.com)

> Will finalize copy on flight back to [#HongKong](https://twitter.com/hashtag/HongKong?src=hash&ref=larrysalibra.com) & hopefully catch an hour or so of shuteye [#StartupThisSunday](https://twitter.com/hashtag/StartupThisSunday?src=hash&ref=larrysalibra.com)
> 
> — Larry Salibra (@larrysalibra) [June 14, 2015](https://twitter.com/larrysalibra/status/610199055914831872?ref=larrysalibra.com)

> Hong Kong bound - [#StartupThisSunday](https://twitter.com/hashtag/StartupThisSunday?src=hash&ref=larrysalibra.com) (@ Singapore Changi Airport (SIN) in Singapore) [https://t.co/mJfWMZe6Qj](https://t.co/mJfWMZe6Qj?ref=larrysalibra.com) [pic.twitter.com/SnfwQ2DHV5](http://t.co/SnfwQ2DHV5?ref=larrysalibra.com)
> 
> — Larry Salibra (@larrysalibra) [June 14, 2015](https://twitter.com/larrysalibra/status/610199428079689730?ref=larrysalibra.com)

> I'm back [#HongKong](https://twitter.com/hashtag/HongKong?src=hash&ref=larrysalibra.com) \- logo & more copy completed on flight [#StartupThisSunday](https://twitter.com/hashtag/StartupThisSunday?src=hash&ref=larrysalibra.com) [https://t.co/cWz9zMEfFt](https://t.co/cWz9zMEfFt?ref=larrysalibra.com)
> 
> — Larry Salibra (@larrysalibra) [June 15, 2015](https://twitter.com/larrysalibra/status/610264626807353345?ref=larrysalibra.com)

> Noticed right at end of flight [@united](https://twitter.com/united?ref=larrysalibra.com) has wifi on HKG-SIN flight - would have been useful [#StartupThisSunday](https://twitter.com/hashtag/StartupThisSunday?src=hash&ref=larrysalibra.com) [pic.twitter.com/slbcuUHMTj](http://t.co/slbcuUHMTj?ref=larrysalibra.com)
> 
> — Larry Salibra (@larrysalibra) [June 15, 2015](https://twitter.com/larrysalibra/status/610266178351566848?ref=larrysalibra.com)

> Bye mobile office #6 or #7 (lost count) - < 6h to go: still some angular & copy work remaining. [#StartupThisSunday](https://twitter.com/hashtag/StartupThisSunday?src=hash&ref=larrysalibra.com) [pic.twitter.com/KtbcA14TKI](http://t.co/KtbcA14TKI?ref=larrysalibra.com)
> 
> — Larry Salibra (@larrysalibra) [June 15, 2015](https://twitter.com/larrysalibra/status/610267731703693313?ref=larrysalibra.com)

> Also can't forget testing on [@pay4bugs](https://twitter.com/pay4bugs?ref=larrysalibra.com) \- catching bugs is why we're here after all! [#StartupThisSunday](https://twitter.com/hashtag/StartupThisSunday?src=hash&ref=larrysalibra.com)
> 
> — Larry Salibra (@larrysalibra) [June 15, 2015](https://twitter.com/larrysalibra/status/610268003041566721?ref=larrysalibra.com)

> Waiting for E33 airport bus driver - eating up valuable time! Hurry up & open the bus! [#StartupThisSunday](https://twitter.com/hashtag/StartupThisSunday?src=hash&ref=larrysalibra.com) [pic.twitter.com/NLL3zxawQm](http://t.co/NLL3zxawQm?ref=larrysalibra.com)
> 
> — Larry Salibra (@larrysalibra) [June 15, 2015](https://twitter.com/larrysalibra/status/610272315654340610?ref=larrysalibra.com)

> In other news [#AppleWatch](https://twitter.com/hashtag/AppleWatch?src=hash&ref=larrysalibra.com) still at 16% after all this [#StartupThisSunday](https://twitter.com/hashtag/StartupThisSunday?src=hash&ref=larrysalibra.com) craziness. Great on plane for controlling 🎵 [pic.twitter.com/3xSK7Xwi1L](http://t.co/3xSK7Xwi1L?ref=larrysalibra.com)
> 
> — Larry Salibra (@larrysalibra) [June 15, 2015](https://twitter.com/larrysalibra/status/610272882384486401?ref=larrysalibra.com)

> Okay. I'm on. Enough tweeting. Back to work! [#StartupThisSunday](https://twitter.com/hashtag/StartupThisSunday?src=hash&ref=larrysalibra.com) [pic.twitter.com/vVjyT5ovE6](http://t.co/vVjyT5ovE6?ref=larrysalibra.com)
> 
> — Larry Salibra (@larrysalibra) [June 15, 2015](https://twitter.com/larrysalibra/status/610273651959566336?ref=larrysalibra.com)

> Hi Castle Peak! Miss me? [#StartupThisSunday](https://twitter.com/hashtag/StartupThisSunday?src=hash&ref=larrysalibra.com) 4.5 hours to go! Home stretch! [https://t.co/QGWWvsb4LS](https://t.co/QGWWvsb4LS?ref=larrysalibra.com) [pic.twitter.com/9bbzxGN1XR](http://t.co/9bbzxGN1XR?ref=larrysalibra.com)
> 
> — Larry Salibra (@larrysalibra) [June 15, 2015](https://twitter.com/larrysalibra/status/610288587964325888?ref=larrysalibra.com)

> Frontend deployment & [@CloudFlare](https://twitter.com/CloudFlare?ref=larrysalibra.com) page rules setup on bus - can see logo [https://t.co/uOko7nlNCc](https://t.co/uOko7nlNCc?ref=larrysalibra.com) [#StartupThisSunday](https://twitter.com/hashtag/StartupThisSunday?src=hash&ref=larrysalibra.com) [pic.twitter.com/VLO8tUXnO2](http://t.co/VLO8tUXnO2?ref=larrysalibra.com)
> 
> — Larry Salibra (@larrysalibra) [June 15, 2015](https://twitter.com/larrysalibra/status/610290769912549376?ref=larrysalibra.com)

> You don't need to bring your [#AppleWatch](https://twitter.com/hashtag/AppleWatch?src=hash&ref=larrysalibra.com) charger if you go to Singapore - Left home 20h ago w/ 92% - now 8% [#StartupThisSunday](https://twitter.com/hashtag/StartupThisSunday?src=hash&ref=larrysalibra.com)
> 
> — Larry Salibra (@larrysalibra) [June 15, 2015](https://twitter.com/larrysalibra/status/610298561394143232?ref=larrysalibra.com)

> I'm back. Snuck in an hour nap. 2.5 hours to go (it's still Sunday on the west coast!) Back to work! [#StartupThisSunday](https://twitter.com/hashtag/StartupThisSunday?src=hash&ref=larrysalibra.com)
> 
> — Larry Salibra (@larrysalibra) [June 15, 2015](https://twitter.com/larrysalibra/status/610319055535247360?ref=larrysalibra.com)

> I'll go back to my regular only tweeting a couple times a day schedule after 4pm & stop clogging up your feed. [#StartupThisSunday](https://twitter.com/hashtag/StartupThisSunday?src=hash&ref=larrysalibra.com)
> 
> — Larry Salibra (@larrysalibra) [June 15, 2015](https://twitter.com/larrysalibra/status/610319355973242880?ref=larrysalibra.com)

> Not even 2pm and I've already hit all 3 activity exercise goals. Thanks [#StartupThisSunday](https://twitter.com/hashtag/StartupThisSunday?src=hash&ref=larrysalibra.com) ! [#AppleWatch](https://twitter.com/hashtag/AppleWatch?src=hash&ref=larrysalibra.com) [pic.twitter.com/XTvEzt7NC5](http://t.co/XTvEzt7NC5?ref=larrysalibra.com)
> 
> — Larry Salibra (@larrysalibra) [June 15, 2015](https://twitter.com/larrysalibra/status/610324943918620673?ref=larrysalibra.com)

> Coming along! Will be close. Regret taking the 1 hour nap :-P [#StartupThisSunday](https://twitter.com/hashtag/StartupThisSunday?src=hash&ref=larrysalibra.com) Sunday ends in Cali in 5m. 1h to go! [pic.twitter.com/Djy9dSgBCi](http://t.co/Djy9dSgBCi?ref=larrysalibra.com)
> 
> — Larry Salibra (@larrysalibra) [June 15, 2015](https://twitter.com/larrysalibra/status/610339793336012800?ref=larrysalibra.com)

> Lesson: much easier for me to write code fast than marketing copy [#StartupThisSunday](https://twitter.com/hashtag/StartupThisSunday?src=hash&ref=larrysalibra.com)
> 
> — Larry Salibra (@larrysalibra) [June 15, 2015](https://twitter.com/larrysalibra/status/610342768599257088?ref=larrysalibra.com)

> 8 min - deploying site w/ live [@stripe](https://twitter.com/stripe?ref=larrysalibra.com) keys. also need to submit [@stripe](https://twitter.com/stripe?ref=larrysalibra.com) application. [#StartupThisSunday](https://twitter.com/hashtag/StartupThisSunday?src=hash&ref=larrysalibra.com)
> 
> — Larry Salibra (@larrysalibra) [June 15, 2015](https://twitter.com/larrysalibra/status/610354378529091584?ref=larrysalibra.com)

> Panic as I couldn't find bank routing number. [@stripe](https://twitter.com/stripe?ref=larrysalibra.com) application approved! [#StartupThisSunday](https://twitter.com/hashtag/StartupThisSunday?src=hash&ref=larrysalibra.com) [pic.twitter.com/3SyFVdg3l2](http://t.co/3SyFVdg3l2?ref=larrysalibra.com)
> 
> — Larry Salibra (@larrysalibra) [June 15, 2015](https://twitter.com/larrysalibra/status/610356154296762368?ref=larrysalibra.com)

> And we're live! On time - 24 hours later [#StartupThisSunday](https://twitter.com/hashtag/StartupThisSunday?src=hash&ref=larrysalibra.com) [https://t.co/uOko7nlNCc](https://t.co/uOko7nlNCc?ref=larrysalibra.com)
> 
> — Larry Salibra (@larrysalibra) [June 15, 2015](https://twitter.com/larrysalibra/status/610356565326098432?ref=larrysalibra.com)

> A bit rough around the edges - still, I'm proud [https://t.co/uOko7nDotK](https://t.co/uOko7nDotK?ref=larrysalibra.com) [#StartupThisSunday](https://twitter.com/hashtag/StartupThisSunday?src=hash&ref=larrysalibra.com) [pic.twitter.com/M9c4Fmh9is](http://t.co/M9c4Fmh9is?ref=larrysalibra.com)
> 
> — Larry Salibra (@larrysalibra) [June 15, 2015](https://twitter.com/larrysalibra/status/610357177782398977?ref=larrysalibra.com)

> Good idea to test your own site w/ a real credit card. After 2nd plan my card was declined. [#StartupThisSunday](https://twitter.com/hashtag/StartupThisSunday?src=hash&ref=larrysalibra.com) [pic.twitter.com/H5C8wLwAB2](http://t.co/H5C8wLwAB2?ref=larrysalibra.com)
> 
> — Larry Salibra (@larrysalibra) [June 15, 2015](https://twitter.com/larrysalibra/status/610363249628876800?ref=larrysalibra.com)

> Check out this sketchy fraud warning email the bank sent. [#StartupThisSunday](https://twitter.com/hashtag/StartupThisSunday?src=hash&ref=larrysalibra.com) Card's unblocked & final tests passed! [pic.twitter.com/8L2sRdIViI](http://t.co/8L2sRdIViI?ref=larrysalibra.com)
> 
> — Larry Salibra (@larrysalibra) [June 15, 2015](https://twitter.com/larrysalibra/status/610363982403112960?ref=larrysalibra.com)

> Thanks everyone who cheered on my [#StartupThisSunday](https://twitter.com/hashtag/StartupThisSunday?src=hash&ref=larrysalibra.com) journey. The result: [https://t.co/uOko7nlNCc](https://t.co/uOko7nlNCc?ref=larrysalibra.com) I'm off to swim & get some rest!
> 
> — Larry Salibra (@larrysalibra) [June 15, 2015](https://twitter.com/larrysalibra/status/610365725027528704?ref=larrysalibra.com)
### A short history of Internet Identity
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/a-short-history-of-internet-identity/
Last updated: 2015-05-10T16:00:00.000Z
Control of your personal identity isn’t something the Internet is known for. It’s more famous for taking away control of your information and giving it to big companies can monetize it. Bitcoin blockchain technology promises to change that.

Those that know me know I’m a huge fan of Bitcoin…not because I get that excited about using it as a payment method, but because the fact that people perceive it as valuable enables a whole bunch of cool decentralized infrastructure. People can use and build on this decentralized infrastructure without permission, forming complicated business relationships, or facing the [threat of a Facebook](http://www.nydailynews.com/news/money/facebook-shuts-breakup-notifier-stalking-app-surge-popularity-article-1.138501?ref=larrysalibra.com) or [Twitter shutting you down](http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2012/08/17/twitter-kills-off-third-party-apps-api%5Fn%5F1794678.html?ref=larrysalibra.com).

## Broken record

There’s a concept in programming called [DRY - “Don’t repeat yourself”](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don't%5Frepeat%5Fyourself?ref=larrysalibra.com) \- that says every piece of information should only exist once. Multiple copies of information make for a lot of work keeping them all the same and making sure they’re correct. By following the DRY principle, programmers can both be lazy and build systems that cost less money to build and test and are less prone to error.

![Repeat yourself as a programmer and your product will look like this broken record](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2015/05/broken_record.jpg) 

Repeat yourself as a programmer and your product will look like this broken record

Unfortunately, up until now, we don’t build systems that are DRY for consumers and end users. How many times have you signed up for a new site or app and been asked to pick a username, password, upload a profile pick, enter your location, fill out a bio and more? If you’ve over the age of 5, the answer is many, many, many times.

And it’s not just apps, people who are interviewed by publications, write guest posts or speak at events are constantly asked to send a profile pic, short bio and social media information for companies to post on their own sites. It’s busy work of the type that people with means hire secretaries and virtual assistants to avoid.

## Profile this

How many times have you updated your profile pic or bio on Facebook or Twitter? Did you reach out to all of those other places on the Internet where you’ve provided profile pics and bios and update those too? I didn’t think so…no one does…there are too many!

A few projects have tried to solve this problem: Gravatar, owned by Wordpress, is a central repository that tries to solve it for people with email addresses…something much of the world who are mobile first will likely never need or have.

The walled-garden social giants like Facebook, Twitter and Tencent all have some version of a centralized single sign system where their users can share information with you. Great as long as willing to agree to their one-sided, [constantly changing](http://consumerist.com/2009/02/15/facebooks-new-terms-of-service-we-can-do-anything-we-want-with-your-content-forever/?ref=larrysalibra.com) often draconian Terms of Service and have your users’ stalked across the Internet. Good luck if your content or politics offends them or the governments to which they answer.

![Neustar ran i-names and used to be owned by Lockheed Martin](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2015/05/lockheed_martin_neustar_funny.jpg) 

Neustar ran i-names and used to be owned by Lockheed Martin

Another project was called [i-names](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-name?ref=larrysalibra.com). Their business model can be summed up as “like domain names but for people”. Each person was supposed to buy a username for $12 per year and use to log on to 3rd party sites. It was great idea…except that getting users who can’t even be bothered to pay $0.99 for an app to spend $12 for a username was never going to happen. It also didn’t help that the project was a partnership with a onetime [US military contractor](https://onename.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com).

One of the more successful projects was OpenID. It started out as a simple standard where a user could log on with a web address. Initially there was a lot of interest because it saved developers from having to spend time developing user management systems. It gained enough traction to get the attention of companies like Google and Yahoo who embraced and extended it but ultimately failed to go mainstream at least three reasons. It was confusing to represent users by website addresses, logging in required lots of redirecting between different sites, increasing the points of failure and risk of phishing and sites started using whitelists and only accepting logins from well-known (ie. known stable) OpenID providers.

![A hammer solves the worst UX.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2015/05/openid-r-logo-900x360.png) 

OpenID tried, but failed.

Imagine my excitement when I happened upon the team at [Onename](https://onename.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com). +ryanshea and +muneeb noticed, like others before them, that Bitcoin technology, specifically the Namecoin blockchain, is a great candidate for solving the disaster that is Internet identity. Unlike [those before them](https://nameid.org/?ref=larrysalibra.com), they understood product, marketing, and user experience in a very Apple like way: incredibly useful technology is worthless if it looks ugly, works poorly, isn’t easy to use and doesn’t make its value proposition clear for normal humans that have better things to do than hang out in technical forums and mailing lists.

![A hammer solves the worst UX.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2015/05/angry-user-post-size.jpg) 

A hammer solves the worst UX.

+ryanshea and +muneeb created Openname, recently renamed to Passcard, a digital passport secured by Bitcoin. Each Passcard has a username, called a +passname, and a profile with information like a profile pic, name, location, bio and social media properties. Anyone can build on Passcard without permission and each user is in total control of the information she shares including when and how it is changed.

In the future, Passcard will eventually offer app and website login and other features, but it already serves as hub for your online identity where you tie together and prove ownership of your social media properties. It also serves as easy way for companies to verify a person’s public online identity.

Passcard is already useful for companies like [Pay4Bugs](https://www.pay4bugs.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com). We give our [crowdsourced testers the option to prove their online public identity using Passcard as one component of an online and offline identity check](https://blog.pay4bugs.com/2015/05/07/pay4bugs-passcard-identity-verification/?ref=larrysalibra.com). This gives our clients additional peace of mind that they’re dealing with professionals who will honor the confidentiality of their sensitive prerelease software.

I’m active in the Passcard community and very excited about its future. It already adds value to [Pay4Bugs](https://www.pay4bugs.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com) and the ecosystem has the potential to create new categories of innovation that weren’t possible when the only option was building on Facebook.

## The future

I’m really excited to tell you about project that I put together this spring called [Nametiles](https://nametiles.co/?ref=larrysalibra.com) that’s built on Passcard and let’s you [add tagging and beautiful embedded profiles to your blog or website](https://nametiles.co/?ref=larrysalibra.com). I'll save that for [another post](https://www.larrysalibra.com/2015/05/11/nametiles-beautiful-blockchain-powered-profiles/?ref=larrysalibra.com).

Read on for [my introduction to Nametiles to learn why its so cool!](https://www.larrysalibra.com/2015/05/11/nametiles-beautiful-blockchain-powered-profiles/?ref=larrysalibra.com).
### Nametiles: Beautiful Blockchain-powered Profiles
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/nametiles-beautiful-blockchain-powered-profiles/
Last updated: 2015-05-10T16:00:00.000Z
I’m very excited to tell you about [Nametiles](https://nametiles.co/?ref=larrysalibra.com), a way to [add beautiful embedded profiles and tagging to blogs and websites](https://nametiles.co/?ref=larrysalibra.com).

[![Nametiles](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2015/05/nametiles-on-black.png "Nametiles")](https://nametiles.co/?ref=larrysalibra.com)

Nametiles lets you embed profile information from [Passcard](https://passcard.info/?ref=larrysalibra.com), a digital passport secured by Bitcoin, and tag people using their Passcard +passname on your site.

## End broken links

![Funny 404 page](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2015/05/funny-404-page.jpg) 

Funny 404 page

If you’ve ever been interviewed, written a guest post or spoken at an event, chances you were also asked to send a profile pic, short bio and social media information for the company to post on their own site. When this information changes, your only option to go through the very impractical process of reaching out to every site and app that has your information to get it updated.

Publishers have no idea when the people mentioned or linked on their blog update their profile pic, bio or website and no practical way to find out. The result is a site littered with broken links and out of date information that conveys sloppiness and apathy to visitors. *“Sloppy”* and *“apathetic”* are two words no brand **ever** wants associated its image.

With [Nametiles](https://nametiles.co/?ref=larrysalibra.com), profile information about those you mention on your site is always up to date because the information is maintained by *those who care most*, the owners of the information.

## Team, members and directory pages made easy

Nametiles makes it quick and easy to create a beautiful team page or member directory with current and up-to-date information. Simply ask each team member for their Passcard +passname and copy some simple code for each user. You can see an example of a team page made of Nametiles along with the simple code that was used to create it on my [Nametiles demo page](https://nametiles.co/larry?ref=larrysalibra.com).

## Nametiles in the wild

As you may have noticed, this blog uses Nametiles. Hover your mouse over or tap my passname +larry and my Nametile will appear! An embedded version of my Nametile is in the sidebar of my blog.

We use a custom version of Nametiles at Pay4Bugs as part of our [crowdsourced tester team verification program](https://blog.pay4bugs.com/2015/05/07/pay4bugs-passcard-identity-verification/?ref=larrysalibra.com). Testers show us their Passcard which we use to verify their public online identity. We then show clients the tester’s Nametile as an additional piece of information clients can use to determine if they want to allow a particular tester to test their sensitive prerelease products.

![Passcard pay4bugs identity verification](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2015/05/passcard_pay4bugs_identity_verification.png) 

Passcard pay4bugs identity verification

You can also see Nametiles in action over on [The Bitcoin Association of Hong Kong’s website](https://www.bitcoinhk.org/?ref=larrysalibra.com), both on the [members page](https://www.bitcoinhk.org/members/?ref=larrysalibra.com) and [posts](https://www.bitcoinhk.org/2015-inside-bitcoins-discount/?ref=larrysalibra.com).

## Adding Nametiles to your site

Using [Nametiles](https://nametiles.co/?ref=larrysalibra.com) is as easy as installing a [Wordpress plugin](https://wordpress.org/plugins/nametiles/?ref=larrysalibra.com) and typing the plus character and their +passname in your blog post. If you’re not using Wordpress a copying and pasting some javascript into your site will get you started in a jiffy. Registration is fast and free! [Learn more about Nametiles or signup today!](https://nametiles.co/?ref=larrysalibra.com)

## Thanks!

Thanks to everyone that's helped with Nametiles including:

- +liongrass for helping with the name and being the first user
- +cmacmurchy for helping with copy & message and letting us test Nametiles on his awesome news site [The Nanfang](https://thenanfang.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com)
- +muneeb and +ryanshea for developing the Passcard specification and kickstarting the movement
### Apple Watch First Impressions
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/apple-watch-first-impressions/
Last updated: 2015-04-27T16:00:00.000Z
Just finished day #4 with the Apple Watch. I keep getting asked what I think about it so I'm collecting my impressions here.

Some background: I'm not a watch guy. I have little interest in expensive mechanical watches and haven't worn a watch since sometime in elementary school. If you want to read impressions from someone that knows about and likes nice watches, check out [Marc van der Chijs' impressions](http://www.marc.cn/2015/04/initial-impressions-of-the-apple-watch.html?ref=larrysalibra.com).

## Why I bought it

It seems pretty obvious to me that computing devices are going to keep shrinking. Once we solve power and interface issues that make big phones the ideal today, we'll look at photos and videos of today's smartphones and they'll look as ridiculous as the [huge phones of the 1980s](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola%5FDynaTAC?ref=larrysalibra.com). I also think that it makes a lot of sense continuously collect and track data about our health.

Apple doesn't come up with the ideas they revolutionize but has a track record of being the first-to-not-suck to market, so I thought it would be fun to try their take on wearables. We've been getting increasing requests for an iOS app for [Pay4Bugs](https://www.pay4bugs.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com) \- perhaps a Watch app is also in our future.

## The Physical Device

I bought the [38mm Apple Watch Sport with the white band](https://store.apple.com/hk/buy-watch/apple-watch-sport?product=MJ2T2ZP/A&step=detail&ref=larrysalibra.com). I was concerned that the size would be too small, but its the perfect size for someone like me who is 169 cm and thin.

- Sports band feels great and is very comfortable.
- Contacts button feels a bit loose which makes it feel cheap.
- Very light almost feels like its not there - which is what I wanted.

![Apple Watch Sport 38mm](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2015/04/IMG_0210.jpg) 

Apple Watch Sport 38mm

## Power

The first question I usually get is about the battery life. Battery life is absolutely fine. A [2 hour "outdoor walk" up and down a mountain](https://twitter.com/larrysalibra/status/592631062234210304?ref=larrysalibra.com) with the workout app running uses about 20% of the battery.

I did experience a charging problem where the watch said it was charging when I went to bed yet woke up to find it at 5% power in power reserve mode. The culprit appears to have been using an old iPhone usb charger with the watch charging cable.

## WatchOS

The interface for WatchOS seems well-thought out and easy to get the hang of and navigate around. Activate on wrist raise seems a bit buggy: sometimes the screen will light up and turn off after only a second or two when you intended to use it. I also had a problem with the Taptic engine where I couldn't feel any haptic feedback for an entire day before I figured out restarting the phone solved the problem.

## Favorite Apps

1. Uber - I'm usually with friends when I take Uber, so I always felt incredibly anti-social and silly walking around with my phone held in front of me like some sort of digital car metal detector waiting for the Uber to arrive. Uber on Apple Watch solves that - one big button to call your Uber and it displays the driver's license plate when he arrives. No more need to ignore your friends.
2. Turn-by-Turn Directions on your Wrist - If you drive a motorcycle or scooter like me, Apple Watch changes everything. Before the Watch, I would have to periodically pull over to the side of the road (dangerous!), fish my phone out and memorize the next upcoming turns when going to a new destination. The end result being that I've spent a lot of time driving around Mong Kok and Sheung Wan in circles. Now, a brief glance at your risk tells you your next turn. Unfortunately, it uses Apple Maps which is pretty horrible in Hong Kong.
3. Music - I like being able to leave my phone in my bag or pocket and control my music. Previously, I would constantly be pulling my phone in and out to control music and get distracted by social media notifications. It's also refreshing to be able to leave my phone at home and take a walk or run some errands away from notifications.
4. Apple Pay - I couldn't believe Apple Pay could be even faster on a Watch - but it is. At places like McDonalds in Hong Kong, Apple Pay on Watch is even faster than pull your wallet out of your pocket and pay with [Octopus](http://www.octopus.com.hk/?ref=larrysalibra.com). An impressive feat!

## Problem apps

1. Alarm - I'm the type of person that only ever has one alarm set in the future. It's annoying that asking Siri to "wake me up at 9am" creates a new alarm that sticks around after it goes off. Also, the alarm on the Watch is so quiet to almost be useless even for a very light sleeper. Would be great if alarms were mirrored on the phone.
2. Digital touch/iMessage - Digital touch didn't really work for me. It's also confusing how its suppose to work because there's no indication in iMessage on other devices that a digital touch was sent (yet animated emojis show up). I've also been experience more iMessages issues than normal since the arrival of the Watch. I'm frequently seeing "delivery failed" when sending messages to contacts on my phone that are working fine from the watch & my mac.
3. FaceTime Audio - You can't make FaceTime Audio calls from the watch only traditional phone calls. Most of my calls are over FaceTime Audio or Signal and my traditional phone calls are almost all international, for which I have to enter a dial around code in some countries to avoid being charged an arm and a leg. Calling from the Watch is pretty useless in its current state for me.
4. Authy - I was really looking forward to Authy on Apple Watch to put an end to searching for my phone every time I log into a site with two factor authentication. Unfortunately, the Authy watch app only shows the 2FA code when your phone is unlocked and the Authy phone app is open. That makes the Authy watch app rather useless.

![Authy Apple Watch App](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2015/04/IMG_0263.jpg) 

Authy Apple Watch App

## Speed

I haven't experienced most of the slow speed issues other people have complained about. I suspect much of it has to do with the pervasive very fast, low latency Internet here in Hong Kong. The weather glance updates current weather in about half a second, the map glance can take about a second or two to show the map. The slowest loading glance for me is the heartbeat glance which takes several seconds to show an up to date reading, but this is because it starts taking a new measurement when you swipe to the glance.

## Fitness

I'm a swimmer who is in the pool almost every day, so I'm very disappointed that I can't use it to measure my swimming. Besides that, I really like the built in activity and workout apps - I've tried apps like runtastic and other apps targeted more at people who have things like gym memberships and lots of proper fitness equipment. They always seemed too fitness nerdy to me and I never liked that they wanted to store your workout data in the cloud.

Activity and its three concentric circle visualization makes it super easy to see at a glance how active you're being in a particular day.

## Wearing a watch again

The verdict is out on this one. The watch is lighter and smaller than I expected, so I'm not as bothered as I feared by it. On the other hand, in a humid climate like Hong Kong and as someone who is in and out of swimming pools very frequently, the moisture that builds up under the band is annoying and sometimes itchy.
### Project calling privacy a human right tracks you without consent
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/project-calling-privacy-a-human-right-tracks-you-without-consent/
Last updated: 2015-04-16T16:00:00.000Z
*Update: They have [removed the tracking](https://github.com/Ourinternet/website/issues/1?ref=larrysalibra.com#issuecomment-94012728). Impressive responsiveness!*

Friend +liongrass pointed me to an organization called the "Global Commission on Internet Governance" that released a [statement calling privacy "fundamental human right"](https://ourinternet.org/publication/toward-a-social-compact-for-digital-privacy-and-security/?ref=larrysalibra.com) on their [open source website](https://github.com/Ourinternet/website?ref=larrysalibra.com). Lofty goals and admirable words.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2015/04/Screen-Shot-2015-04-17-at-11.28.10-PM.png) 

If only their actions and words were consistent. Most \[recent commit\]\[3\]? "Adding outbound link event tracking." 

![Screen Shot 2015 04 17 at 11 28 25 PM](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2015/04/Screen-Shot-2015-04-17-at-11.28.25-PM.png "Screen Shot 2015-04-17 at 11.28.25 PM.png") 

I filed a [bug report](https://github.com/Ourinternet/website/issues/1?ref=larrysalibra.com).
### Apple Watch will make public wifi even worse
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/apple-watch-will-make-public-wifi-even-worse/
Last updated: 2015-04-10T16:00:00.000Z
Like many [globe-traveling entrepreneurs](https://www.pay4bugs.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com), I use *a lot* of mobile data. In Hong Kong, my carrier slows down my data when I hit 6 gigabytes every month, so I hook up to public wifi whenever possible. While there are tens of thousands of wifi hotspots across the city, public wifi is slow in this dense and crowded gadget-loving city. It's common to see 100 or more wifi network choices in a given restaurant, mall, lobby or park as neighboring businesses and carriers compete for customers by offering them free wifi bundled with their product or service. The result is public wifi that is typically dozens of times slower than LTE.

![Wifi networks](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2015/04/wifi_nets.png "wifi_nets.png") 

Wifi, wifi everywhere but not a byte to drink!

Apple Watch promises to make already teeth grindingly slow public wifi a whole lot worse. Here's why:

Let's take a look at a hypothetical coffee shop. When public wifi first debuted, of 50 people in the coffee shop maybe 20 would be connected to the wireless network "surfing the web" (remember that?). In the iPhone era, of those 50 people, 40 are using the wifi network. for a total of 60 devices. Imagine of those 50 people 20 get Apple Watches. Now we've got 80 devices on the wireless network. But that number doesn't tell the whole story.

