Trying to help us enter the post-internet era - Tollgate - FIPS #SovEng Avid through-hiker, over 3500km of the Pacific Crest Trail hiked and counting 🥾. I hate ads and leafblowers I don't read DM's
My goal with these reports is to also tell you a story. A story about the windy road to simple solutions. Communicating that is not always easy and the order of developments can be very confusing, also for me during the process. There is more intuition involved in these things than I'd have anticipated. And the thing about intuition is that you can only start making sense of it when reflecting back.
When the internet goes down, a lot goes down with it. All communication grinds to a halt. A functioning internet is about getting in the new order for tomorrow's groceries. It's about getting the truck-driver at the right loading-dock to pick up that load, and give him the right delivery address. Now imagine that when the internet goes down, we simply... ...wouldn't care?
This year feels different. Sovereign Engineering 06 and 07 are rolling in and I'm gearing up for it right now. Over a month of resonating brainwaves, and this time also radio waves. All above water on the island.
We're already a few weeks into '26, which means it's time for another quarterly update! TollGate, GitHub actions, Resilient networks, it's all here!
So here's the thought experiment: Can the internet work without IP addresses...?
So here's the thought experiment: Can the internet work without IP addresses...?
Aahh... Domain Names... As much of a shitcoin that it is, we still need it, for a while at least.
A summary of what i've been working on the past couple monthts and what I'll work on the next months..
Hiking a trail taught me more about building systems than any screen ever will. In nature, everything follows a flow. It is time we let technology move with that rhythm too.
This is a quick guide on how to install the tollgate OpenWRT package on a GL.Inet MT-3000 router.
This week I made some strides to get TollGate router-to-router payments finally working! Something we said 'will be possible' but hadn't reliably built yet, only some early prototypes were able to do it. And our upcoming event Zitadelle in Germany was good motivation to make the push to finally get this in our TollGate package. Maybe we'll meet you there...?
Protocol updates! In the past months we've learned so much about the gotcha's and other improvements we could make to make the TollGate protocol more usable... It was time to sit down and properly document these changes and simplify the documents a bit in the process as well.
My week 19 started with a celebration of 80 years of liberation from the Germans (we love you guys now tho 🫶🏼). It feels conflicting, we're celebrating freedom, whilst cutting down those freedoms day by day more rapidly as time progresses. Should we still celebrate...?
Alright, This weekly review's gonna be a quick one as i covered my weekend + monday about Sats 'n Facts in the last one. Which leaves us with only a few days, some of which I had to give in and rest...
There's nothing like the ability of a Nostr/Bitcoin meetup to bring your bullish-ness back to a 120%. This weekend I had the honors to be part of the Sats 'n Facts (un)conference so this update will be mostly about the conference.
This past week got me a lot of frustration with the GitHub actions runner and debugging it. Really testing my patience, but at least i saw a bit of progress. TollGate's had a nice wrap-up for the Proof Of Concept app, which some great new ideas on how to make the user experience even better!
I've been on a a bit of a TollGate tangent this week, with some incredible progress!
Holy crap what a week! I can't believe the amount of progress that came out of just these few days. And a special thanks to @Auggie for making this possible with me! Alright, let's get into it...
