I have a short set of rules I actually live by, and I want to write them down before I'm ever rich enough to be tempted to edit them.
We do not hurt. Principle over profit. Poor over immoral.
That's it. Three lines. They sound like slogans until you've had to choose against your own bank account, and then they stop being slogans and start being expensive.
"Poor over immoral" is the one people find naïve. In my experience it's the opposite of naïve. It's the most practical rule I have, because it settles ninety percent of decisions instantly and saves me the exhausting work of negotiating with myself.
I know the shape of the other path exactly. I spent a decade in industries built on nudging people toward things they didn't need. I was very good at it. I could optimize a funnel until it hummed. I know precisely how to make money by being a little bit worse than I should be, at scale.
Which is why the rule matters. It's not a fence around temptations I don't understand. It's a fence around the ones I understand perfectly.
The through-line in everything I build now is the same. I'm most alive when a vulnerable person is being harmed by a system they don't understand and can't see. That's the cipher — privacy for people who can't afford a security team. That's TreeSearch — ranking that can't be bought by whoever has the most money. That's the journalism — surveillance infrastructure explained in language a normal person can follow.
It's all one instinct. Take the machinery that's being used against people who never agreed to it, and turn on the lights.
I don't get to feel superior about this. I helped build some of the machinery. The reason I can explain how these systems manipulate people is that I did the manipulating for a living. This isn't a saint's résumé. It's a defector's.
"Defiance in love" is the phrase I keep coming back to. Not defiance as anger — I have plenty of anger, but anger builds nothing. Defiance as the refusal to accept that the way things are is the way they have to be, done because you love something, not because you hate someone.
I love my son. I love the idea of a person being able to protect their own words. I love the stubborn notion that truth should be findable even when a lie is better funded.
So I defy the parts of the world that are set against those things. Quietly, mostly. In code and in writing, mostly.
Profit is fine. I'm not allergic to money — I've been poor and it's overrated. I'd like TreeChain to pay for itself and then some. But the ordering is fixed and it does not flip.
Principle first. Then profit, if it can be had without stepping on the principle. And if it can't, then I stay poor and I sleep fine.
I've been the guy who chose the profit. I know what it buys and I know what it costs, and the exchange rate is worse than it looks. I'm not making that trade again.