#maybe at a certain point their golden core mitigates it but what about before they cultivate it what about normal ppl

[thoroughlycollected]

So I was doing my job- genuinely earnestly working- when I had the sudden thought: how high above sea level is Cloud Recesses? Are the Lan doing intense upper body strength training in low oxygen like Olympians? Is going down the mountain like taking off training weights to be lighter/stronger/faster?

[wardencommanderrodimiss]

Witches, Chapter 29: something of an overdue talk, in a long overdue chapter.

Hey everyone! We’re back at it, hopefully, with a few orders of business.

First things first: I’d like to issue a small warning for a short discussion of past suicidal ideation that pops up during this chapter. Since this series is a retelling, generally most of you do know what’s coming up next and what we’ll run into and to brace ourselves for that. You know about the characters’ past traumas and future choices and know where that pops up, or if it becomes unexpectedly relevant or makes a new parallel, you did at least know in advance that it happened. Phoenix’s occasional oblique allusion to Edgeworth’s “choosing death”, for instance. 

As this is not something quite like that and comes up more out of nowhere than usual, I just wanted to make sure that no one is uncomfortably caught off-guard. It felt like something different to me personally as I was writing - whether it’s going to strike any of you as different than other heavier material we’ve had in the past, I can’t say, but I’m erring on the side of caution today. If you’ve got any questions or concerns or anything you want done for content warnings in the future, please do come talk to me and let me know!

On two lighter notes: thank you all for bearing with me through the “oops all Fire Emblem only Fire Emblem” hiatus. It’s been a weird year, obviously. I’m hoping that I can carry on with room in my brain for both.

And finally: Happy UR-1 day! Today is, yes indeed, the exact day that Simon Blackquill is arrested for murder, and in honor of that, have a chapter where I mention him one (1) entire time.

[Seelie of Kurain Chapter Masterlist] [ao3]

[Witches of Los Angeles Chapter Masterlist] [ao3]

----

Golden Saturday-morning sunlight streams in through the blinds, lighting up the dust particles swirling through the air. The office is colder than Apollo expects for the end of October - colder than it was last year this time - and Phoenix is even wearing a sweater, the shining locket that Apollo hasn’t seen in a while hanging around the outside of the tall collar. “Morning,” Phoenix says, without raising his eyes from what appears to be a manila folder full of newspaper clippings he is perusing. “What’s up?” 

Straight to business, then. Apollo is fine with that. He grabs the chair from his desk and drags it around, not directly in front of Phoenix’s desk, but near enough that it will be harder for Phoenix to ignore him.

“Is there any way to break a curse?” he asks, shoving his hands deep in the pocket of his hoodie. If it were this cold in a regular office on a Saturday, that would make sense; save money on heating bills when no clients are coming in. This is just - fae bullshit. The beginning of their seasonal tantrums. Winter only properly begins on the solstice, and Apollo really wishes that the fae of Kurain would respect the astronomical seasons. Stave off the snow until the end of December and end it in March. Don’t allow it to span from October to April. 

Phoenix sweeps the scraps of paper all back within the folder and ducks down to set it inside a drawer. “If I knew a way,” he says, rising back up with the magatama in hand and setting it down on his desk with a hard clack, “do you think I would go around looking like I do? You don’t think I would’ve gotten this mess cleaned up a long time ago?”

He doesn’t offer Apollo the magatama for a refresher on what that mess looks like. Maybe he was just making a dramatic point with it. “Oh,” Apollo says, scratching the back of his head, faintly embarrassed by how obvious the answer is if he’d given it a modicum of thought from that perspective. “I guess not.”

“Right,” Phoenix says. “As my understanding goes, you can theoretically maybe mitigate a curse, if you layer another opposing blessing on. I am ‘lucky’” - he makes sarcastic quotation marks to ensure that the bitterness dripping from the word doesn’t go unnoticed, as if Apollo could possibly not notice - “to have known enough fae that I’m saddled with both Fortune and Misfortune, and Life and Death. But I’m also not certain that when you drop those on each other they don’t just each take their own separate niches. I’m not dead, but god knows when I try to go somewhere for a vacation or a day off, I still stumble across crime scenes like nothing else. Stunningly lucky in some aspects, and wildly unfortunate in others. You know me. I don’t need to elaborate too much, do I?”

Apollo nods. 

“So that’s the theory, but I don’t think that helps anyway for your purposes, which - this is about Prosecutor Gavin?”

Apollo nods again. Phoenix sighs and rubs his eyes. “Shit,” he says, folding his hands together in front of his face and leaning his head against them. “I - believe me, Apollo, I wish I had some - I wish I had any way to help him.”

And Apollo does believe him. Apollo has to believe him, and believe that Phoenix means well, because he’d go crazier if he wasn’t reminding himself that Phoenix’s most frustrating decisions are born out of good intent. That Phoenix thinks he knows what’s best, but there’s still that old saying about good intentions. 

“Why didn’t you tell him?” Apollo asks. “You knew before this. You knew before he asked you.”

Phoenix raises his head. “And what does telling him get him? Secure in the knowledge that his brother - who is already in jail by the way, don’t need any more proof of his crimes, he’s already never getting out to be able to hurt anyone ever again - hates him enough to have wished him dead?”

Basically the same reasoning that Klavier had, but Apollo has a counterargument now. “Gives him time to come to terms with it before someone dies!”

“You don’t!” Phoenix slams his palms on the desk. Apollo flinches. Of course everyone is volatile and heated over this topic, but that doesn’t make it easier in the moment that it first gets directed at him from people who are usually frustratingly calm and casual. But Phoenix winces, lifting one of his hands and dragging his fingers through his hair, and sighs. “I’m sorry,” he says, and repeats, much quieter, “You - you don’t. Or I never didn’t. I knew from right when it happened that I was cursed; I had three years between then and when Mia died - it - I could’ve had a decade, or two, and it - it wouldn’t have helped. I wouldn’t have felt any differently. Any more come to terms with it. With the thought that I - helped cause—”

His tongue heavy in his mouth, Apollo nods. “But - but wouldn’t it have been worse to find out right after she died?”

“Of course it would have,” Phoenix says blithely. “Of course that - this - is the worst possible alternative. Of course I would’ve said something if I’d known that this was what would happen instead.”

“But you have to have expected that someone would—”

“No, I didn’t,” Phoenix interrupts. “That’s not how this works. You know Klavier. You know how much he doesn’t say, don’t you? How much I don’t - you know what people like us are like. Who’s going to tell him? Sebastian forgets half the time that he even has the Sight. Kay only acts like she knows things. Prosecutor Blackquill spent until two days ago acting like magic isn’t real even when he knew we knew otherwise. Someone who means ill isn going to keep that information to use it, and not to just plainly say something.” He frowns. “Well, usually not. Unless they’re a clumsy interloper stumbling in somewhere they don’t belong and getting themselves fucked over for it too.”

“So other than Means just walking all over everything” - because he wasn’t immersed in this kind of fae etiquette, didn’t grow up in it, learned just enough to spot what he thought were opportunities and ruined himself by it - “you think every other random stranger is just going to respect all these - these weird little rules about what you don’t say?”

“Rules of engagement, basically,” Phoenix says. “Yeah, I do.”

“Prosecutor Gavin told me that you’re cursed,” Apollo says. “Don’t just tell me that’s - that’s the exception that proves the rule, or whatever.”

Phoenix’s expression, smug and trying to dampen that smugness back into something that respects the seriousness of the conversation, tells Apollo that yes, yes that is absolutely what his retort was going to be. Apollo considers screaming. “I’ve been tangled up in this for far too long,” Phoenix says. “I can promise you, I know the patterns. I know the way these things go.”

“And because you’re so much smarter than the rest of us, that makes it okay?” Apollo demands. “To take a gamble and just hope that it won’t go wildly wrong?” 

And he wants to, really wants to add, I guess that’s what you do, just gamble with people’s fates, and he doesn’t, and Phoenix’s face still darkens like he knows, like he can read Apollo’s mind. Because every time Apollo ends up arguing with him, that’s always at the core. This playing card that haunts them both, burnt a bridge barely built, and they keep trying to balance on the ashen skeleton of it. “Just because Prosecutor Gavin is too fucked up about everything else to be mad at you for hiding this—”

“I did,” Phoenix says, voice low, eyes narrowed and dark as an evening’s storm clouds, “what I thought would be best, based on my prior experiences of both how curses don’t get talked about, and knowing exactly what it is like to personally live with knowing that I’m cursed. This is not something I want anyone to have to know how it feels.”

“So you think ignorance is bliss,” Apollo says. Klavier said that. Apollo wants to know how Phoenix takes that statement.

“I wouldn’t call it ignorance,” Phoenix says. “It’s not like he, or you, didn’t know what Kristoph was like until you found this out. You know the crime, the verdict, the sentencing - and everything else that Kristoph tried but failed to do. That Kristoph also wanted Klavier dead is only another small piece in the grand scheme of it all.” 

Still the same argument that Klavier made; Apollo can’t imagine they discussed it. What brought them to the same conclusion? That they both have lived this strange specific kind of grief? This common ground that they share that is foreign to Apollo.

“Come to terms with - Klavier’s already got to come to terms with the rest of that,” Phoenix continues. “It was obvious during that trial how much Kristoph despised him. He knew that too. He knows that Kristoph ruined more lives than just the people he murdered - that he tried to kill more people than he actually succeeded at - cursed and tried to kill children because he couldn’t have - didn’t want anyone remaining who - who could - could… say…”

If Phoenix hadn’t faltered like that - fumbling and failing to continue, words petering out as he went back over what he just said, his eyes going wide and welling up with horror - then Apollo would have simply assumed that his thoughts were moving too fast for his mouth and he couldn’t keep them straight. It would have been easy to talk right through it, and Apollo wouldn’t think twice. If Phoenix hadn’t showed his own hand, gave the game away. Something too terrible for even seven years of professional poker to hide. 

“Mr Wright?” Apollo asks, and Phoenix turns his head, glancing away away, no longer meeting his eyes when less than a minute ago he was staring him down with a cold confident glare. “What - what are you talking about? Vera, and - not someone else? Who else?”

Phoenix makes a tiny shake of his head, and even that little motion is a bright, distinct liar’s red. It lights up his eyes, too, when they dart down to the floor. “Mr Wright?” Apollo repeats. When would this have been? He casts his mind over everything he learned, just a little over a year ago, Phoenix sitting him down to explain seven years of information collected about Kristoph, what he’d done and how he’d tried to cover it up. He tried to kill Drew Misham to tie up that loose end; he cursed and poisoned Vera, two precautions because he wasn’t confident enough in the former, hoping that if she ever left the house she wouldn’t be able to speak to his identity and the forgery he requested. He killed Zak Gramarye seven years later to hide the same. He wanted to eliminate every link in the chain that connected the diary page to him. Its makers Vera and Drew, and Zak who knew he was the first attorney on the case, and then the page got to Phoenix via—

Via—

“Mr Wright,” Apollo says. His voice shakes. “He didn’t—”

“Promise me something, Apollo,” Phoenix says firmly. His mouth is drawn in a tight line but he doesn’t look stern. He looks more like he’s going to cry and is desperately trying to stop himself. “Promise me.”

“Wh - what? I can’t—”

“Promise me, Apollo.”

Not until you tell me what I’m promising, Apollo thinks, Apollo knows is what he should say. He’s been told this enough times; he’s aware of this on his own. Don’t agree to a deal before all the terms are set. Don’t sign the contract before it’s read thoroughly. Rules for lawyers and fae are the same. Just because Phoenix means well doesn’t mean that Apollo agrees with those decisions he makes; certainly not the one they have been discussing, and likely not whatever Phoenix is asking him to agree to. 

“Please.”

The air in the office is so cold. Even the sunlight seems cold now. Apollo shivers, hunches himself up further. What does Mia think? Is this secret-keeping so natural to her, easy as breathing once was, because she’s fae and that’s what they are, liars by trick and by trade?

“Just promise me you won’t tell her until I do.”

His mouth dry, Apollo nods and croaks out, “All right. I won’t.”

He almost regrets pushing the issue,regrets ever asking Phoenix why he faltered. Phoenix sits slumped, his hands in his hair, and when he glances back up at Apollo, he looks so exhausted that it reminds him of Klavier last night. Burnt-out and broken, when it’s so rare for either of their masks to break. Rarer for Phoenix not to be positioning himself as the one with all the cards in hand; for him to fall apart, for Apollo to actually see him upset. “Yeah,” he whispers, soft enough that Apollo sits forward to make sure he can hear him. “Everyone involved in getting the diary page from him to me, Kristoph wanted dead, or to make sure he could silence them. Everyone who knew, even if she was - eleven years old, or eight. The girl who made it, and the girl who gave it to me. He fucking hated the Gramaryes. You think he didn’t jump at the opportunity to try and get rid of all of them that he could? That he wouldn’t cast a curse on each one who ever entered his sight?”

“And she” - Apollo’s voice cracks - “she doesn’t know? You didn’t tell her?”

“Shit, no,” Phoenix says. He sounds close to cracking, too, and when he drops his hands to his desk he starts shaking his head, his eyes scrunched closed. “Being a Gramarye has been goddamn enough of a curse for her. She lost all her family and then found out that her grandfather buried her mother’s soul in the woods because he was a monstrous son-of-a-bitch who deserved worse than getting to go out on his own terms by shooting himself in the fucking head—”

Apollo shudders. Phoenix had never before directly stated his opinion on Magnifi, but Apollo could definitely tell he held only disdain for the man. This, though, is more than disdain. This is positively venomous, and more than a bit frightening. Did he always feel like this, and hid it, or is this hatred something that has only come about since last year Trucy came back to the office with her mother’s soul in her hands?

