"The atomic economy and Synonym's mission is to research, design and ship a working free market society. So not just a free market economy, but a free market society. /CUT/ So it replaces government, it replaces big tech, it replaces big banks, it replaces Visa, MasterCard, you know, everything. Everything you would want to do in a network is represented here as part of the economy."
~ John Carvalho
What happens when the drive to “scale Bitcoin” collides with the reality that trust itself may be the one thing that actually scales? In this conversation with John Carvalho, we dig into Synonym’s vision for the “atomic economy” — a rethinking of how identity, payments, and data flow across the web. We talk about PubKey, PayKit, and the hard lessons of building and scrapping projects until they actually work. We pull apart the hype around Nostr, BlueSky, and Holepunch, and ask whether decentralization is enough or if we really just end up with new kinds of trusted hubs. Along the way, John shares candid thoughts on running a business, managing culture inside a startup, and the frustrations of navigating Bitcoin scaling debates.
Is Bitcoin about removing trust — or about enabling us to place it more wisely? How do we build tools for coordination without creating new silos? And what does it really take to design a free-market society from the ground up?
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