For the reasons [I've talked about before](https://www.larrysalibra.com/2014/09/15/why-apple-watch-needs-the-iphone/?ref=larrysalibra.com), the Apple Watch depends on iPhone like an alien dinghy depends on its Martian mothership. Watch apps run on the iPhone pull all of their information: location, data, graphics and even animations from the iPhone. This is the case even when that information ultimately comes from the Internet. The user loads up an app on her Apple Watch, the app needs to find flight arrival times, the watch, via wifi (or bluetooth) asks iPhone to look up the data and send the result. The end result is that instead of the data traveling over the wifi network once from the Internet to the phone, it travels over the wifi twice. That's twice the bandwidth used, twice the traffic and twice the wifi congestion compared to the same amount of data loaded via a phone or computer.

To make matters worse, Apple didn't include support for 5ghz wifi on the Apple Watch, the new band being rolled out to mitigate some of the congestion problems, because of its limited battery. It only supports wifi on the overused 2.4ghz band, the same channel that cordless phones, bluetooth and other wireless home gadgets use, including the bluetooth headphones new Apple Watch owners will undoubtably buy.

![Wifi networks](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2015/04/apple_watch_specs.png "wifi_nets.png") 

Apple watch specifications

I'm excited to get my Apple Watch, but am be interested to see how well it works, if at all, in areas with where overcrowded 2.4ghz wifi is already almost so slow and laggy as to be basically useless. My prediction is that suburban users won't see any problems, but Apple Watch users like me in places like Hong Kong and New York City will see connection issues and watch interface lag during peak rush hour times on public transit, high traffic malls and crowded airports.

Cue the cries of Lag-gate!
### Why Baidu was hijacked to attack GitHub
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/why-baidu-was-hijacked-to-attack-github/
Last updated: 2015-03-26T16:00:00.000Z
[Baidu's](https://baidu.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com) content data network (CDN), the computers that serve Baidu analytics and Baidu ads has been hijacked and is being used to launch a distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack on popular developer tool [Github](https://github.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com).

The China Twitterverse has been [buzzing today](https://twitter.com/bridgers/status/581325734490157056?ref=larrysalibra.com) with [reports of weird javascript errors](https://twitter.com/Hexcles/status/581332596782575616?ref=larrysalibra.com) on sites linking to Baidu assets (like Baidu analytics) when accessed outside of the Great Firewall.

![Baidu search results of malicious js](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2015/03/baidu_malicious_js.png "baidu_malicious_js.png") 

Baidu search results of malicious js

Requests to Baidu’s content data network are being intercepted and sending back some javascript code instead of the original requested file. The javascript code instructs visitors browsers to request the Github pages of [anti-censorship group Greatfire](https://github.com/greatfire/wiki?ref=larrysalibra.com) and [the Chinese language edition of the New York Times](https://github.com/cn-nytimes/mirrors?ref=larrysalibra.com). These groups turned to a developer source code control tool to host their information with the knowledge that China was unable to block Github because of the huge cost to its technology industry.

![Malicious JS](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2015/03/malicious_js.png "malicious_js.png") 

Malicious JS

This DDOS attack is interesting for a few reasons:

1. It leverages unsuspecting website visitors with uncompromised machines to create a DDOS attack
2. It makes a China based attack appear to come from outside of China by only inserting the compromising javascript code in Baidu CDN requests made outside of China 3\. It attacks one of the most popular developer site that the Great Firewall has tried unsuccessfully to block in the past because of Chinese developer backlash
3. It appears to be an attempt to pressure Github, a non-news organization, to censor content that China objects to.
4. This outbound attack appears to be originating from the government controlled Great Firewall.

More information and detailed technical analysis [here](http://insight-labs.org/?p=1682&ref=larrysalibra.com) and [demo video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6eAtcwT5Pc&ref=larrysalibra.com) by [Seven Shippo](https://twitter.com/Shippo7?ref=larrysalibra.com).
### FCC Infosec 101: Protect Your Data, Protect Your Sources
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/fcc-infosec-101/
Last updated: 2020-04-11T10:25:09.000Z
I joined [Leonhard Weese](https://liongrass.hk/?ref=larrysalibra.com) and Fabian Lischka in leading a 60 minute workshop on information security and encryption  
for journalists at the [Foreign Correspondents’ Club](http://fcchk.org/?ref=larrysalibra.com) in Central, Hong Kong.

Our goal was to give journalists some basic steps they could take to improve the security of the information  
the collect in the course of their reporting.

Our interactive talk had the following agenda:

- Explain what encryption is
- Protect your device by:  
  - downloading from trusted sources
  - recognizing phishing attacks
  - looking for https connections
- Project your accounts by:  
  - selecting good passwords
  - using a password manager
  - using two factor authentication
- Protect your communications by:  
  - using Redphone/Textsecure/Signal
  - using Telegram Secret Chats

## Slides

[View slides as HTML](https://larrysalibra.com/keynotes/2015-02-26-infosec-101-fcc/) [Download slides as PDF](https://larrysalibra.com/keynotes/2015-02-26-infosec-101-fcc.pdf)

## Photos

[ ![FCC Sign](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2015/02/fcc-sign.jpg) ](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2015/02/fcc-sign-full.jpg?ref=larrysalibra.com) [ ![FCC Board Member Nan Hie and Speakers Larry, Leo, and Fabian](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2015/02/fcc-group.jpg) ](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2015/02/fcc-group-full.jpg?ref=larrysalibra.com) 

I joined Fabian Lischka and Leonhard Weese in the FCC's Main Dining Room to help journalists understand how to use technology to better protect their sources and other private information.

*Want to learn more about Blockstack? [Join us](https://blockstack.org/?ref=larrysalibra.com) or [get in touch](https://larrysalibra.com/invitation/)!*
### China (Finally?) Putting an End to Foreign Investment in the Internet
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/china-finally-putting-an-end-to-foreign-investment-in-the-internet/
Last updated: 2015-01-22T16:00:00.000Z
Great post about in [ChinaLawBlog](http://www.chinalawblog.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com) about how [China is putting an end to so-called variable interest entities (VIEs)](http://www.chinalawblog.com/2015/01/china-vies-are-dead-done-over-stick-a-fork-in-them.html?ref=larrysalibra.com) that most of China's large internet companies, including Tencent, Sina and Baidu, used to IPO overseas and raise funds from foreign investors.

> Yet, the remarkable fact is that these highly capitalized, powerful companies are all operating illegally (as we have pointed out many times on this blog). However, all of this illegal activity has been conducted openly and with the tacit acquiescence of the PRC regulatory authorities. As a result, the big issue for now is what is to be done about the existing VIE entities in China that will be rendered illegal if the Draft is adopted in its current form.

Not only has the foreign internet been de facto banned from China - now all of the big "local" Internet companies have been officially declared illegal. Tough time to be an Internet entrepreneur (or user!) in Mainland China.

I got tipped off about this change in a [Bloomberg article](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2015-01-22/china-seen-planning-overhaul-of-foreign-investment-rules.html?ref=larrysalibra.com) saying how great China's overhaul of foreign investment rules will be.

> “It is a huge change,” [Antony Dapiran](https://twitter.com/antd/?ref=larrysalibra.com), Hong Kong-based partner with law firm Davis Polk & Wardwell, said in an e-mail. “It pushes China so much closer to being a ‘normal’ place to do business.”

Closer to "normal" unless you want to use the Internet or do business in that space.
### Remembering Zhao Ziyang
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/remembering-zhao-ziyang/
Last updated: 2015-01-17T16:00:00.000Z
Yesterday was the 10th anniversary of the death of former Chinese Premier Zhao Ziyang. The [BBC reported on those mourning the anniversary of his death in Beijing](http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-30863571?ref=larrysalibra.com):

> Mourners have gathered to mark the 10th anniversary of the death of China's purged former leader, Zhao Ziyang.

> More than 100 people braved police surveillance to go to what was once his courtyard home in Beijing.

> The former Communist Party leader was under constant house arrest until his death in 2005, and his name is still rarely mentioned in official circles.

> The mourners took flowers and bowed low before photographs of Mr Zhao, in what appeared to be an impromptu ceremony.

> Police officers were stationed outside the compound. They allowed mourners to enter the house to pay their respects, but stopped journalists from going in.

For those not familiar with Zhao:

> Zhao Ziyang was promoted by China's former supreme leader, Deng Xiaoping, who was looking for someone to reform the economy and open up the country to the outside world.

> Mr Zhao's position seemed assured when he was made general secretary of the ruling Communist Party in 1987.

Zhao was leader of a faction that supported non-violence and a conciliatory to student protestors...a faction that lost resulting in house arrest until his death.

Few Chinese born after the mid to late 1980s have even heard of the name of the man who was the second highest ranking official in China for most of the 80s.
### Video: 'The British Chinese' - Identity is Complicated
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/video-the-british-chinese-identity-is-complicated/
Last updated: 2015-01-17T16:00:00.000Z
Came across [this video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-GNrlqLHJYE&ref=larrysalibra.com) where a number of students in a British Chinese language school are asked whether they consider themselves British or Chinese or something else.

I tweeted the link without comment intentionally hoping no one would notice and a Twitter follower [called me out on it](https://twitter.com/wintersinhk?ref=larrysalibra.com).

Some thoughts:

- The school seems be run by people from Mainland China and the "Chinese" identity that most students describe in video plays very much into the PRC government's concept of Chinese ethnic exceptionalism. The same cultural view point that results in people with East Asian looking faces being [harassed for not being able to speak Chinese](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8p-NxcM0dKQ&ref=larrysalibra.com) while praising anyone with a non-Chinese looking face that can say "Hello" in Chinese.
- Defining self-identity based on nation-state affiliation starts to look silly after enough time living in different countries.
- Identity is a fluid and relative concept - While many of these students feel more Chinese than British while in the UK, I would not be surprised if they felt more British than Chinese while in Beijing. What makes us different defines us.
### Nigeria's Baga Massacre. Why don't we care?
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/nigerias-baga-massacre-why-dont-we-care/
Last updated: 2015-01-13T16:00:00.000Z
Many have [asked why there has been so much more attention to the Charlie Hebdo attacks compared to Nigeria's Baga Massacre](http://mic.com/articles/108192/terrorists-killed-2-000-people-in-nigeria-last-week-so-why-doesn-t-the-world-care?ref=larrysalibra.com). Here are my thoughts:

I've been to Paris multiple times. I've studied French. I've read French cartoons. I've read authors, publications, stories. I've explored France through the generations via countless movies and books. I've gone on road-trips in France. My favorite economist is French. I've been influenced by French thinkers. Free speech is important to me. I can pronounce "Charlie." I have friends named Charlie.

I haven't been to Nigeria. I don't know much about it. I've never read a book or seen a movie that takes place in Nigeria. I'm not sure how to pronounce "Boko Haram's Baga". The only way Nigeria has ever entered by life is when princes email me to tell me how many millions they have for me or via a 30 second news spots about corruption.

The Charlie narrative is one I can quickly relate to, understand and visualize (it has cartoons after all!). I know little about Nigeria and have no connection to it so the narrative is not as compelling.

I'm sure I'm not the only English news consumer who has this relationship with these two tragedies. It isn't a judgement about the relative value of human life, but about what feels "closer to home" and is more surprising.

News organization report more about the news their audience is interested in hearing about. It is also natural that news organizations report more about events that are a threat to their profession.

---

After seeing the *n*th "Why is no one paying attention to Nigeria article" and hearing an African perspective from Bitcoin friend located in Kenya, I spent some time reading more about the Baga tragedy. It is a story that needs deserves telling about a part of the world that those of us in the English speaking world don't know enough about. So please, go [read](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015%5FBaga%5Fmassacre?ref=larrysalibra.com) [about](http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jan/12/-sp-boko-haram-attacks-nigeria-baga-ignored-media?ref=larrysalibra.com) [it](http://mic.com/articles/108192/terrorists-killed-2-000-people-in-nigeria-last-week-so-why-doesn-t-the-world-care?ref=larrysalibra.com)!
### Bitstamp Fails - Why Bitcoin CEOs Need to be like Branson
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/bitstamp-fails-why-bitcoin-ceos-need-to-be-like-branson/
Last updated: 2015-01-04T16:00:00.000Z
*Update: Bitstamp CEO Nejc Kodrič [issued a comment via Twitter](https://twitter.com/nejc%5Fkodric/status/552033583486230529?ref=larrysalibra.com) an hour or so after this post went live*

Bitcoin had a rough year in 2014, losing much of its value. The first few days of 2015 aren't looking much better. Since January 3rd, we've watched the price of Bitcoin fall another 20% after 2014 spectacular year long plummet. To add insult to injury, those of us in Asia woke today to the news that Bitstamp is having problems with deposits and withdrawals. Speculation is flying on Coin Dojo & Reddit that we're already seeing Mt. Gox 2015-edition.

Rational people with common sense would think that Bitstamp would have learned from Mt. Gox's failures in leadership and communication and error on the side of being incredibly forthcoming and transparent. Yet, there's been no official comment from the company regarding whatever "issues" they're experiencing beyond a red lettered message warning customers that deposits to old addresses will no longer be honored.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2015/01/bitstamp_fail.png) 

Bitstamp fail

[Bitstamp's official twitter account](https://twitter.com/bitstamp?ref=larrysalibra.com) hasn't had a tweet in 3 days and their \[CEO Nejc Kodrič\] hasn't had \[an original tweet since November 1, 2014\. His [attendance on Bitcoin Talk](https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=38966&ref=larrysalibra.com) is no better: he hasn't been seen there since October 2013\. [Searching for him on the Internet](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Nejc+Kodri%C4%8D&ref=larrysalibra.com) isn't much more help: he doesn't seem to have a personal website or blog. If it wasn't for a couple YouTube interviews we wouldn't even be sure Mr. Kodrič even exists!

A CEO is the human face behind a company. When a company encounters a crisis and a CEO like Nejc Kodrič can't even be bothered to tap the Twitter icon on his phone and spend 140 characters letting his company's customers know he's looking into it, customers are right to fear the worst. Bitstamp has already failed. Users will never trust it again.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2015/01/bitstamp_fail.png) 

Bitstamp 404

The problem with first generation CEOs of Bitcoin companies like Nejc Kodrič and Mark Karpeles is that Bitcoin let nerds sitting in their parents' basements get rich without having to go through the growing up process of learning the leadership, management and social skills that no tech entrepreneur can succeed without.

When your business handles other people's money, it needs to managed by people who understand that money is as precious to people as lives. A hacked Bitcoin exchange is like a downed plane - wealth is the capital that funds people's hopes and dreams. Stolen bitcoins kill dreams like a crashed plane kills families.

Bitcoin CEOs should be looking to people like AirAsia's [Tony Fernandes](https://twitter.com/tonyfernandes?ref=larrysalibra.com) and Virgin's Richard Branson as examples of how to handle a crisis when your business is handling people's hopes and dreams.

Tony Fernandes handled the disappearance of AirAsia's flight QZ8501 admirably. He was transparent and communicative despite the fact no one knew for days what happened. He didn't hide in a room and wait until the case was solved (what his lawyers probably recommended) before talking to the press.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2015/01/tony_fernande_twitter.png) 

Tony Fernande's Twitter

Because of Mr. Fernandes's honesty & transparency I was 100% confident of flying his airline on a ticket I booked within hours of flight QZ8501's disappearance. Based on Nejc Kodrič's handling of Bitstamp's current crisis, I will never use Bitstamp again.

Richard Branson's handling of the SpaceShipTwo crash is another great of example of the right way for a CEO to handle a company crisis.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2015/01/branson_spaceshiptwo_twitter.png) 

Bitstamp 404

This advice isn't just applicable to plane crashes and theft of Bitcoin. Even smaller problems can feel big to your customers - that's why its important for all CEO's to be engaged and proactive. Here at [Pay4Bugs](https://www.pay4bugs.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com), my co-founder C.S Hsia and I don't hesitate to jump on the phone, personally email or visit customers when times are good so in the off chance they have a problem, they are confident that we'll make it right. This is the human aspect of tech businesses and done right is one of the most rewarding.

Luckily for Bitcoin and blockchain based technology, second generation Bitcoin CEOs and Founders understand this human aspect of business. They understand that customers want to know someone with a pulse is thinking about and caring for the Bitcoin. People like: [ANX](https://anxbtc.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com)'s Ken Lo who is always out and about in Hong Kong at Bitcoin events pumping the flesh and supporting the community. [Ryan Shea](https://twitter.com/ryaneshea?ref=larrysalibra.com) of [Onename](https://onename.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com) who is very active on Twitter and replies to (PGP-encrypted) emails and iMessages incredibly fast. [Gatecoin](https://gatecoin.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com)'s CEO Aurélien Menant who manages to attend and speak at every event. [BitMex](https://www.bitmex.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com)'s Arthur Hayes who finds the time to personally write a newsletter filled with trading advice and to his customers once and sometimes even twice a week.

As the Nejc Kodričs and Mark Karpeles of the Bitcoin shadow world get chewed up and spit out by reality and exit stage left, movers and shakers who understand that technology without a soul is worthless will take the lead. 2015 promises to be a bright one for Bitcoin & the blockchain. Happy 2015!
### Richard Stallman: Why you should not use Uber
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/richard-stallman-why-you-should-not-use-uber/
Last updated: 2014-12-31T16:00:00.000Z
Richard Stallman's views are always "interesting"...[his latest on Uber](https://stallman.org/uber.html?ref=larrysalibra.com) are no different ranging from well-reasoned to the absolutely insane

> - It requires passengers to run a nonfree program (an app). As always, a nonfree program tramples its users' freedom.

Free software has never figured out the incentive problem. Look at all the problems we've had with buggy free security software like [OpenSSL](https://blog.pay4bugs.com/2014/04/08/howto-update-ubuntu-to-fix-heartbleed-ssl-bug/?ref=larrysalibra.com) in 2014.

> - That app requires running other nonfree software (in the case of Android, Google Play).

Moving on.

> - It requires you to let Big Brother track you, with a portable phone.
> - Uber requires you to identify yourself, both to order a cab and to pay.
> - Uber also records where you get the cab and where you go with it.

There are huge benefits to non-anonymous system, but important to keep in mind the privacy costs.

> - The US government can get those records, and any lawsuit (such as a divorce lawsuit) can subpoena them.

They can get taxi records as well. Taxis often have cameras and many pay with identifiable payment methods like credit card. If you're worried about divorce lawsuits, you can always consider not getting married.

> - Uber is an unregulated near-monopoly, so it can cut rates for drivers arbitrarily.

Lack of regulation is a feature not a bug

> - Drivers are starting to complain that they're left with little money for their work.
> - Uber drivers are getting shafted; Uber can arbitrarily cut their pay, and they have to work 15 hours a day.

They're free to drive for another company or get another job.

> - Uber plans to do away with human cab drivers.

Awesome! You'd think a technology visionary like Stallman would be excited about this!

> - It would be easy for a non-plutocratic government to prohibit this, and that's what every country ought to do, unless/until every person gets an adequate basic income so people don't need to be employed.

Ban Uber because governments haven't implemented Stallman's fringe socialist vision for society? What?

> - Uber executives and staff have stalked passengers in various ways.

I've actually experienced this. It's kind of creepy. The company needs figure out its policy on this.

> - Uber can track who has a one-night stand. In fact, it did so.

People (including Uber) should spend less time and brainpower worrying about who is sleeping with whom. Grow up!
### Paul Graham: Let in the programmers, but not the lawyers, bankers, doctors
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/paul-graham-let-in-the-programmers-but-not-the-lawyers-bankers-doctors/
Last updated: 2014-12-28T18:00:00.000Z
Paul Graham in [his latest treatise](http://paulgraham.com/95.html?ref=larrysalibra.com) argues that the USA should allow more foreign tech workers into the country.

> American technology companies want the government to make immigration easier because they say they can't find enough programmers in the US. Anti-immigration people say that instead of letting foreigners take these jobs, we should train more Americans to be programmers. Who's right?

Paul Graham is spot on as to why some programmers are better than others:

> How much better is a great programmer than an ordinary one? So much better that you can't even measure the difference directly. A great programmer doesn't merely do the same work faster. A great programmer will invent things an ordinary programmer would never even think of.

This should be obvious, but business school and management types like to think of as programmers as commodities, because it makes something they don't understand (software development) feel less threatening. eg. "I need a few devs," as if they came by the dozen. (This explains why they form so few large, successful technology companies.)

> What the anti-immigration people don't understand is that there is a huge variation in ability between competent programmers and exceptional ones

There is a huge variation in ability between merely competent and exception members of most professions, not just programmers. I don't think anti-immigration people are insensitive to that. They simply want market protection.

Paul is so far off in basic economics that it can only be explained as self-serving delusion:

> The anti-immigration people have to invent some explanation to account for all the effort technology companies have expended trying to make immigration easier. So they claim it's because they want to drive down salaries. But if you talk to startups, you find practically every one over a certain size has gone through legal contortions to get programmers into the US, where they then paid them the same as they'd have paid an American. Why would they go to extra trouble to get programmers for the same price? The only explanation is that they're telling the truth: there are just not enough great programmers to go around.

There aren't enough great programmers **at the *price* startups are willing to pay**. By saying, I'd need to pay *X* for 10 great programmers but I don't want to pay *X*, so Congress please increase the supply so I only have to pay *X divided by 2*, you're driving down salaries.

Paul Graham is a venture capitalist and the goal of VCs is to increase their investment returns. They do this by getting more and higher quality deal flow for less money (hence all blogging & startup "advice" from VCs) and by increasing the success of their portfolio companies. One way to increase the success (or returns) of a company is to get better talent at a lower price.

To get more "great programmers," you can either:

1. Increase the price you're willing to pay *or*
2. Find a way to increase the supply of great programmers.

VCs like Paul Graham and founders ([like myself](https://www.pay4bugs.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com)) obviously don't want to do 1) because that would hurt our investment returns or increase the bar for business success. It's cheaper to try to do 2) by lobbying Congress to make immigration easier for programmers.

I'm all for immigration...I've spent my entire career as an American competing on the free market outside the market protection of the US immigration system. I'm an immigrant in Hong Kong (One visa renewal from permanent residence!), I've employed amazing programmers in Guangzhou, China, and I'm currently writing this post on a trip to Cebu, the heart of IT outsourcing here in the Philippines. I've been shocked by how smart many of the people I've met along the way are. I agree with Paul that most of the great programmers of the world are born outside of the USA. But if you're going to advocate for more immigration, don't pick and choose the professions and pretend it's for the good of the worker or the country when its really about your own bottom line.

Tech workers are easy targets in the US: they're unorganized and not protected by state granted monopolies and licensing regimes. Imagine how far calls for easing immigration requirements for doctors and lawyers would get. It's sad that the people taking advantage of tech workers are other tech workers who have moved into management roles as VCs and founders under the guise of "but it's good for you."

By all means push for more immigration, but equally across all job categories, don't just pick on programmers.
### Econtalk: Artificial Intelligence still not that intelligent
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/econtalk-artificial-intelligence-still-not-that-intelligent/
Last updated: 2014-12-24T16:00:00.000Z
[Great conversation with NYU artificial intelligence expert](http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2014/12/gary%5Fmarcus%5Fon.html?ref=larrysalibra.com) [Gary Marcus](http://www.psych.nyu.edu/gary/?ref=larrysalibra.com) by [Russ Robert](https://twitter.com/EconTalker?ref=larrysalibra.com) on [EconTalk](http://www.econtalk.org/?ref=larrysalibra.com) puts our progress on AI in perspective.

TL;DR: Progress on artificial intelligence as we know it today is almost all the result of brute force and not actual intelligence.

> people have always been saying it's \[AI\] 20 years away. And they were saying it was 20 years away in 1955 and they're saying it now. And so people always think it's just around the corner. The joke in the field is that if you say it's 20 years away, you can get a grant to do it. If you said it was 5 years away, you'd have to deliver it; and if 100 years, nobody's going to talk to you.

Anyone who has ever worked in academic research knows exactly what he's talking about.

Worth a listen for those looking for a bit of nuance behind the public fears of people like Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking & [Infosec Taylor Swift](https://twitter.com/SwiftOnSecurity?ref=larrysalibra.com) worried about AI destroying the human race.
### N reasons why the spooks love Tribler
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/n-reasons-why-the-spooks-love-tribler/
Last updated: 2014-12-23T16:00:00.000Z
[Great security analysis of promises-to-make-bittorrent-anonymous app Tribler](https://tribler.org/?ref=larrysalibra.com)

> TLDR: Do not use this if your threat model includes active attackers,  
> adversaries versed in cryptography, those with lots of money, or if you  
> wish to be anonymous.

Many problems come from using sources of "random" numbers that are pseudorandom (ie. not really random) and inappropriate (dangerous!) for cryptographic use.

> Most of the fixes require major revisions to the wire protocol.  
> As it appears that there is no versioning, how that will be done is  
> left as an exercise for the student.

A junior developer worth his laptop shouldn't create a protocol (or an API!) without versioning. One wonders about the thought process of the development team.

Hat tip to [MadBitcoins](https://twitter.com/madbitcoins?ref=larrysalibra.com) for the link.
### Apple Pay: 4 lessons Bitcoin needs to learn
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/apple-pay-4-lessons-bitcoin-needs-to-learn/
Last updated: 2014-11-08T12:13:00.000Z
Apple Pay launched in the US on October 20, 2014, and has been doing very well. 1 million cards added in the [first 3 days](http://time.com/3543375/apple-pay-cvs-rite-aid/?ref=larrysalibra.com). In the first 3 weeks, just one merchant, Whole Foods, saw [150,000 Apple Pay transactions](http://blogs.wsj.com/cio/2014/11/06/whole-foods-cio-says-apple-pay-instacart-paying-off/?ref=larrysalibra.com). Few Bitcoin accepting merchants are seeing anything close to that in transaction volume.

Let’s take a look at what Bitcoin can learn from Apple Pay’s success.

## 1\. Customer demand, not merchant needs drives payment method adoption

Who thinks merchants were sitting around one day and thought, “You know, it really sucks that we don’t have to pay a fee to accept cash. Let’s start accepting credit cards so we can pay banks a fee!”? No one, that’s who.

Merchants started accepting credit cards because the smart ones figured out that customers wanted to pay with them, and were avoiding merchants that didn’t accept credit cards. The really good merchants also figured out that customers that pay with credit card spend more money.

The merchant deal when it comes to credit card acceptance is an increase in sales of 10% to 15% or more in exchange for a 2-3% fee. Credit cards let customers spend money they don’t have. For merchants, credit card fees let them offer an instant supplier line of credit without the management overhead or counter-party risk.

The rewards incentive structure of credit cards is such that banks take much of the fee paid by merchants and pay it directly to consumers in the form of cash back or point based rewards. This incentivizes customers to prefer credit card over cash or Bitcoin. After all, if you’re already paying for credit card fees, why not get the benefits?

Frankly, merchant fees are the merchant’s problem and anyone who has been a merchant (as [I am](https://www.pay4bugs.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com)) understands that you don’t get very far in business telling the customer about your problems.

A redditor nicely [sums up many customers’ sentiment regarding merchant complaints about fees](https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/2ld8pz/bitpay%5Fproves%5Fapple%5Fpay%5Fis%5Fjust%5Fsexy%5Ftech%5Fit%5Fdoes/clu0v2m?ref=larrysalibra.com):

> When the goddamned stores start buying me free smartphones, then we can see if there's some room left to fix *their* problems. Until then, they can f\*ck themselves.

## 2\. Consumers and businesses love their credit cards

Apple noticed what the “save the merchants from their fees” crowd ignores, people love their credit cards. Emotional attachment-style love.

This is especially true in hyper-competitive credit card markets like the USA. People dedicate lots of time picking a credit card that offers rewards that match their lifestyle or personality. There are even blogs and communities built up around finding the best credit card deal. The credit card one chooses is a reflection of her personality and aspirations.

The sports fan may get an NFL co-branded credit card that helps them get perks or discounts for their favorite team. The travel nut might get a travel rewards credit card co-branded with their favorite hotel chain or airline. The affluent or those with money to burn might spend $500 a year for the Platinum American Express. Those who’ve made it and want to let others know, will no doubt carry the same card as James Bond, the American Express Centurion Card, aka “The Black Card.”

### Free lunch

Perhaps more importantly, credit cards give many people the illusion that they get something for nothing.

Credit cards also give consumers an excuse to treat themselves to something they otherwise couldn’t justify. A consumer can choose an airline credit card and use his reward points to get a pair of tickets to Hawaii for “free”. He can use those “free” tickets to justify spending additional money and vacation time on a week in Hawaii. Many people given the value of those tickets in cash rewards discounts on product purchases would have a harder time justifying the same trip. After all, that cash should probably be used for something more practical: retirement savings, the kids’ education, paying off the mortgage, etc. Airline rewards are great because they have no practical use besides flying around to somewhere cool.

This is even more true for business customers with expense accounts. They get to keep the rewards from company spending - essentially a legalized kickback - and view them as a fringe benefit. Hang out with professionals that travel a lot: consultants, bankers, lawyers, etc. and chances are when the bill comes they’ll start telling you how great their credit card is.

Apple Pay lets people keep what they love about their credit cards, both features and card design.

There is plenty of room in merchant fee structure for Bitcoin based payment systems to come up with even more attractive rewards programs for consumers and the people that pay on behalf of businesses.

## 3\. Sex sells

A anti-Apple post [BitPay proves Apple Pay is just “sexy tech”](https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2lctmh/bitpay%5Fproves%5Fapple%5Fpay%5Fis%5Fjust%5Fsexy%5Ftech%5Fit%5Fdoes/?ref=larrysalibra.com) got a lot of attention on Reddit because it complained a lot about merchant problems. But the title is where the gold is. Sex sells. People want to use Apple Pay because it looks beautiful and physically feels good to use. You get a sense of control that you don’t have when a merchant takes your card and disappears behind a counter or into another room. Using Apple Pay feels like you’ve entered the future of fingerprint payment we’ve watched on TV and [movies](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back%5Fto%5Fthe%5FFuture%5FPart%5FII?ref=larrysalibra.com) for decades.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2014/11/apple_pay.jpg)

Bitcoin payment online is just as sexy. Scan a QR code and send your coins to a website and watch as a few seconds later your browser automagically moves from the “please pay” page to the “payment received” page. Compared to the credit card experience of typing and retyping lots of numbers, online Bitcoin payment is magical.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2014/11/bitcoin_qr.jpg)

Bitcoin payment in [meatspace](http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=meatspace&ref=larrysalibra.com) is anything but sexy or magical. QR codes don’t work very well weirdly lit places (like bars & restaurants) where consumers like to pay for things. And then there’s the awkward period of time where the customer’s wallet has indicated that bitcoin payment has been made, but the merchant’s app still shows “waiting for payment.” In best cases, this is only 5-10 seconds, but more often than not, poor internet connectivity or system issues results in payment confirmation taking 20 or more seconds.