“—so yeah, on top of that, I’m definitely going to tell her that the same man who killed her father cursed her just because of the accident of who her family is.”

“B-but—” Apollo doesn’t quite know what he’s arguing. He also doesn’t know where all of his prior conviction went. Of course Klavier should have been told - because he found out in the worst way possible - and Trucy - to take a gamble with her too - that’s got to be just as wrong— “Nine-Tails Vale,” he says suddenly. “We went there, and then there was a murder - that - that’s - is that like—”

“Like what happens to me?” Phoenix asks. “What happens with a curse? Yes. That’s how it goes.”

“And you - you’re not going to - to tell her? Ever? In case - in case something happens to her like with Klavier, or—” Too many thoughts are playing in his head, and the next one grabs hold of him and pivots him away from the point he was going to make about maybe why Trucy should know. “The concert,” he says. “When we went to the concert, Trucy and I, and Klavier was there too of course but that’s - Romaine LeTousse was murdered. They’re both cursed and they - wait, was Klavier cursed then? That was before…” 

Did Klavier know when it happened? Did he tell Apollo? He’d said that Phoenix had seen him twice since the trial last October. Presume then that Kristoph cursed him then. The last time the brothers saw each other, and that doesn’t make one bit of sense. 

“How could Kristoph have cursed him?” Apollo asks, and he doesn’t miss a momentary flash of panic that passes over Phoenix, his eyes popping wide for half a second and a loud, sharp intake of breath. “Klavier always has iron on him. He gave me—” He looks down at his hand, and then back up, to Phoenix’s lifted eyebrows. Apollo sticks his hand back in his pocket. “What’s the point in iron if it doesn’t actually save you from being cursed?”

Phoenix is obviously trying not to move. He knows Apollo is watching him, waiting for a twitch, anything to pounce on and draw an answer out of him. Staring steadily back at Apollo, he barely blinks; he rests his folded arms on his desk and his fingers curl just a little tighter into where he’s gripping his arm. Apollo is right to be asking these questions. He’s getting closer to something that Phoenix is hiding. 

“Or it does,” Apollo says. The veins on the back of Phoenix’s hand flex from his grip. Apollo thinks about someone else with a tense hand and secrets. “And he couldn’t have been cursed then, at Vera’s trial, if it does. So then Mr Gavin hated him that much before then.” Phoenix blinks placidly, but he doesn’t adopt his lazy-eyed gaze. Too serious even for that. “And you lied,” Apollo adds. “You lied about when.”

Phoenix flinches. It’s just a tiny one, pulling his head back, the muscles in his jaw and neck tightening, but Apollo can’t miss the light show. Can’t miss that the lie is bleeding out of him.

He finds himself on his feet, not stepping any closer to Phoenix’s desk, just needing the height, just needing to move a little to stop the shaking in his hands and in his chest, a trembling that goes right down to his heart. “He knew already that he’s cursed! Why did you keep lying to him!” 

“I didn’t lie to him,” Phoenix says evenly, but very quietly, and Apollo wants to go over and slam his fists on the desk and make him stop with these hollow justifications, make him face what he’s done couched in none of his winding words. “I just didn’t correct his assumption.”

“That’s lying!” Apollo shouts. “That’s still lying! That’s what happened in Mayor Tenma’s trial! Do you remember that? Do you care!” 

“Don’t accuse me of not caring.” Phoenix’s voice is low, his eyes dark, staring up at Apollo. “I do care. I—”

“You don’t care about lying! But you do care about - what, about us? Doing this because you care, because you always know what’s best for everyone not to know!” Apollo throws his hands in the air. Phoenix’s brow furrows further, his jaw set tightly. “Never mind that Athena had a breakdown during the trial because Means hit her exactly where you were worried she would be! And you didn’t prepare her! Never mind that Klavier’s having a breakdown now because he found out at the worst possible time! When you could have told him! You know—”

“And if what he knows already hurt him this badly, then what do you think would be happening if he knew Kristoph cursed him years ago?” Phoenix slams his hands on his desk like he’s at the defense’s bench, pushing himself up out of the chair and onto his feet. “That his brother’s wanted him dead for that long? You think that’ll help anything, for him to find that out right now on top of all this? You want him to have that to come to terms with right now, too? I didn’t lie to him! He made an assumption that I didn’t correct because I’m not in the business of salting anyone’s wounds!”

He makes - a point. Apollo sees where he’s coming from. Why he’d do that. An additional piece of truth, yesterday the same as a salting of the wound. “But you don’t think he’s ever wondered if - if Mr Gavin resented him for that long? If he - if you would be setting something to rest, if you told him that. You can’t decide for someone else what they’re capable of handling.”

“Fair point,” Phoenix says. He sinks back down into his chair, and then motions to Apollo’s, suggesting he sit back down. “If he’d asked, I’d have told him. If he ever asks, I’ll tell him. I just wasn’t about to drop that on his head with him unprepared. Or if he asks you - I’m not asking you to swear silence to that. Shit, if you ever think that it’ll help him to know, then tell him - tell him you just found out from me, throw me under the bus and lie to make me look worse, that’s fine.”

Apollo returns to his chair, still not feeling any less like he wants to take a swing and see if he’s gotten any better at punching since last April. “You want me to lie now too?” he asks. 

“I want you to use your best judgment about what he might want to know or be able to handle,” Phoenix says. “To not pile on more if he didn’t ask, if you don’t think he’s prepared. Like I said, when it comes to being cursed, I didn’t ever not know, and I know what the knowing is like. Yeah, I took a gamble that if I didn’t tell them then no one else ever would. That they’d never know, I hoped.” 

He shakes his head and then leans it back against his chair, his eyes closing. “See, it’s not just grief, not at all. The woman who cursed me was someone I thought I knew. Though I’d known for a while. She had actually wanted me dead since we first met.” His eyes pop back open. “Eventually she tried to poison me, and when that didn’t work she tried to frame me for murder, and when that plan fell apart she just tried to kill me with a curse because she was pissed about it. She was a lot stronger than Kristoph, I’ll tell you that much. But Mia stepped in, and now I’m still alive and other people just drop dead all around me instead.”

He sounds almost like he is making a recitation, like he’s rehearsed it, scripted it. Apollo wonders if he’s ever told anyone else all these details, if anyone else lacking the Sight knows that Phoenix is cursed, and if he used this same script then too. He’s speaking about himself, something so personal, in a way so curt and crisp, so much more detached than he’s been speaking about Klavier, or Trucy. 

Apollo nods numbly, unable to force his tongue to ask any of the questions he has.

“I could have come to grips with her hating me that long and that much - I could’ve come to terms with it and moved on. I was - well, I eventually became glad to know what she was. I could’ve been okay with all that. Eventually. If I hadn’t known about the curse. But I did and the - the knowing, the - Mia was murdered. Three years after she saved me. That long, thinking I could accept that I was cursed, and as soon as something really happened - I couldn’t.”

He presses his hands together and rests them against his chin. “And I couldn’t ever even just grieve her, because I had this guilt. That her death was my fault - I know, I know, some other man murdered her. He got to rot in jail for the rest of his life for his crimes, and he would’ve hated her whether or not I was cursed. For the things she did and because of what he was, and I had no part in any of that, but I was still - thinking, if maybe if she hadn’t ever taken me under her wing. If I hadn’t been around, maybe it would’ve been different somehow. Maybe she would have survived.”

The lights flicker gently and return dimmer and softer than they were before. Everything that gets talked about in this office, Mia hears; Apollo wonders if Phoenix doesn’t get sick of it sometimes, just want to say something without her offering input. Even if this is presumably well-meant, some attempt at comfort, the most a dead woman who can’t speak can give. Apollo exhales and can see his breath. He shivers again. “Why are you telling me this?” he finally asks. 

“I want you to understand.” Phoenix rubs his hands together, a vacant look in his eyes, like he hasn’t quite realized why he’s so suddenly cold. “What it felt like, and what I’m worried about. If I’d told Klavier, or I tell Trucy - once I say something, I can’t take it back. That’s it, and they know, forever, just like I do. So I want to be sure that this won’t - I want—” He drops his hands and reaches over and picks up the magatama, idly spinning it around between his fingers. Apollo can’t remember ever seeing him this uneasy, this fidgety. “Klavier, especially, reminds me of myself when I was his age, and of a prosecutor I knew then, too. And that - recognition” - he gestures with the magatama clutched in his hand - “is not good, because we were not - okay.”

Apollo wishes he could remember with clarity all that Phoenix said to him about this time a year ago, about Klavier, about Phoenix being concerned for him. He does remember that Phoenix said something about some other prosecutor then, too, that Klavier reminded him of. Or that he was worried Klavier was going to end up like.

Phoenix inhales slowly, and says, “Six months after Mia was murdered - which was three, three and a half years after I was cursed, mind you - I lost someone else. I didn’t realize how badly he was doing - he did a good job at hiding it, and I didn’t know how to reach out. I was wrapped up in my own loneliness and depression, and then he was gone.” 

He stops turning the magatama between his fingers, staring down at it for a few seconds, and then he resumes fidgeting with it. “I felt like I’d caused both of those. Couldn’t convince myself otherwise. Every other factor I knew there was, every single thing I couldn’t prevent or control, all these other things that other people did - I still thought that if I wasn’t cursed, then it could have been - just different enough that they would still be here.” He reaches up, brushing his fingertips across his temple. “Wouldn’t have been a fatal wound. Or wouldn’t have—”

He falters, staring past Apollo now, over at the window. This is the same thing he said about Mia earlier, about that sense of guilt, even knowing someone else murdered her. That he held some kind of responsibility, for a curse that seems to manifest itself as coincidence. Just coincidence, a little too often. 

“They could’ve been okay, somehow, in the end, I thought,” he continues. “And instead, I was - I was there, I was still around, and they weren’t. And all I could think was that if I didn’t do something, then I would just lose the other few friends I still had - they would be around me, and they would die for it.”

“Didn’t you say that there’s no way you know to break a curse?” Apollo asks. From Phoenix’s solemn expression, he’s not going to suddenly say that there is a method, but Apollo has no idea what he is going to say. What that something he thought to do was. 

“Right,” Phoenix says. “So I thought - only way to take the curse out of the equation is by taking myself out of the equation. I thought - as long as I’m not around - if I go and die, then anyone else who I love won’t. The curse will be gone, right, if death finally takes me. But the curse only seemed to hit other people, not me, so if dying was what I needed to do, then I…”

Klavier lying on the stage, wondering why it had to be Courte who died instead of himself. Phoenix’s dark, pained eyes, as he speaks again, finishes the thought in a voice barely above a murmur. “It made - made far too much sense to me, then. Was far too appealing a prospect.”

The question of what Phoenix won’t quite spell out catches sideways in Apollo’s throat, and when he tries to force it he just makes a soft croaking sound. Phoenix presses his lips together and glances away. “It’s a pain I wouldn’t wish on anyone,” he adds softly. “Klavier’s - he’s what, twenty-whatever? I was twenty-five when I—” 

When Mia died, Apollo thinks, but that Phoenix doesn’t finish the thought, swallows hard and stares at his desk and says something else, makes Apollo think there was something even worse he could have said, with that implication he didn’t say. “And Trucy - she’s my daughter. I’m supposed to protect her. I took her in because I couldn’t live with the thought of anything else happening to her when I could bring her here, hope that Mia could somehow bless and protect her as much as she did me. But I can’t imagine just - I can’t let that happen to her. To suffer the way I did, to - to spend her life wondering if wherever she goes, someone’s going to die - the concert, Nine-Tails Vale, to ever - to think she can blame herself. Or that everyone she loves is better off without her. Or to—”

He blinks, fiercely, his eyes watering, and Apollo hopes he’ll never have to see Phoenix this close to tears again. Phoenix, cursed and trying - and in the case of Klavier, now failing - to shelter others from that same pain. Klavier, and Trucy, and—

“What about Vera?” he asks. “You explained to me, but did you ever tell her that she’s—” Phoenix stares at him, blinks slowly. Apollo squeezes his own eyes shut. “You didn’t tell her.” He’s unable to muster the same indignation he was before. He can’t really even bring himself to feel manipulated. Phoenix told him exactly that he was saying all this to make Apollo understand. Phoenix sought this reaction. But Phoenix’s chessmaster act has never superceded his desire to keep secrets before; there’s no way that Apollo can convince himself that this emotional vulnerability is all entirely a ploy to get Apollo to shut up. How many times has he refused to explain something and just left Apollo to stay angry about being in the dark? He has never been reluctant to do that. To just sit silent and lock Apollo out. To let Apollo hate him for his secrets.

He wanted Apollo to understand, intimately, whatever it took. So that Apollo would agree keep these secrets. So that Apollo would go along with him. And it might be concern that drives him - he cares, of course he does - but it’s still manifesting in the most infuriating ways possible. In well-meant silence.

“Would you want to know?” Phoenix asks, and that question at this time is an answer and confirmation in itself. “I know the truth is important to you, Apollo - I know it is to all of us.” 

For once, Apollo believes he means it. He’d know it’s the truth because he can see when Phoenix is lying, but he’s actually convinced, this time. 

