Still Here (Mostly)

Dear (hundreds of) bots and the occasional human reader,

An update on why things have been so quiet around here.

First of all, I took on a new position where I constantly come into contact with confidential information, at times crypto-related. Information I’m not allowed to share, because if I do, I literally go to jail. No exaggeration. I’m also working full-time again, instead of my old 80% regime (Yay Europe! Awesome employee rights when it comes to parental leave), so work taxes (lol, a typo for “takes”, but I’m leaving it) most of my waking time (Nay Europe! Cries in a tax rate of over 50%).

A second reason is family life, which requires so much of my time, attention... and energy. Energy, or rather the lack thereof, was the word I was looking for, because oh my, life is not always easy. Throw in three kids and, yeah, it gets pretty brutal at times. Life is not a pony camp, as someone around here famously said on TV.

I’ve also noticed that people don’t seem to share as much as they used to. In the few hours I spent scrolling through X, I didn’t come across much valuable or insightful info. It’s probably related to the hype cycle: in a bull market everything goes great, there’s plenty of attention, and it’s attractive to ride that wave. In the current bear market, that ship has failed. Same for some (most?) audit shops. They seem to be bunkering down and just doing the work, without boasting much about it on X. And speaking of X: what the fucking fucker’s fuckfest volume fuck. If you’re wondering why the world is going to shit, look no further. What an endless cesspit it still is... <insert “always has been” meme>

A couple of months ago I pointed Claude (Opus, on the free model credits when it first became available) to this website and asked what a good way forward would be content-wise. And, I shit you not, it came back with something like: “Your skills are in the perfect triangle of security, blockchain and regulation, blablabla”. I can’t look it up since I canceled my Pro subscription, but sycophancy much? Besides, I’m not going to publish content I don’t feel is genuinely valuable to you as a reader. It’s something I’ve always tried: every post should have a nugget of knowledge in it. I read the resource I’m sharing first, and I learn something, aka it adds a wrinkle to my smooth brain (as the $GME apes would phrase it on Reddit). So no, I’m not keeping this site running as a “platform” to “leverage” for job opportunities if I ever leave my job. No thank you. The site stays up, though, and I’ll post when I have something worth sharing.

Which brings me to who I did want to point out today: Peter Kacherginsky and his newsletter BlockThreat. He keeps going at it, curating the worst (or best, you decide) hacks every week, and he’s turned it (maybe it always was, forgive me) into a source of original, valuable personal insight on security. Great to witness. I’m guilty of mostly referring to and/or rehashing other people’s content, since I’m not fit to start pumping out original content on blockchain security, but hey, it’s honest work, and nobody minds a genuine referral.

On the AI front (inevitable, I know!): the folks at Cantina built Apex, an AI pentesting and code security solution trained specifically on finding code bugs (enter the great debate: general vs specific models), and supposedly it’s surprisingly effective. That smart contract audits are trending towards AI-assisted workflows isn’t surprising, but that it works in practice, kinda is. I’ll leave it there, but it’s something to ponder. On the other hand, a lot of hacks keep coming down to improper infrastructure setups and so forth (“Web2 security”, as we used to call it), and I’m not so sure that gets fixed as easily by an agent scanning a code repository and/or spinning up a node to simulate some stuff.

Anyway, I’m calling it quits for now. I hope that clears up the state of this website. See you (or hear from you) later, and don’t hesitate to reach out.

Best regards,

Rey

Disclaimer: this was originally typed on my phone on the train during my morning commute, so forgive my scattered thoughts. I cleaned it up with the help of Claude (Oh Laaaawd).

Photo by Filipe Resmini on Unsplash