Essays on the Promise and Betrayal of Web3

You Say You Want a Revolution

by Thomas Jay Rush

Web 3.0 promised to decentralize power, eliminate middlemen, and return the internet to the people. Then came the speculation, the scams, and the billionaires. The revolution got complicated.…

Get the Book About the Book

“These seventy-five essays chronicle Rush's journey from wide-eyed convert to battle-scarred engineer, building tools for a revolution that may never come.”

Praise for the Book

“Whether he's eulogizing the DAO, worrying about immutable IDs in the wrong hands, or laying out mantras for decentralized data, Rush writes with the same conviction he has put into TrueBlocks for ten years. The user owns the data or the whole thing was pointless.”
Lefteris Karapetsas rotki

“Ethereum wasn’t built in a straight line. it was messy and contradictory. This book captures that better than most. A great read for anyone who's trying to build something that matters.”
Kevin Owicki Gitcoin

“Having lived through it, I find myself screaming at the pages for someone to do something. The monster being built piece by piece. The minivan speeding toward the inevitable brick wall. Jay documents the many choices that lead to crypto’s current situation.”
Nicholas Fett Tellor

What’s Inside

The DAO Awakening

The founding trauma — when sixty million dollars disappeared and three experts could not agree on basic facts. Ten essays written in real-time as The DAO rose, fell, and was autopsied.

Building TrueBlocks

The quiet years of construction. A project gets its first name. Essays about difficulty bombs, block production, the Byzantium fork — technical, exploratory, optimistic.

III

The Decentralization Manifesto

The philosophical stakes crystallize. The RPC is not enough. Eight essays that shift from pure technical exploration to advocacy.

The Unchained Index

The technical breakthrough. Indexing what the node forgot. Seven essays documenting the core innovation: address appearances, bloom filters, the architecture that would become the Unchained Index.

The Long Grind

Pandemic years. Grant reports and growing doubts. The tools work — where are the users?

The Specification

The index is formalized. The grants continue. Recipes for a world that is not cooking. The Unchained Index specification is published. The technical problems are solved. The adoption problem remains.

VII

The Prisoners Dilemma

The machines learn to talk. The humans keep defecting. ChatGPT conversations, philosophical essays about cooperation and trust, explorations of L2s.

VIII

The Island

The view from the end. Looking back at what was built. The final grant reports, the miniDapps framework, the retrospectives.

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About the Book

In May 2016, Thomas Jay Rush watched the impossible happen: a startup with no CEO, no employees, and no board of directors raised $150 million in thirty days. Within weeks, $60 million vanished from the “unhackable” smart contract. Three experts analyzed what happened. They disagreed on basic facts.

That moment of confusion sparked a ten-year obsession. These seventy-five essays chronicle Rush’s journey from wide-eyed convert to battle-scarred engineer, building tools for a revolution that may never come. Written as dispatches from the trenches, they document the slow betrayal of decentralization’s founding principles, the rise of corporate middlemen, and the gap between crypto’s promises and its reality.

The code remains, waiting for dreamers who still believe the original promise was worth keeping.

About the Author

Thomas Jay Rush is a software engineer and writer. He’s spent more than forty years building software, from early database systems to blockchain infrastructure.

Rush holds a mathematics degree from Temple University, an MS in Computer Science from University of Pennsylvania, and an MFA in Poetry from Rosemont College. Rush has been writing about technology since the days of 8K floppy discs.

He lives with his wife in near-perfect harmony. You can find TrueBlocks at trueblocks.io and his personal writings at stonylanepress.com.