“But,” Phoenix continues, “if you already know that the person who cast the curse hates you and is in jail for committing murder - already got to come to terms with that, or grieve that, or for someone else dead - you already know that truth. Would you really, honestly want to live with also knowing that you’re cursed?”

To possibly want to die because of it, like Phoenix did? Apollo opens his mouth. He wants to say yes, yes he would like to know, because that’s the truth of it and he wants to always know the truth, all of its facets no matter how ugly. 

Doesn’t he? 

He thinks about Nahyuta, about Dhurke, about trying to forget they ever were anyone, because that’s easier than facing the fact that Dhurke abandoned him, and they might both be dead by now. Easier than wondering whether they were human or fae or something else. He doesn’t want to know what they were. He wants to deny the dreams, to convince himself they’re nothing but the weird subconscious mash-up of memory and the fae horrors Clay has spent all these years warning him about. He doesn’t want the truth about his childhood. He doesn’t want to remember his childhood at all.

(Is it well-meant silence when he doesn’t tell Clay, or Trucy, or Klavier, about them? To not worry them about his life and his past? Or is it just cowardice on his part? Blissful ignorance.)

He closes his mouth. Thinks about the smile Trucy forced onto her face as she realized that Apollo was about to reveal to the court that her father Zak Gramarye was murdered six months before then. Thinks about how she couldn’t keep that smile forced when she found out that her dead grandfather took her mother’s soul for his own personal gain. Thinks about Klavier lying on the stage wishing that he had been the corpse there, not Courte. All the pains that truth has caused them. Is that better or worse than that alternative? Does it depend on what truth it is being hidden?

(He thinks about how long it’s been since he’s said Nahyuta’s name out loud. What color were his eyes in real life, and not Apollo’s haunted dreams? He doesn’t remember.)

“I - I don’t really know,” he admits.

The smug, victorious expression he expects never arrives on Phoenix’s face. There’s no satisfaction in winning this argument. “I’m sorry,” he says, closing his hand around the magatama. “I told you about Vera because it mattered directly for that case, but the rest of this - I wanted to shoulder it myself. So the rest of you don’t have to worry about it. I don’t want you to have to keep secrets from anyone. But I don’t know what else to do.” He forces a smile onto his face with visible effort that makes Apollo wince. Nothing masks the exhaustion written into the lines on his face. “Maybe we put our heads and together we figure out some better way to talk about it. If I ever figure that I should tell…”

He trails off, touching a finger to his locket. Tell Trucy. If he ever gains reason to think that he should tell Trucy. Would he actually run it by Apollo first, ask for his advice? The possibility of being in Phoenix’s confidence for something that isn’t a case doesn’t make a damn bit of sense. 

“I still don’t think you should try and keep it secret forever,” Apollo says, “but I - I guess I see what you mean. And why you don’t just…”

Why he doesn’t just tell her. More reason that just because Phoenix doesn’t “just tell” anyone anything. For once, he’s not being a cryptic bastard.

“Believe me, Apollo,” Phoenix says darkly, “I’m always thinking ahead and trying to plan for the worst. I’m not naive enough to just hope that anything will stay one way ‘forever’. But I have to be sure I don’t make it worse, either.”

It isn’t the lack of a visual cue that makes Apollo believe him. It’s knowing him that makes Apollo believe him. Phoenix always has his eye on something down the line, playing out the plan a few steps ahead to find the complications. Even - especially - while he wasn’t a lawyer. A gambler’s steady hand holding the cards, chancing on an outcome, because the cost of doing nothing at all is even more unthinkable. 

Apollo nods, more times than necessary, lacking anything else to say. Phoenix cocks his head. “Apollo, you all right?” he asks. 

What the hell is he supposed to say - how the hell is he supposed to be? Fine? In what world is he possibly fine? At the end of this, he’s learned more than he ever dreamed he would from his sole initial question, but in it all, that first answer has never changed. 

This is all there is. A rabbit hole of pain so unfathomably deep and winding, and in its darkest depths, the same as the answer given to him on the surface: there’s no way to break a curse. Their lives aren’t the kind of fairy tale where true love’s kiss can wake a sleeping beauty or transform a beast back to a prince - it’s grimmer than that, colder than that, crueler than that. Curses not so concretely visible but more like haunting coincidence, a ghost whispering at the shoulder with reminders of guilt. How could a man who wasn’t even there when the crime happened blame himself for his mentor’s murder? And yet, even after the killer’s confession, how could he not? How can even the curse’s caster be blamed when someone else wielded the murder weapon? And yet, how could they not share in it?

Apollo would rather someone have been turned into a frog, honestly. Wouldn’t that be easier to grapple with, a simple chain of cause and effect, and no ambiguity in who to blame. 

“No,” Apollo finally says. “Not really, no.”

“I guess that was a bit of a stupid question, huh.”

Apollo nods. No kidding. What’s a better question at this point, anyway? Not what he says. “How - how can there really not be any way? For a curse to be broken, I mean.”

Phoenix spins his chair around, resting his head back against it, eyes turned up to the ceiling. Once he slows to a stop, facing the windows, he says, “I mean, maybe it’s possible there was, once, but it was forgotten. There’s a lot of magic that’s gone that way.” 

He gives Apollo a moment to digest that, and then continues, “The Court’s heyday was thousands of years ago. They’re living ruins of what they used to be, and a fraction of what they used to know. Maya - you haven’t met her, she’s Pearl’s cousin - Maya’s helping me out with some matters by trying to dig up more about some kinds of magic they’ve forgotten the nuance of. But even that’s something we’ve got a hint that they knew, once. Not like—” He shrugs helplessly. “I’m sorry. Don’t hold your breath waiting for a way to break a curse.”

“Oh,” Apollo says, somewhat surprised, but pleasantly so, that Phoenix said that much. It would be typical of him just to reiterate that no, there just isn’t any way he knows, that’s all, and to skip the explanation for fear of giving Apollo false hope. But thinking about the prospect of false hope is still easier than really, truly considering the meaning of what Phoenix just said - that this, that everything they’ve ever had to deal with in regards to the fae, could have be so much worse. They could do so much worse than all this pain they’ve ever wrought - they were once so much more dangerous than this, and now their Court is only ruins. This is what they are when they are weak.

“If I do find anything out, I’ll—”

Phoenix breaks off, rising up slowly from his chair, staring at something past Apollo, over his shoulder. Apollo twists around to look, not sure what he expects to see, but it certainly isn’t Vongole standing in the doorway, her head held high, her body much more solid than it usually appears, and stiller. The wispy fur at the back of her legs and off of her tail does not stir as though she is made of mist and surrounded by a breeze that affects only her; she could almost, in this moment, be a normal dog, but for her glowing eyes and her ears so bright red as though they were dipped straight in paint.

All the color drains from Phoenix’s face. He snatches up the magatama and springs to his feet, hurrying past Vongole to peer into the other half of the office. Apollo rises to his feet; if Klavier was here - if he heard what Phoenix was hiding - how Apollo promised to keep it a secret—

Vongole stares at Apollo. She doesn’t move. Phoenix reappears in the doorway, curling a hand in his hair, but his face has fallen slack with obvious relief. The claws curled into Apollo’s heart unclenches. “So then what are you doing here?” Phoenix asks the hound, whose ears fold back flat against her head, though her snout does not turn to shift her attention to Phoenix. She stares Apollo down like she will pounce. “Does he send you places or did you just wander here yourself?”

“You don’t know?” Apollo asks.

“You think I’ve ever had the chance to ask either Kristoph or Klavier about the logistics of their spectral hellhound?” Phoenix asks. Apollo tries to remember when he first started seeing Vongole. Whose ownership she would have been under. How soon after Kristoph’s arrest did Klavier come back to Los Angeles?

Despite her weirdly lanky proportions, like a regular dog was put on a rack and stretched out, Vongole always moves with grace, a predator’s prowl and elegance. A monster, but a beautiful one. She circles Apollo like she intends to herd him somewhere, like she is a shark smelling blood waiting for the moment to strike. “What—” Apollo spins too, trying always to keep her in his sight. She moves just slowly enough that he can keep up, but just quickly enough that he becomes slightly dizzy in his efforts. “What do you want?”

She stops. Apollo steps forward, trying to escape her circle, but she swings suddenly to the side, throwing her body up against Apollo’s hip. He expects her to fade through him, as she does walls and doors, but when she hits him he staggers with the force of her weight. And the cold - her body is cold and it reaches straight through his clothes, cold enough to burn, ice on bare skin type of burning, and Apollo doesn’t understand. He’s touched Vongole before, without problem, hasn’t he? Surely he has. What’s wrong with her? Or is something wrong with Klavier?

She trots over to the door, standing on the threshold, staring back at Apollo with her head aloft. He can’t bring himself to move, can’t unfreeze his feet from where they are riveted into the ground. Vongole presses her ears back against her head, lowering it so that her neck is level with her shoulders, prowling again, and she makes another circle of Apollo before again stopping in the doorway.

“I think she wants you to go with her,” Phoenix says.

She wags her tail, much faster than the usual low, wide swishing path that it takes. Apollo wrenches his foot from the floor and takes one step forward. Vongole bounds through the front room of the office, weaving between magic props tossed carelessly on the floor as though she couldn’t pass through them. And she stops and waits at the door, glancing expectantly back at Apollo. He fumbles his phone free from his pocket, finding no messages waiting for him; why would Klavier do something as cryptic as sending his faery dog to collect Apollo, rather than just calling or texting him?

Unless it isn’t Klavier instructing Vongole. Unless she’s acting on her own. Or unless Klavier is in trouble.

“You’d better go,” Phoenix says. “I can lend you the—”

“It’s fine,” Apollo says. He’s pretty sure that Klavier hates the magatama, and he found him fine without it last night. And he didn’t have Vongole guiding him then. 

“Let me know that everything’s all right,” Phoenix says quietly. Apollo opens his mouth to ask what Phoenix knows, why he’s so sure that this means something is wrong - remembers what Phoenix said about himself and how Klavier reminds him of himself, long ago. Closes his mouth. Knows why Phoenix worries.

Phoenix always worries. He means well. His road is paved in well-intended worry.

“Yeah,” Apollo says. “I’ll - I’ll let you know.”

Vongole waits for him only to reach the door, diving through it as his hand reaches for the doorknob. He next finds her waiting beside the bike rack, her smoky fur drifting independently of the chill breeze, and as soon as he mounts his bicycle she lopes off down the sidewalk. She never looks back at him but is obviously monitoring him in some way, her pace changing depending on obstacles and traffic so that she always remains in his sight. He follows her through the quieter (relatively, anyway) city of weekend mornings, through his usual stomping grounds, to end up on the stoop of an apartment building that is - quite frankly, not as grandiose as Apollo would expect. He presumes this is where Klavier lives.

(If it’s not, then he’s far too deep into something that it’s also far too late to back out of.)

Vongole noses one of the buttons on the buzzer at the entryway and disappears through the door. Only seconds later, too quickly for her to have physically covered the necessary amount of ground, the door clicks to unlock. Apollo enters the lobby and before he has time to take in his surroundings, she appears in front of him. Literally appears - not bounding up to him out of a wall, but materializing out of the air, white fog swirling in circles around her ankles. She directs him to the elevator, pressing her nose into the button for the fourth floor and then several times in quick succession slamming her nose into the close doors button. “So were you always like that, or did you pick up your impatience from him?” Apollo asks.

She sits down and fixes her eyes on him. He doesn’t know what that means. He’s not sure why he bothered talking to her. She can’t respond - can she understand? Does she have some way to communicate information she hears to Klavier? Surely not - hopefully not, depending how long she was in the office.

She does not move until the elevator halts at their destination, and she springs to her feet and slips through the doors before they have opened wide enough for a fully-corporeal dog of her size to pass through. But when he makes it through, she meets him right at the other side, her impatience not taking her any further down the hall until Apollo can follow right at her tail. The walls are not cracked and peeling as in Apollo’s building, but they are certainly plain - again, very much not the kind of place he would imagine Klavier to live.

Vongole throws herself through the door of Apartment 404, and Apollo waits in front of it. A moment passes, and then another. Right. Even a faery dog doesn’t have opposable thumbs to grip a doorknob. He fails to swallow his apprehension but knocks anyway. There has to be a reason Vongole brought him here. He can’t just run away from it. 

The seconds crawl past. Apollo reaches up to knock again, but the door swings suddenly open, and he flinches back.

Klavier’s hair is barely held together in a ponytail, strands falling loose around his face, and he looks even more like he hasn’t slept, going by the shadows under his eyes. And Apollo never thought there would come the day that he sees Klavier in sweatpants, but - he’s still alive. He’s still intact in one mobile piece, and he’s lucid enough to look annoyed. Apollo fumbles for words, any at all, but none arrive on his tongue. He hadn’t thought this far ahead. He starts to raise his arm to point at Vongole, to blame her, and before he can, Klavier sighs, shaking his head, his apparent annoyance sliding into exhaustion, and he steps out of the doorway, pulling the door open wider, and gesturing for Apollo to come in.

-

[notes on the chapter]

[thefalse9]

Zinedine Zidane Was As Impressive In Walking Away As He Was At Managing Real Madrid

And so it was with the world at his feet, having completed the most impressive three year stretch that a manager has argubaly ever had at the club-level, Zinedine Zidane walked away from Real Madrid and everything it represented; the glamour, the success and the stage upon which he had achieved so majestically, so unquestionably.