The moment detractors start calling Bitcoin “just sexy tech” is the moment Bitcoin has won.

## 4\. Lack of control feels horrible

Unlike Apple Pay where the consumer feels a sense of fingerprint control, even experienced coinheads paying with Bitcoin can feel a loss of control.

Just last week at a dinner and drinks event with the founders of [ANX](https://anxbtc.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com) and [OKCoin](https://www.okcoin.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com), one of our [BAHK](http://www.bitcoinhk.org/?ref=larrysalibra.com) founding members tried to pay his bill from his exchange’s wallet app. He forgot that he needed to verify bitcoin withdrawals and there were a few tense minutes when he thought payment had been sent but the merchant denied receiving payment, with both sides blaming each other. Not cool. Both the merchant and the customer felt like they had lost control. People like products services that add control to their life, even if that control is illusionary.
### Umbrella Movement: Legality versus Morality
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/umbrella-movement-legality-versus-morality/
Last updated: 2014-10-28T05:45:00.000Z
Asks a friend of a friend on Facebook:

> Not absolute sure if legal legitimacy is close to moral legitimacy... Can contravention of the law be justified on moral grounds?

Legality and morality are not the same.

From \[Bastiat's **The Law**\] :

> "The law perverted! And the police powers of the state perverted along with it! The law, I say, not only  
> turned from its proper purpose but made to follow an entirely contrary purpose! The law become the  
> weapon of every kind of greed! Instead of checking crime, the law itself guilty of the evils it is  
> supposed to punish!"

And then:

> "When law and morality contradict each other, the citizen has the cruel alternative of either losing his  
> moral sense or losing his respect for the law. These two evils are of equal consequence, and it would be  
> difficult for a person to choose between them."

What we are seeing in Hong Kong is the breakdown in respect for the law because it is being abused and used as a tool to achieve what a [large portion of HK society feels](http://www.com.cuhk.edu.hk/ccpos/images/news/20141022-eng.pdf?ref=larrysalibra.com) is an immoral ends.

You can see this to a larger extreme in mainland China. The Party writes the law so the law says whatever is convenient to the Party; people see little legitimacy in the way the laws and therefore either ignore laws or follow them solely out of fear of punishment not out of a respect.

Society works best when people accept laws as the rules to the game - it is costly (and not very effective) to use force to compel large numbers of people to accept a system they find unjust no matter how "legal" that system is.
### Why Apple Watch needs the iPhone
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/why-apple-watch-needs-the-iphone/
Last updated: 2014-09-15T09:32:00.000Z
Apple has done it again. It’s taken a product category [filled for decades with failed products](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smartwatch?ref=larrysalibra.com#History) that saw little success even among dedicated nerds and re-invented it to make it both useful and cool.

The most often heard complaint, even among [fanbois](http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=fanboi&ref=larrysalibra.com) is “But I wish it didn’t require an iPhone nearby to work.”

The Apple haters, always out in force, blame the iPhone requirement to greedy Apple trying to get its lemming-like customers to spend even more money.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2014/09/shutup_and_take_my_money.jpg)

## Wrong. Here's why:

Remember back in the day when owning an iPod, iPhone or iPad required you to also have a computer? This wasn’t Apple trying to sell more Macs, if they were just trying doing that, why would they have made iOS devices work with Windows? It was because without a computer, you couldn’t download mp3s or upgrade software. Connectivity technology of the day hadn’t developed to the point where it could be integrated into small mobile devices.

When the original iPod was released in late 2001, products supporting the original Wi-Fi standard had only been on the market for a year. Real world speeds assuming no one else was using it were so slow it would have taken around an hour an a half to sync music to the original 5 gigabyte iPod. You wouldn’t have to worry about the time though, because you would have used up all of the battery power before it finished syncing. That’s why Apple included a Firewire port over 40 times faster than wifi at the day. Not only was it fast, but it also gave your iPod power while it synced.

Unlike 2001, when the original iPod launched, in 2014 we are surrounded by fast wireless options. Yet Apple confronts the same problem with the Apple Watch as the original iPod. Wireless is everywhere but Apple Watch can’t afford to use it.

## Wireless, Wireless Everywhere but Not a Drop to Drink

Other smartwatch on the market have difficulty getting a full day of power out of the tiny batteries that fit on our wrists. The Pebble manages multiple day battery life, but only does so with a black and white screen that's more at home in a 1950s' TV than today's selfie age. As anyone who has ever used airplane mode on their phones to save power can tell you, if you put a 3G or LTE chipset in a smartwatch, battery life would go from a day to maybe it might make it through lunch time…if you eat quickly. The thing is, you need a lot of power to get a signal from your phone to a cell phone tower miles away power that watch sized batteries don't have.

Even Wi-Fi uses a lot of power compared to something like short range low energy Bluetooth. While Apple has indicated that Apple Watch will have Wi-Fi, I believe that like AirDrop, Personal Hotspot in iOS 8, Handoff and Continuity, a Bluetooth LE connection between your Apple Watch and iPhone will be its always on link to the outside world and Wi-Fi will only be fired up for short-lived high bandwidth applications like copying music or photos to your Watch.

A few years from now, as battery and wireless technology advances and Apple Watch gains its own independent link to the outside world, we’ll look back with nostalgia to the days when you had to carry around a thin battery antenna slab called the iPhone in our pockets and purse to provide Internet for your Watch. I look forward to that day!
### Hong Kong helpers: low pay isn't racism
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/hong-kong-helpers-low-pay-isnt-racism/
Last updated: 2014-08-24T06:17:00.000Z
A [reader brought up treatment of foreign domestic helpers are a great example of racism in Hong Kong](https://www.larrysalibra.com/2014/08/22/racism-in-hong-kong/?ref=larrysalibra.com#comment-1555535163).

However, it's important not to confuse perceived low pay and racism. They're separate issues. Let’s look at helper pay.

The "cheapness" of maids is because of the large supply. If there were no visa restrictions at all, maids (and labor in most categories) would be cheaper. People come to Hong Kong to be foreign domestic helpers because they make more money than they would staying in their own country.

I have a classmate in the Philippines and he tells me that many college educated people, often with masters degrees, only make US$300 to US$1000 a month. That's before taxes, housing, food and transportation. In comparison, the minimum wage for maids in hong kong is about US$520 and your employer is required to provide housing, food and health insurance. At home, much of your wage goes to paying living expenses, as a maid in Hong Kong, [your living expenses are paid by your employer](http://www.immd.gov.hk/en/forms/forms/id407%5Fdetail.html?ref=larrysalibra.com) and your wage is discretionary income.

The picture is even clearer if you look at total value of compensation (like the taxman does). Single people without the need for maids that have employer provided housing (often worth more than their salary!) like to rent out the empty rooms, including the maids quarters, for extra cash. In more upscaling housing, maids quarters are often nicer then the subdivided rooms (套房) many single white collar Hong Kong workers pay US$500 to US$1500/month to live in and can have market monthly rental values of US$1000 to US$2000 (or more!).

Even a bed in a closet in Hong Kong in a really bad location is hard to find for less than US$200-300 a month. Beds in shared rooms often go for this much.

By including the rental value of housing, (ignoring utilities, health care & food, return home plane ticket, etc also provided by employer) helper compensation is much higher than the headline minimum wage and explains why many would pick being a maid in Hong Kong versus staying at home. In Hong Kong, your living expenses are taken care of and you have discretionary cash each month; at home your (often lower) monthly wage gets consumed paying for living expenses.

Everything I’ve described here assumes Hong Kong employers of foreign domestic helpers are playing by the rules. The reality is many employers don’t play by the rules they agreed to and dehumanizing racism is a motivating factor.

## Political rants

The foreign domestic worker policy is an economic policy that functions as a giveaway to the Hong Kong real estate industry. Both parents working to make the mortgage payments keep housing prices even higher than they would be simply because of government restrictions on the land supply, mandated inefficient use and developer collusion.

This is one of the many government policies that distort the Hong Kong economy with biases towards (and away from) certain industries. White collar industries in Hong Kong are protected by a visa policy that has (unwritten) salary price floors, education and experience requirements. You have to pay a foreign hire a certain amount or more or the employment visa won’t be granted. The salary price floor is much higher than the minimum wage for maids.

![](http://i.imgur.com/AUGYD3e.png)

I am a fan of a liberal visa policy. However, all industries should be treated equally. Maids shouldn’t have different visa policies than bankers and computer programmers. Current helper visa policy punishes unskilled local Hong Kong workers relative to college educated white collar by forcing the former to compete on a global labor market while protecting the latter. While punishing unskilled local worker, it also manages to set up the employer-helper relationship in a way makes it [very easy for employers to be abusive and almost impossible for helpers to escape such abuse](http://hkhelperscampaign.com/scrap-the-2-week-rule/?ref=larrysalibra.com).
### Racism in Hong Kong
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/racism-in-hong-kong/
Last updated: 2014-08-21T17:39:00.000Z
You don’t move to a foreign country where most people look different than you and stay for very long if you can’t put up with mild racism. I always expected there to be racism in China, but assumed that Hong Kong would suffer less from this being an “international city” (whatever that means) and a former British colony. It doesn’t. It’s worse. One would also think that the novelty of people looking different than you would have worn off here. It hasn’t.

In this post, I’m going to share a couple stories of racism I recently encountered in Hong Kong. This isn’t meant to be a complaint but instead to let people know it happens.

## Flat in Tai Po

I had a flat tire driving north on the Tolo Highway near Tai Po last week. A flat on car is no big deal - pop on a spare and you’re good to go. On a motorcycle, it’s at best a good scare and at worst, extreme pain ad disfigurement followed by death. My vehicle went from being a gasoline powered bicycle to something more like a gasoline powered unicycle. The main goal in such a situation is to avoid falling over and getting pummeled by the speeding tons of metal surrounding you on all sides while easing over to the breakdown lane and out of harm's way.

When I finally managed to seek shelter in the V shape shoulder between an entrance ramp and the main expressway, alive, in one piece with no injuries, I was rewarded with the realization that motorcycles don’t have spare tires.

I tried calling a number of towing companies. I started in English and got “Sorry” and a hang up. Then I tried in Mandarin with similar responses. Out of ideas, I called the non-emergency number of the Hong Kong Police in Tai Po. I tried speaking in English with the officer than answer, but after I explained the situation, he would say “Go on” even though I had finished explaining it. It was clear that he wasn’t understanding what I was saying. So I asked him if he spoke Mandarin. I re-explained my situation in Mandarin and he immediately understood the problem I was having. He told me not to worry, to make sure that I am safely off the road and to hold tight while they sent police over to help me out.

I got another call a couple minutes later from what would turn out to be the two cops who came to rescue. When they arrived on the scene, the first question wasn’t about my near brush with death or why I was hiding behind construction barrels, but “Are you mixed race?” Not exactly the first question I would expect out of the mouth of the police in a place that claims to be Asia’s World City.

## The Wrong Type of Foreigner

I spent a few days exploring village house housing options around Hong Kong. Each trip to a real estate agent went something like this:

Me: “I’m interested in village houses.”

Agent: “Just you? Living alone?”

Me: “Yes”

Agent: “Most village house landlords won’t rent to your type: Foreigners...But you’re not like them. You’re white. Hmm...let me see what I can do.”

Then the agent would head for the phone.

Agent: “Hello? Mrs. Wong, house rented yet? Would you rent to a foreigner? Oh, Ok then.”

**Hangs up.**

Agent: “Hello? Mrs. Ho, house rented yet? Would you rent to a foreigner? This one isn’t like those ones. He’s white. Hey, what nationality are you?”

Me: “I’m American”

Agent: “He’s American. Has a work visa. Ok then, I’ll bring him over to look at the place.”

After a couple days of various combinations of this discussion, I figured out that the foreigners that landlords didn’t want to rent to are those from South Asia and Africa...basically anyone that isn’t white or East Asian looking.

In the end, I decided that I wasn’t really interested in living so far from the MTR and having to drive everywhere anyways.
### Bitcoin's end game
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/bitcoin-s-end-game/
Last updated: 2014-06-22T16:00:00.000Z
I had the good fortune to (literally) travel around the world last month with multiple stops in the USA, Europe and Asia talking with customers and friends about [crowdsourced software testing](https://www.pay4bugs.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com) and Bitcoin.

While I’m happy to talk about software testing, most people were more interested in Bitcoin. Everywhere I went, people wanted to know where I think Bitcoin is headed. Today, I’ll do better than tell you, I’ll show you.

---

This week is Hong Kong’s Bitcoin coming out party.

The biggest names in Bitcoin and cryptocurrency technology have descended upon our fair city for an action packed week of events and [talks](http://www.mediabistro.com/insidebitcoins/hong-kong/speakers.asp?ref=larrysalibra.com#larrysalibra).

When you’re walking through Central on your way to the [Bitcoin Assocation of Hong Kong’s launch party](https://www.bitcoinhk.org/events/launch-party/?ref=larrysalibra.com) this evening, I want you to take a look at Hong Kong’s beautiful skyline.

[![](https://blog.pay4bugs.com/images/blog/2014/06/hong-kong-bay-at-night-thumb.jpg)](https://blog.pay4bugs.com/images/blog/2014/06/hong-kong-bay-at-night.jpg?ref=larrysalibra.com)

What do you see? [The International Financial Center](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International%5FFinance%5FCentre?ref=larrysalibra.com). [The Bank of China Tower](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank%5Fof%5FChina%5FTower%5F%28Hong%5FKong%29?ref=larrysalibra.com). The Citibank Building. [The HSBC Building](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HSBC%5FMain%5FBuilding,%5FHong%5FKong?ref=larrysalibra.com). World class skyscrapers that are the envy of other cities.

But look again…look harder. What you’re really looking at is Bitcoin’s end game.

---

Of the world’s top [10 most valuable company public companies](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List%5Fof%5Fcorporations%5Fby%5Fmarket%5Fcapitalization?ref=larrysalibra.com#2013) Only two are in skyscrapers. One is Exxon in a 44 story building in Houston and the other is Berkshire Hathaway in the [Kiewit Tower](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiewit%5FTower?ref=larrysalibra.com) in Omaha, a “skyscraper” so small that it wouldn’t even have an elevator in many cities in Asia. Companies in competitive industries don’t build skyscrapers. 

Hong Kong’s skyline was built by banks and their demand for expensive office space. As you lean back and stretch your neck to look towards the sky, what you’re seeing aren’t office buildings but the ridiculously high profit margins that are only “earned” with protected industries.

The best thing about Bitcoin is the excitement that it has generated and the cryptocurrency ecosystem that has grown from that mixture of passion and technology. The movement and technology is evolving so quickly it doesn’t matter if Bitcoin itself lives or dies.

Even if Bitcoin disappeared tomorrow, some of the thousands upon thousands of projects already spawned from Bitcoin technology or inspired by Bitcoin will live on. These projects will give people a choice in areas such as [payment](https://blog.pay4bugs.com/2013/04/10/bitcoin-payout-for-testers/?ref=larrysalibra.com), wealth storage, trust and law where today their “choice” is determined by the country into which they happened to be born.

Bitcoin’s end game is creative destruction: to bring the skyscrapers tumbling down by introducing competition where none existed and bringing down costs for consumers and businesses.

Bitcoin, tear down those walls!

***Hope to see you at [tonight’s party](https://www.bitcoinhk.org/events/launch-party/?ref=larrysalibra.com)!***

***Building cool new cryptocurrency tech and need help testing it? Email us at [startups@pay4bugs.com](mailto:startups@pay4bugs.com) and ask how we can help!***

*Originally posted on the [Pay4Bugs Blog](https://blog.pay4bugs.com/2014/06/24/bitcoins-end-game/?ref=larrysalibra.com) \- check out [Pay4Bugs](https://www.pay4bugs.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com)!*
### Bitcoin exchanges' SSL more secure than banks'
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/bitcoin-exchanges-ssl-more-secure-than-banks/
Last updated: 2014-04-09T10:45:00.000Z
In case you've been living in a cave, a major security flaw was found in the security software that powers more than two-thirds of the Internet's secure websites. It's been name "[Heartbleed](http://heartbleed.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com)" and affects the open source OpenSSL library behind much of world's secure software, including the widely used Apache and Nginx web servers.

It's been interesting to watch how the industry has responded to this bug. Bitcoin exchanges have been on the ball - Hong Kong's two major Bitcoin exchanges, [ANX](https://www.anxbtc.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com) and [Bitfinex](https://www.bitfinex.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com) reached out to customers and the community almost immediately to assure them that they either [weren't affect (ANX)](https://discuss.hkbitcoin.org/t/heartbleed-bitcoin-exchange-vulnerability/94/2?ref=larrysalibra.com) or had [already taken steps to remedy the situation (Bitfinex)](https://discuss.hkbitcoin.org/t/heartbleed-bitcoin-exchange-vulnerability/94?ref=larrysalibra.com).

What about the banking industry? We haven't heard much from them beyond some smug comments along the lines of "big banks don't use free open source software like OpenSSL so they weren't affected." Right.

Ok then. Let's take a look at just how good the security of banks' SSL is versus that of Hong Kong's Bitcoin Exchanges to see if that smugness is really justified.

# Hong Kong's Banks

## Bank of China

*A-* on SSL, not bad for a website that auto-plays flash videos with audio on their homepage.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2014/04/bohk_ssl.png)

## Citibank

*B* on SSL.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2014/04/citibank_ssl.png)

## HSBC

*B* on SSL.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2014/04/hsbc_ssl.png)

# Hong Kong's Bitcoin Exchanges

## Bitfinex

*A-* on SSL.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2014/04/bitfinex_ssl.png)

## ANX

*A* on SSL. Top of the class!

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2014/04/anx_ssl.png%20500)

# Bitcoin exchanges are overachievers.

Hong Kong's Bitcoin exchanges are using much more secure SSL implementations than Hong Kong's banks. It's clear that after the trust issues the Bitcoin suffered from amateurs at Mt.Gox, that exchanges are going out of their way to make sure their customer's coins are secure.

The difference between Hong Kong's banks' SSL and Bitcoin exchanges' SSL is actually a lot more pronounced than the grades issued by the diagnostic site would seem to indicate.

**None** of the three most famous banks in Hong Kong I tested supported [Perfect Forward Secrecy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect%5Fforward%5Fsecrecy?ref=larrysalibra.com). This means that if the private keys of any of the banks are ever compromised, by hackers, the NSA, a rogue employee leaving his unencrypted company laptop on the bus, etc., all historical traffic will be exposed. Imagine your loan history, payment details, banking passwords, credit card statements from months or years ago suddenly revealed to the world because your bank couldn't be bothered to use best practice SSL security on their web sites.

But banks don't have to worry. They're licensed and regulated by the [HKMA](http://www.hkma.gov.hk/?ref=larrysalibra.com) so if anything happens they can say "but we were compliant" and point their finger at the taxpayer and the government. After all, they're the same people that use HKID numbers, home addresses and birthdays, which are [public record](http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-03-07/hong-kongs-corporate-directors-want-some-privacy?ref=larrysalibra.com) and on Facebook, as the main security keys for customer accounts.

Is anyone really surprised that Hong Kong's Bitcoin exchanges, operating in an intensely competitive global environment, without the comfort and plausible deniability offered by a government licensing scheme, are motivated to offer their customers better security than banks?
### How English Killed Bitcoin
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/how-english-killed-bitcoin/
Last updated: 2014-02-25T12:00:00.000Z
[Mt. Gox finally died](http://www.coindesk.com/mt-gox-loses-340-million-bitcoin-rumoured-insolvent/?ref=larrysalibra.com) and may be taking Bitcoin with it. Cause of death? English. Here's how:

"Online trading," "Buy/Sell", "Bid/Ask", "Deposit", "Withdrawal", "Market Cap"

What do these words make you think of? If you're like most people in the developed world, you think of trading stocks. If you've never traded stocks before, you might think of a bank or an auction house.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2014/02/wolf_of_wall_st.jpg) 

Now, what images do you associate with these words? Skyscrapers in Midtown or Lower Manhattan? Well-dressed, wealthy men in suits? [Leonardo diCaprio sinking a 170 foot yacht?](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The%5FWolf%5Fof%5FWall%5FStreet%5F%282013%5Ffilm%29?ref=larrysalibra.com)

The word "exchange" is associated in the minds of most people with storied institutions like the New York Stock Exchange, NASDAQ and HKEx. Securities markets, while not without their problems, have helped to generate trillions in wealth over their hundreds of years of history and played a large role in the development of the prosperous societies in which they exist.

Bitcoin entrepreneurs are an ambitious lot, so it's natural that they would want to adopt language associated with wealth and prosperity for their cryptocurrency businesses. But that language comes with a certain set of assumptions, assumptions that subconsciously influence people's behavior.

The problem with Bitcoin exchanges is that they're really more like street-side money changers than heavily regulated stock exchanges. So why not just call them Bitcoin Money Changers? Money changers aren't sexy like exchanges...they look like this:

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2014/02/money_changer.jpg) 

Not exactly what entrepreneurs forward-thinking enough to see the potential of cryptocurrency to change the world aspire to.

And herein lies the problem. No sane person would even consider leaving their money in the hands of a money changer for more than the time it takes to make the transaction. The money changer doesn't trust you and you don't trust him. That's why he has iron bars on the front of his shop and 3 inch bullet proof glass and why you don't let your eyes off your cash.

Call your business a money changer and customers take their money and run. Call yourself an exchange and even [smart people that know better](http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1yv6ph/some%5Fwords%5Ffor%5Fmy%5Ffriends/?ref=larrysalibra.com) leave their money with you for way longer than is needed to make the trade.

And if you don't want your Bitcoin to disappear, treat your favorite Bitcoin exchange as what it is, a money changer...not like it's a stock exchange.

Unfortunately, when greed comes in to play, even otherwise rational people make poor decisions. "But it's not like it's a tiny hole in the wall shop with rusty bars run by a guy that hasn't showered or shaved in 3 days...it's an exchange!"

And that's how English got Bitcoin [Goxed](http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=goxed&ref=larrysalibra.com).

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2014/02/mtgox_money_changer.jpg)
### Secrets Revealed on China Mobile iPhone Launch Day
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/secrets-revealed-on-china-mobile-iphone-launch-day/
Last updated: 2014-01-17T12:36:00.000Z
Today, Apple officially kicked off their alliance with China Mobile, the world's largest mobile carrier with almost 800 million subscribers. While mainstream media widely covered the launch day from Beijing, complete with pictures of Tim Cook and China Mobile executives, they missed some of the more interesting details - details important to Apple shareholders and those of us with iPhones that use China Mobile's network.

> Having fun in Beijing at the iPhone launch with China Mobile! [pic.twitter.com/AqoqLbbeO7](http://t.co/AqoqLbbeO7?ref=larrysalibra.com)
> 
> — Tim Cook (@tim\_cook) [January 17, 2014](https://twitter.com/tim%5Fcook/statuses/424041405296549888?ref=larrysalibra.com)

China Mobile and Apple negotiated for years over the terms of this agreement - longer than any other major carrier. There were always rumors regarding the various sticking points, but now that China Mobile is an officially supported iPhone carrier, we have some answers.

# Apple won the war against carriers - they're big dumb pipes

Carriers around the world have lived in fear of losing ownership of the relationship with their customers and becoming simply commodity providers of bandwidth. They've tried time and time again to develop their own app stores, sell content to their subscribers and become payment platforms. China Mobile was actually one of the more successful carriers at this strategy.

Unfortunately for carriers, today's Apple-China Mobile launch was the final nail in the coffin for the mobile carrier as anything other than a commodity provider of bandwidth.

If you recall, it was widely reported that a major sticking point between Apple and China Mobile was China Mobile's insistence on offering on including its own app store on iPhones it sold. Fortunately for consumers, there's been no sign of China Mobile's app store on China Mobile-edition iPhones. The battle that started with the original iPhone and AT&T and ended today. Apple won the war.

# Apple is making a custom iPhone for China Mobile

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2014/01/iphone_5s_china_models.png) 

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2014/01/iphone_model_a1530_lte.png) 

The iPhone 5s sold by China Mobile is A1518\. It is essentially the same as the A1530 sold in Hong Kong, Singapore and unlocked by the Apple Stores in China, except that WCDMA (3G) and FDD-LTE technologies are disabled whenever one is in China. One can only assume this was a concession on Apple's part to help China Mobile reduce churn and prevent customers from taking a China Mobile iPhone to their competitor China Unicom. As you can see by the chart above, the Apple offers a technology specific model for each of China's three carriers and disables the competition's technology when the device is used domestically.

Besides having cost implications for Apple regarding adding more SKUs this also has implications for the grey market. It looks like the Hong Kong model A1530 will remain the most sought after iPhone in the mainland market because it fully supports both China Mobile's and China Unicom's 3G and 4G networks and does so almost 20% cheaper than via official channels in the mainland.

# China Mobile's Hong Kong network was not included in the deal

China Mobile like most China's state-owned enterprises has a [really complicated corporate structure](http://www.wikinvest.com/stock/China%5FMobile%5F%28Hong%5FKong%29%5F%28CHL%29/Restructuring?ref=larrysalibra.com). For example, China Mobile (Hong Kong) Limited and China Mobile Hong Kong Company Limited are completely different companies. The former is a holding company, while the later is the Hong Kong-based mobile phone provider formerly known as People's and often called CMHK that offers services using branding identical to that in the mainland. It wasn't apparent at the time of the Apple-China Mobile alliance announcement whether or their Hong Kong network.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2014/01/china_mobile_carrier_bundle.png) 

The answer is that as of today, it was not included. While mainland issued China Mobile sims got over the air carrier updates today bringing their version up to China Mobile 15.7, while China Mobile HK sims got nothing...just the generic non-Apple partner network carrier bundle "Carrier 15.5". This means no LTE (TD or FDD!) for China Mobile HK subscribers either in Hong Kong or while roaming in China. Unless you use the infamous "AB dual mode cards" widely available online and available in mainland China Mobile just north of the border.

*Disclosure: At the time of writing, I own shares of Apple Inc.*
### 5 problems with Uber in China and why I love it!
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/5-problems-with-uber-in-china-and-why-i-love-it/
Last updated: 2014-01-05T11:18:00.000Z
Many of us in the Hong Kong tech community have followed the Uber closely from afar - watching with jealousy as our friends in the valley and NYC tweet about riding around in Uber comfort. City after city in Asia launched Uber: Taipei, Singapore, Shanghai - but not Hong Kong! A couple weeks I got wind of a soft launch party for Uber Shenzhen. I was both curious to learn about and try the service as I was to see how a start-up that's raised over a quarter of a billion dollars from the likes of Google and Goldman-Sachs rolls. So I dropped everything, grabbed my passport and took the HK$7 minibus to the border.

# Happy hour

The soft launch party was a happy hour event at the Futian Shangri-la in downtown Shenzhen. It was a half-indoor, half-outdoor bar/tent venue. Uber's Martin Li, the man in charge of the Shenzhen market, greeted everyone at the door. The usual Shenzhen English-speaking tech crowd was well-represented...over-represented in fact since Shenzhen is a Chinese city. But this wasn't surprising since Uber is an American company and seems to have hired management from outside of China. Or perhaps the local tech crowd was too busy hanging out with local Internet giant Tencent celebrating its [$100 million investment in Uber competitor Didi Dache](http://www.techinasia.com/tencent-tips-100-million-funding-chinas-leading-taxihailing-app-wechat-integration/?ref=larrysalibra.com)?

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2014/01/uber_happy_hour.jpg) 

It was great to chat with the Uber Shenzhen team and understand how they're rolling out the service. Martin encouraged me to try the service and share any problems. Since finding bugs is what my company [Pay4Bugs](https://www.pay4bugs.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com) does, I was more than happy to oblige!

I tried Uber out roughly a half dozen times around Christmas and in this post, I'll share the problems I saw and why I think they're no big deal.

Stick with me to the end of the post...I've got codes to share that will get you two free Uber rides in Guangzhou and Shenzhen!

# What's wrong

## 1\. Drivers haven't bought in

I asked each of my drivers what they thought of Uber. All of them were concerned about the viability of the business model in China. One driver asked me if taking a cab wouldn't just be easier after driving 30 minutes across the city the pick me up. Another was concerned that the [cost of the car he was driving](http://www.autohome.com.cn/18/?ref=larrysalibra.com), well on the way to $100k, was more than [Uber is charging](https://www.uber.com/cities/guangzhou?ref=larrysalibra.com) riders for the service. A valid concern consider Uber rates in Guangzhou are only marginally more than taxi fares. A third was concerned that no one besides foreigners and overseas Chinese seemed to be using the service.

## 2\. Uber Shenzhen drivers don't know the city

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2014/01/uber_lost.png) 

Shenzhen is an immigrant city in China. Very few people grew up there. Unlike cities like Guangzhou and Beijing where cab drivers are often locals who have spent their whole lives there, Shenzhen cab drivers are always from other parts of China. Uber Shenzhen seems have run into the same problem as the cab companies finding drivers who know the city.

My first Uber Shenzhen trip took [60 minutes and over 22 km](https://larrysalibra.com/images/2014/01/actual%5Froute.png) to go what's only a [25 minute 9 km trip if you follow Google Map's out of date directions](https://larrysalibra.com/images/2014/01/google%5Froute.png). It's even less if you drive using road signs and a sense of direction instead of following GPS.

Subsequent trips in Shenzhen were much smoother, but all saw the drivers using GPS to find the location of landmarks so well known that someone like me who has never lived in Shenzhen and only driven in the city 2 or 3 times has no problem finding.

This was in stark contrast to Uber Guangzhou drivers that had no problem finding even the obscure locations I could throw at them as someone who lived in Guangzhou for the better part of 7 years. One even pointed out that the name I was using for a place was actually the name from a decade or so ago. None of them needed to use GPS. Impressive!

## 3\. Uber Guangzhou needs to ditch the VW Passats

Uber Guangzhou offers Mercedes E-classes, Audi A6Ls and something called the VW Magotan. It turns out Magotan is just the name for the locally produced VW Passat. My first Uber Guangzhou trip was in one of these vehicles. I felt pretty silly watching empty VW taxi cabs pass me by that by using Uber I was paying more money and waiting longer to take a car no better than a taxi.

It seems to me that one of the biggest selling points of Uber's black car service in China will be the face you gain by showing up in a luxurious ride with a well-dressed, professional driver. Showing up in a Passat instead of an Audi or Benz isn't quite the same.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2014/01/uber_shenzhen_audi.jpg) 

## 4\. Uber needs to accept China Unionpay

As of this post, Uber only accepts Visa, Mastercard, American Express and Discover as payment for trips in China. Chinese Yuan denonminated fares are converted to U.S. Dollars before being deducted from your credit card. This is a problem in a country where most credit cards are China Unionpay. You can't very well expect some living in a country with foreign currency controls to make a cross-border foreign currency transactions to get home at night from their local bar.

