You Say You Want | a Revolution

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—when the blockchain's promise of perfect transparency crumbled under scrutiny—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 in a trustless system, and the maddening gap between crypto's utopian promises and its grubby reality. Part technical memoir, part warning, part love letter to abandoned ideals, this collection captures the moment when Web3 became Web 2.5, then Web 2.1, then—let's be honest—just Web2 with extra friction and worthless tokens. The code remains, waiting for dreamers who still believe the original promise was worth keeping.

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 Template University, an MS in Comptuer Science from The University of Pennsylvania, and an MFA in Poetry from Rosemont College. Rush has been writing about technology since the days of 8K floppy drives. He lives with his wife in near perfect harmony. You can find TrueBlocks at https://trueblocks.io and his personal writings at stonylanepress.com.