Mere days after leading Real Madrid to a third straight Champions League victory, Zidane announced that he would be stepping away as manager of the kings of European Football; the announcement coming on the same day that a vote of “no-confidence” would be taking place in Spain and possibly lead to the fall of the nation’s current Prime Minister. Some in Spain said that the news of Zidane’s decision had eclipsed the news regarding a new head of the Spanish Government.There was truth hidden beneath the joke.

Zidane leaves the club after a tenure in which he had won more than all but one of Real Madrid’s managers in all their history. Most impressively, he did so in two-and-a-half seasons; a feat so ridiculous and incredible a thought that it’s hard to put into words. More importantly, Zidane was this successful while comporting himself as a complete gentleman. A stark contrast to the days of Jose Mourinho and his prickly personality, ZIdane was graciousness and class personified. 

There was never a negative comment, never a display of agitation, nor an obnoxious outburst. Never was Zizou embroiled in drama, but rather he did his best to avoid it and put the focus solely on his club and the nature of what was being done on the pitch. It is incredibly telling that on the day that he announced his resignation from the most revered post in World Football, Zinedine Zidane received a lengthy standing ovation from the media; not because of his notable talent as a player and later as a manager, but because he will be missed for his candor, the gentlemanly nature of his relationship with the press and the class he brought back to Madrid.

And in truth? That may be the biggest accomplishment of his tenure in the Spanish capital. ZIdane was able to manage with aplomb while keeping his composure, his calm and his class while directing what at times has been known to be the biggest powder-keg in World Football. Managing Real Madrid requires the ability to manage and understand the emotions and needs of superstar players while navigating a ferocious press core who lives upon aggrandizing the latest defeat, the latest tactical mistake or the latest comment and making it into a state of national emergency. Most difficult, it requires a certain ability; a patience and a certain degree of tact to navigate a relationship with the megalomaniac in charge, Florentino Perez, Real Madrid’s president.

The masterful handling of that relationship was Zidane’s most valuable asset as a manager because Perez, a notorious meddler reknown for phoning managers and demanding certain players be played in certain spots, was mitigated by the former French international. Often, Real Madrid managers don’t have the stones to withstand the constant demands and the constant meddling of the team president, but Zidane, once one of Perez’s favorite galacticos was quickly able to assert himself, his independence and avoid the interference from the board.

Upon hire, Zidane benched Gareth Bale and James Rodriguez - at the time two of Florentio Perez’s most recent purchases, golden boy trinkets who were the latest on the galactico assembly line. In their place, Zidane would start Isco, the Spanish starlet who has become a key cog of the Spanish National Team, Casemiro, as strong a midfielder as you’ll find in Europe, and has given multiple starts and opportunities to both Lucas Vasquez and Marco Asensio; both of which are destined to be stars in the Spanish capital for years to come. It’s so hard to overstate how brave this move was because nobody had ever benched one of Florentio Perez’s shiny new toys before, let alone two. Now here was Zidane, once the golden boy of his own generation, handling it all with overarching calm and the self-assurance that made him one of the best players of all-time. 

And so, the Zidane legacy is probably etched in stone, unimpeachable with his current resume listing him as a 3-time Champions League winner as a manager to go alongside his illustrious playing career. That said, his legacy as it’s current stated won’t be fully appreciated or dug into until years from now when we can all appreciate the true scope of his accomplishments. Zidane won 3 Champions League titles while never really cementing one particular style of play. He consistently evolved and rose to the challenge of his opponent, adapting and making adjustments to suit the needs of the game at-hand. This was remarkably effective in the Champions League, but in the domestic league, which is more about imposing your will on weaker teams and taking points, Real Madrid often lost focus and played down to their opponents; the same idea of adapting to your opponent suddenly hurting them in domestic league play when they were clearly better than their opponent and should have just attacked and stormed them out of the gate.

Zizou will probably never be viewed as a “tactical genius” in the vain of a Pep Guardiola or a Jurgen Klopp - men who have always played to a specific and set playing style and forced their players to either adapt to the playing style or die. Instead, Zidane allowed his players the freedom to express themselves as they best saw fit and through fierce loyalty to them and their abilities, allowed them to grow and develop with self-assurance and confidence. Marco Asensio is what he is now because of the unyielding faith that Zidane showcased him all year. Look at the faith in Nacho Fernandez, in Dani Carvajal, in Lucas Vasquez, all of whom rewarded him handsomely time and time again.

It was ability to connect with his team that made him a better manager than his counterparts; the belief that connecting to his squad would be the best way to get the most out of their talents. When Real Madrid had a deal all set to bring in Kepa Arrizabalaga from Atletico Bilbao during the January transfer window, Zidane blocked it at the last second because he didn’t want to send a message to his team that he didn’t believe in them and that changes needed to be made. He stood up to Florentino Perez, put his faith behind current goalkeeper Keylor Navas, and it could be said without question that without the play of Keylor Navas in net, Real Madrid doesn’t win the Champions League this year.

So it’s with that self-assurance, with that calm that Zidane walks away from the best gig in football. Those same traits that made him a remarkable manager, the same traits that won over what was once a fractured locker room and earned him unprecedented leeway with Florentino Perez are the same traits that allowed him to leave at the very top of Club Football. Having achieved all he could achieve with this team, Zidane stepped away knowing that it couldn’t possibly get better and in truth? Would possibly only get worse. 

Big changes are coming to this Madrid team, with a planned overhaul seeing many of the same figures that Zidane pledged loyalty to probably walk out the door by the time the new season starts. Maybe ZIdane didn’t want to endure that and didn’t want to stick around to see the exodus of the same players who had rewarded him because of his faith in them. 

Furthermore, maybe the criticisms had gotten too loud. Champions League victories were diminished by the press when a domestic league title wasn’t won or achieved. Decisions that unified and bonded a team, such as the public dismissal of adding Kepa Arrizabalaga from Atletico Bilbao were consistently questioned. The constant pandering to new stars without an appreciation for the current roster built, and the additional voices beginning to meddle in personnel decisions, be it Perez or the press had gotten too loud, too often. It was no coincidence that the front cover of MARCA, the famed Spanish footballing newspaper had a front cover that featured 4 possible summer targets for Madrid this summer with the headline, “Do You Want Them, Zidane?”, the message obvious that if those reinforcements didn’t come, it would be Zidane’s cross to bear.

And so, that’s the brunt of it. A majestic manager who may not have been a tactical genius, but one who was spectacular in every other aspect of the role. He managed the board room, he managed the superstars at his disposal, he created new ones through faith and conviction and he galvanized his roster through fierce loyalty to their abilities. In spite of constant barbs from the press, he kept his composure, his calm and his elegance; winning them over to the point that grown men stood and applauded them when he finally said enough was enough.

Zidane will never be as fully appreciated as a manager as he was as a player. People will chalk his success up to the players around him, to the budget, or to a myriad of excuses people have created to diminish his success.

The truth is? He won 3 Champions League titles in 3 years, went to 4 in 5 years and was able to do it in the shark tank known as the Santiago Bernabeu. He handled it as well as anybody ever has, and took the team to heights unprecedented, and his resignation has finally begun to brought about the respect, admiration and benevolence he deserved while he was handling the job.

He left as impressively as won. 

[your-dietician]

Health Awaits: Spirit Adrift's Nate Garrett on Conquering Alcoholism Through Physical Fitness

New Post has been published on https://tattlepress.com/fitness/health-awaits-spirit-adrifts-nate-garrett-on-conquering-alcoholism-through-physical-fitness/

Health Awaits: Spirit Adrift's Nate Garrett on Conquering Alcoholism Through Physical Fitness

photo: Dillon Vaughn

Nate Garrett (Spirit Adrift, ex-Gatecreeper) is a survivor. We’re all survivors of something, but Garrett’s something was as big as it gets, a 15-year bout with alcoholism that left him at death’s door. At the brink, he chose to live.

Living is a struggle, and out of struggle comes strength. Today Garrett is in top shape and writing music nonstop. He tells us how he got this far, and what he does to stay on the straight and narrow.

(A good companion to this interview is BJ Fogg’s book Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Change Everything, which teaches techniques for things Garrett mentions, such as starting out small and replacing bad habits with good ones.)

Given the epidemic, let’s start out with mental fitness. Do you “work out” in that way?

The primary reason I work out physically is for the mental effect. One of the main things I’m trying to mitigate by working out so much is the latent rage that I have. I guess it’s from traumatic events in my life. It takes a lot to get me to the point that I get extremely angry. But when I do, it’s really bad.

My anxiety is at an all-time low. I’ve always struggled with anxiety so bad to the point that it would give me insomnia, and I would have panic attacks. I can’t actually remember the last time I had a full-blown panic attack. So I’m doing really good, man. I mitigate all that stuff with physical activity, writing music, staying busy with music, reading. I’m getting really into stoicism. I’m getting better and better at practicing that, day to day.

The drug and alcohol recovery work that I do every day – that helps immensely. I’ve found a new group of guys that I’ve been hanging with on Zoom that’s awesome. I do it every morning. It’s a multi-tiered approach. That shit can sneak up on you. No one thing for me is going to fix my mental issues. I have to stay fluid and vigilant with it.

Tell me about the morning work.

I found that during this whole [pandemic], routine has been awesome for me. I’ve been doing sun salutation for a really long time. It gets your breathing going. It centers you in the morning, stretches everything out. And then I’ll walk the dogs. It’s kind of a core workout because they’re really strong, and they pull because they’re still puppies. Then I get home, and at the same time every morning, I meet with the group of guys.

Again, it’s about centering yourself. It’s about being vigilant about your thoughts. Your thoughts begin to dictate your actions, which begin to dictate your habits, which over the course of weeks and months and years—then that’s your life. Your thoughts become your actions become your habits become your life. Your life is essentially habit on a long enough timeline. The key is breaking bad habits or reducing bad habits and increasing good habits.

When you got sober, did you stop one big habit cold turkey, or did you gradually stop small habits?

The gradual thing didn’t work for me, and I don’t think that works for a true alcoholic. My drinking career was about 15 years. I started when I was 12 or so, stopped when I was 27. Throughout that drinking career, there were countless times that I was like, “I’m going to stop.” But stopping forever never seemed possible or appealing in any way. The first time I got drunk, I was like, “I’m going to die drunk, because this fixes everything wrong with me, and it’s worth it to live a shorter life and die a horrible death if I get to be drunk every day and all of my problems are solved.” But the problem is, eventually you find out that dying a physical death from alcoholism is not good. It’s not quick. It doesn’t just end. It’s really shitty.

Your situation had a name, alcoholism and drug addiction is its sibling. But I would argue that most people have something similar. It just doesn’t look as dire. Maybe one is trapped in a bad relationship or in a job from which one needs money. What would be your advice to people wanting to drop that monkey off their back?

You just have to recognize the internal window of opportunity for action. It might take years for that to come. For the last two or three years of my drinking, I didn’t want to do it. I was trapped. And, yeah, it’s not just drugs or alcohol that can convince you that you need them. But I think we all have an internal gauge for our true selves and our true purpose and our true path to serenity and peace in this life. It’s been called different things by different people. Crowley calls it the holy guardian angel, our truest version of ourselves that’s connected to our purpose in this life.

Any day that you wake up could be the day that you are given whatever chemical reaction in your head that creates some kind of mood or some perspective shift where you say, “Fuck it, today is the day that this ends.” You don’t have to change your whole life in that moment. It’s corny, but you just take one step. Like Harley Flanagan, whom you just spoke to, said, if you’re sitting watching Netflix, get down and do a few pushups. And don’t feel bad if you can only do five pushups, or one or zero. And then just do that the next day, again.

Dude, six years ago, I was dying. I was basically in a state of paranoid schizophrenia. I had drunk myself into a complete mental illness that I didn’t even know was in me, or that I didn’t even know it was possible for me to experience. My internal organs were failing. I couldn’t eat. All I could do was drink alcohol. And if I stopped drinking alcohol on my own at home, I was going to die. Talk about an impossible condition. I really truly didn’t see a way out of it. I was certain I was going to die miserable and insane. But six years later, I’ve never been happier. And I’m not special. I just took a little bit of action.

Garrett in his home gym.

Did you pursue fitness when you were a drunk?

Hell no [laughs]. I was too fucked up.

Do you think physical fitness filled the space that alcoholism left?

Yeah, partially, and re-engaging and falling back in love with the stuff I was doing before I got in such bad shape. Falling back in love with listening to music and writing music. Falling back in love with interacting with people. I wasn’t interacting with any people at the end of my drinking at all, except the people in my head that didn’t actually exist.

When I was growing up, I was very active in sports. I always loved doing outdoors stuff. I played baseball for a really long time. I was a really good pitcher. My best friend growing up was a state champion wrestler in Oklahoma and a Golden Gloves boxer. We started a little amateur boxing group between our friends. We would just box each other in the front yard. I started lifting weights in high school. I really dug lifting weights and listening to Carnivore or Black Flag. That stuff always helped me with dealing with trauma and pain in my life, even from an early age.

But when the drinking and craziness took over, all of that stuff took a back seat to the real priority, which was staying out of my mind 24 hours a day, for years. By the end of my drinking, I wasn’t capable of doing anything. I couldn’t even eat. I was weak and dying. I had a terminal condition, and I still treat it to this day.