But word from Uber is that they have deals with local Chinese payment firms in the works and hope to be able to accept Unionpay and other local payment solutions shortly.

## 5\. Uber drivers can't call non-mainland numbers

My first experience with Uber was a pick up at the Shenzhen Bay Immigration Control Point right after clearly immigration from Hong Kong.

The roads look like spaghetti on the map and there's no way to tell if a given road on the map will allow an Uber car to drive. Apparently the position I gave my Uber driver on the map was some place that wouldn't let private vehicles enter. He couldn't call the Hong Kong mobile phone number on my Uber account because you need to enable international calling to call from mainland China to Hong Kong. I didn't know he couldn't find me. Luckily Uber Shenzhen's Martin Li had added me on Wechat and sent me a Wechat message to let me know the driver couldn't find me.

It seems to me one on of the biggest customer bases of Uber, especially Uber China, will be people visiting from overseas used to using Uber in their home market. Are Uber users expected to update their accounts with local phone numbers whenever they travel?

# So why do I love it?

Uber changes the social dynamic of transportation in China. It takes away the stress of getting from point to A to point B. No more running after taxis. No more driving in circles around parking garages looking for a spot. No more random people asking you for money to "watch" your car parked on the street. No more automated traffic "infraction" tickets issued by corrupt local governments. No more interrupting the flow of the evening with a noisy phone call to your driver or a car service...a few quiet taps and your Uber will be waiting. No more excuses from the [*fu'erdai*, or rich second generation](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuerdai?ref=larrysalibra.com) that they need to drunk drive their expensive imported luxuries cars to and from clubs because they need face. No more wallets stuffed full of tiny taxi [*fapiao*](http://www.larrysalibra.com/2009/04/17/10-things-you-didnt-know-about-invoices-in-china/?ref=larrysalibra.com).

I showed the app to some friends at a dinner in Guangzhou...the type of people that drive nice cars everywhere even if it's inconvenient. They asked me...what car do you get? I pointed out the plate glass window at the A6L and Uber driver in a suit. Their eyes grew wide before they looked down at their phones and started searching the App Store for the [Uber app](https://uber.com/invite/es2zl?ref=larrysalibra.com).

Are you in Guangzhou or Shenzhen and new to Uber? Use the code LarryGZ or LarrySZ to get two free rides! Sign up [here](https://uber.com/invite/es2zl?ref=larrysalibra.com)!

Have you tried Uber in China yet? Let me know what you think in the comments!
### Why do we hate stuff?
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/why-do-we-hate-stuff/
Last updated: 2013-10-27T06:20:00.000Z
There’s a growing divide in this world. It’s not the wealth gap or the digital gap, or the education gap.

It's what I call the "stuff gap" and it's a divide between those that live to accumulate physical possessions and those that live to avoid them.

Growing up in the 80s and 90s, there was always a desire to buy new stuff: the latest toy advertised on [Saturday morning cartoons](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturday%5Fmorning%5Fcartoon?ref=larrysalibra.com) It wasn't just the kids. My dad would tell my brother and I the specs and the latest woodworking tools or boat parts he wanted to buy.

Some time between college and my life today running a [growing business](https://www.pay4bugs.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com) out of Hong Kong I acquired a general dislike of "stuff." Why?

I always assumed that this realization was unique to my particular situation. When you periodically move from city to city often across international borders, all on your own dime without corporate or government expat relocation services, lots of "stuff" quickly becomes a liability. How is that that things you bought out of choice because you presumably liked them can become a royal pain in the rear end? It's all about utility.

## Negative utility

Economists like to talk about how much [utility](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utility?ref=larrysalibra.com) an object or purchase gives a person. The more value it provides the holder or the buyer, the higher the utility. Utility is a measure of personal preferences. And different people have different measures utility for the same object. Imagine there's a young girl hoping that her boyfriend will give her a rose to show his love. If she actually receives such a flower, the girl will treasure that rose and post pictures on Facebook for all of her friends to see. Instead, imagine a boy who is trying to avoid the advances of a clingy girl he's not interested in...and he also happens to be allergic to flowers. If the boy in our story received the exact same rose, he would hate it. Not only does it a represent unwanted advances but the rose also will probably make him sick. He experiences negative utility from the rose...he'd would rather not have it.

How we define the utility we get out of any given object isn't as simple as liking it or disliking it. We can both like certain characteristics of an object but dislike other things about it.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2013/10/potter.jpg) 

Let's look at a trusty book you really like, the hardcopy version of **Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows**, for example. This book makes you really happy. That's why you forked over $30 or more to buy it. You read it straight through in one sitting and then put it on your shelf and promptly forgot about it. The book sits well-behaved on your bookshelf and only bothers you when you occasionally have to move it to dust.

All is well and good until you decide you want to move from Ohio to Hong Kong. In Ohio, space is so abundant that you had a room bigger than the size of the average luxury Hong Kong flat that you called a library and was used just to store books. In Hong Kong, a 400 square foot apartment for single occupant is a luxury.

You want to make this move quickly and without spending lots of time and money. Suddenly, your hardcopy version of Harry Potter anymore isn't so attractive. Not only did it cost you $30 but even though you've long since finished enjoying it, it's still costing you money because you have to either carry it around the world, pay someone to move it, or figure out how give it away or sell it. It's as if the book is sitting on its shelf screaming out "Pay attention to me! Deal with me!" An object which you loved so much suddenly is quite a burden.

If you run into this problem frequently enough, like I do, you start to become adverse to buying physical items. My line of thinking when I consider buying a non-consumable physical object is something like this. "You want me to pay $xxxx for your widget, which is going to take up **Y** square feet of my apartment which costs me US$**Z** a month? And then I have to either pay to move it, carry it around for the rest of my life or figure out how to get rid of it?" I better **REALLY** like your widget if you expect me to not only pay the price you're asking but bear all of the after sales costs that come with dealing with your widget.

I thought it was just me...the result of a unique lifestyle that values mobility and the ability to work with a team spread across different countries versus accumulating large amounts of stuff that make it so much harder to achieve that goal.

But it turns out it's not just me and my lifestyle. I and others with similar lifestyles are just extreme examples on the leading edge of a demographic trend away from accumulating physical possessions. The cause is the Internet and computers which allow us to buy digital versions of products, photos, book, movies, etc, that have none of the downsides of a physical product. You didn't buy DVDs because you liked the shape of the product or the beautiful design of the plastic case. You bought them because you like watching movies. If you buy an eBook, you never have to pay to move it, dust around it to keep it clean, or grow through that agonizing decision making process of "do I keep it or do I give it away?"

[Tyler Cowen said it best](http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2013/09/tyler%5Fcowen%5Fon.html?ref=larrysalibra.com) on [Econtalk](http://www.econtalk.org/?ref=larrysalibra.com):

{% blockquote %}  
"there will be a big generational shift away from the physical product. There will be a general decline of stuff, including the desire to own a home of your own. And we see this in the data--lower rates of household formation, lower rates of owning stuff."  
{% endblockquote %}

Do you like to accumulate stuff or are you also trying to constantly minimize your physical possessions? Let me know in the comments!
### Why you should work until you drown
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/why-you-should-work-until-you-drown/
Last updated: 2013-10-13T08:30:00.000Z
In the past few years movements like "lean startup," the "four hour work week" and "start up weekend" have gain a lot of popularity. The gospel they preach? Building a business should be quick...a sprint and not a marathon.

If you haven't changed the world by they end of the weekend or your three-month accelerator...you've failed!

Maybe that's the reality for some people and some businesses. They either get things right on the first try or they give up and close up shop. One sprint and they're out. That's not our philosophy at [Pay4Bugs](https://www.pay4bugs.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com).

To me, building a business is more like a marathon of sprints. And a marathon of sprints isn't a sprint, it's a marathon. Speed is important, but your goal should be the first company to get a product "right" and get it to market.

Putting out new products is really easy. Craig Federighi said it best, ["New is easy, right is hard."](http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-09-19/cook-ive-and-federighi-on-the-new-iphone-and-apples-once-and-future-strategy?ref=larrysalibra.com#p2) [Pay4Bugs](https://www.pay4bugs.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com) took me two weeks of evenings coding to build the first version. It's since taken us years to refine and we've only recently figured out what we think is the "right" formula. New was easy. Right is hard.

Apple wasn't the first to build a smartphone, but they were the first to get it right. But imagine if they'd announced the iPhone six months after everyone was already using Samsung Galaxies. History would have turned out a lot different.

So we know finding the right formula is critical, but so is doing so quickly, while it's still relevant. So how fast should you go? What's the right pace?

Instead of more running/business analogies, let's talk about swimming, because I'm swimmer. In college, my event was the 200 butterfly. Suggest swimming butterfly to casual swimmers and they'll run away in fear. "Butterfly...I can't do that, I'll drown!" Even many competitive swimmers with years of swimming under their belts try to avoid the stroke.

The difficult part of butterfly is the synchronous over-water recovery, where you have to lift both of your arms, your head and part of your torso out of the water all while breathing. No other stroke requires that you hold most of the mass of your body *above* the water.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2013/10/butterfly_stroke.gif) 

Other strokes can be swam easily with poor technique. The worst that happens with bad breaststroke, freestyle or backstroke is that you don't go very fast. But not butterfly.

Butterfly is unforgiving. If your stroke is inefficient, you use an insane amount of energy with each stroke just keeping your body from drowning. Poor technique in butterfly usually ends with coughing up a lot of pool water.

Even swimmers really good at butterfly start using bad technique when they're exhausted. This is the Catch-22 of butterfly. Go really fast to win, but go too fast and you'll drown and lose. If you push yourself too fast on the first 25 yards of a 200 yard butterfly and you can look forward to spending the next 175 yards drinking pool water and coughing. Hardly a formula for victory.

So treating a 200 fly like a 25 yard sprint clearly won't work. But we still haven't figured out the right pace.

Let's leave the pool for a bit and see what comedian [Jerry Seinfeld](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I%27m%5FTelling%5FYou%5Ffor%5Fthe%5FLast%5FTime?ref=larrysalibra.com) has to say about over the counter medicine:

{% blockquote %}  
Nobody wants anything less than 'extra-strength'.  
'Extra-strength' is the absolute minimum.  
You can't even get 'strength'. 'Strength' is out now.  
It's all 'extra-strength'.  
Some people are not satisfied with 'extra', they want 'maximum'.  
"Give me the 'maximum-strength'."  
"Give me the maximum allowable human dosage."  
"Figure out what will kill me and then back it off a little bit."  
{% endblockquote %}

Back to the pool. I always approached pacing myself in 200 butterfly race like Seinfeld's take an OTC medicine. I figure out how fast I need to make myself drown, and then back it off a little bit.

Building a business is like swimming the 200 fly. Figure out how fast you need to go so that when you get to your goal you'll be burned out, have run out of money or been committed to an insane asylum and then back it off a little bit.

Point is, if you push yourself too hard, you won't make it and if you don't push yourself hard enough, by the time you get there, it will be too late.

How do you pace your work and building your business? Let me know in the comments!
### The 6 Best Places to Get Work Done in Hong Kong
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/the-6-best-places-to-get-work-done-in-hong-kong/
Last updated: 2013-10-06T13:30:00.000Z
Offices are expensive and no one *really* likes to go to them. When we had an office at [Pay4Bugs](http://www.lcsd.gov.hk/beach/en/beach-address-south.php?ref=larrysalibra.com#bigwavebay), I found myself going anywhere but the office when I needed to get serious work done. Other members of our team felt the same way.

Peoples' lives aren't static, as they grow and form relationships things change. One of the things is often where they want to live. Should you stop working with an otherwise awesome team member just because they want to live in a different city or country? Marissa Mayer may say "Yes," but my answer and that of others in my generation is a resounding "No!"

The [Pay4Bugs](http://www.lcsd.gov.hk/beach/en/beach-address-south.php?ref=larrysalibra.com#bigwavebay) team is spread out between New York, Hong Kong and Guangzhou - and there are immense benefits to having people in each of these places both to the company and to the individuals. We wouldn't have it any other way.

I'm based in Hong Kong and often get asked by others in the HK tech community where I work since it's no longer out of a proper office. They don't see me at the coffee shops and the co-working spaces. I don't drink coffee, so coffee shops have never made much sense to me. When I was studying Chinese years back in college, I used to spend obscene amounts of money on Starbucks hot chocolate while I practiced my characters. But that doesn't seem a very wise investment as metabolism slows with age.

Co-working spaces also never really appealed to me - you essentially replace a rent check with a check to the co-working space. Instead of a quiet and distraction free office, you get an shared space full of interesting and socialable people. Maybe it's just me, but I find it difficult to focus in such an environment. The temptation to chat under the guise of networking is just too great. They're horrible places for me to get stuff done.

So where *do* I work in Hong Kong? Well I have a home office - a quiet separate room dedicated to work on the 20th floor with gigabit internet, dual-band wifi, [a custom router and ZFS storage pool](http://www.larrysalibra.com/2013/09/29/a-tiny-server-saves-my-internet/,?ref=larrysalibra.com) and a beautiful view of the mountains to boot. And some days, I stay at home and work out of the home office. But many days I find I am more productive with my mobile office working from somewhere else in Hong Kong. Today, I'm going to tell you about my top six favorite places to work out and about in Hong Kong:

## 6\. The Library!?

I bet you're thinking, "Are you still in college, who over the age of 22 works in a library?" No, but hang with me...I have good reasons for liking the library.

Hong Kong has more than [60 public libraries](http://www.hkpl.gov.hk/?ref=larrysalibra.com) spread throughout the city. They have [free wifi](http://www.gov.hk/en/theme/wifi?ref=larrysalibra.com) power outlets, couches, desks and tables and excellent air con to keep you cool on hot summer days. They're open every day of the year save for a subset of seven public holidays.

My favorite libraries for my mobile office are the Hong Kong Central Library and the Tin Shui Wei Ping Shan Library.

Hong Kong Central Library in the center of all the action on Hong Kong Island between the Causeway Bay and Tin Hau MTR stations. It offers (free) desks with power outlets that have a beautiful view of Victoria Park and food and drinks on the ground floor by the rear entrance.

Tin Shui Wei Ping Shan Library is one of Hong Kong's newest libraries and one of the closest to the border with China. It's upper floors have desks, huge couches and tables with views of the mountains of the New Territories. There's also an indoor pool in the same complex which makes it great for doing a few laps while you think though tough problems.

The best part about libraries is that, unlike Google, they don't [filter bubble](http://dontbubble.us/?ref=larrysalibra.com) you. Sometimes you stumble across a great book that solves a problem you hadn't even considered in a topic area you didn't even know existed just by wandering browsing the bookshelves. Libraries are one of the best tools to help you create serendipity.

## 5\. Public parks

Hong Kong has dozens of green, leafy [public parks](http://www.lcsd.gov.hk/en/ls%5Fpark.php?ref=larrysalibra.com) complete with grassy fields, gazebos, restroom and refreshment facilities. Did I mention they have [free wifi](http://www.gov.hk/en/theme/wifi?ref=larrysalibra.com)?

My favorite park is [Yuen Long Park](http://www.lcsd.gov.hk/parks/ylp/en/index.html?ref=larrysalibra.com) which has a part aviary, part lookout tower pagoda. The top levels of the pagoda have benches and on clear days offers views of most of the northwest New Territories and even across the border (and the Great Firewall) to Shenzhen from Nanshan to Futian.

[ ![View from Yuen Long Park pagoda - Shenzhen in the distance](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2013/10/yuen-long-park.jpg) View from Yuen Long Park pagoda - Shenzhen in the distance ](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2013/10/yuen-long-park.jpg?ref=larrysalibra.com) 

## 4\. Public swimming pools

I'm a swimmer - so I spend a lot of time at pools - I'm in one almost every day. Luckily, Hong Kong has a lot of really nice public pools, [43 pool complexes](http://www.lcsd.gov.hk/beach/en/swim-intro.php?ref=larrysalibra.com) to be exact, each with multiple pools. Besides being great for swimming, a little known secret is that most of Hong Kong swimming pools have large spectator stands which double as great locations for your mobile office.

Swimming pool spectator stands are free, usually empty and the ones at outdoor pools are shaded from both the sun and the rain. My favorite pool for working in the stands is the [Tung Chung Swimming Pool](http://www.lcsd.gov.hk/beach/en/swim-address-is.php?ref=larrysalibra.com#tungchung), a large indoor yet partially open to the outdoors natatorium located on Lantau Island near the airport. The pool is just across the street from the large Food Republic food court at the [CityGate Outlet Mall](http://www.citygateoutlets.com.hk/?ref=larrysalibra.com), which makes it easy to grab some inexpensive, quick eats to keep you going.

[ ![Working in the spectator stands at Tung Chung Swimming Pool, Hong Kong](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2013/10/tung-chung-pool.jpg) Working in the spectator stands at Tung Chung Swimming Pool, Hong Kong ](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2013/10/tung-chung-pool.jpg?ref=larrysalibra.com) 

## 3\. Mountain tops

You're aiming for the top of the world, so why not work there? Bring your mobile office to a mountain! Working on top of a mountain with nothing but the sound of the breeze and clouds moving by gives me a chance both to see the big picture and focus on the details away from the complexity and distractions of day-to-day, city life. In Hong Kong, with [more than 100 mountains and peaks](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List%5Fof%5Fmountains,%5Fpeaks%5Fand%5Fhills%5Fin%5FHong%5FKong?ref=larrysalibra.com) all a short ride away wherever you are, it's easy to bring bring your mobile office to the top of the world.

My mountain of choice is Hong Kong's tallest peak, [957 meter Tai Mo Shan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tai%5FMo%5FShan?ref=larrysalibra.com). You can drive much of the way up the mountain or hike up the trail that follows Tai Mo Shan Road. There are several grassy openings along the trail with picnic tables along the 500 to 700 meter levels. I like to camp out a table near the top that looks north over Yuen Long and the huge valley between the mountain and Shenzhen.

[ ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2013/10/working-at-tai-mo-shan.jpg) Working on Pay4Bugs Hooks on Tai Mo Shan, Hong Kong ](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2013/10/working-at-tai-mo-shan.jpg?ref=larrysalibra.com) 

Unlike most of the other places we've mentioned so far, there's no power or wifi on Tai Mo Shan, but Internet access isn't a problem because there's 4G LTE coverage. Just make sure you bring plenty of battery power for your laptop and phone!

**Pro tip:** Need to make calls to Mainland China but don't want people to know you're in Hong Kong? Tai Mo Shan and many of the other peaks in the northern New Territories have strong cell phone signals from the mainland - just bring your sim card and select the right network!

## 2\. Beaches

You may have gathered I like water and the outdoors. So it's no surprise working at the beach is near the top of my list of favorite places to get work done in Hong Kong.

Unknown to much of the world that associates Hong Kong with tall buildings, high finance and dim sum ([char siu bao](http://store.kokonuzz.com/product/char-siu-bao?ref=larrysalibra.com) yum!), Hong Kong has almost [one hundred beaches](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beaches%5Fof%5FHong%5FKong?ref=larrysalibra.com). The forty or so [government managed beaches](http://www.lcsd.gov.hk/beach/en/index.php?ref=larrysalibra.com) have lifeguards, swimming areas, shark-prevention nets and changing room/shower facilities. And most of these have free wifi!

My favorite beach to work at is [Big Wave Bay Beach](http://www.lcsd.gov.hk/beach/en/beach-address-south.php?ref=larrysalibra.com#bigwavebay) on south eastern Hong Kong Island. I typically go for a late morning swim, grab early lunch and a table at the the restaurant on the edge of the beach. This leaves enough time for a solid 6 hours of work before an end of the day swim.

Get reading for #1, after the jump! **Drum roll please!**

[ ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2013/10/coding-at-big-wave-bay.jpg) Coding at Big Wave Bay Beach, Hong Kong ](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2013/10/coding-at-big-wave-bay.jpg?ref=larrysalibra.com) 

## 1\. Hong Kong International Airport

*The airport?!?* Business travelers everywhere must be confused - to them airports are a thing of nightmares - late flights, missed flights, security lines, expensive food, uncomfortable seats.

But Hong Kong International Airport (HKIA) is different, in a good way! If you're not going anywhere (in the physical sense) but your business is headed to great places and you're looking for a place to get stuff done, HKIA is the place to be. It has all of the basics covered: it's easy and cheap to get to HKIA from most of Hong Kong. There's free wifi and power outlets galore. Don't like that your co-working office closes at 9pm or 11pm? No problem, the airport is open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year...366 days in leap years.

And there's more: There are dozens of restaurants covering every taste and budget and the ones outside of security are no more expensive than elsewhere in Hong Kong. There's even a Popeye's Chicken for those of you looking for some great Louisiana fried chicken and buttermilk biscuits!

[ ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2013/10/popeyes-chicken-at-hkia.jpg) Enjoy Louisiana-style fried chicken in Hong Kong International Airport ](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2013/10/popeyes-chicken-at-hkia.jpg?ref=larrysalibra.com) 

Meeting rooms? Check! Press conference room? You bet! Showers! Of course! IMAX theater? Got it! Massage? What's that!? Are you telling me that your co-working space doesn't have on-site massage and an IMAX theater? That's so...backward.

HKIA has several great places for your mobile office. Here are two of my favorite:

## Terminal 2

HKIA is unique among airports in that its 2nd terminal, Terminal 2, doesn't actually have any planes or a "secure" area. It's just a big airy mall with some check-in counters. If we were just interested in HKIA because it's a mall, that wouldn't make a lot of sense because Hong Kong is covered in malls. But Hong Kong malls are filled to the brim with shoppers and noise - hardly good places to get work done.

HKIA's Terminal 2 is pretty low traffic as malls go. Most people head straight for the check in counters and then off to Terminal 1 for their flights. I like to grab a big table in the second floor food court by the big multi-story windows and watch planes land and take off over the ocean as I code away.

[ ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2013/10/imax-at-hkia.jpg) An airport with an IMAX theater! ](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2013/10/imax-at-hkia.jpg?ref=larrysalibra.com) 

Did I mention [HKIA has an IMAX theater](http://www.uacinemas.com.hk/eng/cinema/CinemaList?id=22&ref=larrysalibra.com)? It's also in Terminal 2 and is not only the 2nd largest IMAX theater in Hong Kong but also the cheapest. It's also usually close to empty...rarely are there more than a dozen people in a theater that holds 350.

**Pro tip:** Sometimes I'll motivate myself by treating myself to daily 9:30pm showing of the latest IMAX blockbuster...if I meet the day's work goals.

## Charging stations

[ ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2013/10/hkia-charging-station.jpg) HKIA has charging stations straight from *2001: A Space Odyssey* ](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2013/10/hkia-charging-station.jpg?ref=larrysalibra.com) 

For those of you who are fitness-minded and looking to get away from a sedentary life of sitting in front of the computer, HKIA Terminal 1 has the answer for you. There are series of charging stations strategically placed among the check-in rows on the departure level of Terminal 1 that are perfectly designed standing desks. Each charging station has two standing desk height laptop platforms, two usb charging ports and four 220v outlets. This makes them perfect for collaborating with another member of your team.

**Pro tip:** Bring a travel plug adapter and offer to lend it to jet-lagged executives trying to charge their US or EU laptops in HK's British plugs - you'll make a friend and might even make a sale.

Where do you go to get work done in Hong Kong? What are your favorite places to work in *your* city?
### A tiny server saves my internet!
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/a-tiny-server-saves-my-internet/
Last updated: 2013-09-29T08:38:00.000Z
In Hong Kong, we face a unique set of problems. Space is at a premium and our Internet connections are so fast that consumer routers made for mere mortals are too slow for us Hongkongers.  
The misleadingly named home "gigabit routers" rarely have the processing power to perform [NAT](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network%5Faddress%5Ftranslation?ref=larrysalibra.com) on a single TCP connection at even a few hundred megabits. That's a problem when you live in a city where multiple fiber-to-home internet providers offer gigabit service for around US$30 a month...yes, that includes TV.

It's a very first world problem: most people would be happy to [move to Kansas](http://googleblog.blogspot.hk/2011/03/ultra-high-speed-broadband-is-coming-to.html?ref=larrysalibra.com) and pay [Google](https://fiber.google.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com) more than twice what we Hongkongers pay in order to have the same problem. But as the many threads in [local computer](http://www.hkepc.com/forum/forumdisplay.php?fid=12&ref=larrysalibra.com) [forums](http://computer.discuss.com.hk/forumdisplay.php?fid=115&ref=larrysalibra.com) show, this is no solace when you could be enjoying gigabit but you're not.

The solution is pretty easy - build your own router with a PC and a couple of gigabit network cards.

Imagine my excitement when a [HP ProLiant Gen8 MicroServer](http://hp.com/go/MicroServer?ref=larrysalibra.com) showed up at my flat right before [Typhoon Usagi](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typhoon%5FUsagi%5F%282013%29?ref=larrysalibra.com) hit Hong Kong.

![](images/2013/09/box_typhoon.jpg) 

The Gen8 MicroServer has 2 gigabit nics (plus a 3rd for HP's management firmware iLO - more on that later) and room for 4 3.5 inch SATA drives. Mine came with the Intel® Pentium® G2020T, 16 gigabytes of ram and a 500 gigabyte hard drive. Plenty of power to route a gigabit with some left over to serve as a home NAS.

## The Gen8's Hardware - Perfect for HK

Hong Kong's housing and office prices are the most expensive in the world. You've heard the old adage that time is money. In Hong Kong, space is money. Fixed costs are measured in square feet as much as in dollars. So it's as if someone at HP was thinking specifically about Hong Kong when they designed the Gen8 MicroServer.

The Gen8's best feature is that it packs a lot firepower and flexibility into little more than half a square foot. And it's designed to let you stack multiple MicroServers and their matching network switches. That means a Hong Kong business can have its own in-house data center in the space taken up by the office water cooler.

The Gen8's hardware is designed put a lot of thought into how to maximizing expandability in minimal amount of space. You can tell someone really cared. Drives slide in and out the front without any tools. The case comes apart with two easy on the finger thumb screws. You only need a tool if you want to take the motherboard out, and it's conveniently included inside the front door.

Another plus for Hong Kong's SME and home office market, where people and machines work together in close quarters, is the Gen8's (lack of) noise level. Unlike the Mac Mini Server, which sounds like it's about to take flight under heavy load because of it's tight thermal tolerances, tiny fans and tightly packed interior, the Gen8's well-ventilated interior plus large, rear ventilation fan is quiet and cool no matter how much work you throw at it. The only noise I could hear came from the hard drive and only then if air con was switched off.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2013/09/gen8-microserver-insides.jpg) 

## Firmware frustration

If only my experience with the Gen8's built in iLO4 management firmware and bios was as good as the hardware. For those that aren't familiar with iLO, it essentially gives you a web browser accessible control panel for your server hardware. It has a cool feature that let's you mount an ISO on a web server as a CD/DVD-ROM drive. Perfect for installing an operating system - especially in Hong Kong with our gigabit internet. As HP says, iLO let's you "Simplify server setup."

The bad news is HP doesn't actually let you use this feature unless you buy an additional [license](http://h17007.www1.hp.com/us/en/enterprise/servers/management/ilo/index.aspx?ref=larrysalibra.com#tab=TAB3). I understand the business reasoning for doing this, they're trying to segment their customers to charge for the value provided, - but I think this is the wrong way to do it. Why you would want to go out of your way to make sure some customers can't "Simplify server setup" and have a worse user experience is beyond me. That's like taking a perfectly good car, locking the doors and only unlocking them if the customer pays more. "Oh, you don't want to climb through the windows to get into your car? Just buy this additional license and you can use the doors!"

On the upside, HP does have a free 60-day trial license for iLO available. I signed up for the trial license and was able to boot off of the HP-custom ESXi ISO image and install the OS to a USB drive plugged into the internal USB port. Unfortunately, my machine wasn't able to boot off the USB drive after installation, despite the BIOS was set up properly to enable this. I even tried another making another bootable USB drive with a recent Ubuntu version and still wasn't able to get the machine to boot.

No matter, I could still install ESXi directly to the hard drive...except that I couldn't, because I ran into another bug in the Gen8's firmware. iLO had decided that my 60-day trial license had already expired, so it would no longer let me boot off the remote ESXi ISO. The warm, glowing feeling the MicroServer's hardware had left me with was quickly being replaced with the frustration of running into bugs that HP should have caught and fixed during testing. Saving customers from this feeling is exactly why we created [Pay4Bugs](http://www.pay4bugs.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com).

After much messing about, I was finally able to install ESXi through HP's built in "Intelligent Provisioning" feature. Unfortunately, even the "custom install" option wouldn't let me choose where ESXi was installed, so I didn't have the option of trying installation to a different USB drive. It just installed ESXi to the internal hard drive.

Fortunately, once ESXi was up and running I could get back to enjoying the Gen8's beautifully packaged power.

My next step was to install a [free Windows 7 virtual machine](http://www.modern.ie/en-us/virtualization-tools?ref=larrysalibra.com#downloads) since VMware doesn't seem to have a Vsphere client for Mac OS X. I later moved this VM to the Gen8 and install VNC, which makes it easy access using [Chicken](http://chicken.sourceforge.net/?ref=larrysalibra.com) from my Mac both for managing ESXi and using IE10 to test web sites.

I set up two Ubuntu 12.04 LTS virtual machines on the Gen8\. One to serve as the router and another as the NAS.

## The router

For the router, I assigned eth0 to the vmware bridged network connected to the physical nic port for my local network. Eth1 and eth2 were assigned to virtual nics connected to the second physical pro with two different vlans. I connected each of the two vlans to different ports of my PCCW-provided GPON terminal via the HP PS1810 managed switch that came with my server. Since PCCW provides two DHCP assigned public IPs, this let me assign both to the same router, one to eth1 and one to eth2.

I configured eth1 for general NAT (Masquerading) and set up [one-to-one NAT ](http://www.shorewall.net/NAT.htm?ref=larrysalibra.com) with the second public ip to give one internal machine full, unblocked two-way internet access.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2013/09/gen8-network-config.png) 

One of the problems of gigabit internet access is finding ways to saturate it. A couple simultaneous downloads of large files hosted on a [Softlayer cloud server](http://www.softlayer.com/cloudlayer/computing/?ref=larrysalibra.com) with a gigabit interface in Singapore, Amazon Cloudfront and Cachefly did the trick. With the Gen8 router set up, I could consistently break 900 megabits. Not too shabby for a $30 / month internet connection.

