About the Book

In May 2016, a startup with no CEO, no board, and no employees raised $150 million in thirty days. Within weeks, a hacker drained $60 million from its “unhackable” smart contract. Three respected experts analyzed the attack — and couldn’t agree on basic facts.

How is that possible? The blockchain is supposed to be perfectly transparent.

That question launched a decade-long project called TrueBlocks and produced this book: seventy-five essays, written in real time, documenting the birth, adolescence, and troubled maturation of an idea called “decentralization.”

You Say You Want a Revolution is not a polished manifesto. It’s dispatches from the trenches — frustrated notes about problems encountered, excited sharing of solutions found, and increasingly pointed critiques of an ecosystem determined to forget its own founding principles.

What You’ll Find Inside

• Real-time accounts of the DAO hack as it unfolded in 2016
• Technical deep-dives into the difficulty bomb, gas mechanics, token issuance, and the architecture of indexing systems
• Progress reports from Ethereum Foundation grants — sometimes optimistic, sometimes exhausted
• Rants about centralized “dApps,” the inadequacy of the RPC, and an industry that abandoned its principles for convenience
• A self-aware reckoning — the author catalogues his own project’s ten stupidest ideas, then explains why he’d do it all again
• The Unchained Index specification — the engineering blueprint for permissionless, local-first data access

The Core Argument

The problem was never the blockchain. The problem was access to the data on it. The entire Web3 industry — worth hundreds of billions — is built on a database without an index. Every centralized API provider filled that gap, and in doing so, re-centralized the very thing blockchain was supposed to set free.

TrueBlocks built the index. With it, any user can query their own transaction history locally, privately, instantly, with 18-decimal-place accuracy, without asking anyone’s permission.

The code works. The tools exist. Whether anyone uses them is another question entirely.