One of the first things that I did coming out of detox—we went to Target, and I bought running shoes and a pair of shorts. And I just started running, and running, and running. I was running all the time, every day. I think that helped me physically from the damage I’d done to myself. But it also burned up a lot of that obsessive excess energy that had no outlet. Alcohol had been my outlet for all this obsessive, crazy energy. So I wanted to make sure I didn’t just stop that obsession and sit there with no new obsession and no place for that [energy] to go.

After you got sober, you got back into lifting weights. Tell me about that.

The first serious weightlifting memory that I have was two years later, on tour with Cannibal Corpse. Alex Webster—who you should definitely talk to for this, he’s a fitness guy, a big runner—he came out with the sectioned dumbbells from which you can pull out different weights. A couple of guys on the crew busted out a fuckin’ bar and plates and all this stuff. And like I said, when I was 17, 18, I was big on compound lifting, like bench press, squats. But these dudes got me into deadlifting. And I was hooked immediately, to the point that we were doing it every day. And on subsequent tours with Gatecreeper, Eric Wagner and myself would bring a bar and plates and rack, and we would do deadlifts and squats and bench presses every day that we could.

Are Cannibal Corpse putting the rack and weights below the bus?

Yeah, underneath. For us, it was way more of a pain in the ass. There was skepticism from some of the other guys in Gatecreeper at first because we just had a trailer. But it worked out. We figured out a system. We put the plates up in the front corner. We put all the weight stuff in the front of the trailer so that we could unload the gear, bust the stuff out on the street, work out real quick, and put it back. At the end of the night, it’s already in there, out of the way; we put the gear back in and go.

When you say street, you mean next to the venue.

Yeah. We played House of Blues in New Orleans, which is right in the middle of the French Quarter. We had this motherfucker set up on a main street in the French Quarter. We were doing heavy squats, and, man, it was fun. We met some characters doing that, all over the world. In Canada, we had some drunk guy fall into the bar and almost knock it over because he was trying to show us how it was done. In New Orleans, there was this dude from Oklahoma who was a former football coach. He came over and started talking shit to all of us about our technique. I just kept calling him, “Coach”. That was fun. A drug dealer came over and did some squats with us.

When are you doing these workouts before the show?

On the tour that we had all that equipment, it would be after load-in and before doors. On the last Spirit Adrift tour, I would do resistance band stuff and shadowboxing. On the last tour I did with Gatecreeper, I would actually find the closest boxing gym and go fuck around, which was really fun, to see each individual city’s boxing gyms. If I couldn’t find a boxing gym, I would just go to a regular gym and run or lift weights. I did that every day of that tour.

Garrett with Maleek Jackson at his boxing gym in Philly.

Tell me about staying sober on tour. Obviously, you’re seeing drinking and substance abuse around you.

It might actually make it easier. We run into people that probably shouldn’t be drinking and doing drugs the way that they are. A lot of fellow musicians and fans will talk to me when they’re fucked up about not wanting to be fucked up. So it’s a good reminder.

The program that I’m in, if you do it right, it works. I’ve never seen it not work with somebody that actually puts the effort in and does it. One of the things that happens early on is that the obsession is lifted. No one knows how far into sobriety that will be. But it’s happened to every single person that works the program that I’m in. At one point the obsession was lifted for me. It was well before I went back on tour.

Another thing that helps is seeing people. I know a few people that have kind of followed in my footsteps. There’s people whose footsteps I followed in also. It’s inspiring to see somebody that’s struggling and know that by saving my own life and improving my own life, that it may lay some groundwork for somebody to follow suit. That’s all way better than whatever fleeting experience I would have by getting drunk, which would inevitably ruin my life in the end.

Nita Strauss said that calories count on the road. Would you agree with her?

Yeah. I’m probably more active on tour than at home, despite all the sitting in a van. There’s a lot of walking. I load the gear every single night. I think I might eat more frequently on tour than I do at home. But I try to be super mindful. Thor from Swans wrote that thing about touring years ago, and one of the things he talked about was eating oranges for fiber, or just eating a piece of fruit. And I’m real big on that. You can get an apple and a banana almost anywhere—at a truck stop, in any state.

It’s a mental health thing. I don’t like feeling like shit. And there’s enough stuff on tour that builds up to make you feel like shit that you don’t need to be adding on to it in any way, shape, or form. You’re not going to get the right amount of sleep, which is really difficult for me. I read that a lack of sleep leads to an increase in negative thoughts, and I was like, “Oh, wow, that explains a lot.” I don’t have a capacity for an increase in negative thoughts. On tour, sometimes I’m like, god, I literally want to fucking kill everybody, and I don’t know why. So, I definitely don’t want to exacerbate an already fucked up, twisted brain by eating like shit.

Sometimes you have to. We eat a lot of Taco Bell on tour because I feel like it’s the lesser of the fast food evils. Even if the quality is shit, beans and rice will provide you with some protein and stuff like that. I eat as much fruit and vegetables as humanly possible. I hit grocery stores as much as I possibly can. I like to keep a stock of fruit and vegetables and kombucha. Kombucha is huge. I drink that stuff every day if I can.

What does it do for you?

Part of it is that it burns my throat and my esophagus in the same way that whiskey did, which is really nice. It just makes me feel good. It makes my blood feel a little on fire. I joke that it’s like a microdose of alcohol. I’ve been drinking kombucha since I got sober, and it hasn’t led to anything bad happening, so I think it’s OK.

What’s your diet like at home?

Pretty good. I’m not that strict on anything. My wife works for Whole Foods, so she’ll bring home good groceries. We do a lot of smoothies and fruit in the morning, usually some kind of chicken thing for lunch, just basically experimenting with all the different ways you can eat chicken. Lots of rice and veggies and stuff like that. We’ll plan a meal out where we’ll go fucking insane. But for the most part, simple meals at home.

Where do you get health and fitness cues from?

Right after I got sober, I started listening to the Joe Rogan podcast. I really enjoy it, man. I do get some of it from following MMA fighters. I’m really, really obsessed with MMA and boxing, more so MMA these days. David Goggins—when I found out about that guy, I started religiously following him.

Tell me about stoicism. What have you been reading?

A couple years ago I read Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, which is kind of *the* book for stoicism. Before that, Marcus [Bryant, Spirit Adrift drummer] gave me the Tao Te Ching, which is proto-stoicism in certain ways. Most recently, I went and got Ryan Holiday’s books. There’s three of them. I read all three of them real quick. They’re almost like “Stoicism for Dummies,” and I don’t mean that as an insult at all. I think he would probably agree with that. I’m going to keep reading, because I like it a lot. Also, the recovery program I’m in, it’s an amalgamation of a lot of different things, but it draws heavily from stoicism. It took me a while to realize that. I think that’s where it started creeping into my life, through recovery.

For working out at home, what do you have, and what do you do?

I have a—I think PRx is the company—it’s a foldout rack. And I got a foldout bench in the garage. I do squats and overhead press, pullups, deadlifts, any sort of super-heavy compound lifting out there. We have a workout room which is more where my wife does her thing. I have an Aqua Bag in there, which is great. It’s just a big bag filled with water that you punch. So I work on my boxing in there. We have kettlebells and that sort of thing.

Do you write out your reps and sets?

It’s just kind of based on how I feel. I keep a loose track in the back of my mind about not doing anything two days in a row. If I feel like I’m good to go, I’ll do something. And if I feel like I should do something else, I do something else. If I feel like I should go run three miles, I’ll do that. If I feel like I’m slow, I’ll go do something that doesn’t require dynamic muscle movements, like I’ll go deadlift or something. If my back is hurting, I’ll do pull-ups and try to stretch my spine out a little bit. I don’t really adhere to anything all that tight. What I do is I make sure that I’m doing whatever I need to do every day to maintain consistency and discipline and also my mental health.

How do you handle rest and recovery?

Unfortunately, I don’t rest or recover enough. I keep saying I’m going to start doing yoga and stuff, but I really don’t do it. I went back to Arizona for a week to record an EP that we just did, and I didn’t do any working out for a week. And I was amazed at how good I felt. Because of the fact that my primary motivator for going so hard physically is to mitigate my mental issues, I don’t like to rest. When I rest, I sit there and I think.

With Austin kickboxing crew (featuring Blk Ops’ Champ Morgan, second from left)

Maybe recording filled that space for that week.

It did 100%, yeah. A lot of people don’t realize that thinking and mind activity burns calories. It literally burns energy. So, you can sit and be working on a record for 12 hours a day, and you’re not doing anything crazy, you’re not lifting anything heavy, your heart rate’s not being accelerated—by the end of the day, you feel physically exhausted, not just mentally exhausted. It’s because your brain is on overdrive.

Would you draw any connection between physical performance and musical performance?

I know that the more in shape I am, the better I sing. Singing is a very physical activity. And, playing, too. You just have more stamina. There’s a definite connection there, absolutely.

It helps to look good on stage, too.

Yeah, that’s important, I guess. One thing that I do keep in mind is, depending on what’s coming up in my musical life, I might change what I’m doing with my workout routine. So, knowing that I’m going to have to sing, I might start powerlifting less and running more to lean more into the cardiovascular training and be a little more light feeling with my muscles.

For someone who’s starting from ground zero and has been sitting on the couch and eating badly, what’s your advice to them?

If you want to change bad enough, just take that first step. If I could get out of the hole that I was in, anyone can do it. It might seem impossible, and I know that it’s easier to just sit and stew and wish that things were a certain way. But all you have to do is start. It’s going to take a while. Like I said early on, it’s all about habit. You just set a goal, and you work at it every day, every single day, just a little bit.

I was addicted to drinking whiskey. All I wanted to do was drink whiskey, that’s it. Now I’m addicted to stuff that’s not only not killing me, but actually improving my health. That just came over time and repetition and forming a new habit. One day you’ll look back and be amazed at what happened.

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Florincoin – the 2014 Altcoin You Don’t Remember – Is Attracting Real Users

One of the most recognizable names in the crypto space (and perhaps even outside of it) is using one of the least recognizable blockchains.

Overstock.com subsidiaries Medici Ventures and tZERO have been utilizing the FLO blockchain for some time in work aimed at re-organizing property rights. At one time, a video of the tZERO homepage even showed the little-known blockchain at work.

Still, if you haven’t heard of FLO before, you won’t be alone. Maybe Florincoin, the blockchain’s moniker when it first launched in 2013, shortly before the 2014 altcoin boom – will ring a bell, at least those who were in New York at the time.

Joey Fiscella was a staple in the growing New York City crypto community during that area. A young, extroverted programmer, he had the ability to schmooze with the best of the business types. While the rest of the scene was focused on bitcoin, to a certain extent litecoin and for the lolz dogecoin, Fiscella was instead always talking Florincoin – a coin that’s visage bears a golden fleur-de-lis.

He was a regular at the New York Bitcoin Center and was always handing out thin strips of paper with Florincoin private keys (I used to have one, but as is the nature of small scraps of paper, it has been lost).

The idea was simple: Florincoin was bitcoin but with additional room for transaction comments, 140 characters at that time. And those characters would allow a decentralized social media (what else had a 140-character limit back then? Twitter), one that couldn’t be censored or stopped.

It’s a dream that’s still being toyed with today – from Steemit to Peepeth to Minds – but since then Florincoin, now FLO, has moved on.

Today, most of the developers and businesses involved in FLO are interested in it as an indexing tool, something that could provide the backbone of a blockchain-based Google.

Not only has Medici Land Governance begun adding property records on the FLO blockchain (and partnered with the state of Wyoming, the city of Tulum in Mexico and a government official in Zambia), but T-zero is adding digital locate receipts, which locate the ownership of a stock, into FLO to mitigate naked short selling.

On top of that, FLO is being utilized by the Open Index Protocol (OIP), a database for decentralized publishing of all kinds, and an app on top of OIP called Alexandria, which allows users to search and browse info in that database.

The list of users goes on too.

The California Institute of Technology, also called Caltech, uses FLO to store more than 17,000 records of information gathered with microscopes, and just recently announced the creation of another repository of microscope data.

So how, a crypto enthusiast might ask, did FLO become a blockchain with actual users (and seemingly without gloating in the hopes of sparking a price pump)?

According to Chris Chrysostom, a senior software developer at Medici Ventures, “As a developer I’m always open to looking at other solutions; people mention bitcoin a lot because right now it’s a good starting point for communicating concepts.”

But, he continued:

“One thing that FLO provides that bitcoin doesn’t is, right now, it has the ability to accept 1,040 bytes of metadata. FLO is able and willing to take on the blockchain bloat that many people are critical of in bitcoin.”

The bytes and the bloat

To understand how one of the most-anticipated and regulated token projects in the space came to use a blockchain that most people don’t even know about, you have to start with its first real business case.

Utilized by husband and wife team, Devon and Amy Reed, Florincoin became the underlying technology of the Decentralized Library of Alexandria (DLOA).

A blatant nod to the ancient world library that was burned down (while it’s become a modern-day symbol for the loss of cultural knowledge, the crypto project used it as a way to illustrate the problems inherent to centralization), the project was initially touted as a decentralized library. According to Amy, the co-founder of the project, in an earlier interview, all types of content, including books, blogs, video, audio and art could be added to the blockchain and secured from censorship.

DLOA was the forefather of today’s decentralized content platforms, hoping to untangle the messy distribution models that currently exist for content creators and viewers online.

The project chugged along for a couple of years quietly, until Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web and the founder of the W3C, a standards organization for the web, was given a demo of the app.

According to Amy, Berners-Lee loved it, but said: “change the name.”