# $ Filezilla

On the NAS virtual machine, I set up [ZFS for Linux](https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ZFS?ref=larrysalibra.com) and created a mirrored ZFS storage pool with one device a virtual disk on the Gen8 and the other a virtual disk shared via iSCSI on another local machine.

```
root@filezilla:~# zpool status
  pool: tank
 state: ONLINE
  scan: resilvered 35.3G in 0h39m with 0 errors on Fri Sep 27 18:05:17 2013
config:

	NAME                                                        STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM
	tank                                                        ONLINE       0     0     0
	  mirror-0                                                  ONLINE       0     0     0
	    scsi-1494554000000000040e6e84e62a169d163f8a7902e219d51  ONLINE       0     0     0
	    pci-0000:00:10.0-scsi-0:0:1:0                           ONLINE       0     0     0

errors: No known data errors
root@filezilla:~#

```

I created a ZFS filesystem inside the storage pool for each of my NAS shares. Since I live in a largely Apple world (besides our company's all Ubuntu servers), I went on to set up the open source daemon for Apple's file sharing protocol netatalk. Netatalk used to be a bit temperamental, but now seems to be rock solid. You can even make it look like an Apple Time Capsule by [following these instructions](http://www.tonymacx86.com/servers/86371-howto-use-ubuntu-mac-os-x-time-capsule.html?ref=larrysalibra.com). If you come from the Windows world, you'd want to set up samba for file sharing.

Performance isn't the best in the world, but much of that is my fault for making a ZFS mirror with a remote iSCSI virtual drive. It could be easily and cheaply improved by adding an inexpensive, small SSD as a cache in front of the ZFS mirror, essentially letting the MicroServer function like Apple's [Fusion drive](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion%5FDrive?ref=larrysalibra.com).

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2013/09/gen8.jpg) 

# The little server that could

The HP ProLiant MicroServer Gen8 is a well-designed, capable workhorse for small businesses or home offices. The firmware issues I ran into detract from the "it just works" hardware design, which is unfortunate, yet something that HP could easily fix in a future update.

While it let me speed up my internet and store some extra data, what you could do with it in Hong Kong with inexpensive gigabit internet is so much more exciting that what I've done. For example, imagine you were a small video production company. You could fill the Gen8's four drive bays with SSDs. The SSDs would be your ZFS cache and your ZFS storage devices would be remote iSCSI targets. It could serve as your office's gateway to unlimited remote NAS storage with onsite NAS performance.

What would you do with yours?
### Chinese: Your Kids Don't Care
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/chinese-your-kids-dont-care/
Last updated: 2013-08-07T18:14:00.000Z
There seems to be a mini epidemic of Taiwanese having kids in English speaking countries, finding difficultly teaching their kids Chinese and creating Kickstarters to solve the problem.

First was my Wesleyan classmate [Cindy](https://www.facebook.com/cindyuhsin)'s [Joy Learning Club](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uct%5FRd7aSRA&ref=larrysalibra.com), a fun family field trip program conducted in Mandarin around New York City.

Now there's Shaolan's [Chineasy](http://chineasy.org/?ref=larrysalibra.com) which promises to make learning Chinese "easy" by drawing (really cool) pictures out of each Chinese radical to reflect the original meaning

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2013/08/chineasy-fire.png) 

I read and write Chinese. It took me less than 2 years of study from start to finish to achieve the fluency to work in a Mandarin-only office. And 18 month of those 2 years was spent studying Chinese in the USA while taking other classes.

Compared to the years and years I spent studying but not learning French, I learned Chinese pretty quickly. A friend noticed and asked me if I think Chineasy would be useful:

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2013/08/fb-chineasy.png) 

My take: Fun for kids. Could be helpful for some visual learners. But make learning Chinese easy? Easy like as in easy as pie? No way!

In college, our first year Chinese class learned (to write) radicals in the second two weeks of class. First two weeks was pinyin.

We didn't have Chineasy flash cards, but had a great teacher that shared some of the same character-resembles-its-meaning insight that Shaolan is pitching.

But the real learning for us was because our teacher, under the threat of letting her down, forced us to practice writing each character over and over and over and over - until we learned it.

You're don't learn to write Chinese unless you write Chinese.

Learning a language is like getting in shape. It's always hard and any product that promises to make it easy is snake oil.

# Chinese isn't hard

Chinese being a "hard" language (with English being "easy") is a myth perpetuated by Chinese as part of their cultural self-image. This myth is blindly accepted by non-Chinese speakers because the language seems incredibly foreign compared to what they're used to. Fancy that - a foreign language that seems foreign.

But Chinese really isn't that hard. Sure there's simply more material to learn for writing compared to completely phonetic languages. But that doesn't make it hard, that just makes it more.

And where Chinese has more to learn with regard to writing it makes up with less complicated grammar: no verb tenses, no objects with gender, no verb conjugation. Verbs in French are so complicated that there's an entire [dictionary-sized reference volume](http://www.amazon.com/dp/0764179837?ref=larrysalibra.com) just to catalog them! *Zut alors!* If you have ever owned a copy of **[501 French Verbs](http://www.amazon.com/dp/0764179837?ref=larrysalibra.com)** you can breathe a sigh of relief because there are no verb reference books for Chinese - there's no need!

If Chinese was really that hard, the [literacy rate](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List%5Fof%5Fcountries%5Fby%5Fliteracy%5Frate?ref=larrysalibra.com) in China wouldn't be over 90% with a population a large portion of which grew up on poor rural farms without high quality education.

# It's academic

Learning Chinese is "hard" for the ShaoLan's kids because they're little kids in London where learning Chinese seems to them as pointless as being forced to study French, Spanish, Italian and German growing in Ohio was to me. It's the same reason my grandparents never really learned Italian from their newly arrived Italian immigrant parents.

Shaolan is just experiencing what millions of other immigrants have after having kids in a country with a native language that's not their own. Kids don't always care where you came from - especially when they're young. It may hurt, but it's reality, and colorful flashcards aren't likely to change it.

But kudos to Shaolan for the cool artwork and almost certain Kickstarter success! I wouldn't mind her illustrated characters on a t-shirt!
### Reason #1000 Hong Kong is better for tech
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/hong-kong-is-better/
Last updated: 2013-07-11T06:45:00.000Z
**Dear Silicon Valley,**

Read it and weep:

![Hong Kong internet is faster](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2013/07/hk-is-faster.png) 

**Love,**

**Hong Kong**

1000 megabits for less than US$30 a month

Dorothy, you're not in Kansas anymore.

Hong Kong: We do IT faster.
### Just live with it
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/just-live-with-it/
Last updated: 2013-06-21T15:08:00.000Z
We humans are horrible at judging relative risk.

I've found fear, risk and our inability to judge it interesting ever since the days after 9/11\. People…and the country…did crazy things in reaction to a threat whose statistical chance of death or injury was infinitesimal. The same behavior was apparent when I was in Washington, DC, during the [Beltway Sniper Attacks](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beltway%5Fsniper%5Fattacks?ref=larrysalibra.com) and again in the Spring of 2003 during the SARS epidemic in China.

During SARS, long after it had become apparent that the disease wasn't spreading quickly and didn't have a high fatality rate, people were still panicking and fleeing the country. The very same people who days before were happy cruising the [most dangerous roads in the world](http://english.people.com.cn/90001/90776/90882/6378731.html?ref=larrysalibra.com) without seat belts in taxicabs of questionable build quality were suddenly scared to death of a disease that was doing less damage than the flu does in one month.

Seeing high risk where there is little is a problem. It can cost us money, time, missed opportunities and even freedom.

Two wars and the intelligence programs at the heart of the Snowden NSA leaks grew out of the judgement of the risk posed by terrorism post-9/11.

June 10's EconTalk Podcast [Schneier on Power, the Internet, and Security](http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2013/06/schneier%5Fon%5Fpow.html?ref=larrysalibra.com) addresses the issue of misjudging risk and also what it means to have power on the Internet and the role of it might play in maintaining security. It is an hour well spent.

My favorite part was what Scheiner has to say about risk:

{% blockquote %}  
We accept the risk of getting in a car. It's really hard to find something where driving there isn't the most dangerous part of the activity. Maybe sky diving. By far the taxi ride to the airport is the most dangerous part of a plane ride. The drive to the marathon is the most dangerous part of the day. So we are able to accept risks. We tend to accept risks that are normal parts of our life. Terrorism is rare and spectacular; plane crashes are rare and spectacular. So we over-exaggerate them. The proper response is to accept that life entails risk. And that's okay. That's not bad; that's not a failing; that's not something to fix. That is part of being in the world. For many years in our country we have recognized that the price of liberty is the possibility of crime. We deliberately reduce police power because we have a better society because of it, even though the occasional criminal gets through. Those sorts of tradeoffs, those sorts of acceptances, become harder as we live in a world where risk systematically gets removed. Where medical science, where product safety--where all of these things reduce risk, suddenly we look at our residual risk and we are aghast. What do you mean, we haven't fixed terrorism? We have warning signs on ladders, for heaven's sake. Right? We don't allow children to swim in pools unattended any more. We know better. What do you mean we can't fix terrorism? Go fix it. That's a perfectly reasonable reaction in a society that has just gotten rid of risk after risk after risk. Here's another one; just get rid of it. Can't I take a medication to get rid of this risk like I do with all the other ones? We need technology to save us

{% endblockquote %}

Objectively judging risk is difficult. We've evolved to fear risk. And it's in our nature to prioritize visible risks, no matter how small, over much higher risks that we've become used to. It's hard to fight against nature.

When judging risks in my own life, I like to look at statistical probabilities and worst case scenarios. In most cases, the worst case scenario is really not that bad. When the worst case scenario is something like death, the statistically probability is almost always lower than risks I'm already comfortable taking. (like driving a car)

How do you judge risk in your own life?
### Bitcoin Payout for Testers
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/bitcoin-payout-for-testers/
Last updated: 2013-04-09T16:00:00.000Z
Many Pay4Bugs testers have asked us to offer an alternative to PayPal. Our testers would rather be earning money finding problems in Pay4Bugs customer projects before those bugs result in our customers losing revenue and harming their brand image, than wasting time dealing with cross-border PayPal payment issues.

We know our testers don’t like spending time going back and forth with PayPal support trying to get their earnings out of PayPal all while paying exorbitant exchange and wire fees to get their money into their home country anymore than we like watching them go through the process.

The answer to our tester’s PayPal and financial system woes is Bitcoin. We’re happy to announce that we support Bitcoin as a payout option for tester earnings effective immediately.

![Bitcoin Payments Logo](https://blog.pay4bugs.com/images/bitcoin-large.png "Bitcoin Payments Logo")

For those that aren’t familiar with Bitcoin, it is the first decentralized digital currency. Transactions happen between users without any bank or financial institution to get in the way. Check out this short video introduction to Bitcoins:

## Bitcoin works where PayPal doesn’t

We’ve increasingly found that testers in certain countries are unable to accept U.S. Dollar PayPal payments because of political disagreements between their (usually corrupt) governments and PayPal.

This is something we find unacceptable. If a tester earns money helping Pay4Bugs customers find problems with their products, we have a legal and *moral* obligation to ensure that the tester is paid.

Now testers can opt to have their monthly Pay4Bugs earnings sent to them in Bitcoin. We’ll convert their US Dollar earnings to Bitcoins at the USD/BTC rate on our payout day and send their coins immediately to the tester’s Bitcoin address. Testers can choose to keep their Bitcoins and sell them for the product, service, or currency of their choice.

## Choosing to receive Bitcoin payout

Existing testers can choose to receive their earnings in Bitcoin by going to the [Payment Settings](https://www.pay4bugs.com/t/payments/settings?ref=larrysalibra.com) section of their account, selecting Bitcoin as their payout method and entering a valid Bitcoin address.

![Pay4Bugs Bitcoin Payout Settings](https://blog.pay4bugs.com/images/blog/2013/04/bitcoin_settings.png "Pay4Bugs Bitcoin Payout Settings")

Want to earn some Bitcoins? Learn more about [becoming a Pay4Bugs tester](https://www.pay4bugs.com/testers?ref=larrysalibra.com). Building a product that accepts Bitcoin and want to find bugs and security holes before your coins are stolen? [Sign up for Pay4Bugs today](https://www.pay4bugs.com/client/pricing?ref=larrysalibra.com) and offer our testers a reward to find bugs in your product!

*Originally posted on the [Pay4Bugs Blog](https://blog.pay4bugs.com/2013/04/10/bitcoin-payout-for-testers/?ref=larrysalibra.com) \- check out [Pay4Bugs](https://www.pay4bugs.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com)!*
### The Death of Walled Social
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/the-death-of-walled-social/
Last updated: 2012-12-11T20:30:00.000Z
Privacy and ad-supported services don't go together. Former Sun Microsystems CEO and fellow Wesleyan alum, [Jonathan Schwartz, writes](http://jonathanischwartz.wordpress.com/2012/12/11/whos-following-your-family/?ref=larrysalibra.com) that companies such as Facebook that earn their living by selling users' private information to marketers are much the same as stalkers. Users are acting irrationally, he writes, in expecting Facebook to do anything but exploit their privacy to maximize profit.

{% pullquote %}  
Vocal {"dissent from Facebook users isn't irrational behavior, but bargaining for a better deal"}...a large scale price negotiation. How much privacy are people willing to exchange to use Facebook? The complainers say "less", Facebook says "more". Clearly, Facebook hasn't found the privacy price point that all users are happy to pay. Luckily for the competition, Facebook can't please everyone all of the time.  
{% endpullquote %}  
There will always be people who want more privacy than whatever Facebook offers just as there will always be people willing to trade the details of their entire life for the chance to spend an hour a day pulling virtual weeds on a virtual farm.

## Your privacy is priceless…or is it?

Schwartz implies that regulation is the cure for Internet privacy and cites the US healthcare privacy law, [HIPAA](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health%5FInsurance%5FPortability%5Fand%5FAccountability%5FAct?ref=larrysalibra.com), as a model that Internet privacy legislation might follow.

First, the economic: HIPAA establishes an extremely high price floor on a person's health information. It takes away your right to independently value your medical privacy. Value your health privacy at $100,000? Too bad…you can't sell it because the buyer's cost to buy is $250,000 in fines plus jail time.

Let's conduct a thought experiment. What if there was a hospital that would treat you for free even for elective procedures, no insurance needed. The catch? You need to to waive your HIPAA rights so they could sell your medical information. Would you take the deal? You might not do it, but my guess is that some people would find it a pretty attractive deal.  
{% pullquote %}  
Ad-supported Internet services such as Facebook and Gmail are just like that hypothetical hospital. They say we'll give you this service for free in exchange for some of your privacy. That {"the same people who spend over $100 a month on cable TV will give up their privacy to avoid paying the $5 a month Google asks for Gmail"} goes to show how little value they place on privacy.  
{% endpullquote %}

## HIPAA-style Internet regulation anyone?

Regulation of Internet privacy along the lines of HIPAA would take away those choices from consumers, choices that many consumers happily make. To write off privacy price floors as a cost of doing business and to pretend that an Internet where privacy can't be traded won't have a much smaller supply of the free services consumers love is to ignore the laws of economics. Not a very strong argument for HIPAA-style Internet privacy regulation.

However, the lack of transparency about what happens to your information online after you click submit does present a compelling argument for disclosure regulation. After all, markets don't function very well when participants don't access to information. Consumers can't make decisions about how they value the privacy they're trading to Facebook if they don't even know how much or what they're giving up.

## Market to the Rescue!

A better approach is to let technology and the market solve users' privacy concerns. Technology in the form of open standards and decentralized systems can allow users to have the best of both worlds.

Email is a good example of this. If I value my privacy, I can shop around and pick an email provider that treats my data securely or even run my own email server. If I don't want to pay, I can sign up for one of the free ad-supported email services like Gmail. Want something in the middle? I can pay Google $5 a month and they'll give me Gmail and let me keep my privacy by turning off the ads and the tracking.  
{% pullquote %}  
It wasn't always like this. In the early days, email wasn't interoperable...you could only send email to users of the same system or network. {"Don't like their privacy policy? Tough beans. Use a different system."}..just remember you can't reach your friends/co-workers who use the other systems. Sound like the current state of the "social web" to you?  
{% endpullquote %}

## Sowing the seeds of destruction

At the present, for social web to reach a level of standardization and interoperability similar to email may seem hopeless in the face of the huge network effects enjoyed by Facebook & Twitter. However, both the technology and the demand from users is starting to appear. This leads me to believe that the days of the walled-off social web will one day come to an end.

The existence of companies like Schwartz's [CareZone](https://carezone.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com) that make protecting user privacy their priority and offer products that don't ask users to pay for a service with their privacy are one step in that direction.

The creation of technology that provides decentralized and open replacements to major features of Facebook, et al., is another step. Mozilla's [Persona](https://login.persona.org/about?ref=larrysalibra.com) is a promising example of a decentralized, open single sign on system that shows that features of today's walled gardens can not only be replaced, but can done so in a way that is both easier to use and offers stronger privacy.

{% pullquote %}  
Decentralized technologies and standards threaten walled gardens. So do the companies that use them. If companies with compelling products adopt and support these technologies and continue to innovate, the ecosystem outside the walled garden will grow and blossom into a world that makes Facebook's garden feel stuffy and constricting. {"Remember AOL Keyword? Neither do I."}  
{% endpullquote %}
### Just fucking do it!
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/just-fucking-do-it/
Last updated: 2012-12-04T10:34:00.000Z
"Just fucking do it!" New York Islanders owner and tech entrepreneur [Charles Wang](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles%5FWang?ref=larrysalibra.com) told a couple of wild-eyed kids who were trying to raise seed capital to fund their start up idea. I was one of those kids.

Best business advice I've ever received.

Those who follow "Just fucking do it!" don't spend time reading motivational messages and passing around bits of inspiration. While you're spending time reading "10 ways to make your dream happen," your competition is "Just fucking doing it!"

But once upon a time, before I met Charles Wang, before I had customers or employees, profit or payroll, when my business was just me in my parents's basement, a college buddy and a dream, I had a motivational sign. Just one. And I made it myself.

I had completely forgotten about the sign and its contents until my dad reminded me of it yesterday during a phone call sharing recent successes. This morning he sent me a scanned copy, and I'm going to share it with you.

The words are paraphrased from [an article by Chris Taylor](http://money.cnn.com/magazines/business2/business2%5Farchive/2006/03/01/8370584/index.htm?ref=larrysalibra.com) but the cheesy fonts and layout are entirely my fault.

![Larry's Stubborn entrepreneur motivational sign.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2012/12/stubborn_entrepreneurs.png) 

People will give you a million reasons why whatever you're trying to do won't work, isn't needed, is a bad idea or is too risky. It doesn't matter. The only battles you need to win are with your own mind and the market. Everything else is irrelevant.

Now get back to work, make your own motivation, and just fucking do it!
### People are it
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/people-are-it/
Last updated: 2012-11-24T05:21:00.000Z
I've spent a lot of time studying foreign languages. One thing I've learned is that language isn't about logic and persuasive arguments---language is what it is no matter how illogical or offensive.

{% pullquote %}  
{"If you need to write a blog post to argue why a certain usage of language should be right, you're wrong."}  
{% endpullquote %}

Katrina Casio of Brooklyn College's *The Kingsman* argues that [the pronoun "they" should be acceptable as a singular pronoun](http://thekingsmanpaper.com/2012/11/they-is-correct/?ref=larrysalibra.com "They is Correct"). In other words, "they is a student," is just as acceptable as "he is a student."

Wait you say, she doesn't propose "they is a student," but "they are a student." So not only does she propose using a plural pronoun with a singular antecedent but also using the plural forms of verbs to describe the actions of the singular antecedents…singular antecedents that are being represented by plural pronouns. Say what? Wait a minute, I've just gone cross-eyed.

But seriously, let's just use the singular, third-person personal pronoun we already have in English, the word "it." Other languages, such as Chinese, use the same third person pronoun without regard to the gender or lack of gender, for people and objects alike. It works fine for them.

Using "it" instead of a singular they would also save us from a host of other issues such as the verb plurality mentioned early.

Before someone accuses me of being insensitive to gender confused people, I must point out that we already use "it" to refer to those most loved in our lives, our children: "Is it a boy or a girl?"

Sure, some people may still be offended, but "it" uses 50% less paper than they. They'll feel better when they realize they're saving trees!

I vote for the environment, I vote it!

But let's be realistic, "it" for gender neutral people isn't going to "happen" anymore than a singular they.

{% pullquote %}  
{"Language is a democratic institution"} in the most basic sense of the word. Its rules aren't decided by linguists, teachers or language geeks. They're decided organically in pop culture and daily conversation.  
{% endpullquote %}

Better to figure out how to use the singular they in a catchy video good enough to get several hundred million hits on YouTube. Why not ask PSY for help? Perhaps they \[*sic*\] will help.
### Adam Smith is Pro Obamacare
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/adam-smith-is-pro-obamacare/
Last updated: 2012-10-13T07:19:00.000Z
I am a classical liberal. Adam Smith's proposition that individuals pursuing their own self-interest serve the common good is right. [Violence](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly%5Fon%5Fviolence?ref=larrysalibra.com) is behind every act of government, therefore: 1) government should be minimized, and, 2) suspicion of government is both necessary and healthy.

So why am I writing in support of state involvement in healthcare?

A New York Times opinion piece passed through my Twitter stream over the past week that reminded me of how it is logically consistent to be a classical liberal and support state involvement in the health insurance market.

{% pullquote %}  
[Nick Kristof](https://twitter.com/NickKristof?ref=larrysalibra.com), in his [opinion piece advocating against the repeal of Obamacare](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/14/opinion/sunday/kristof-a-possibly-fatal-mistake.html?ref=larrysalibra.com), shares a story about his freshman roommate from Harvard, Scott Androes. A financial adviser and pension consultant, {"Scott decided playing poker was more important than buying health insurance."} He didn't get early medical treatment for symptoms that turned out to be prostate cancer and the result was a probably treatable condition was allowed to development into a probably fatal death sentence.  
{% endpullquote %}

In typical Kristof fashion, the opinion piece is heavy on emotional appeal, and light on logic. Most of the article is spent arguing that society should feel bad for Scott because he made a bad decision which combined with some bad luck and so we should give him a second chance. While a touching argument, the result is a world where people that make good decisions pay for the bad decisions of others incentivizing bad decision making. Sounds like the financial industry. Heads I use my health insurance premium to play poker, tails society pays for my cancer treatment. That's fair. Not.

Kristof's strongest argument, the one that will convince those who typically disagree with Kristof's politics, only makes a brief cameo: Scott's choice to play poker instead of buying healthcare has already cost society over $500,000\. This is a failure of government to fulfill one of the three roles Adam Smith enumerated as the sole roles of government: to protect its citizens from wrongs committed against them by other citizens.

{% pullquote %}  
The moment society required hospitals to provide emergency care without regard to ability pay, health insurance stopped being an individual issue and became everyone's business. {"Your lack of health insurance is my problem."} Obamacare, while far from a perfect solution, begins to redirect the costs of a bad choice made by an individual to the individual instead of imposing them on society. Individuals bearing the costs of their own decisions and personal accountability? That's something Republicans, classical liberals and Libertarians should be lining up to support. Adam Smith is pro Obamacare. Why aren't you?  
{% endpullquote %}
### China beats Silicon Valley: G+ needs to copy Weibo
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/china-beats-silicon-valley-g-needs-to-copy-weibo/
Last updated: 2011-07-10T16:00:00.000Z
Google recently opened up a field trial of it's Google+ Facebook/Twitter competitor. So far, reaction to G+ has been largely positive among the early adopter crowd.

Google+ has even earned a stamp of approval from the Chinese government which blocked Google+ within days of its launch...a milestone that Facebook took years to reach.

Despite generally positive reactions from both early adopters and the Chinese government, there have been user interface complaints. The G+ user interface issue that drives me crazy is the presentation of stream data, specifically threaded conversations. They take up a lot of space and make the conversation difficult to follow. It gives G+ users the feeling of being overwhelmed, inability to keep up with activity and general chaos. G+'s display of threaded conversations is one instance where Google would do well to copy its Chinese competitor, because the Made in China idea is better than what Silicon Valley has delivered.

Take a look at this screenshot of my G+ stream:

![Google+ conversation](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2011/07/Screen-shot-2011-07-10-at-9.56.56-PM.png) 

This single G+ conversation, takes up the *entire* vertical height of the browser on my 13in Macbook Pro. This make it impossible to skim for interesting content in the stream because you can only see one conversation at a time.

Now I know Googlers all have huge super high resolution monitors or implants that display directly to their retinas, but many of us are not so lucky. If they'd like those of us with normal sized screens and human eyes to keep using G+, they need to find a better way to handle threaded conversations. They need only look east to China to learn how to do threaded conversations right.

Take a look at a worst case example of threaded conversations on China's Twitter clone [Sina Weibo](http://www.weibo.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com).

![Sina Weibo threaded conversation](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2011/07/Screen-shot-2011-07-10-at-9.57.53-PM.png) 

In Weibo, you can clearly see what the person you follow says about the thread parent. You can also see a brief summary of the parent thread in a callout bubble beneath your friend's "tweet". As you can see in the "tweet" posted by HXYCO, the parent thread has been "shared" over 8600 times and almost 1000 comments have been left on the original post. You can also see a tiny thumbnail of the original picture.

Weibo understands what Google doesn't. Unless I'm interested in a paying attention to a particular conversation, I don't need to see a whole screen about it. And being interested in a conversation means being interested now at this immediate moment, not that I shared it or commented on it at some point in the past. We all move on in life and that includes our interactions with social network posts.

Google, if you're reading, I know Chinese internet companies don't get a lot of respect in Silicon Valley, but Weibo has some lessons you'd do well to learn and apply to G+.

Follow me on [Weibo](http://weibo.com/lizhaojing?ref=larrysalibra.com), [G+](https://plus.google.com/102265519349282868653?ref=larrysalibra.com) and [Twitter](http://twitter.com/larrysalibra?ref=larrysalibra.com).
### Why does my blog redirect to insidetools.ru?
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/why-does-my-blog-redirect-to-insidetools-ru/
Last updated: 2011-07-10T16:00:00.000Z
My friend [Michael Michelini](http://www.michaelmichelini.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com) asked me why visitors to his blog sometimes get sent to a Russian .ru site when they try to visit his blog. He asked his IT friend about the problem and was told he couldn't replicate it.

Never send an IT guy to do the job of a liberal arts guy. Let me try my hand:

The symptoms were as follows:

- When his blog URL was entered directly in a new browser session, it would load normally
- When clicking on Google search results for his blog, it would get redirected to the suspicious insidetool.ru address
- After clicking on the Google search result for his blog, entering his blog address manually still resulted in a redirect to the .ru address

I suspected that something had infected his Wordpress installation that only redirected Google search results. This would make sense, because it would minimize the chance that the owner of the blog would immediately notice the infection. How many blog owners visit their own blog by searching on Google? Smart.

To remove variables like possibly infected browsers, caches, sessions, etc. I tested this theory by opening a Terminal session and using telnet to connect directly to his web server.

First I simulate a google search "click." I do this by sending a HTTP GET command via telnet and including a header field Referer set to a Google search results URL:

{% codeblock %}

Delorian:\~ larry$ telnet www.michaelmichelini.com 80  
Trying 74.208.82.110...  
Connected to www.michaelmichelini.com.  
Escape character is '^\]'.  
GET / HTTP/1.1  
host: www.michaelmichelini.com  
Referer: [http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&amp;source=web&amp;ct=res&amp;cd=7&amp;url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.michaelmichelini.com&amp;ei=0SjdSa-1N5O8M\_qW8dQN&amp;rct=j&amp;q=michaelmichilini&amp;usg=AFQjCNHJXSUh7Vw7oubPaO3tZOzz-F-u\_w&amp;sig2=X8uCFh6IoPtnwmvGMULQfw](http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&cd=7&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.michaelmichelini.com&ei=0SjdSa-1N5O8M%5FqW8dQN&rct=j&q=michaelmichilini&usg=AFQjCNHJXSUh7Vw7oubPaO3tZOzz-F-u%5Fw&sig2=X8uCFh6IoPtnwmvGMULQfw&ref=larrysalibra.com)  
{% endcodeblock %}

{% codeblock %}

HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently  
Date: Sun, 10 Jul 2011 15:36:51 GMT  
Server: Apache  
Location: [http://insidetools.ru/pkg/index.php](http://insidetools.ru/pkg/index.php?ref=larrysalibra.com)  
Transfer-Encoding: chunked  
Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1

ef

301 Moved Permanently  
<h1>Moved Permanently</h1>  
The document has moved <a href="[http://insidetools.ru/pkg/index.php](http://insidetools.ru/pkg/index.php?ref=larrysalibra.com)">here</a>.

0

Connection closed by foreign host.  
Delorian:\~ larry$  
{% endcodeblock %}

Yep. His blog is redirecting us to the .ru link.

Next I simulate the address being directly entered into the web browser. Again, I do this by sending a HTTP GET request for his blog directly to the web server via telnet. Notice how this time, I do not include a Referer header. This indicates to the web server, that the visitor entered the address directly into their web browser instead of clicking on a link.

{% codeblock %}

Delorian:\~ larry$ telnet www.michaelmichelini.com 80  
Trying 74.208.82.110...  
Connected to www.michaelmichelini.com.  
Escape character is '^\]'.  
GET / HTTP/1.1  
host: www.michaelmichelini.com  
{% endcodeblock %}

{% codeblock %}

HTTP/1.1 200 OK  
Date: Sun, 10 Jul 2011 15:37:14 GMT  
Server: Apache  
Content-Encoding: none  
X-Pingback: [http://www.michaelmichelini.com/xmlrpc.php](http://www.michaelmichelini.com/xmlrpc.php?ref=larrysalibra.com)  
X-Powered-By: PHP/4.4.9  
Transfer-Encoding: chunked  
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8

{% endcodeblock %}

Bingo! His site loads up normally.

Now we can be 100% sure that the problem is in his webserver and its Wordpress installation and not because of infected Google results, poisoned web browsers, and the like. Knowing how to replicate a problem is the first step to solving it.

How and why his blog got infected? How to fix it? I'll leave that to you to figure out.
### Outcasts on Chinese Subways
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/outcasts-on-chinese-subways/
Last updated: 2011-06-23T16:00:00.000Z
Friend [Tricia Wang](http://triciawang.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com) is spending a year in China doing [fascinating research on poor migrants and their use of technology](http://bytesofchina.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com). She recently shared an excellent write up regarding her [experience undercover as a migrant on the Beijing subway](http://www.triciawang.com/bytes-of-china/2011/6/23/how-i-was-treated-on-the-subway-when-i-was-doing-fieldwork-a.html?ref=larrysalibra.com).

I've lived in China for several years, most of which have involved riding the subway around Chinese cities. As a commenter on Tricia's blog pointed out, we foreigners in China receive similar reactions when riding the subway as migrant workers.