So the application – a Google-like search for the data, became just Alexandria and the protocol, which allows content creators to decide how their content is categorized before adding it to the FLO blockchain, became known as the Open Index Protocol (OIP).

And as that change happened, the number of bytes that could be stored in a transaction was increased as well – from 140 to 528 and then to 1,040, the limit today. But what’s perhaps the most fascinating about OIP is that in a mess of new competition, the project has stuck with FLO.

From Storj to Filecoin or even more broadly ethereum or EOS, there’s a slew of blockchain projects looking to tackle a similar use case – decentralized file storage – and these new players tout advanced architecture that makes their platforms faster, stronger, overall better.

But Devon remains unphased by the shiny new toys.

“When we started the project, our goal was to build a shared data layer that is censorship-proof, persistent and as interoperable as possible,” he told CoinDesk. “This required certain technical choices, which FLO fit perfectly – and even though other things have been launched since which do a variety of things, they don’t meet those needs better than FLO does.”

For that index that OIP is, Devon contends, the project needs full global state replication (to make censorship attempts transparent), proof-of-work consensus (to make censorship attempts expensive and defensible) and the ability to directly benefit from bitcoin’s developer community (a fork of bitcoin).

According to Devon Reed, sure, OIP could instead store its index on ethereum, and with that gain a different developer community and plenty of hype.

But, he said, the project would lose in other ways. For instance, after sharding is implemented, the project wouldn’t any longer get full global state replication; and after Casper – ethereum’s switch to a proof-of-stake consensus algorithm – the project wouldn’t have the security of proof-of-work.

On top of that, the publishing fees would no longer be decided by the OIP working group, and would instead, entirely be a function of the gas costs – priced by the ethereum core developers – of certain operations.

For many intents and purposes, FLO has become a kind of single purpose blockchain specifically for OIP. And that wasn’t a bad thing for FLO. While other institutions are starting to use FLO now, for many years Devon and Amy were the only ones really focused on FLO and they brought in a significant number of the developers that work on the blockchain to this day.

The original angel

Take Sky Young, a senior full stack developer at Alexandria.io, who started working on the FLO protocol because of her role with Alexandria in August 2015.

Or Jeremiah Buddenhage, also known as bitspill, who began developing on the FLO blockchain after he completed and claimed a bounty posted by the Alexandria team to update the protocol. After that, Buddenhage told CoinDesk, Alexandria offered him contract work until hiring him as a full stack developer in the summer of 2017.

Both developers get paid to work on OIP, which many times involves the development of FLO, keeping the blockchain up-to-date, probably more so than it would be were there not a company so tied into its success.

Before OIP and Alexandria, there was only FLO’s (then Florincoin’s), creator, a pseudonymous developer going by the moniker SkyAngel. It’s pretty similar to bitcoin’s Satoshi Nakamoto, although SkyAngel remains around here and there, said Fiscella.

SkyAngel did not return requests for comment.

In June 2013, Fiscella was trolling crypto forums looking for altcoins to mine and stumbled on FLO – hours after the software was released, he began mining the cryptocurrency and after noticing a couple of bugs (nothing consensus-related) in the code, he contacted SkyAngel within a week of its release. He’s been volunteering his time towards development ever since.

And while Fiscella got his fair share of shit for messing around with FLO – this was back in the day when people thought all altcoins were useless or worse, scams – there’s a sense of pride now.

“FLO is one of the oldest altcoins that is still actively traded and developed,” he told CoinDesk.

And it’s done so, he continued, without a pre-mine for developers, without raising huge amounts of money in an initial coin offering (ICO), without even a million dollars from a venture capitalist. Although, the FLO developers have raised $50,000 from the community over the past six years and the OIP and Alexandria team have raised a few $100,000 here and there, which they used to continue FLO development.

As such, many of the developers working on FLO right now are also pretty happy with the way it’s all turned out.

For instance, Young describes FLO as “hidden” and “undervalued.” And although Buddenhage was initially only attracted to FLO as a way to make money from small programming gigs, his “appreciation and understanding” has grown significantly over the years.

He told CoinDesk, “The big idea that made me want to keep working on this project is the idea of building a public space – allowing users to determine the worth of their own work and for the consumers to determine if it’s appropriate (rather than being held to the mercy of rates decided by a private company or a vague definition of ‘advertiser friendly’).”

In describing my story, meeting Fiscella years later at a crypto meetup and thinking, ‘Holy shit, Florincoin still exists,’ Buddenhage, who’s been in the space since 2013, laughed, saying:

“It’s great to see people react when they re-discover that FLO/Alexandria have not joined the ranks of shitcoin yet nor is it merely idling on but has actually grown in the shadows.”

Enter tZERO

It was Chris Chrysostom, a developer that was looking to build a simple application called a bill of sale on a blockchain, that found FLO and eventually brought it into the Medici ranks.

While he began the project hoping to utilize bitcoin’s OP_RETURN feature, Chrysostom quickly became frustrated with that because cumbersome to use and doesn’t hold enough data to create anything substantial. So he started looking around, reading through some content about Factom and the Storj white papers, both of which mention FLO (again Florincoin at that time).

That led Chrysostom to Alexandria, where he worked alongside Devon and Amy, building out the project’s payment capabilities.

Then in July 2017, he was picked up by Medici Ventures.

Now a senior software developer at the venture capital subsidiary of Overstock.com, Chrysostom brought to the job his interest in FLO. Chrysostom was assigned to a project within Medici Ventures focused on property rights – the idea being a global property rights registry – and FLO and the work being done by the Open Index Protocol seemed like a natural fit there, he told CoinDesk.

“We use it specifically for projects, proofs-of-concept and research for this property rights project,” he said.

While Patrick Byrne, the founder and CEO of Overstock, announced a partnership in late 2017 with Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto with a similar intent, Chrysostom said his work using FLO at Medici Ventures was different, yet could easily support the De Soto project if necessary.

According to Chrysostom, he was looking for a proof-of-work blockchain with similarities to bitcoin, so many similarities that the development work on bitcoin’s core team could then be applied to the other blockchain as well. For instance, security measures and scaling technologies like Segregated Witness.

“FLO was really appealing – bitcoin wants its use case to be focused on value transfer (and that’s fine); FLO has taken it upon itself to have a lot of similarities to bitcoin but with the added feature of application data,” Chrysostom said. “Which is more suited for the property rights use case.”

And sure enough, Chrysostom has similar things to say about the project’s ethos and morals.

“It’s really appealing that FLO hasn’t gone down the path of turning itself into an ICO; it didn’t try to segregate coins in a certain way, like the staking mechanisms; it’s quite admirable that it has remained an open-source project,” he said, adding:

“Four to five years have gone by, and it’s still about what its founding was all about – an open blockchain with a little extra use case. I just find it admirable that it’s stuck to that.”

And as for OIP and Alexandria, those teams get Chrysostom’s praise too since, according to him, they focused on building out the software instead of hyping the coin.

Chrysostom said:

“FLO has been quite the stealth coin in my opinion.”

While Chrysostom would, of course, love to see the developers and projects building on FLO get rewarded for their work, he understands that with investment comes responsibilities that might divert the focus away from the open index goal.

For Medici Ventures part, it does not provide investment to FLO developers, Chrysostom explained, although he continued, “If the day comes that someone wants to make a pitch to Medici Ventures … I think they’d listen. They listen to all kinds of things.”

Keeping it afloat

Still, that’s not to say everything has run smoothly in the FLO community.

For instance, toward the end of 2015, customers of Cryptsy, the only digital currency exchange that listed FLO, began having withdrawal issues, and shortly after the exchange claimed it was insolvent after a July 2014 hack.

While a class action was mounted at Cryptsy in the aftermath, the parties that brought the class action against the exchange didn’t list FLO as one of the coins you could redeem. According to Fiscella, there are 11.5 million FLO coins in one Cryptsy wallet that haven’t moved since February 2014, so he suspects not that the exchange’s founders ran away with the coins (because then they probably would have sold them off at some point) but that these coins could not be recovered by any party, the exchange or even law enforcement.

“It wasn’t worth anything at the time,” Fiscella said. “But FLO was once around 40 cents.”

At that price, the coins lost in Cryptsy would have been worth more than $4 million.

Since then Bittrex and Poloniex have also listed FLO (actually on the same day in March 2015), although Poloniex removed it shortly after the exchange was acquired by Circle. Poloniex didn’t give a reason for the delisting of FLO, though the coin was taken off the site with a handful of other altcoins.

While some thought the reason was low volume, Fiscella argues that other coins that were not delisted had lower volume than FLO, so really he speculates the delisting was about FLO’s low hashrate, which meant that FLO could be relatively easily 51% attacked.

This was right around the same time that Crypto 51, a website calculating the cost of 51% attacking (and then double spending) cryptocurrencies, appeared. Once that website was up, a number of cryptocurrencies, including bitcoin gold and vertcoin, began dealing with attacks.

And FLO, which was on the Crypto51 list with an attack price of only $300, was exploited on Bittrex in September 2018 and 25 bitcoins were stolen. The attack works like this: an anonymous account deposited hundreds of thousands of FLO coins into Bittrex, traded that FLO for the 25 bitcoins, withdrew the 25 bitcoins and then rewrote about 480 FLO blocks. In this way, the FLO deposit was reversed and the hacker was able to reclaim the hundreds of thousands of FLO they had initially deposited and was also out with the bitcoin as well. The wallet at the exchange then didn’t have the FLO to deposit into the accounts that had bought the altcoin.

When Bittrex’s system detected this, it shut down FLO trading for about a month, until the developers fixed the issue.

“And by fixed it, I mean we paid 700,000 FLO to Bittrex,” Fiscella said, adding:

“And by we, I mean me.”

Bittrex did not respond to requests for inquiry.

Joey used the FLO he had been mining since the beginning to pay back the exchange and other FLO developers set up a “Big Mac Fund” for Joey, where community members have donated about half of the 700,000 to Joey for his ongoing work on the protocol.

Before the attack happened, Fiscella had been discussing the issue with Alexandria’s Devon Reed, saying they needed to increase the hash rate before something like this happened. But it was too little, too late.

After the attack, the developers working on the protocol decided that FLO needed to add some additional security measures to the scrypt-based mining algorithm (an alternative to bitcoin’s SHA-256 algorithm) since scrypt-based mining made it easier for an attack to take place.

The developers decided to add an extra rule to the consensus algorithm, a so-called max reorg depth limit feature. This feature requires large reorganizations of the blockchain be rejected, and it’s a similar feature to that used by bitcoin cash and ravencoin.

If that sounds like something that could kill a cryptocurrency, make people so skeptical of its security and value that they sell off their bags and leave it to die, it’s definitely happened before.

But FLO has endured and actually, it’s developers learned from its mistakes and evolved.

“The people who have joined have not asked to be paid, they’re just activists or investors,” Fiscella told CoinDesk, adding: “Everyone joined organically and they’re using their skills and network to grow the community. I think that’s really important.”

Today, there are about 10 active mining pools and another 10 that sometimes mine FLO, which increases the robustness of the coin. Also in early 2018, FLO’s code was updated to Segregated Witness, a protocol change that adjusts the way data is stored, making blockchains more scalable.

Echoing Fiscella’s comments about FLO being successful because of its determined developer community, Buddenhage concluded:

“They all appear to know what they’re doing and why they’re here putting in the effort whenever/wherever life/work allows the opportunity being that it’s a side project and volunteerism keeping it going, perhaps slowly at times but always moving forward with dedication and purpose.”

FLO coins featured image via gunkworks.no; images in the article via Joey Fiscella

This news post is collected from CoinDesk

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Florincoin – the 2014 Altcoin You Don’t Remember – Is Attracting Real Users

Source: https://www.coindesk.com/florincoin-the-2014-altcoin-you-dont-remember-is-attracting-real-users

One of the most recognizable names in the crypto space (and perhaps even outside of it) is using one of the least recognizable blockchains.

Overstock.com subsidiaries Medici Ventures and tZERO have been utilizing the FLO blockchain for some time in work aimed at re-organizing property rights. At one time, a video of the tZERO homepage even showed the little-known blockchain at work.

Still, if you haven’t heard of FLO before, you won’t be alone. Maybe Florincoin, the blockchain’s moniker when it first launched in 2013, shortly before the 2014 altcoin boom – will ring a bell, at least those who were in New York at the time.

Joey Fiscella was a staple in the growing New York City crypto community during that area. A young, extroverted programmer, he had the ability to schmooze with the best of the business types. While the rest of the scene was focused on bitcoin, to a certain extent litecoin and for the lolz dogecoin, Fiscella was instead always talking Florincoin – a coin that’s visage bears a golden fleur-de-lis.

He was a regular at the New York Bitcoin Center and was always handing out thin strips of paper with Florincoin private keys (I used to have one, but as is the nature of small scraps of paper, it has been lost).

The idea was simple: Florincoin was bitcoin but with additional room for transaction comments, 140 characters at that time. And those characters would allow a decentralized social media (what else had a 140-character limit back then? Twitter), one that couldn’t be censored or stopped.

It’s a dream that’s still being toyed with today – from Steemit to Peepeth to Minds – but since then Florincoin, now FLO, has moved on.

Today, most of the developers and businesses involved in FLO are interested in it as an indexing tool, something that could provide the backbone of a blockchain-based Google.