I think there are two discrete reactions during her undercover experience, the origins of which deserve exploration. The first is the response of subway riders when Tricia and Yang Jie (the migrant worker) get on the subway with poor personal hygiene and with large amounts of freight. The second is reaction of the rider when he saw Tricia's iPhone and texting in English.

The first is not a class issue, but an issue of community standards. The subway (in Guangzhou at least...and from what I recall from my Beijing days, it was the similar) has traditionally been a way to commute to work and get around for middle/upper middle class people -- generally white collar. The subway is more comfortable (or used to be..but that's another story all together), faster and more reliable than trying to get a cab in the heat, dealing with traffic or dealing with driving and trying to find parking. This position as a luxury form of public transit was reinforced by limited subway coverage and relatively high pricing compared public buses. Regarding limited coverage, until recently, in both Beijing and Guangzhou, subway coverage was mostly limited to a few central business and residential areas. Not the places large numbers of migrants lived. Back in 2003, when I lived in Beijing, buses were exactly 50% cheaper than taking the subway. Until last year in Guangzhou, the Guangzhou metro started at 2 yuan and prices went well in excess of 10 yuan per trip. In contrast, almost all in-city buses cost 2 yuan.

Since Subway transit developed as a premium form of public transit, the community standards that developed around subway transit in Chinese reflect this. Personal hygiene is important. Cleanliness is important. Not making fellow riders have an unpleasant trip is important. (ie. using a premium public transit method to move freight around.) If people wanted to have a miserable public bus experience, they wouldn't have paid more for the subway.

As an aside, this reminds me of a time I was riding Hong Kong's MTR from Tung Chung back to Hong Kong station with some friends. There was an overweight older white gentleman sitting across the aisle who apparently just completed a difficult hike on a mountain on Lantau. He decided it would make sense on Hong Kong's sparkling clean MTR to take his shirt off and expose his sweaty folds of fat to the clean seats and surrounding riders. People quickly shunned him, moved away and started whispering and throwing dirty looks. One of my friends asked me to "go tell your 'countryman' to put his shirt back on...we don't do this here!"

If you don't adhere to accepted community standards in the subway, people will treat you the same as if you showed up to a black tie affair wearing shorts and sandals. Dirty looks, whispers, avoidance are par for the course.

The second issue, the rider's reaction to Tricia's iPhone and English texting, is simply surprise to see someone acting inconsistent with an accepted stereotype. The average Chinese subway rider would assume someone who can afford and iPhone and is educated enough to text in English wouldn't go out in public without showering for days and take freight on the subway. This is the same as the reaction I get when fellow subway riders see me texting and weiboing in Chinese. The average rider assumes that a foreigner wouldn't have learned to read and write Chinese. Chinese subway riders make these assumptions (stereotypes) because they are almost always true. iPhone wielding Tricia disguised as migrant and Larry the Chinese texting foreigner are a rarity on Chinese subways.

I encourage everyone interested in China and technology to follow [Tricia's Bytes of China blog](http://bytesofchina.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com).
### Startup Visa Act: Pay to Play in the USA?
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/startup-visa-act-pay-to-play-in-the-usa/
Last updated: 2011-03-15T16:00:00.000Z
I'm a foreign entrepreneur in South China who has taken advantage of similar existing provisions in both Hong Kong and PRC law to sponsor my own work visas. The result has been a profitable business that employs Chinese, and happy founders and shareholders. If I was a Chinese in the USA instead of an American in China, I never would have passed the start line.

The USA is a horrible place for foreign entrepreneurs who aren't already Green Card holders. There's no way for you to stay in the country legally without a full time job from a large employer eligible and willing to sponsor a work visa, if the lottery allocates one.

The [Startup Visa](http://www.startupvisa.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com) movement promises that they will change that by offering temporary work visas to foreigners who raise certain amounts of money from US-based VCs or angel investors.

However, it seems to be written specifically to give US VCs and professional angels and the companies in which they invest an advantage over firms like [my own](http://www.appartisan.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com) funded by non-professional (and several non-American) angels and our own profits.

What's with the arbitrary restrictions and thresholds for amount of capital that must be raised or number of jobs created? If a business only creates 4 jobs and generates $480,000 in revenue after 2 years, do we not want that business? Or is the founder of that business supposed to start running around at the end of his 2 years to try to raise an additional $500k he may not need to protect his visa status? Businesses don't grow according to legislatively mandated schedules.

I agree with [Vivek Wadhwa](http://twitter.com/vwadhwa?ref=larrysalibra.com) that [venture capital is not necessary and that the USA should be open to anyone who wants to create jobs](http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/jan2011/tc20110126%5F904791%5Fpage%5F2.htm?ref=larrysalibra.com). What VCs don't tell founders (but real entrepreneurs will) is that the more capital you raise the harder you make it to succeed, if by succeed, you mean creating a profitable, self-sustaining business. VCs aren't interested in merely self-sustaining profitable businesses that grow organically. They're only interested in "grand slams"...get big or go bust. This may be fine if you have a portfolio of companies, but if you're a founder where your business is your life, you're probably not so interested in going bust.

The proposed act distorts incentives for foreign entrepreneurs to take on more capital investment (and more risk), than they may otherwise need merely in the hope of keeping their visa status and puts professional VC and angel investors in a stronger negotiating position with foreign founded startups by making them the gatekeepers to a visa to the USA.

It's actually not hard to create a bill that doesn't have fixed dollar amounts and arbitrary restrictions on from where money can be raised without encouraging fraud. Hong Kong has done it with their class of employment visa called the "Visa permit to enter the HKSAR for investment to establish/join in a business." The defining criteria is that the applicant must be "in a position to make substantial contribution to the economy of the HKSAR."

At the time I sponsored my own investment visa to become [Appartisan Limited](http://www.appartisan.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com)'s first Hong Kong-based employee, we would not have qualified under the standards of the proposed Startup Visa Act in the USA. Our capital raised was not high enough and nor was our revenue. However, the Hong Kong Immigration Department was simply concerned that I would benefit Hong Kong by being a positive part of the economy whether that be through tax revenue generated or employment opportunities for locals.

Immigration Department officials requested our company financials, evidence of my personal financial position, proof of business (our start up had already begun trading), personal references and a personal guarantee from a Hong Kong Permanent Resident (I asked a friend) that if I were to become destitute, that they would be be responsible for buying me a ticket back to the USA and putting me on a plane so that I wouldn't become a burden to society.

If the Hong Kong government can figure out how to apply such a standard without massive fraud, I am confident that US Customs and Immigration with its considerably greater resources could as well.

If the USA adopted a similar visa entry scheme, the Americans who would be employed by such businesses and the US Treasury would be thankful. Just ask the PRC and Hong Kong residents who are employed as a result of my business if they're glad I could start my business and the Hong Kong Inland Revenue Department & China Taxation authorities if they like the tax revenue I generate.

The Startup Visa movement is yet another example of a well-intentioned US political movement hijacked by the finance industry interested in improving their own market position at the expense of those who aren't in their club.
### Cleveland is Not a Place for Young Talent
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/cleveland-is-not-a-place-for-young-talent/
Last updated: 2011-01-30T16:00:00.000Z
I grew up in Cleveland. Like many people my age who wanted to do "more" than "just" graduate from college, get a job and have a family. I moved away from Cleveland...to South China where I own a [growing technology business](http://www.appartisan.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com).

A friend of mine [Mike Shafarenko](http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=15500795) recently [shared a link](http://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story%5Ffbid=163883323658981&id=15500795) (login required) to [Tom Bier's Op-Ed about making over Cleveland to attract young talent](http://www.cleveland.com/opinion/index.ssf/2011/01/make%5Fover%5Fcleveland%5Fto%5Fattract.html?ref=larrysalibra.com) on Facebook. His link generated a thread of comments ranging from "Cleveland is awesome there's so much to do" to "Cleveland needs to stop trying to compete with bar scenes in other cities."

Cleveland needs to give up on trying to attract young talent and focus on its strength: being a great place to raise a family.

How many times have you heard someone say "I want to move so my family can enjoy a better standard of living and quality of life, so I'm going to move to Manhattan"? What about, "I want to move my family to a bigger house, so I'm going to move to Central, Hong Kong?" That's right, you haven't!

People move to Cleveland because it is a great place to raise a family. $1 million US dollars will get you a 400 square foot apartment in Central, Hong Kong. Manhattan prices aren't far behind. For the same amount of money, you could buy a mansion in a picturesque Cleveland suburb with acres of grass and forest for your kids to play in.

For young talent that spends most of their time either working or socializing, size of living space isn't a priority. All they want is a place to sleep. For a family, they want a house with enough room so that their kids can have their own rooms and space to play.

Moving a young family around on public transit is a trying experience. Places like Hong Kong and NYC are expensive for car owners. In Cleveland, parking tickets are cheaper than the cost of an hour of parking in the cities that attract young talent. Minivan life is much more affordable.

You're probably thinking, Cleveland, with its low cost of living, sounds like a great for young talent without much money like the starving artists and startup entrepreneurs. Wrong!

Mike hits the nail right on the head:

> Whenever I talk to people about Cleveland, I describe it as "fragmented coolness." There are pockets of great things, but because they are spread out, nothing gets to scale.

Translated, "fragmented coolness" means, you need to have a car. I know the Cleveland public transit defenders will start tooting the horn of the RTA and talk about Cleveland's bus and light rail system. But a public transit system with headways of 15, 30 or more minutes is not a public transit system, its a transit system for poor people whose time is valueless. Young talent has things to do and time is of the essence. They may not have money, but can't afford to waste hours getting around. No car in Cleveland? You're stranded and under house arrest. 

Families seek stability so that they can raise their children. Young talent seeks change, to make a difference. Change threatens families. Stability threatens young talent trying to create change. The two are contradictory.

Cleveland needs to stop feeling guilty about being a great place to have a family and not such a great place for young people.

There's nothing wrong with that.

By feeling guilty about it and acting like this is some problem, Cleveland gives legitimacy to the view as Cleveland as "the mistake on the lake."

How about this new slogan: "Cleveland: For when you're ready to grow up"

What's your take on Cleveland's inferiority complex and multi-decade drive to attract young people?
### 7 Reasons Cantonese is Dying & Mandarin is King
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/7-reasons-cantonese-is-dying-mandarin-is-king/
Last updated: 2024-11-21T02:02:15.000Z
Last fall, the New York Times published an article describing [the rising importance of Mandarin in Chinatown](http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/22/nyregion/22chinese.html?ref=larrysalibra.com). This [seemed to offend travel writer](http://daisann.com/2009/10/22/cantonese-is-dead.aspx?ref=larrysalibra.com) Daisann McLane, an avid student of Cantonese. She insists that Cantonese is flourishing and cites her time with certain infamous Hong Kong politicians in New York's Chinatown as evidence of such Cantonese. She's wrong. Cantonese's days are numbered.

I live in Canton (Guangzhou), which, unlike McLane's Hong Kong, is the home of Cantonese's [prestige dialect](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prestige%5F%28sociolinguistics%29?ref=larrysalibra.com) where I have run a business for the past 3 years. I am fluent speaking, reading, listening and writing in Mandarin including obscure IT/tech vocabulary that the average Chinese does not know. I spend in excess of 90% of each day speaking only Mandarin or Cantonese and I spend zero time interacting with Guangzhou's expat community. While learning Chinese, I spent significant time in class with the Chinese immigrants and their children in New York City and other Chinatown.

And now for 7 reasons why Cantonese is dying...

## 1\. Everyone in Canton speaks Mandarin

It is impossible to only speak Cantonese in Guangzhou. Several Hong Kong and local Guangzhou friends of mine have tried this out only to find out rather quickly that they need to either break out their rusty Mandarin or get another cab.

A friend of mine who was born and raised in Guangzhou and attended Sun Yat-Sen University in Guangzhou, a native Cantonese, spent the good part of a decade abroad in graduate school in upstate New York only to return to be shocked how the language dynamics of his hometown had changed and his native Cantonese was no longer the only game in town.

## 2\. Everyone in China speaks Mandarin

Learning Cantonese writes:  
{% blockquote %}  
Still, despite more than 50 years of official support, education, and with all the levers \[sic\] of the central Chinese government pushing the primacy of Gwok Yu (national language), Mandarin is the first language of a whopping 40% of all Chinese. (It's spoken by just 70% of Chinese, which is still an astonishing figure, given the primacy of putonghua.  
{% endblockquote %}

Getting 70% of any population to do anything is impressive. Getting 70% of 1.3 billion people (in)famous for not following rules to do anything is nothing short of a miracle.

**Who are the "just 70%" of Chinese that speak Mandarin?**

- the business, political and academic elites
- all students
- the entire workforce
- anyone who has gone to school since the mid-20th century.

The 30% that don't speak Mandarin are economically and politically irrelevant because they're for the most part out of the workforce. They spend their time at home and their only interaction outside of their generation is constrained to their own children and grandkids, all of which are among the 70% that speak Mandarin. The 30% that don't speak Mandarin will be dead in the next two decades.

## 3\. Mandarin is the language of business and money

Mandarin is to China what English is to the rest of the world. Those who want to be successful and make money speak Mandarin. When a Cantonese person gets together with someone from anywhere else in China to do business, have fun or even get married, they speak Mandarin and not Cantonese.

When Sir Donald Tsang, Chief Executive of the Hong Kong SAR Government travels from Hong Kong to Beijing to talk policy, you can bet he's speaking Mandarin and Hu Jintao and his underlings are not speaking Cantonese. Money and power is ultimately controlled by Beijing.

When a Cantonese and a non-Cantonese start dating during college, guess what they speak? You guessed it...

## 4\. New York Chinatown Kids Speak English Not Cantonese

The children of those oft-cited Cantonese and Fujianese speaking immigrants in New York's Chinatown speak English not Cantonese and Mandarin with everyone except their parents. Almost all are illiterate in Chinese. The few that try to learn written Chinese usually give up pretty quickly. Many of them were my first year Chinese classmates. 

When these first generation children of Chinese immigrants get married and have kids, they speak English with their spouses, friends and coworkers. If they can manage to convince their children to learn Chinese, it will be Mandarin, not Cantonese.

This is no different than any other immigrant story. My great great grandparents spoke Italian. Did my grandparents? A few phrases. Do my parents? No. Do I? No.

## 5\. Kids play in Mandarin

Spend time in the courtyards and elevators of Guangzhou's developments and you'll find that when local kids play with kids from other provinces, their games are in Mandarin. Their cartoons are also in Mandarin. In fact Guangzhou and Guangdong children's channels are also in Mandarin.

## 6\. Entertainment is in Mandarin

Of 80+ cable TV channels in Guangzhou, less than 10 are Cantonese, 3 or 4 are English and the rest are Mandarin. Even the majority of Guangzhou TV, Guangdong TV and Southern TV's channels are Mandarin and not Cantonese. As someone who is studying Cantonese, I often go out of my way to track down the original Cantonese version of Hong Kong movies. It is much more difficult than you would think this being the birthplace of Cantonese. You have to go out of your way to find original Cantonese movies because most DVD vendors just carry Mandarin dubbed editions. A Mandarin edition can be sold nationwide. A Cantonese edition is worthless outside of Guangdong Province.

## 7\. Mandarin is taking over Hong Kong

The average Hong Kong person's English is not good. If you try to get along solely on English, it doesn't work very well outside of expat-frequented areas. You are much better off simply speaking Mandarin. Cab drivers and cashiers in Hong Kong who speak and understand little to no English will understand exactly what you say in Mandarin.

Go into any Hong Kong government office, Inland Revenue, Immigration Department, the Companies Registry, you pick, and try to conduct your business in English. Then try again in Mandarin. Mandarin works every time, while English is very hit and miss.

More than [13.5 million mainland tourists](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tourism%5Fin%5FHong%5FKong?ref=larrysalibra.com) visited Hong Kong, 100% of them speak Mandarin and they have cash to spend. Hong Kong's population is only 1/2 of that. Hong Kong businesses are pretty squarely focused one the 1.3+ billion strong mainland market and that requires competency in Mandarin.

In fact, in 2007, Hong Kong's Education Chief told schools to teach more in Mandarin and English and less in Cantonese. In the Hong Kong Government's view, better English helps Hong Kong maintain its international competitiveness and better Mandarin helps Hong Kong to be more competitive in mainland China. Any chance Beijing's Minister of Education will be telling schools to teach more Cantonese to help mainland competitiveness in Hong Kong and Chinatown? There's better chance the Great Firewall be dismantled tomorrow than that happening.

## In Defense of Cantonese

I love Cantonese. Its a beautiful and incredibly fun language. I decided to study it because I enjoy it. But I don't delude myself into thinking its a good investment in the future beyond its entertainment and academic value. Enjoy it while it lasts.
### Assets & IPv6 on Ruby on Rails
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/assets-ipv6-on-ruby-on-rails/
Last updated: 2010-02-18T16:00:00.000Z
All of our internal production sites starting in 2009 have been launched with dual stack IPv4/IPv6 from day one. We typically serve static assets (images and javascript) from our content delivery network to improve load performance. Unfortunately, the CDN we use is IPv4 only. The following Ruby on Rails code snippet is from `/config/environments/production.rb` that rewrites static asset paths to serve from the RoR server for IPv6 and SSL requests and the CDN for IPv4 requests.

{% codeblock %}  
ActionController::Base.asset\_host = Proc.new { |source, request|  
remote\_ip = IPAddr.new(request.remote\_ip)  
if request.ssl? || remote\_ip.ipv6?  
"#{request.protocol}#{request.host\_with\_port}"  
else

# replace your.cdn/path with the host + path to your IPv4-only CDN

"#{request.protocol}your.cdn/path"  
end  
}  
{% endcodeblock %}
### China Real Estate Bubble?
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/china-real-estate-bubble/
Last updated: 2010-01-29T16:00:00.000Z
You should be worried when the CEO of Beijing's largest real estate company Zhang Xin has this to say:

> My view is that the real estate business has a lot of asset bubbles, but even with asset bubbles it doesn't mean that we are getting out of the business. The strategy is not giving up or leaving, the strategy is to keep a lot of cash, to sell as fast as possible, and to turn around assets faster – even faster than before.

She points out that rent is way too low for the prices at which properties are selling: 

> Now, if you look at the prices for the property being sold versus the rent you collect there is a real disconnect. Prices are too high, rent is too low, so if you hold property in order to get yield you are likely to get very little. For us it makes no sense to hold property, so our strategy is to sell everything. We see ourselves very much as a manufacturer. We buy land, we build, and then we sell. And the asset bubble has compelled us to be even more of a manufacturer.

If property developers who are interested in long-term income streams won't even consider holding on to their own properties...should you? 

[Read the whole interview](http://www.cibmagazine.com.cn/Features/Face%5FTo%5FFace.asp?id=1190&zhang%5Fxin.html&ref=larrysalibra.com) for more of her thoughts! Thanks to Twitter [Niubi](http://twitter.com/niubi?ref=larrysalibra.com) for pointing this interview out!
### 6 Reasons Why Pizza Hut does better than Papa John's in China
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/6-reasons-why-pizza-hut-does-better-than-papa-johns-in-china/
Last updated: 2010-01-17T16:00:00.000Z
Quick post as I wait for my 12 inch 1/2 chicken curry 1/2 pepperoni pizza from Pizza Hut to be delivered here in Guangzhou:

I was [reminded tonight](http://twitter.com/larrysalibra/status/7904651726?ref=larrysalibra.com), yet again, by [Papa John](http://www.papajohnschina.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com)'s nationwide delivery hotline why [Pizza Hut](http://www.pizzahut.com.cn/?ref=larrysalibra.com) does so much better in the China market.

1. They accept credit cards. It is 2010 folks...even in China few people pay in cash for middle and upper end eating out (in which Papa John's with its 100 CNY+ pizza prices most definitely falls.) You don't need to accept international cards (Visa, Mastercard, etc...even though Pizza Hut does), but at least accept [China Unionpay](http://en.chinaunionpay.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com)! If mom & pop outfits accept Unionpay for sales of 10 CNY or less, Papa John's surely can find a way.
2. Their delivery people don't turn your pizza upside down in route.
3. They don't randomly stop offering sizes and crusts (such as the 12 inch traditional crust) in conflict with their online menu and published promotions.
4. They accept online orders.
5. Their nationwide toll-free delivery line actually takes orders for the whole period of time that its open instead of stating that the delivery line is open until 10pm but telling people who call at 9:53pm that their locations don't accept orders after 9:55pm. (???) Additionally, they don't, after having the ridiculousness of this pointed out, say that they will place the order anyways but if the pizza doesn't show up, the customer will have to deal with the store.
6. There is actually some degree of product consistent between locations unlike Papa John's where pizzas from different locations taste totally different.

In Papa John's defense, their pizzas generally do taste better. However, I'm not going to order them if its such a hassle. This isn't some deep insight from a business China expert...it's common sense.
### Google's China Lessons: Forbidden Fruit & Face Saving Retreat
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/googles-china-lessons-forbidden-fruit-face-saving-retreat/
Last updated: 2010-01-12T16:00:00.000Z
I woke up today to the headline that [Google is threatening to leave the China market ](http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/14/world/asia/14beijing.html?ref=larrysalibra.com)in response to what it says were a series of attacks aimed at the Gmail accounts of human rights activists.

First, I must admit that I am a big fan and heavy user of Google's services. Our company uses many Google services on a daily basis and I hold Google stock. However, today's move, smells strongly of a brilliantly crafted marketing ploy generate PR or perhaps even a way to leave the China market without admitting failure.

My first reaction was along the [lines of this twitterer](http://twitter.com/thelowlypeon/status/7689783761?ref=larrysalibra.com). Finally, someone is willing to take a stand against injustice and the hassle China makes foreign businesses go through. However, after reading some [additional coverage](http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704362004575000440265987982.html?ref=larrysalibra.com), [watching Larry Kudlow's interview of Google's Chief Legal Officer on CNBC](http://video.nytimes.com/video/2010/01/12/business/1247466517265/google-may-close-operations-in-china.html?ref=larrysalibra.com) and discussing this news item with people both in and out of China, it became apparent that my initial impression may have been incorrect.

In fact, today's announcement seems to indicate Google has learned a lot more about China and Chinese culture from its China experiment than others give them credit.

**Google's China Lessons**

1. One of the quickest ways to gain popularity among the masses is to be banned
2. Find a way to save face when confronted with defeat

## The Marketing Allure of Forbidden Fruit

Google has learned what many other successful Chinese businesses, artists, authors and musician long since known. One of the best ways to get your product to become extraordinarily popular is to get it banned by the government. Books like *[Shanghai Baby](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanghai%5FBaby?ref=larrysalibra.com)* and the extraordinarily popular TV drama *Woju（[蜗居](http://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-cn/%E8%9C%97%E5%B1%85?ref=larrysalibra.com)）*which details the story of a young girl who became the mistress of a corrupt Communist Party official were partially or completely banned and consequently soared in popularity. 

In the short term, today's news will without a doubt cause many who would typically just use Baidu to give Google China another try simply to see what all the fuss is about it. In the long term, if Google makes good on its threat, Google.cn is shut and the US-based Google.com is subsequently blocked, you can be sure more people than ever in Mainland China will be use ever more creative ways to access the US-based search engine and other Google services to see what is being hidden from them.

## Failure in the Chinese Market

Despite Google's popularity abroad, outside of Google of China's IT industry, very few Chinese use Google services. Among my 100s of contacts in Mainland China, ranging from those in high government and Party positions to simple uneducated workers from the countryside who use email, I can count on one hand the number that use Google's Gmail service. Among those, all except for one are people who have lived and/or studied outside of China at some point. Besides a few users of Yahoo China's email service, the remainder use one of the home-grown email providers such as 163.com or the built-in @qq.com email with which, every user of insanely popular, homegrown [QQ chat network](http://im.qq.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com) is provided.. 

Language provides a lot of insight into Google's position in various markets. Much like "google" used as a verb has made its way into English vocabulary as a word to mean "to use Google to search the web for something," Baidu plays a similar role in Chinese. Their slogan *Baidu Yixia, Ni Jiu Zhidao (百度一下，你就知道)* which means "Baidu a little bit and you'll know" is one of the better know corporate slogans in China up there with McDonald's "I'm Loving It."

Some of Google's services do not even work properly in China through no fault of the Chinese Government. For example, the map view of Google Maps on the iPhone is consistently about 3 kilometers off in Guangzhou when displaying current location despite the fact that the satellite view is dead on. This makes Google Apps essentially useless for finding or following directions in South China. It is as if no one from Google has ever tested this product in Guangzhou despite the fact that this is arguably Mainland China's most important city in the southern half of the country.

Google China's much touted [music download service](http://www.google.cn/music/homepage?ref=larrysalibra.com) created to compete with the extremely popular, easy to use and very useful [Baidu MP3](http://mp3.baidu.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com) service which allows users to download MP3s of the latest music for free has never worked from our China Unicom leased line in Guangzhou with their music supplier's servers always indicating that our IP block did not have permission to access the music files required to use the site. This may have been because Google was trying to err on the side of caution when setting up IP access parameters to in order to avoid allowing free downloads of music outside the Mainland China market and incurring the wrath of their music label partners. However, the reality of the situation is that if it didn't work for me on 1 of my 2 internet connections in Mainland China, then there were probably many others who had the same problem. Like me, they probably tried the service once or twice, ran into a problem and then gave up and went back to Baidu MP3.

For most companies, a user base of Google's size in Mainland China would be considered a success. But the fact of the matter is, Google's wild success and huge market share in other countries around the world means that in comparison Google's China operation with its tiny market share and near irrelevance to the daily life of normal Chinese makes it a large failure.

In their battle to win market acceptance and work towards the market share numbers they enjoy in other markets, Google has had to re-develop most of their services specifically for the Mainland Chinese market to cater to different customer tastes and comply with a significantly different regulatory environment. The result of doing so has been a less than tepid response from Chinese Internet users.

Saying they are threatening to close down their China operations because of China cyberattacks and government censorship is ingenious at best. How would shutting down their China operations prevent future cyberattacks from in China on its US-based servers? The answer is that obviously it wouldn't. The government censorship excuse is weak because Internet censorship now is to a large part much less stringent than it was when they entered the China market. Major foreign news sources have very rarely been blocked in the past year or so unlike in years past when they entered the market.

The only thing that has changed is that Google's China operation has gained a track record of little success over the past several years. They have run numerous campaigns to promote g.cn and google.cn (eg. ads through the Guangzhou Metro, on every bus stop, and many TV stations) with little success. Someone internally has probably decided that their little progress is not worth the cash cost of the China operation and the large PR cost of being seen by some as doing the dirty work of the Chinese Communist Party. So instead of admitting defeat and tarnishing their brand's image of success, they instead have chosen to blame the Chinese government and use this as a face saving way to wrap up a failed operation under the guise of "Doing no evil" and human rights. The only thing better from a PR perspective would be to figure out how to spin the closing of their China operation as being ["for the children."](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For%5Fthe%5Fchildren%5F%28politics%29?ref=larrysalibra.com)

No, Google's threat to leave the China market was not made because of some higher moral calling but instead was a carefully crafted business decision to make one last attempt to generate interest in their China services before throwing in the towel and doing so without hurting the Google brand's image of inevitable success. Look at it in another way...do you think Google would even think about threatening to close down its China operations if it had already cornered 90%+ of a market over 300 million users strong? I don't think so.
### Monthly plans, logos, lower rates, attachments, & more!
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/monthly-plans-logos-lower-rates-attachments-more/
Last updated: 2010-01-03T16:00:00.000Z
Just a quick note to let everyone know that a big upcoming revision of our Pay4Bugs Software Testing Service has been deployed to the testing server for testing.

This update focuses on adding monthly plans which will allow us to add a whole sleuth of useful improvements in 2010 and reduce costs for our large volume customers.

In addition to monthly plans, the new version has support for multiple users, logo upload and more! The feature most requested by testers, the ability to add attachment directly to bug reports, also has made it into this update.

Log in to Pay4Bugs now as a tester and look for the Pay4Bugs project and assignments for instructions on how to test the latest version! Based on your feedback, we hope to have this version deployed to production by the end of the month. As always, cash-rewards in the form of Bug Bounties are waiting as a token of our gratitude.

We will post more regarding the features in this new version on our [company blog](http://blog.attigohk.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com) before the version is pushed to production. (And, yes, we promise to try to blog more frequently!)

Log in to [Pay4Bugs](http://www.pay4bugs.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com) now and start filing your bug reports!
### 3 Italy's 3G Network Overloaded by iPhones?
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/3-italys-3g-network-overloaded-by-iphones/
Last updated: 2009-12-31T16:00:00.000Z
There has been plenty of news about data traffic growth caused by iPhone popular overloading networks in the USA and [more recently the UK](http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/d718fa08-f401-11de-ac55-00144feab49a.html?ref=larrysalibra.com).

I have been in Northern Italy for the holidays using [3 Italy](http://www.tre.it/?ref=larrysalibra.com)'s 3Power10 pre-paid SIM for the duration of my visit. I was quite surprised with the incredibly slow performance of their network after my positive experience with China Unicom's brand new 7.2megabit HSPDA network in Guangzhou.

On China Unicom in South China, where official iPhone sales have been off to a slow start, I get download speeds ranging from 800 kbps to 3.5+ megabits consistently averaging around 1.9 megabits. In Northern Italy on 3 Italy, the range is from <10 kps up to a maximum of \~1.1 megabits. Averages in Italy, however, are quite low around 100 kbps. Perhaps this has something to do with the fact that every other person on the street seems to have an iPhone?
### Centralization and Censorship
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/centralization-and-censorship/
Last updated: 2009-10-08T16:00:00.000Z
For those of you that don't know, Facebook and Twitter have been blocked here in the People's Republic of China for the past several months.

While most would say that this offers a lessons regarding censorship, an equally important lesson is what it teaches us about systems engineering, specifically the design of communications networks.

Because Twitter and Facebook are privately-owned, walled gardens, they make for very easy targets for censors. The various systems that make up the Internet work so well because they were designed to be decentralized and distributed, allowing the network or at least parts of it to keep functioning in the case of nuclear attack.

Twitter can't even function properly under the normal load of its own customers... A little Party propaganda brings them both to their knees. We need a better solution...

**Update: Turns out Bitcoin was the solution I was looking for. If only I knew at the time I wrote this post!**
### Google IPv6 SSL Certificate Problem
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/google-ipv6-ssl-certificate-problem/
Last updated: 2009-07-29T16:00:00.000Z
I have been accessing Google via IPv6 for the past few months thanks to the nice people at Hurricane Electric. Every once in a while when using Gmail, I will get a security error warning me that the SSL certificate for mail.google.com does not belong to that site (see below). This only happens over IPv6\. Today, I am being served a certificate for Google South Africa's domain. I am clearly in China and my tunnelbroker.net IPv6 tunnel terminates in Fremont, California. Anyone else have a similar problem?

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2009/07/google_ipv6_untrusted.png)
### China Unicom 3-Year iPhone Exclusive
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/china-unicom-3-year-iphone-exclusive/
Last updated: 2009-07-27T16:00:00.000Z
[Chinese media is reporting](http://stock.hexun.com/2009-07-28/120018176.html?ref=larrysalibra.com) that China Unicom and Apple have signed a 3 year deal to sell the iPhone in mainland China. Reports are that Unicom will purchase iPhones from Apple for 3,000 Chinese Yuan each and guarantee sales of 1 to 2 million units per year and revenue of 5 billion Chinese Yuan. It is speculated that end user prices will be somewhat higher than other markets because of PRC taxes and customization required to disable WiFi for the mainland China market.

Further speculation is that iPhone will make its mainland China debut in time for the 10/1 National Day holiday.

My experience as a trial China Unicom 3G user is that their network deployment is first rate. It will be interesting to see how it holds up after a flood of iPhones.
### Yogurt Workshop
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/yogurt-workshop/
Last updated: 2009-07-14T16:00:00.000Z
My friend Karen and her business partner Andy have been hard at work introducing the concept of [gourmet frozen yogurt](http://www.yogurtworkshop.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com) to the Guangzhou consumer. Their brainchild, [Yogurt Workshop](http://www.yogurtworkshop.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com), recently opened its first two stores in Guangzhou.

[Yogurt Workshop](http://www.yogurtworkshop.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com) offers 4 flavors of frozen yogurt, Original, Green Tea, Guava and Mango. I am a particularly big fan of Original and Green Tea flavors. Original flavor should not be confused with vanilla frozen yogurt. It actually tastes like real yogurt. (because it is) The Green Tea flavor is soft and subtle and perfectly compliments Yogurt Workshop's wide range of toppings, enhancing their flavor without drowning out their flavor with overwhelming sweetness.

![green tea](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2009/07/greentea-300x225.jpg) 

Each cup of [Yogurt Workshop frozen yogurt](http://www.yogurtworkshop.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com) includes two free toppings. Toppings include a wide assortment of fruits, cookies and candies. Orders to go are served in branded paper cups while orders for eat in are served in tasteful dishes with quality stainless silverware as seen in the picture to the left.

Yogurt Workshop is open 7 days a week from 10am to 10pm at both its original location in the Tianhe YouYiCheng underground mall at the West entrance of TeeMall (Guangzhou Metro Tiyuxi Road Station) and its most recent new location at the Mayflower Mall on the level directly accessible from the Guangzhou Metro Gongyuanqian Metro station. Both locations offer in store seating.

Yogurt Workshop frozen yogurt is also available on the dessert menus of select fine restaurants around Guangzhou.
### Find your bugs faster...
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/find-your-bugs-faster/
Last updated: 2009-06-24T16:00:00.000Z
We have heard both from [Pay4Bugs](http://www.pay4bugs.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com) customers and testers that they needed a better way to manage the ever increasing number of bugs our testers have helped customers find.

Over the weekend, we rolled out three small changes to help both customers and testers find the bugs they are looking for faster.

**Mark bugs as fixed**

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2009/06/fixed_feature-en.png) 

Fixed Feature

Marking a bug as fixed not only helps customers keep better track of the status of their project, but hides the bug from the view of testers, giving them the opportunity to notify the customer if it should reoccur.

**Bug search**

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2009/06/search-en.png) 

Bug Search

Each table of bugs now offers real-time search of bug report contents. No submit or page refresh needed!

**Bug sorting**

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2009/06/sort-en.png) 

Bug Sort

Bugs can be sorted by any one of various attributes.
### Newspaper Blackout Poetry in Chinese
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/newspaper-blackout-poetry-in-chinese/
Last updated: 2009-06-24T16:00:00.000Z
I have been a fan [Austin Kleon's Newspaper Blackout Poetry](http://www.austinkleon.com/newspaper-blackout-poems/?ref=larrysalibra.com) since I came across them on Facebook. Last week, while walking by a newspaper stand in Guangzhou, I suddenly had the urge to give it a try myself with a Chinese newspaper.

You can see how it was made on my [Chinese blog](http://lizhaojing.com/2009/06/25/%e9%bb%91%e6%9a%97%e4%b8%ad%e7%9a%84%e8%af%97/?ref=larrysalibra.com) or, for those whose computers don't like Chinese characters, in [my photo gallery](http://photos.larrysalibra.com/gallery/8611904%5FNcsBn?ref=larrysalibra.com).

For those of you that can't read Chinese, the poem is called "With Family" and roughly translates as follows:

> "With family, work, a son, a wife, education, mutual encouragement and support in our lives, one can have confidence and hope."

The original article was from the [Nanfang Daily](http://www.nanfangdaily.com.cn/?ref=larrysalibra.com).

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2009/06/blackout-large-finished.jpg) 

A Newspaper Blackout Poem in Chinese
### 3.0 Locks 1st Gen iPhone
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/3-0-locks-1st-gen-iphone/
Last updated: 2009-06-17T16:00:00.000Z
Despite what some [other blogs claim](http://henstudio.com/apple/iphone-apps/2009/06/18/iphone-30-firmware-upgrade-for-jailbreak-iphone-2g-and-iphone-3g/?ref=larrysalibra.com) restoring my jailbroken/unlocked 1st generation iPhone with 3.0 software did result in it being re-locked to AT&T making it impossible to use my China Mobile GoTone SIM. Activation with iTunes would only work with the original AT&T sim and did not work with a [3 Hong Kong](http://www.three.com.hk/?ref=larrysalibra.com) SIM despite 3HK being an official iPhone carrier.
### Reviewing the Relationship between Intelligence and Success
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/reviewing-the-relationship-between-intelligence-and-success/
Last updated: 2009-06-08T16:00:00.000Z
Fellow China watcher [Nick Kristof ](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas%5FKristof?ref=larrysalibra.com)has a [great op-ed](http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/07/opinion/07kristof.html?ref=larrysalibra.com) that looks at the relationship between three races that have traditionally enjoyed above average success in America and intelligence.

His policy conclusion:

> "...the most decisive weapons in the war on poverty aren’t transfer payments but education, education, education."

The broader lesson: 

> "...success depends less on intellectual endowment than on perseverance and drive."

Take responsibility for your own future!
### Cachefly seems to be down
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/cachefly-seems-to-be-down/
Last updated: 2009-06-03T16:00:00.000Z
The CDN [Cachefly](http://www.cachefly.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com) seems to be partially down. As of 4:24pm HKT, their homepage and FTP upload server are both not responding. Data currently deployed on their network still works fine. Are they simply down for an update or will they be joining GM in bankruptcy court?

Usually I would just post this on Twitter, but as many of you may know, it is currently blocked in China because of certain anniversaries.
### Pay4Bugs Quick Switch for OpenID
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/pay4bugs-quick-switch-for-openid/
Last updated: 2009-05-24T16:00:00.000Z
![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2009/05/quickswitch.png) 

Pay4Bugs Quick Switch

A couple of weeks ago we released an update to [Pay4Bugs](https://www.pay4bugs.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com), our [software testing marketplace](https://www.pay4bugs.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com), that had hidden in it a small but incredibly usual new feature for those of you that have both Customer and Tester accounts. Quick Switch is a pair of tabs that appear at the top of the page when you have Tester and Customer accounts with the same OpenID. One click now allows you to switch from your Customer to your Tester account and vice versa with no redirects!

Quick Switch is only available when you have signed up for a Customer account using the same OpenID as your Tester account. As if you needed another reason to leave behind the days of memorizing endless usernames and passwords and use OpenID.
### Organizing Photos on SmugMug
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/organizing-photos-on-smugmug/
Last updated: 2009-05-23T16:00:00.000Z
Those that know me well, or have had the opportunity (or perhaps bad luck) to travel with me know that I enjoy taking pictures. Late last year, I started looking for a place to store the over 10,000+ digital photographs I have taken over since I acquired my first digital camera in earlier this decade.

After doing some research, I settled upon [SmugMug](http://www.smugmug.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com) after reading raving reviews and signed up for the free 14 day trial. For several years, I used Adobe Photoshop Album to organize my photos, so I had a big directory filled with many a directory for each time I downloaded photos from my camera. Because I had already uploaded my photos to a web hosting account, I needed a command line uploader to get the photos into SmugMug. There were a few available in the [SmugMug Hacks](http://wiki.smugmug.net/display/SmugMug/Hacks+and+Apps?ref=larrysalibra.com) section, but none at the time were able to handle recursive uploading of multiple directories.

I ended up spending a few hours putting together a simple [Java-based command line uploader for SmugMug](http://sinopop.net/smugjcu/?ref=larrysalibra.com) to solve my problem.

Unfortunately, I got busy and was unable to actually upload my photos until recently. Now that I have finally have uploaded all of my photos, I am now faced with the prospect of organizing them. What I would like to do is make most albums unlisted and select only the best photographs to display publicly.

The way to do this that makes the most sense to me, is to have the ability to make photos exist in multiple albums. For example, [my photo of a dilapidated military plane abandoned in the Mongolian countryside](http://photos.larrysalibra.com/gallery/8284557%5FnCbGW/1/541813060%5FTCRUt/Large?ref=larrysalibra.com) should exist both in the unlisted gallery that contains all of my photos from that trip that I share with friends and family and also in the [public Mongolia gallery](http://photos.larrysalibra.com/gallery/8284557%5FnCbGW?ref=larrysalibra.com) that the whole world can view on my photo's page.

Right now, I have to create a copy of pictures that I want to be part of public galleries and then move them to the public gallery. It works, but is a bit click-intensive and has the downside that there's no way to tell in which galleries a given photo appears.

Wishlist:

- Virtual albums (one photo can be in multiple album)
- A way to copy multiple photos, and select a destination album besides the current album
- An easy way for friends to download all photos in an album in one click (download as ZIP)
- Multilingual interface - (specifically Chinese) - I know this is a long shot because I know firsthand how hard it is to maintain internationalized websites. I cannot blame the wonderful SmugMug folks for focusing on one language.
- A search interface in the API
I am incredibly happy with SmugMug. They are among the top tier of high-quality web-based businesses out there. One can think of them as the [37signals](http://www.37signals.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com) of digital photography. 

I have some updates and bug fixes to [SmugJCU](http://sinopop.net/smugjcu/?ref=larrysalibra.com) that I will put together and release in the near future. In the meantime, keep your eyes peeled for [new photos](http://photos.larrysalibra.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com).
### 10 Things You Didn't Know About Invoices in China
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/10-things-you-didnt-know-about-invoices-in-china/
Last updated: 2009-04-16T16:00:00.000Z
There is a lot of [confusion about invoices in China](http://www.jonatshanghai.com/?p=109&ref=larrysalibra.com). If you ask for an invoice from a vendor in most of the world and you will get a piece of paper issued by the vendor that lists the items or services you are buying, total amount due and terms. In Mainland China, asking for an invoice ("kai fapiao" ie. 开发票) will result at best in a piece of paper listing how much you spent on what goods and services or, more typically, several small squares of paper with various values that vaguely resemble very ugly Monopoly money and have little to no indication of what you purchased or from where it was purchased.

[![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2009/04/fapiao-150x150.jpg)](fapiao) 

Chinese tax invoice

Below are 10 things you may not have known about invoices in China.

## 1\. Chinese invoices are actually taxation invoices##

These pieces of paper issued by the relevant government taxation authority are proof that the proper tax has been paid on the goods or services.

## 2\. Chinese companies can only expense goods and services for which a taxation invoice was issued##

If a taxation invoice was not issued for a good or service purchased by a company, this means that the vendor did not pay the proper tax on the transaction and consequently the customer will unable to deduct the expense and end up paying the (often higher) income tax rate on the amount of the un-taxed transaction.

## 3\. Chinese invoices are a critical part of the Value Added Tax system

Chinese invoices help to align incentives such that customers put pressure on their suppliers to pay taxes. In practice, however, Chinese invoices create a strong incentive to conduct all transactions in cash with the result that no parties paying any taxes. 

Regarding our friend and fellow Ohioan [Jon@Shanghai](http://www.jonatshanghai.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com) and [his problem with deducting his rent](http://www.jonatshanghai.com/?p=109&ref=larrysalibra.com), his mistake was being a wage earner at a foreign enterprise that fully reports his earned income. If he had worked for a small to medium private Chinese company, they would have probably under reported or never reported his income and he would not have had to even file a tax return.

The tenants in China that request invoices for their rent usually do not care about paying the additional cost passed on by the landlord because they would be using the taxation invoice as a way to expense the rent to a third party.

## 4\. Chinese invoices in many cities have scratch-off prizes as an incentive for customers to request them

Invoices in cities such as Shenzhen have scratch-off spaces similar to lottery tickets where you can instantly win cash. This is supposed to work as an incentive for customers to request taxation invoices from businesses and increase tax compliance. 

## 5\. Chinese invoices cost money for businesses to purchase

Businesses are supposed to purchase invoices by paying the tax rate for the particular good or service category on the face value of the invoice. However, they often find ways to purchases invoices on the black market at significantly reduced rates. 

## 6\. Chinese invoices make it easy and convenient for civil servants and government officials to get reimbursed by the government for personal expenses

Many civil servants can get reimbursed by submitting taxation invoices to their work unit. Since taxation invoices often make it impossible to know what was actually purchased by instead simply listing a category, many entertainment venues will simply issue "food and drink" taxation invoices for services rendered. 

## 7\. Chinese invoices for goods and services claimed as expenses by companies need to be collected and pasted on to pages in a book for possible review by taxation officials

Similar to Western rules requiring retention of business records, Chinese taxation invoices claimed as business expenses must be retained. 

## 8\. Deduction of expenses (like rent) from income taxes is only allowed when a taxation invoice has been issued

If you do not have a taxation invoice for a good or service, the appropriate tax was not paid on the good or service. To the Chinese taxation authorities, it does not matter if the tax was actually paid but the invoice was lost or misplaced. 

## 9\. Properly issued taxation invoices should be dated with the current date and stamped with the taxation invoice company chop

Many vendors will ask you for the name of the individual or "unit" (company or government body) in which the invoice should be issued. This proves that the purchase was an expense of that person or unit. 

## 10\. Taxation invoices are frequently purchased on the black market

The black market for taxation invoices is so strong that a large amount of daily text message spam is advertising black market availablity of taxation invoices. Many telephone poles have stickers or writing on them advertising a phone number to call for those interested in purchasing black market taxation invoices.
### Yahoo! OpenID - No Wonder They Keep Losing Marketshare
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/yahoo-openid-no-wonder-they-keep-losing-marketshare/
Last updated: 2009-04-05T16:00:00.000Z
I saw a [post a few weeks ago on Planet OpenID](http://www.identitywoman.net/getting-openid-to-work-when-oh-when?ref=larrysalibra.com) describing the difficulty a tech savvy user had trying to login to an OpenID-enabled site using a Yahoo!-provided OpenID.

In the problem described in [iwoman's post](http://www.identitywoman.net/getting-openid-to-work-when-oh-when?ref=larrysalibra.com), a tech savvy user gets confused by the fact that Yahoo tells you "your OpenID is xyz, but you don't have to remember xyz, you can just type 'yahoo.com'." The engineers here (like the ones at Google) are probably thinking, "We should not encourage users to enter account-identifiable information on third-party sites."

If this is their goal, why do they even bother to tell people their OpenID? Everyone else that uses OpenID either their personal OpenID directly on the rely-party or clicks on a button (eg: Google) that allows them to enter it on the identity provider site. Furthermore, have they not tried to follow their own instructions? Saying "You don't have to remember it \[your personal OpenID\]" means "You can remember it, but you don't have to remember." This implies that you should be able to use your OpenID directly.

We ran into a similar problem developing the OpenID login our [Pay4Bugs software testing market](https://www.pay4bugs.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com). Initially, we had a button to support login via Yahoo! OpenIDs, but found out just before launch that they imposed additional requirements on rely-parties beyond those imposed by all other major OpenID providers. Yahoo! decided to require the use of an infrequently used section of the OpenID 2.0 specification that checks to make sure the URL you are sent back to is an approved and advertised entry point for the rely party. It is as if they just read the specification and developed their OpenID support based on that without looking at how OpenID is used in the real world. (I will go into more detail about the specific problems we encountered in the last post of my [Radical Technology Decisions series](https://larrysalibra.com/radical-technology-decisions/))

Yahoo! seems to suffer from a cultural problem where engineers design new features with little to no thought to either usability or how various technologies are used in the real world. Their OpenID support is a case-and-point demonstration of this problem and far from the only example.

Let's look at Yahoo! Mail as an example. Anyone that has developed a new webapp has probably run into [the problem where all email sent by your server goes to Yahoo! Mail's spam box](http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&newwindow=1&q=email+goes+to+yahoo+spam&btnG=Search&ref=larrysalibra.com) even if you follow every rule and standard to (sign with DKIM, publish SPF records, sign with DomainKeys) demonstrate your email is legitimate. DomainKeys was even *developed by Yahoo!* and yet they still send DomainKey-verified emails to spam. How useful is an email box where email of only big known providers gets through and emails from the latest and greatest startups get sent to spam? To a tech person or a business person, not very useful. But surely, if Yahoo! engineers actually used their own email system, they would be aware of this problem?

Neither Google's Gmail and OpenID implementation suffer from these deal-breaker problems. In the one place where Google's OpenID implementation departed from common practice (ie. its use of directed identity), Google [clearly explains how its implementation works](http://code.google.com/apis/accounts/docs/OpenID.html?ref=larrysalibra.com) and how to make it work with your rely party. Is it any wonder that Yahoo! keeps losing marketshare? At this rate, perhaps they should consider changing their name to Ya...Who?
### Pay4Bugs finds Ubuntu 8.04 Ruby On Rails IPv6 Bug
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/pay4bugs-finds-ubuntu-804-ruby-on-rails-ipv6-bug/
Last updated: 2009-03-10T16:00:00.000Z
The launch of [Pay4Bugs](http://www.pay4bugs.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com) was unique not only because it is one of the first real products launched from day one with dual stack IPv4/IPv6 access, but also because Pay4Bugs, along with its sister [IPv6-enabled OpenID provider, 87id](http://87id.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com), is the first site to make possible OpenID sign on using exclusively IPv6 in a production environment. That is to say, the two make the first known IPv6-enabled commercial OpenId provider and relying party combination.

Knowing that some aspects of the software supporting this configuration may not have had extensive real life testing in production IPv6 environments, I [invited friends on The Great IPv6 Experiment mailing list](http://mail.your.org/pipermail/v6test/2009-February/000434.html?ref=larrysalibra.com) to help us give IPv6 access to Pay4Bugs and 87id a thorough shakedown.

For those of you not familiar with the[ Pay4Bugs Software Testing Market](http://www.pay4bugs.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com), Pay4Bugs allows software developers to post their production or pre-production software or website and offer a [reward or "bug bounty" to testers](https://www.pay4bugs.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com) who find and report bugs.

# Target Acquired

[![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2009/03/ipv6bugsmall.png)](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2009/03/ipv6buglarge.png?ref=larrysalibra.com) 

OpenId/IPv6 Pay4Bugs bug report screenshot (click for full image)

Besides finding and reporting several non-IPv6 related Pay4Bugs typo and glitches, one IPv6-enabled tester helped us locate a rather serious problem in our IPv6 stack.

The Pay4Bugs tester reported that during OpenID login, the relying party contacted his IPv6 enabled OpenID server via IPv4 instead of IPv6\. To see the original full bug report, you can click on Pay4Bugs bug report screenshot at the right.

Before approving the bug, I first verified the tester's problem was reproducible by logging into Pay4Bugs with my 87id OpenID while watching the 87id Apache access log. The log confirmed Pay4Bugs's OpenID subsystem was in fact connecting to 87id to conduct discovery via IPv4 instead of IPv6 consistent with the tester's report.

# Drilling down to the root cause

## Simple things first

From years of experience, I have learned that when trying to solve potentially complex problems, it is best to make sure the simple things are working as intended. Computer not turning on? Is it plugged in? Car not starting? Is there gas in the tank? 

In this case, the first step was to double-check on both the 87id and Pay4Bugs servers that IPv6 connectivity between the two worked. A simple ping from one to the other verified that DNS AAAA record lookup and IPv6 routing was working fine.

Since the only services on the machines to display strange IPv6 behavior to this point were the Pay4Bugs and 87id web apps, this led me to suspect a problem with the Ruby on Rails stack.

## Search amongst the gems

Pay4Bugs uses the excellent [ruby-openid gem](http://openidenabled.com/ruby-openid/?ref=larrysalibra.com) to handle OpenID login. Examining the source code to locate the section responsible for connecting to the OpenID provider for OpenID discovery indicated that it relies on the "Net::HTTP" standard library to create the requisite HTTP connection. Nothing regarding DNS look up or selecting IPv4 versus IPv6 was handled at this level. 

## Testing Ruby

With the ruby-openid most likely eliminated from the list of suspects, I set about testing Net::HTTP to see if using it directly to open an HTTP connection to an IPv6-enabled server would result in an IPv6 connection or an IPv4 connection. 

{% codeblock %}  
irb(main):001:0> require 'net/http'  
\=> true  
irb(main):002:0> Net::HTTP.get\_print '87id.com', '/index.html'  
{% endcodeblock %}

From the 87id Apache log:

{% codeblock %}  
210.21.67.21 - - \[07/Mar/2009:17:26:21 +0000\] "GET /index.html HTTP/1.1" 404 947 "-" "-"  
{% endcodeblock %}

The 87id server logs did in fact indicate that our attempt to download the non-existent file index.html were coming via IPv4\. This ruled out Apache, [Passenger](http://www.modrails.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com) (mod\_rails) and even Rails as possible culprits.

I knew from the success of our earlier ping test that the problem wasn't a problem with the underlying operating system's address resolution code. Therefore, the next logical step was to examine Ruby's address resolution logic.

{% codeblock %}  
irb(main):001:0> require "socket"  
\=> true  
irb(main):002:0> IPSocket.getaddress "87id.com"  
\=> "65.19.178.122"  
{% endcodeblock %}

Ah HA! Problem located! If it was behaving properly, it would have given us the following result:

{% codeblock %}  
irb(main):001:0> require "socket"  
\=> true  
irb(main):002:0> IPSocket.getaddress "87id.com"  
\=> "2001:470:1f04:18a::87"  
{% endcodeblock %}

# Recompile Ruby

A search of the Ruby source code revealed references to a compile time configuration option "--with-lookup-order-hack (expected INET, INET6 or UNSPEC)". Ubuntu wouldn't have shipped a deliberately IPv6-broken Ruby stack on an IPv6-enabled operating system would they?? Apparently, the answer is "Yes." 

Simply compiling a fresh copy of Ruby 1.8.6 and installing fixed the Ruby IPv6 look up problem.

# Houston, we have another problem

After updating our staging server with the fresh copy of Ruby, despite the irb test succeeding, OpenID login would STILL occur over IPv4\. Beginning to suspect this might not be just a Ruby problem, I tried to telnet directly to the 87id webserver. 

{% codeblock %}  
larry@passat:\~$ telnet 87id.com 80  
Trying 2001:470:1f04:18a::87...  
Trying 65.19.178.122...  
Connected to 87id.com.  
Escape character is '^\]'.  
^\]{% endcodeblock %}

telnet>

Address lookup was working properly, but it just was not connecting via IPv6\. I started to suspect our IPv6 firewall was configured improperly and blocking all outgoing TCP connections.

After much tweaking and re-tweaking our ip6tables scripts, I was convinced the firewall was configured properly just not behaving as the configuration said it should. Most notably, the kernel seemed to be just ignoring the "state RELATED,ESTABLISHED" settings and simply dropping the TCP "ACK SYN" packet (see below) sent as a response to a new TCP connection request as if it was a new, unknown connection instead of one that I had initiated myself.

{% codeblock %}  
root@sophia:/etc/ip6wall# telnet 87id.com 80  
Trying 2001:470:1f04:18a::87...  
Mar 7 19:41:12 sophia kernel: DROP INPUT IN=sit1 OUT= MAC=fe:fd:42:a0:8d:76:00:0c:db:fc:8b:59:08:00:45:00:00:64:db:8e:00:00:1c:29:42:4e:48:34:68:4a:42:a0:8d:76 TUNNEL=72.52.104.74->66.160.141.118 SRC=2001:0470:1f04:018a:0000:0000:0000:0087 DST=2001:0470:1f04:0ba4:0000:0000:0000:0002 LEN=80 TC=0 HOPLIMIT=63 FLOWLBL=0 PROTO=TCP SPT=80 DPT=50756 WINDOW=5632 RES=0x00 ACK SYN URGP=0  
{% endcodeblock %}

A bit more googling revealed that IPv6 TCP connection tracking did not work on the (relatively old) kernel version that we were using. Updating to a newer kernel and a quick reboot solved the problem.

Thanks again to the Pay4Bugs tester who helped us find and correct this problem!

Please let us know of anymore IPv6-related bugs (or any bugs for that matter) by leaving a comment here or logging in as a[ Pay4Bugs Tester](https://www.pay4bugs.com/testers?ref=larrysalibra.com) and filing a bug report under the appropriate assignment!
### Visual Representation of the size of IPv6 versus IPv4
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/visual-representation-of-the-size-of-ipv6-versus-ipv4/
Last updated: 2009-03-08T16:00:00.000Z
[Aaron Toponce](http://pthree.org/?ref=larrysalibra.com) over at[ Planet Ubuntu](http://planet.ubuntu.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com) has an [excellent article with graphics](http://pthree.org/2009/03/08/the-sheer-size-of-ipv6/?ref=larrysalibra.com) that really puts the vast size of the IPv6 address space in perspective in relationship to the almost used up IPv4 address space in perspective.

I would just add that 64bits of the 128bit IPv6 address space do not necessarily have to be dedicated to the MAC address of one's Ethernet adapter. [Google (IPv6-only link)](http://ipv6.google.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com) does not do this on their servers and neither do we on our IPv6-enabled sites.

On a related note, the testing of OpenID login via IPv6 with [Pay4Bugs](http://www.pay4bugs.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com) as the OpenID IPv6-enabled rely party and [IPv6-enabled OpenID provider](http://87id.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com) that some kind souls on the [The Great Pv6 Experiment mailing list](http://mail.your.org/mailman/listinfo/v6test?ref=larrysalibra.com) had been helping with uncovered a least one bug in the Ubuntu 8.04 Ruby on Rails stack. We were able to fix the bug and a post will be coming soon regarding the details and the fix.
### High School Calculus and Economic Recovery
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/high-school-calculus-and-economic-recovery/
Last updated: 2009-03-06T16:00:00.000Z
{% blockquote New York Times [http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/07/business/economy/07jobs.html?pagewanted=2](http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/07/business/economy/07jobs.html?pagewanted=2&ref=larrysalibra.com) Continuing Job Losses May Signal Broad Economic Shift %}  
"But history also shows that when fear \[from the financial crisis\] lifts, the economy returns not to normalcy but to wherever it was when the crisis began, Mr. Harris said. That means that even if order is restored to the financial system, the economy will still be staring at a recession."  
{% endblockquote %}

If health of the economy is represented by a continuous function f(*t*) where *t* is time and a "financial crisis" < recession < "normalcy", then the [intermediate value theorem](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermediate%5Fvalue%5Ftheorem?ref=larrysalibra.com) proves this comment.
### Radical Technology Decisions - No IE6 Support, A Reality Check
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/radical-technology-decisions-no-ie6-support-a-reality-check/
Last updated: 2009-03-04T16:00:00.000Z
*This post is the third in [a series about radical technology choices](https://larrysalibra.com/2009/02/19/radical-technology-decisions/) in [Pay4Bugs](http://www.pay4bugs.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com).*

In the first post in this series, I listened among our radical technology decisions the decision to launch our new [Pay4Bugs Software Testing Marketplace](http://www.pay4bugs.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com) without any support for Internet Explorer 6\. In the interests of full disclosure, let me first say that in the days since the first post in this series, I have partially backtracked on my decision to not support IE6 in [Pay4Bugs](http://www.pay4bugs.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com). After explaining the rational behind the initial decision, I will go into the reason we now partially support IE6.

## A dinosaur

IE 6 is simply a dinosaur. It was released in mid-2001 almost 8 years ago at which time it did not properly support the standards Microsoft advertised it as supporting. Despite number security and bug fixes over the 6+ years until its replacement IE7 was released, it continues to only partially support CSS 2 and behave significantly different from web standards. 

The length of time between its initial release and its replace is often attributed to the near monopoly status achieved by Microsoft in the browser market corning nearly 95% the marketplace in 2002 and 2003\. As the browser monopoly, there was little incentive to spend resources innovating and developing a replacement version.

## Time Cost

When developing the [Attigo Virtual Language Immersion](http://www.attigo.us/?ref=larrysalibra.com) platform, we learned the hard way that making web pages display properly on Internet Explorer 6 takes significantly more time than achieving consistent display on all modern browsers. You can pretty much write to the XHTML 1.1 and CSS 2.1 standards and your pages will display consistently across Firefox, Opera, Safari, Google Chrome and yes even Internet Explorer 7\. 

One of the biggest problems with IE6 is that it does not support transparent PNG images. This means that if you have an image that is not a perfect rectangle, you need to include a background color in the image. This means that your background in the image when placed on the page must match up down to pixel-level accuracy with the background of your site.

## Design for your Market

Attigo was designed for the relatively conservative educational market. While students often have the latest and greatest on their personal computers, browser standards for machines owned by educational institutions are often set on a campus-wide basis and only periodically revised and updated. With this in mind, IE6 support for [Attigo](http://www.attigo.us/?ref=larrysalibra.com) was a no brainer. 

In contrast, our [Pay4Bugs Software Bug Marketplace](http://www.pay4bugs.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com) targets the technology market which, by its very nature, tends to consist to a large part of early adopters. Since members of this market are responsible for developing the latest and greatest software products, they are much more likely to personally use up-to-date browsers.

Based on this initial analysis both of the target market and the time cost of supporting IE6, I made the decision that we would not support Internet Explorer 6 in Pay4Bugs.

## Fast Forward to Reality

This initially worked great. We developed the site, the look, and the graphics. We even made a nice little sticky note-like pop up that appears when a visitor uses an old version of Internet Explorer asking the vistor to upgrade. We tested the site around our office here in Guangzhou and on our computers at home. We even sent links to pre-production versions of the site to have friends and family in the States and Europe test it out as well without telling them that it would not support IE6\. No problems reported. 

Our reality check came soon after launch when we started to recruit Chinese language testers here in China. 90+% of browsers in China are either Internet Explorer 6 or some third-party browser that is essentially IE6.

I already knew this about the general web population in Mainland China. High piracy rates mean that, for all intents and purposes, the entire country runs the same Windows XP SP3 + IE6 + Microsoft Office 2003 + other pirated software ghost image that they give you when you buy a computer even if that computer was sold with a legitimate licensed version of Windows Vista. Additionally, mainland China sites including banks and online commerce sites often only will work on Windows XP and IE6.