Not only has Medici Land Governance begun adding property records on the FLO blockchain (and partnered with the state of Wyoming, the city of Tulum in Mexico and a government official in Zambia), but T-zero is adding digital locate receipts, which locate the ownership of a stock, into FLO to mitigate naked short selling.

On top of that, FLO is being utilized by the Open Index Protocol (OIP), a database for decentralized publishing of all kinds, and an app on top of OIP called Alexandria, which allows users to search and browse info in that database.

The list of users goes on too.

The California Institute of Technology, also called Caltech, uses FLO to store more than 17,000 records of information gathered with microscopes, and just recently announced the creation of another repository of microscope data.

So how, a crypto enthusiast might ask, did FLO become a blockchain with actual users (and seemingly without gloating in the hopes of sparking a price pump)?

According to Chris Chrysostom, a senior software developer at Medici Ventures, “As a developer I’m always open to looking at other solutions; people mention bitcoin a lot because right now it’s a good starting point for communicating concepts.”

But, he continued:

“One thing that FLO provides that bitcoin doesn’t is, right now, it has the ability to accept 1,040 bytes of metadata. FLO is able and willing to take on the blockchain bloat that many people are critical of in bitcoin.”

The bytes and the bloat

To understand how one of the most-anticipated and regulated token projects in the space came to use a blockchain that most people don’t even know about, you have to start with its first real business case.

Utilized by husband and wife team, Devon and Amy Reed, Florincoin became the underlying technology of the Decentralized Library of Alexandria (DLOA).

A blatant nod to the ancient world library that was burned down (while it’s become a modern-day symbol for the loss of cultural knowledge, the crypto project used it as a way to illustrate the problems inherent to centralization), the project was initially touted as a decentralized library. According to Amy, the co-founder of the project, in an earlier interview, all types of content, including books, blogs, video, audio and art could be added to the blockchain and secured from censorship.

DLOA was the forefather of today’s decentralized content platforms, hoping to untangle the messy distribution models that currently exist for content creators and viewers online.

The project chugged along for a couple of years quietly, until Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web and the founder of the W3C, a standards organization for the web, was given a demo of the app.

According to Amy, Berners-Lee loved it, but said: “change the name.”

So the application – a Google-like search for the data, became just Alexandria and the protocol, which allows content creators to decide how their content is categorized before adding it to the FLO blockchain, became known as the Open Index Protocol (OIP).

And as that change happened, the number of bytes that could be stored in a transaction was increased as well – from 140 to 528 and then to 1,040, the limit today. But what’s perhaps the most fascinating about OIP is that in a mess of new competition, the project has stuck with FLO.

From Storj to Filecoin or even more broadly ethereum or EOS, there’s a slew of blockchain projects looking to tackle a similar use case – decentralized file storage – and these new players tout advanced architecture that makes their platforms faster, stronger, overall better.

But Devon remains unphased by the shiny new toys.

“When we started the project, our goal was to build a shared data layer that is censorship-proof, persistent and as interoperable as possible,” he told CoinDesk. “This required certain technical choices, which FLO fit perfectly – and even though other things have been launched since which do a variety of things, they don’t meet those needs better than FLO does.”

For that index that OIP is, Devon contends, the project needs full global state replication (to make censorship attempts transparent), proof-of-work consensus (to make censorship attempts expensive and defensible) and the ability to directly benefit from bitcoin’s developer community (a fork of bitcoin).

According to Devon Reed, sure, OIP could instead store its index on ethereum, and with that gain a different developer community and plenty of hype.

But, he said, the project would lose in other ways. For instance, after sharding is implemented, the project wouldn’t any longer get full global state replication; and after Casper – ethereum’s switch to a proof-of-stake consensus algorithm – the project wouldn’t have the security of proof-of-work.

On top of that, the publishing fees would no longer be decided by the OIP working group, and would instead, entirely be a function of the gas costs – priced by the ethereum core developers – of certain operations.

For many intents and purposes, FLO has become a kind of single purpose blockchain specifically for OIP. And that wasn’t a bad thing for FLO. While other institutions are starting to use FLO now, for many years Devon and Amy were the only ones really focused on FLO and they brought in a significant number of the developers that work on the blockchain to this day.

The original angel

Take Sky Young, a senior full stack developer at Alexandria.io, who started working on the FLO protocol because of her role with Alexandria in August 2015.

Or Jeremiah Buddenhage, also known as bitspill, who began developing on the FLO blockchain after he completed and claimed a bounty posted by the Alexandria team to update the protocol. After that, Buddenhage told CoinDesk, Alexandria offered him contract work until hiring him as a full stack developer in the summer of 2017.

Both developers get paid to work on OIP, which many times involves the development of FLO, keeping the blockchain up-to-date, probably more so than it would be were there not a company so tied into its success.

Before OIP and Alexandria, there was only FLO’s (then Florincoin’s), creator, a pseudonymous developer going by the moniker SkyAngel. It’s pretty similar to bitcoin’s Satoshi Nakamoto, although SkyAngel remains around here and there, said Fiscella.

SkyAngel did not return requests for comment.

In June 2013, Fiscella was trolling crypto forums looking for altcoins to mine and stumbled on FLO – hours after the software was released, he began mining the cryptocurrency and after noticing a couple of bugs (nothing consensus-related) in the code, he contacted SkyAngel within a week of its release. He’s been volunteering his time towards development ever since.

And while Fiscella got his fair share of shit for messing around with FLO – this was back in the day when people thought all altcoins were useless or worse, scams – there’s a sense of pride now.

“FLO is one of the oldest altcoins that is still actively traded and developed,” he told CoinDesk.

And it’s done so, he continued, without a pre-mine for developers, without raising huge amounts of money in an initial coin offering (ICO), without even a million dollars from a venture capitalist. Although, the FLO developers have raised $50,000 from the community over the past six years and the OIP and Alexandria team have raised a few $100,000 here and there, which they used to continue FLO development.

As such, many of the developers working on FLO right now are also pretty happy with the way it’s all turned out.

For instance, Young describes FLO as “hidden” and “undervalued.” And although Buddenhage was initially only attracted to FLO as a way to make money from small programming gigs, his “appreciation and understanding” has grown significantly over the years.

He told CoinDesk, “The big idea that made me want to keep working on this project is the idea of building a public space – allowing users to determine the worth of their own work and for the consumers to determine if it’s appropriate (rather than being held to the mercy of rates decided by a private company or a vague definition of ‘advertiser friendly’).”

In describing my story, meeting Fiscella years later at a crypto meetup and thinking, ‘Holy shit, Florincoin still exists,’ Buddenhage, who’s been in the space since 2013, laughed, saying:

“It’s great to see people react when they re-discover that FLO/Alexandria have not joined the ranks of shitcoin yet nor is it merely idling on but has actually grown in the shadows.”

Enter tZERO

It was Chris Chrysostom, a developer that was looking to build a simple application called a bill of sale on a blockchain, that found FLO and eventually brought it into the Medici ranks.

While he began the project hoping to utilize bitcoin’s OP_RETURN feature, Chrysostom quickly became frustrated with that because cumbersome to use and doesn’t hold enough data to create anything substantial. So he started looking around, reading through some content about Factom and the Storj white papers, both of which mention FLO (again Florincoin at that time).

That led Chrysostom to Alexandria, where he worked alongside Devon and Amy, building out the project’s payment capabilities.

Then in July 2017, he was picked up by Medici Ventures.

Now a senior software developer at the venture capital subsidiary of Overstock.com, Chrysostom brought to the job his interest in FLO. Chrysostom was assigned to a project within Medici Ventures focused on property rights – the idea being a global property rights registry – and FLO and the work being done by the Open Index Protocol seemed like a natural fit there, he told CoinDesk.

“We use it specifically for projects, proofs-of-concept and research for this property rights project,” he said.

While Patrick Byrne, the founder and CEO of Overstock, announced a partnership in late 2017 with Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto with a similar intent, Chrysostom said his work using FLO at Medici Ventures was different, yet could easily support the De Soto project if necessary.

According to Chrysostom, he was looking for a proof-of-work blockchain with similarities to bitcoin, so many similarities that the development work on bitcoin’s core team could then be applied to the other blockchain as well. For instance, security measures and scaling technologies like Segregated Witness.

“FLO was really appealing – bitcoin wants its use case to be focused on value transfer (and that’s fine); FLO has taken it upon itself to have a lot of similarities to bitcoin but with the added feature of application data,” Chrysostom said. “Which is more suited for the property rights use case.”

And sure enough, Chrysostom has similar things to say about the project’s ethos and morals.

“It’s really appealing that FLO hasn’t gone down the path of turning itself into an ICO; it didn’t try to segregate coins in a certain way, like the staking mechanisms; it’s quite admirable that it has remained an open-source project,” he said, adding:

“Four to five years have gone by, and it’s still about what its founding was all about – an open blockchain with a little extra use case. I just find it admirable that it’s stuck to that.”

And as for OIP and Alexandria, those teams get Chrysostom’s praise too since, according to him, they focused on building out the software instead of hyping the coin.

Chrysostom said:

“FLO has been quite the stealth coin in my opinion.”

While Chrysostom would, of course, love to see the developers and projects building on FLO get rewarded for their work, he understands that with investment comes responsibilities that might divert the focus away from the open index goal.

For Medici Ventures part, it does not provide investment to FLO developers, Chrysostom explained, although he continued, “If the day comes that someone wants to make a pitch to Medici Ventures … I think they’d listen. They listen to all kinds of things.”

Keeping it afloat

Still, that’s not to say everything has run smoothly in the FLO community.

For instance, toward the end of 2015, customers of Cryptsy, the only digital currency exchange that listed FLO, began having withdrawal issues, and shortly after the exchange claimed it was insolvent after a July 2014 hack.

While a class action was mounted at Cryptsy in the aftermath, the parties that brought the class action against the exchange didn’t list FLO as one of the coins you could redeem. According to Fiscella, there are 11.5 million FLO coins in one Cryptsy wallet that haven’t moved since February 2014, so he suspects not that the exchange’s founders ran away with the coins (because then they probably would have sold them off at some point) but that these coins could not be recovered by any party, the exchange or even law enforcement.

“It wasn’t worth anything at the time,” Fiscella said. “But FLO was once around 40 cents.”

At that price, the coins lost in Cryptsy would have been worth more than $4 million.

Since then Bittrex and Poloniex have also listed FLO (actually on the same day in March 2015), although Poloniex removed it shortly after the exchange was acquired by Circle. Poloniex didn’t give a reason for the delisting of FLO, though the coin was taken off the site with a handful of other altcoins.

While some thought the reason was low volume, Fiscella argues that other coins that were not delisted had lower volume than FLO, so really he speculates the delisting was about FLO’s low hashrate, which meant that FLO could be relatively easily 51% attacked.

This was right around the same time that Crypto 51, a website calculating the cost of 51% attacking (and then double spending) cryptocurrencies, appeared. Once that website was up, a number of cryptocurrencies, including bitcoin gold and vertcoin, began dealing with attacks.

And FLO, which was on the Crypto51 list with an attack price of only $300, was exploited on Bittrex in September 2018 and 25 bitcoins were stolen. The attack works like this: an anonymous account deposited hundreds of thousands of FLO coins into Bittrex, traded that FLO for the 25 bitcoins, withdrew the 25 bitcoins and then rewrote about 480 FLO blocks. In this way, the FLO deposit was reversed and the hacker was able to reclaim the hundreds of thousands of FLO they had initially deposited and was also out with the bitcoin as well. The wallet at the exchange then didn’t have the FLO to deposit into the accounts that had bought the altcoin.

When Bittrex’s system detected this, it shut down FLO trading for about a month, until the developers fixed the issue.

“And by fixed it, I mean we paid 700,000 FLO to Bittrex,” Fiscella said, adding:

“And by we, I mean me.”

Bittrex did not respond to requests for inquiry.

Joey used the FLO he had been mining since the beginning to pay back the exchange and other FLO developers set up a “Big Mac Fund” for Joey, where community members have donated about half of the 700,000 to Joey for his ongoing work on the protocol.

Before the attack happened, Fiscella had been discussing the issue with Alexandria’s Devon Reed, saying they needed to increase the hash rate before something like this happened. But it was too little, too late.

After the attack, the developers working on the protocol decided that FLO needed to add some additional security measures to the scrypt-based mining algorithm (an alternative to bitcoin’s SHA-256 algorithm) since scrypt-based mining made it easier for an attack to take place.

The developers decided to add an extra rule to the consensus algorithm, a so-called max reorg depth limit feature. This feature requires large reorganizations of the blockchain be rejected, and it’s a similar feature to that used by bitcoin cash and ravencoin.

If that sounds like something that could kill a cryptocurrency, make people so skeptical of its security and value that they sell off their bags and leave it to die, it’s definitely happened before.

But FLO has endured and actually, it’s developers learned from its mistakes and evolved.

“The people who have joined have not asked to be paid, they’re just activists or investors,” Fiscella told CoinDesk, adding: “Everyone joined organically and they’re using their skills and network to grow the community. I think that’s really important.”

Today, there are about 10 active mining pools and another 10 that sometimes mine FLO, which increases the robustness of the coin. Also in early 2018, FLO’s code was updated to Segregated Witness, a protocol change that adjusts the way data is stored, making blockchains more scalable.

Echoing Fiscella’s comments about FLO being successful because of its determined developer community, Buddenhage concluded:

“They all appear to know what they’re doing and why they’re here putting in the effort whenever/wherever life/work allows the opportunity being that it’s a side project and volunteerism keeping it going, perhaps slowly at times but always moving forward with dedication and purpose.”