I always assumed from working with my (excellent) development team here that most people who had anything to do with web development would probably use anything but IE6\. My theory was quickly proven wrong.

## Survey the Damage and Adjust

Immediately, we started getting in complaints from Internet Explorer 6-using techies that the site was just about unusable on IE6\. It was clear that if we wanted to get any users in the China market, we would have to investigate the problem and adjust our practices. We fired up a copy in Microsoft's Virtual PC Internet Explorer 6 test image and found out that because of IE6 CSS issues, the registeration and login forms were pretty much unusable. 

## Compromise for an International Site

In the end, we decided to support IE6 from a usability perspective but not guarantee that the site will look its best. We spent a day adjusting CSS and tweaking the layout so that IE6 renders Pay4Bugs with pretty much the same result as other browsers. However, we decided to stick with our transparent PNG images which means some pages, like the Tester Login page, look a bit weird. 

The decision to continue using transparant PNGs and not fully support IE6 still provides us a large time savings when laying out images in that there is no need to consider pixel-perfect matching of an image's background with the site background.

We hope that those people who are bothered by the display inconsistencies will take the time to [upgrade to a more recent browser](http://www.pay4bugs.com/en%5FUS/client/faq?ref=larrysalibra.com#upgrade%5Fbrowser). Some will. Most probably won't. But at least the large portions of the Mainland China tech market we were being turned away by our browser support choice will no longer feel completely unwelcome.
### Radical Technology Decisions - Dual Stack IPv6/IPv4
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/radical-technology-decisions-dual-stack-ipv6ipv4/
Last updated: 2009-02-20T16:00:00.000Z
*[This post is the second in a series about radical technology choices](https://larrysalibra.com/2009/02/19/radical-technology-decisions/) in [Pay4Bugs](http://www.pay4bugs.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com).*

In my previous post, I discussed our decision to make [several radical technology choices](https://larrysalibra.com/2009/02/19/radical-technology-decisions/) in designing the new [Pay4Bugs software testing service](http://www.pay4bugs.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com). In this article, I will discuss the decision to launch Pay4Bugs with IPv6 enabled from the beginning.

## What is IPv6?

For those of you that are not familiar with IPv6, it is the next-generation addressing scheme for the Internet. Each computer connected directly to the Internet needs to have a unique address so that other computers can send data like web pages and videos to it. The current version of the Internet Protocol, IPv4, was defined over 28 years ago in 1981\. It only provides for a bit over 4 billion (4,294,967,296 to be exact) addresses. That means that only 4 billion computers can be directly connected to the Internet at one time. 

4 billion sounds like a lot. After all, there are only 6.7 billion people in the world. One would think (and be correct) that most of these people do not have computers and even if each human had a computer, they probably would not be online at the same time. In theory, this number should be more than enough.

## So, what's the catch? I don't see the problem!

The catch is that theory is not reality. The term "computer" actually means a lot more than just PCs. Right now, many, if not most of the almost 3 billion mobile phones in use worldwide are also small computers that can go online and each need an Internet address. Most of the equipment that runs the Internet such as routers, gateways, and firewalls, are also computers that need their own address. Many digital TV cable boxes are also computers that need Internet addresses. There are also initiatives to network other things such as home appliances, security cameras, thermostats, baby monitors, etc. 

Each person many have multiple if not dozens of devices that either require or could benefit from connectivity to the Internet.

## Poorly allocated, IP address waste

To compound the problem, the real number of usable IPv4 addresses is much less than 4 billion as various blocks of addresses are reserved and allocation methods and technological constraints result in a lot of waste. To illustrate, the United States [has over 1.3 billion IPv4 addresses with a population of only 300 million](http://www.modernlifeisrubbish.co.uk/article/ips-assigned-per-capita?ref=larrysalibra.com). Certain large companies and US government agencies (such as the Department of Defense) own one or more class A blocks of over 16.7 million IPv4 addresses each. In comparison, one class A block has more addresses than many other countries have in total. 

Available IPv4 address space is estimated to be exhausted in about two years (as of the date of this post) as you can see by the counter below. Economists will point thatIPv4 will never run out because as the shortage increases, the price for an IPv4 address will just increase.

This is already happening. In the USA, where IPv4 addresses are still plentiful, our ISP charges $1 per month for each additional address. However, in our Guangzhou, China office, China Unicom charges 100 CNY (almost $15) per month for each IPv4 address because addresses are much more scare than in the States. At some point the price for additional IPv4 addresses will be such that many otherwise useful services will either be priced out of the market or never even have the opportunity to exist.

## Use a router, stupid.

Most residential Internet Service Providers, at least in North America, only give their customers one address. Customers have figured out that if they if they buy a router that uses a technology called NAT (Network Address Translation) that assigns non-unique addresses to all of the computers in the house and use the one unique Internet address provided by theISP as its own address. With this configuration, browsing websites, sending emails and much other general Internet usage works pretty well. 

## Great! So we all need NAT! Address problem solved!

Wrong! NAT fails as a solution to this problem anytime another computer on the Internet needs to talk to your computer that is connected to a NAT router. This happens anytime you make or receive aVoIP call or video call using something like Skype . Other computers on the Internet have no way to know which computers are behind your NAT router or how to send messages to them unless those computers tell them first. 

A good analogy is to imagine your name is Joe and you have a cousin named Jane Smith who works at The Great Big Widget Company. If you send a letter addressed "Attn: Joe's Cousin, The Great Big Widget Company, 123 Main Street,Anytown , USA," your message would have very little chance of reaching Jane. The solution would obviously to address the letter to the attention of "Jane Smith." The problem is, the Great Big Widget Company has decided to assign employees numbers and the mail room can only look up an employee's location in the company directory if the employee number is written on the mail. The mail clerk has no way to find out Jane's employee number and you have no way to find out Jane's employee number.

The NAT router is the mail room and the company directory and your cousin Jane is actually Jane's computer. To get a better idea of complexity of the real world situation, imagine Jane also frequently works at other companies (she's a consultant) where they assign her a different employee number that changes periodically. She also is not told which company she is working at each day and is forbidden from asking the company. Her only way to find out where she is working is to send a letter to you and ask you to see which company's mailroom stamped the envelope. This just like a computer behind a NAT router has no idea which address the ISP has assigned to the router and no way to directly find out by asking the router. It can only send request to some other computer on the Internet and ask it "Where did this come from? Where am I?"

## So how does VoIP work anyways?

There are several methods to work around the problem of not being able to directly reach another computer on the Internet. In short, these methods, while they are successful much of the time, are not always successful. If you have ever had a Skype call fail or disconnect, it is more than likely the problem was caused by NAT. Perhaps your router's address changed. Perhaps your router forgot that the unmarked data coming from your partner in the call is supposed to go to your computer. 

## Why do you care?

I care about this problem because our company's namesake product, the [Attigo virtual language immersion service](http://www.attigo.us/?ref=larrysalibra.com), has to deal with the problems caused by NAT on a daily basis. In fact, a large portion of our development time was spent understanding and working around various problems caused by NAT for theVoIP component of the service. 

If IPv6 was widely adopted and the IPv4 shortage problem did not exist, developing the Attigo service would have taken significantly less time. Online voice and video chat products such as Skype and Google Talk would also benefit with much high rates of success, higher quality, and lower call drop rate.

## A Classic Chicken and Egg Problem

IPv6 adoption has been slow mainly because few sites of any importance are available via IPv6 with the result that customers and their ISPs have little reason to use it. I started IPv6Links.net as a hobby a few years ago to create a [directory of sites available via IPv6](http://ipv6links.net/?ref=larrysalibra.com). In the years since, most IPv6-enabled sites that have been posted to it are either blogs or other sites talking about IPv6\. Few businesses beyond a few niche hosting providers have made their website available via IPv6\. 

At least it was that way up until recently when [Google started making its properties available via IPv6](http://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/?ref=larrysalibra.com) on an opt-in basis.

After our work on bringing the [Attigo service](http://www.attigo.us/?ref=larrysalibra.com) to market, I decided that we would make our future products available via IPv6\. My motivation is to do our small part in spurring adoption of IPv6 by at very least demonstrating that making sites available via IPv6 does not cause undue difficulty to customers and can be done with minimal additional effort on the part of development and system administration teams.

It is a decision that pretty much any business school management type or venture capital investor would criticize and shoot down in a minute as being a risky decision with little relation to the core business that adds needless complexity.

They would be right, but we did it anyways.

## You decide.

Let us know how it works out for you. Visit Pay4Bugs and [post your website or software to be tested](http://www.pay4bugs.com/en%5FUS/client/overview?ref=larrysalibra.com) and while you're at it, sign up to be a Pay4Bugs tester and [earn money testing software](http://www.pay4bugs.com/en%5FUS/tester/overview?ref=larrysalibra.com). Drop us an email at support at pay4bugs.com or leave a comment on this blog if you for whatever reason can't access the site. Perhaps you are one of the minority that our enabling of IPv6 on the site has breaks your access.
### Radical Technology Decisions
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/radical-technology-decisions/
Last updated: 2009-02-18T16:00:00.000Z
Designing [Pay4Bugs](http://pay4bugs.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com), our new global [software testing marketplace](http://pay4bugs.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com), provided us with much more flexibility in our technology choices when compared with designing our company's namesake product [Attigo Virtual Language Immersion](http://www.attigo.us/?ref=larrysalibra.com). Attigo's target market is the education market. Schools and educators, understandability, tend to be relatively conservative when it comes to adopting the latest and greatest in Internet technology. In comparison, the Pay4Bugs [software testing service](http://pay4bugs.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com) is designed specifically with developers that design tomorrow's cutting edge software products in mind.

One of the reasons it takes so long for new technologies to make it into widely used products is because of the traditional business school approach to evaluating risk. Using this approach, anything new and not widely used is labeled as risky and therefore undesirable while anything in widespread use and with a track record of success is considered safe and desirable. When applied to technology start ups, this approach goes on to say that creating a new product is risky enough without having to troubleshoot fringe technologies, explain new processes to customers or risk alienating x% of your potential audience because their system does not support your choice of platform.

With Pay4Bugs and the early adopters we expect will make up the bulk of its audience, we decided to go out on a limb by incorporating some new technologies and making some decisions about the platforms we support that are not yet mainstream but that we either think will have the potential to in one way or another make for a better user experience.

The decisions we made are as follows:

- OpenID\-based login as an option for customers
- OpenID\-based login as mandatory for testers.
- Dual stack IPv4/IPv6 from day 1
- No support for IE6
We made these decisions because it is the direction in which I believe the web is headed or needs to be headed. In later posts, I will further explore the rational behind each of these decisions and the implications.
### Ruby Regex Tool
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/ruby-regex-tool/
Last updated: 2008-12-11T16:00:00.000Z
Awesome web-based tool that helps to generate ruby regex! [http://www.rubular.com/](http://www.rubular.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com)
### New Supplement Price Comparison Launches
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/new-supplement-price-comparison-launches/
Last updated: 2008-11-24T16:00:00.000Z
Congratulations to Friends at [ClutchWave LLC](http://www.clutchwave.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com) for launching [PricePlow.com](http://priceplow.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com), soon to be the leader in [shopping for supplements](http://priceplow.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com). Whatever you're looking for, be it [protein](http://www.priceplow.com/cheap%5Fsupplements/product%5Fcategories/1/Protein?ref=larrysalibra.com), vitamins, weightloss products, fatty acids or amino acids, [Priceplow](http://priceplow.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com) will help you find the flavor you want at the best price.
### Amazon Cloudfront vs Cachefly - Performance Benchmark
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/quick-review-amazon-cloudfront-vs-cachefly-vs-amazon-s3/
Last updated: 2008-11-19T16:00:00.000Z
Amazon Web Service's new Content Data Network, [Cloudfront](http://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/?ref=larrysalibra.com) was launched two days ago. Previously [Cachefly](http://www.shareasale.com/r.cfm?B=30596&U=309456&M=7037&ref=larrysalibra.com) had been the premier choice for Small and Medium size businesses looking for a content data network to speed up downloads for the users.

I was mainly interested in download speed in the Greater China region and North America.

To test relative speeds, I downloaded the same 20 megabyte file at several different locations from each of Cachefly, Amazon S3 and Amazon Cloudfront and noted the range of speeds.

**New York City - Time Warner Cable (Queens)**

- Cachefly: 1100 - 1200 kilobytes/s
- S3: 1000 - 1100 kilobytes/s
- Cloudfront: 1100-1200 kilobytes/s
**Cleveland, Ohio - Time Warner Cable** 
- Cachefly: 88 - 172 kilobytes/s
- S3: 65 - 80 kilobytes/s
- Cloudfront: 74 - 92 kilobytes/s

**Taipei**

- Cachefly: 230-240 kilobytes/s
- S3: 140 - 150 kilobytes/s
- Cloudfront: 170 - 180 kilobytes/s

**Guangzhou, China - China Netcom 4 mbit dedicated fiber**

- Cachefly: 430 - 495 kilobytes/s
- S3: 220 - 240 kilobytes/s
- Cloudfront: 440 - 490 kilobytes/s

**Fremont, California - Hurricane Electric**

- Cachefly: 3580 - 3990 kilobytes/s
- S3: 270 - 850 kilobytes/s
- Cloudfront: 5940 - 6350 kilobytes/s

**Conclusion**  
When [Cloudfront](http://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront?ref=larrysalibra.com) is fast, it is really fast! It wins out for top speed and for flexibility given how like all Amazon Web Services offerings is controlled by an API.

[Cachefly](http://www.shareasale.com/r.cfm?B=30596&U=309456&M=7037&ref=larrysalibra.com) is still in our experience the fastest overall in the regions that are important to us. They also do not suffer from some of the restrictions Cloudfront places on updating files. With Cloudfront, updates can take up to 24 hours to reach edge servers. [Cachefly](http://www.shareasale.com/r.cfm?B=30596&U=309456&M=7037&ref=larrysalibra.com) does not have this problem. Updates made by ftp or sftp appear momentarily across their network.
### Symmetric Cone NAT using Linux IPTables
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/symmetric-cone-nat-using-linux-iptables/
Last updated: 2008-04-14T16:00:00.000Z
I spent quite a long time googling for a way of re-creating symmetric cone nat in house without buying Cisco hardware. Hopefully someone else will find this useful. This was done on Ubuntu 8.04 beta.

```
eth1 = public ip
eth0 = lan ip

```

```bash
echo "1" > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward
/sbin/iptables --flush
/sbin/iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -o eth1 -j MASQUERADE --random
/sbin/iptables -A FORWARD -i eth1 -o eth0 -m state --state RELATED,ESTABLISHED -j ACCEPT
/sbin/iptables -A FORWARD -i eth0 -o eth1 -j ACCEPT

```
### Rails and J2EE Deployment
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/rails-and-j2ee-deployment/
Last updated: 2008-01-13T16:00:00.000Z
[Hongli Lai asks why some think Rails deployment is difficult](http://izumi.plan99.net/blog/index.php/2008/01/14/what-is-so-hard-about-rails-deployment/?ref=larrysalibra.com). First, a disclaimer. I am not a Ruby on Rails expert. I have only used Rails for one small production project. I found both Ruby and Rails quite easy to pick up coming from a J2EE background. What can be done with such a small investment in learning and in time writing code is quite amazing. However, I, like others, found deployment to be surprisingly inconsistent with the rest of the Ruby on Rails experience.

First let me begin by adding some detail to Hongli Lai's description of deploying a J2EE app. A WAR is just a ZIP file of your application's directory structure that ends in ".war". You don't need to create a WAR to deploy J2EE apps, you can also just upload files to the server like PHP. Depending on what framework(s) you use (Struts, Spring, Faces, etc) you may need to edit XML configuration files. Stock JSP, like PHP, doesn't *require* any configuration files.

The trouble I have had with deploying Rails is the difficulty of ensuring the same gems are installed on the deployment machine as on the development machine. In my view, the confusing issue is that gems by default seem to install system-wide or user-wide unless you configure your Rails apps to look in a specific directory. This is in comparison to J2EE where libraries are by convention usually all in your application's directory structure (/WEB-INF/libs) so you can just zip up the directory and give it to an installation of Tomcat (or any J2EE application server) and it will *just work*.

I never understand why with the strong emphasis on convention in the Rails development model, why the deployment process includes system administration tasks like gem installation. Why isn't it convention that gems and Rails are all installed in a place inside the application's directory structure so as to be independent of whatever versions the rest of the system has installed? The Ruby on Rails deployment model seems to default to assuming the developer has superuser control of the deployment machine. However, this is often not the case both in corporate environments and shared hosting environments.
### OpenID & OAuth Latency - Painful User Experience
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/openid-oauth-latency-painful-user-experience/
Last updated: 2007-09-22T16:00:00.000Z
Draft 1 [OAuth 1.0 spec](http://oauth.net/documentation/spec?ref=larrysalibra.com) was [announced](http://identity20.com/?p=131&ref=larrysalibra.com) yesterday. By my count, it requires no less than 6 HTTP request/response round trips assuming the user is already logged in to the service provider.

If the user is NOT logged into the service provider and has to log in before approving or denying the consumer's request, the number of round trips is increased by a minimum of two for a site using traditional user name/password authentication or even more if the site uses OpenID. Heaven forbid the user isn't logged into her OpenID provider. In this case the number of request/response round trips skyrockets. Imagine the visible user experience in this case:

1. Initiate protected resource request from service provider
2. Redirected to service provider's site to approve request....but wait user is not logged into service provider's site...
3. Prompt for OpenID
4. Redirect to OpenID site to verify OpenID...but wait user is not logged into the OpenID provider's site
5. Prompt for OpenID provider's login credentials
6. Prompt to approve service provider's login request at the OpenID provider site
7. Prompt to approve the consumer's protected resource request at the service provider's site
8. Wait as the service provider redirects back to the consumer with the approved request token....  
...which then redirects back to service provider to get the access token...  
...which then redirects back to the consumer...  
...so that the consumer can redirect back to the service provider and access the intended resource.

This may work great in the bay area where everyone is 10 ms ping time away from everyone else, but try even just a simple OpenID login to a USA-based site when you're on the Asia-side of the Pacific. Even when you're already logged in to your OpenID provider, there's **significantly** more waiting than the traditional username/password authentication session.
### The Cost of Landscape versus Active Directory in the China market
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/the-cost-of-landscape-versus-active-directory-in-the-china-market/
Last updated: 2007-09-07T16:00:00.000Z
Why does a [Landscape](http://www.canonical.com/landscape?ref=larrysalibra.com)\-managed deployment of Ubuntu cost US$250 per seat per year? For my 7-seat deployment in our new China-based subsidiary, that would cost us US$1,750/year. Compare to the Microsoft Partner Program's Actionpack Subscription at HK$2,792 (\~US$350) per year. The Actionpack Subscription even provides 10 seats worth of internal-use software. That means 10 Vista licenses, 10 Office licenses and 1 license for an entire back office set up including Windows Server, Exchange and many other products. 10 seats of Ubuntu with Landscape would cost a staggering US$2,500 per year!

To put the cost difference in perspective of the local market price levels, the difference in cost is more than our entire month's payroll. That US$2,150 could pay a freshly graduated software engineer from one of China's better universities 4 year bachelor programs for 6 to 8 months.

Now of course, to be fair, the cost of Landscape also includes support from Canonical, but even if support was something we wanted, being only available in English and French, it is hardly something we would be able to make use of in China.
### How to ban smoking...
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/how-to-ban-smoking/
Last updated: 2007-09-01T16:00:00.000Z
Ohio voters passed the [SmokeFreeOhio](http://smokefreeohio.org/?ref=larrysalibra.com) late last year. Ten months after the voters spoke, the [first fines were issued against offending businesses](http://www.newsnet5.com/health/13994828/detail.html?ref=larrysalibra.com). The penalty for businesses that have ignored the will of voters for almost a year? A measly US$100\. There are bars that make more than that on the sale of one bottle of liquor or wine.

Such weak enforcement is worse than no enforcement at all. The message this sends to the market is that the state isn't really that serious about maintaining smoke-free public areas. The end result is a playing field that's not level, exactly what a state-wide public smoking ban was supposed to prevent.

Ohio should study Hong Kong on how to enforce a public smoking ban. [Hong Kong's Smoking (Public Health) Ordinance](http://www.tco.gov.hk/english/legislation/legislation%5Fsa.html?ref=larrysalibra.com) provides for much stiffer penalties for violators of the smoking ban. Individuals are liable for up to HK$5000 (\~US$640) per violation on summary conviction. They don't waste time sending letters saying "please don't violate the smoking ban." If you violate the ban, you fork over the money. The much higher fine sends a clearer message to the market about the commitment of the government to enforcement of the law and commitment to protection of public health.
### Musings on I-Names: A Skeptic Turns Supporter
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/musings-on-i-names/
Last updated: 2007-03-12T16:00:00.000Z
I am a huge fan of [OpenID](http://openid.net/?ref=larrysalibra.com). My initial interest was piqued by the promise of no longer having to remember login credentials for dozens if not hundreds of websites. The security benefits of only having to protect one set of login credentials instead of many became quickly obvious thanks to an [ebay hacker]({{ post%5Furl ebay-account-hacked-case-and-point-for-openid }}).

I must say, when I first heard about the use of URLs as identifiers, I was skeptical (and to some degree remain skeptical) that your average, not-an-early-adopter consumer will be willing to wrap her brain around the concept that a website address is sometimes also a username. To me, the most obvious identifier to use would have been the email address. Almost everyone on the internet has at least one and it is already associated with identity in everyday life.

## I-Name Skeptic

I became increasing skeptical when I heard that as an alternative to URLs, an identifier called [I-Names](http://www.inames.net/?ref=larrysalibra.com) was also part of the OpenID spec. I-Names are [XRI](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XRI?ref=larrysalibra.com) globally rooted at xri.net. This means one organization (a company in this case) has a monopoly on the issuance of I-Names.

We know from economics that monopoly suppliers have the incentive to create artificial scarcity and drive up prices. Yes, this means you have to **pay** for an I-Name. The going rate is about US$20 for an "individual I-Name" and US$55 for an "organization I-Name." Wow! Someone must have a lot of confidence the market is going to buy into I-Names even given that OpenID URLs offer many of the same benefits at little or no cost beyond a domain name registration which has almost already been paid for other reasons.

Charging more than twice the current market price for domain names for something that isn't really that valuable until the network of people that use it is pretty substantial is hardly a way to stimulate viral adoption and gain the benefits of network effect. This is especially true when OpenID URLs are out there are a direct substitute for single sign on identifiers and have a marginal cost of US$0 to the user.

## Skeptic Turns Supporter

Despite my early skepticism, I continued to read up on I-Names to figure out why intelligent people would spend so much time trying to create something that at first glance by an identity layman seemed to be a scheme to charge unsuspecting consumers US$20 for something that could basically get for free by using an OpenID provider such as [MyOpenID](http://myopenid.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com). 

[Drummond Reed](http://xri.net/=drummond?ref=larrysalibra.com) ([\=drummond](http://xri.net/=drummond?ref=larrysalibra.com)) has been one of the most visible supporters and whose posts on the OpenID mailing lists and [his blog](http://equalsdrummond.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com) have been most helpful in shedding light on why I-Names are technically superior and desirable for consumers.

## Supporter Buys-In

Convinced of the superiority and desirability of I-Names, I decided to buy my own individual I-Name. You can buy an I-Name for a number of accredited registrars. Having little info to go on, I bought mine from [2idi](http://2idi.com/?ref=larrysalibra.com) because it is one of the initial registrars. I falsely assumed that they would have the most well developed feature set and management interface. 

I have been using my I-Name to log on to OpenID sites that support it. Hopefully, once the OpenID 2.0 spec is complete, support for I-Names will be more consistently implemented. Right now sites using older OpenID spec 1.0 libraries do not accept I-Names.

Because of the less than desirable feature set of my I-Name provider and the fact that they do not yet support the latest OpenID spec, the best security practices, or provide a means to manage relying parties, I have tried without success to delegate OpenID authority using XRDS to my MyOpenID URL. Has anyone else been able to accomplish this? Perhaps 2idi is listening and could let us know if and when we will be offered a feature set more comparable to other OpenID providers?

Much of the success or failure of I-Names will resolve on getting the world at large to accept and recognize them for what they are, a unified contact handle that has the potential to replace phone numbers, email addresses, mailing addresses and more with one simple identifier all while giving users more control over their information and who is allowed to contact them and by what means. US$20 per year is way too high for anyone but the most enthusiastic early adopters to pay if that goal of mass popularization is ever to be met, at least in the beginning.

One road to adoption that seems very promising is by employers providing delegated community I-Names to their employees or websites to their users. For example:

`@example.company*Marketing*Fred.Smith < ----- This would be Fred Smith in Example Company's Marketing department.  
`  
`  
@example.company*Smithy < ----- This could be the user with nickname Smithy at Example Company's Web 2.0 application.  
`

## Help Delegating

I am interested in providing users of my yet to be launched tech start up with community I-Names. However, I have yet to find an I-name registrar website that provides information on how this could work beyond simply mentioning it is possible. 

Simply put, I imagine asking my users to provide their I-name or OpenID when registering. If they provide an OpenID, my site would issue them a new i-number and an associated community i-name under my company's organization i-name. If they provide an i-name during registration, the existing i-name's i-number would be used as their unique identifier and an a community i-name under my company's organization i-name would be issued and associated with the existing i-number.

Ideally, this could all be accomplished with an i-name registrar provided API so that we do not have to run an XRI resolver. Is this possible? Does anyone know of a detailed explanation of how something like this should be implemented?

If this is a service that i-name providers are already offering, how is it priced?

[Linksafe](http://linksafe.name/?ref=larrysalibra.com) seems to indicate that the US$55 / year fee includes the ability to delegate community i-names. Does this mean that Linksafe would provide login, contact, and forwarding services for community i-names that are created under an organization's i-name?

## The I-Name Future

I look forward to the day where I can print my i-name on my business card and people will automatically know what it is and how to use it. Unfortunately, that day will not come until the ease with which people can get i-names is closer to that of the ease with which they get OpenID URLs by both significantly reducing the price of individual i-names and making it a lot easier for websites and companies to provide their users with community i-names with a cost structure that makes sense and minimal technology investment. 

If anyone can shed more light on the questions I have raised, or point me to some answers, please leave a comment using your OpenID or I-Name.

Or contact me privately using my [i-name](http://xri.net/=larry/%28+contact%29?ref=larrysalibra.com).
### eBay Account Hacked -> Case and Point for OpenID
URL: https://larrysalibra.com/ebay-account-hacked-case-and-point-for-openid/
Last updated: 2007-02-24T16:00:00.000Z
I logged into my email today to 50+ emails from eBay. My initial reaction was:

> Great! Google's email SPAM filter has finally broken down.

Unfortunately, it was not a simple case of spoofed eBay emails making it through the trusty SPAM filter. My eBay account had been hacked. Some one had gained access to my account and posted about 50 listings for "eBay Listing Confirmed: brand new CLH LRG DEAD SERIOUS HOODIE size XXXL" of different sizes. The final two emails from eBay were "TKO NOTICE: eBay Registration Suspension - Possible Unauthorized Account Use" and "TKO NOTICE: eBay Listing(s) Removed" indicating that eBay has disabled my account and removed the unauthorized listings. Good job eBay!

## Why did this happen?

I'm not a frequent eBay user by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, I probably haven't used my account in about two years.

### Was my password strong and frequently changed?

**No, of course not!** If I used eBay on a daily basis, perhaps I would use a more difficult (and harder to remember) password and frequently generate new ones. However, like *most* users, *even* tech-savvy ones, I have other things to do with my time besides come up with, memorize and deploy new passwords. However, this problem of users having too many site credentials to remember and protect could be **avoided** if eBay and other sites adopted a decentralized authentication system such as [OpenID](http://openid.net/?ref=larrysalibra.com) in the future.

[![OpenID Login - Step 1 - IPv6Links.net](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2007/02/screenshot-openid-login-1-ipv6linksnet.png)](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2007/02/screenshot-openid-login-1-ipv6linksnet.png?ref=larrysalibra.com) 

OpenID Login - Step 1 - IPv6Links.net

OpenID works by giving each user an [URL](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/URL?ref=larrysalibra.com) or an [iname](http://inames.net/?ref=larrysalibra.com) that the user uses to identify herself to a website instead of creating a login and password for each site. After enter her OpenID (Step 1), the user is redirected to her OpenID provider to verify she is the owner of the OpenID provided (Step 2).

For those new to OpenID, I have taken screenshots of a hypothetical AOL user with screen name "YourSN" and OpenID "[http://openid.aol.com/YourSN](http://openid.aol.com/YourSN?ref=larrysalibra.com)" trying to log on to [ipv6links.net](http://ipv6links.net/?ref=larrysalibra.com), my testbed for IPv6, OpenID, and other next-generation web technologies.

[![OpenID Login - Step 2 - AOL' 'OpenID Login - Step 2 - AOL](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2007/02/screenshot-openid-login-2-aol.png)](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e4/74/e474b4cb-cbee-4c30-844d-ae523b708967/content/images/2007/02/screenshot-openid-login-2-aol.png?ref=larrysalibra.com) 

OpenID Login - Step 2 - AOL' 'OpenID Login - Step 2 - AOL

Using OpenID, each person would only need to have one OpenID and could use the same OpenID to log on to any number of sites. The benefit of this is that abstracting the verification of a users identity away from the site to which she is logging in plus reducing the number of identities for which she must remember credentials allows advanced security techniques could be used to protect her identity.

Her OpenID would be better protected by simply selecting a stronger password and changing it frequently. It is much easier to frequently change passwords if one must only change it in one place instead of on every site on the Internet. [Two factor authentication techniques](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-factor%5Fauthentication?ref=larrysalibra.com) such as [SecurID](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Securid?ref=larrysalibra.com) or having the user answer a series of predefined questions could be used.

## All of your eggs in one basket?

Some would argue that OpenID or other such web-based [single sign on](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single%5Fsign%5Fon?ref=larrysalibra.com) systems are akin to putting all of your eggs in one basket. There is some truth to this, in that if your OpenID is compromised, criminals can potentially access all of the sites where you use that identifier. However, the nice thing about having all of your eggs in one basket, is that it is much more feasible to fiercely guard one or two baskets to make it much harder for any Internet fox to get to your eggs than it is to guard the dozens of baskets that exist when users are forced to maintain a user name and password for each website.

### Choose the most secure basket for your eggs

With the **status quo** users are forced to store information regarding their identity in whatever method a website offers. Identity storage and protection are usually not the core competencies of most websites including places like eBay. OpenID's decentralization allows users in the free market to choose to put their proverbial eggs in the basket of an OpenID provider whose core competency and **raison d'être** is identity management and with a reputation for the most secure basket.