FLO coins featured image via gunkworks.no; images in the article via Joey Fiscella

Source: https://www.coindesk.com/florincoin-the-2014-altcoin-you-dont-remember-is-attracting-real-users

source https://www.initialcoinlist.com/florincoin-the-2014-altcoin-you-dont-remember-is-attracting-real-users/ source https://initialcoinlist1.blogspot.com/2019/05/florincoin-2014-altcoin-you-dont.html

[initialcoinlist1]

Florincoin – the 2014 Altcoin You Don’t Remember – Is Attracting Real Users

Source: https://www.coindesk.com/florincoin-the-2014-altcoin-you-dont-remember-is-attracting-real-users

One of the most recognizable names in the crypto space (and perhaps even outside of it) is using one of the least recognizable blockchains.

Overstock.com subsidiaries Medici Ventures and tZERO have been utilizing the FLO blockchain for some time in work aimed at re-organizing property rights. At one time, a video of the tZERO homepage even showed the little-known blockchain at work.

Still, if you haven’t heard of FLO before, you won’t be alone. Maybe Florincoin, the blockchain’s moniker when it first launched in 2013, shortly before the 2014 altcoin boom – will ring a bell, at least those who were in New York at the time.

Joey Fiscella was a staple in the growing New York City crypto community during that area. A young, extroverted programmer, he had the ability to schmooze with the best of the business types. While the rest of the scene was focused on bitcoin, to a certain extent litecoin and for the lolz dogecoin, Fiscella was instead always talking Florincoin – a coin that’s visage bears a golden fleur-de-lis.

He was a regular at the New York Bitcoin Center and was always handing out thin strips of paper with Florincoin private keys (I used to have one, but as is the nature of small scraps of paper, it has been lost).

The idea was simple: Florincoin was bitcoin but with additional room for transaction comments, 140 characters at that time. And those characters would allow a decentralized social media (what else had a 140-character limit back then? Twitter), one that couldn’t be censored or stopped.

It’s a dream that’s still being toyed with today – from Steemit to Peepeth to Minds – but since then Florincoin, now FLO, has moved on.

Today, most of the developers and businesses involved in FLO are interested in it as an indexing tool, something that could provide the backbone of a blockchain-based Google.

Not only has Medici Land Governance begun adding property records on the FLO blockchain (and partnered with the state of Wyoming, the city of Tulum in Mexico and a government official in Zambia), but T-zero is adding digital locate receipts, which locate the ownership of a stock, into FLO to mitigate naked short selling.

On top of that, FLO is being utilized by the Open Index Protocol (OIP), a database for decentralized publishing of all kinds, and an app on top of OIP called Alexandria, which allows users to search and browse info in that database.

The list of users goes on too.

The California Institute of Technology, also called Caltech, uses FLO to store more than 17,000 records of information gathered with microscopes, and just recently announced the creation of another repository of microscope data.

So how, a crypto enthusiast might ask, did FLO become a blockchain with actual users (and seemingly without gloating in the hopes of sparking a price pump)?

According to Chris Chrysostom, a senior software developer at Medici Ventures, “As a developer I’m always open to looking at other solutions; people mention bitcoin a lot because right now it’s a good starting point for communicating concepts.”

But, he continued:

“One thing that FLO provides that bitcoin doesn’t is, right now, it has the ability to accept 1,040 bytes of metadata. FLO is able and willing to take on the blockchain bloat that many people are critical of in bitcoin.”

The bytes and the bloat

To understand how one of the most-anticipated and regulated token projects in the space came to use a blockchain that most people don’t even know about, you have to start with its first real business case.

Utilized by husband and wife team, Devon and Amy Reed, Florincoin became the underlying technology of the Decentralized Library of Alexandria (DLOA).

A blatant nod to the ancient world library that was burned down (while it’s become a modern-day symbol for the loss of cultural knowledge, the crypto project used it as a way to illustrate the problems inherent to centralization), the project was initially touted as a decentralized library. According to Amy, the co-founder of the project, in an earlier interview, all types of content, including books, blogs, video, audio and art could be added to the blockchain and secured from censorship.

DLOA was the forefather of today’s decentralized content platforms, hoping to untangle the messy distribution models that currently exist for content creators and viewers online.

The project chugged along for a couple of years quietly, until Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web and the founder of the W3C, a standards organization for the web, was given a demo of the app.

According to Amy, Berners-Lee loved it, but said: “change the name.”

So the application – a Google-like search for the data, became just Alexandria and the protocol, which allows content creators to decide how their content is categorized before adding it to the FLO blockchain, became known as the Open Index Protocol (OIP).

And as that change happened, the number of bytes that could be stored in a transaction was increased as well – from 140 to 528 and then to 1,040, the limit today. But what’s perhaps the most fascinating about OIP is that in a mess of new competition, the project has stuck with FLO.

From Storj to Filecoin or even more broadly ethereum or EOS, there’s a slew of blockchain projects looking to tackle a similar use case – decentralized file storage – and these new players tout advanced architecture that makes their platforms faster, stronger, overall better.

But Devon remains unphased by the shiny new toys.

“When we started the project, our goal was to build a shared data layer that is censorship-proof, persistent and as interoperable as possible,” he told CoinDesk. “This required certain technical choices, which FLO fit perfectly – and even though other things have been launched since which do a variety of things, they don’t meet those needs better than FLO does.”

For that index that OIP is, Devon contends, the project needs full global state replication (to make censorship attempts transparent), proof-of-work consensus (to make censorship attempts expensive and defensible) and the ability to directly benefit from bitcoin’s developer community (a fork of bitcoin).

According to Devon Reed, sure, OIP could instead store its index on ethereum, and with that gain a different developer community and plenty of hype.

But, he said, the project would lose in other ways. For instance, after sharding is implemented, the project wouldn’t any longer get full global state replication; and after Casper – ethereum’s switch to a proof-of-stake consensus algorithm – the project wouldn’t have the security of proof-of-work.

On top of that, the publishing fees would no longer be decided by the OIP working group, and would instead, entirely be a function of the gas costs – priced by the ethereum core developers – of certain operations.

For many intents and purposes, FLO has become a kind of single purpose blockchain specifically for OIP. And that wasn’t a bad thing for FLO. While other institutions are starting to use FLO now, for many years Devon and Amy were the only ones really focused on FLO and they brought in a significant number of the developers that work on the blockchain to this day.

The original angel

Take Sky Young, a senior full stack developer at Alexandria.io, who started working on the FLO protocol because of her role with Alexandria in August 2015.

Or Jeremiah Buddenhage, also known as bitspill, who began developing on the FLO blockchain after he completed and claimed a bounty posted by the Alexandria team to update the protocol. After that, Buddenhage told CoinDesk, Alexandria offered him contract work until hiring him as a full stack developer in the summer of 2017.

Both developers get paid to work on OIP, which many times involves the development of FLO, keeping the blockchain up-to-date, probably more so than it would be were there not a company so tied into its success.

Before OIP and Alexandria, there was only FLO’s (then Florincoin’s), creator, a pseudonymous developer going by the moniker SkyAngel. It’s pretty similar to bitcoin’s Satoshi Nakamoto, although SkyAngel remains around here and there, said Fiscella.

SkyAngel did not return requests for comment.

In June 2013, Fiscella was trolling crypto forums looking for altcoins to mine and stumbled on FLO – hours after the software was released, he began mining the cryptocurrency and after noticing a couple of bugs (nothing consensus-related) in the code, he contacted SkyAngel within a week of its release. He’s been volunteering his time towards development ever since.

And while Fiscella got his fair share of shit for messing around with FLO – this was back in the day when people thought all altcoins were useless or worse, scams – there’s a sense of pride now.

“FLO is one of the oldest altcoins that is still actively traded and developed,” he told CoinDesk.

And it’s done so, he continued, without a pre-mine for developers, without raising huge amounts of money in an initial coin offering (ICO), without even a million dollars from a venture capitalist. Although, the FLO developers have raised $50,000 from the community over the past six years and the OIP and Alexandria team have raised a few $100,000 here and there, which they used to continue FLO development.

As such, many of the developers working on FLO right now are also pretty happy with the way it’s all turned out.

For instance, Young describes FLO as “hidden” and “undervalued.” And although Buddenhage was initially only attracted to FLO as a way to make money from small programming gigs, his “appreciation and understanding” has grown significantly over the years.

He told CoinDesk, “The big idea that made me want to keep working on this project is the idea of building a public space – allowing users to determine the worth of their own work and for the consumers to determine if it’s appropriate (rather than being held to the mercy of rates decided by a private company or a vague definition of ‘advertiser friendly’).”

In describing my story, meeting Fiscella years later at a crypto meetup and thinking, ‘Holy shit, Florincoin still exists,’ Buddenhage, who’s been in the space since 2013, laughed, saying:

“It’s great to see people react when they re-discover that FLO/Alexandria have not joined the ranks of shitcoin yet nor is it merely idling on but has actually grown in the shadows.”

Enter tZERO

It was Chris Chrysostom, a developer that was looking to build a simple application called a bill of sale on a blockchain, that found FLO and eventually brought it into the Medici ranks.

While he began the project hoping to utilize bitcoin’s OP_RETURN feature, Chrysostom quickly became frustrated with that because cumbersome to use and doesn’t hold enough data to create anything substantial. So he started looking around, reading through some content about Factom and the Storj white papers, both of which mention FLO (again Florincoin at that time).

That led Chrysostom to Alexandria, where he worked alongside Devon and Amy, building out the project’s payment capabilities.

Then in July 2017, he was picked up by Medici Ventures.

Now a senior software developer at the venture capital subsidiary of Overstock.com, Chrysostom brought to the job his interest in FLO. Chrysostom was assigned to a project within Medici Ventures focused on property rights – the idea being a global property rights registry – and FLO and the work being done by the Open Index Protocol seemed like a natural fit there, he told CoinDesk.

“We use it specifically for projects, proofs-of-concept and research for this property rights project,” he said.

While Patrick Byrne, the founder and CEO of Overstock, announced a partnership in late 2017 with Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto with a similar intent, Chrysostom said his work using FLO at Medici Ventures was different, yet could easily support the De Soto project if necessary.

According to Chrysostom, he was looking for a proof-of-work blockchain with similarities to bitcoin, so many similarities that the development work on bitcoin’s core team could then be applied to the other blockchain as well. For instance, security measures and scaling technologies like Segregated Witness.

“FLO was really appealing – bitcoin wants its use case to be focused on value transfer (and that’s fine); FLO has taken it upon itself to have a lot of similarities to bitcoin but with the added feature of application data,” Chrysostom said. “Which is more suited for the property rights use case.”

And sure enough, Chrysostom has similar things to say about the project’s ethos and morals.

“It’s really appealing that FLO hasn’t gone down the path of turning itself into an ICO; it didn’t try to segregate coins in a certain way, like the staking mechanisms; it’s quite admirable that it has remained an open-source project,” he said, adding:

“Four to five years have gone by, and it’s still about what its founding was all about – an open blockchain with a little extra use case. I just find it admirable that it’s stuck to that.”

And as for OIP and Alexandria, those teams get Chrysostom’s praise too since, according to him, they focused on building out the software instead of hyping the coin.

Chrysostom said:

“FLO has been quite the stealth coin in my opinion.”

While Chrysostom would, of course, love to see the developers and projects building on FLO get rewarded for their work, he understands that with investment comes responsibilities that might divert the focus away from the open index goal.

For Medici Ventures part, it does not provide investment to FLO developers, Chrysostom explained, although he continued, “If the day comes that someone wants to make a pitch to Medici Ventures … I think they’d listen. They listen to all kinds of things.”

Keeping it afloat

Still, that’s not to say everything has run smoothly in the FLO community.

For instance, toward the end of 2015, customers of Cryptsy, the only digital currency exchange that listed FLO, began having withdrawal issues, and shortly after the exchange claimed it was insolvent after a July 2014 hack.

While a class action was mounted at Cryptsy in the aftermath, the parties that brought the class action against the exchange didn’t list FLO as one of the coins you could redeem. According to Fiscella, there are 11.5 million FLO coins in one Cryptsy wallet that haven’t moved since February 2014, so he suspects not that the exchange’s founders ran away with the coins (because then they probably would have sold them off at some point) but that these coins could not be recovered by any party, the exchange or even law enforcement.

“It wasn’t worth anything at the time,” Fiscella said. “But FLO was once around 40 cents.”

At that price, the coins lost in Cryptsy would have been worth more than $4 million.

Since then Bittrex and Poloniex have also listed FLO (actually on the same day in March 2015), although Poloniex removed it shortly after the exchange was acquired by Circle. Poloniex didn’t give a reason for the delisting of FLO, though the coin was taken off the site with a handful of other altcoins.

While some thought the reason was low volume, Fiscella argues that other coins that were not delisted had lower volume than FLO, so really he speculates the delisting was about FLO’s low hashrate, which meant that FLO could be relatively easily 51% attacked.

This was right around the same time that Crypto 51, a website calculating the cost of 51% attacking (and then double spending) cryptocurrencies, appeared. Once that website was up, a number of cryptocurrencies, including bitcoin gold and vertcoin, began dealing with attacks.

And FLO, which was on the Crypto51 list with an attack price of only $300, was exploited on Bittrex in September 2018 and 25 bitcoins were stolen. The attack works like this: an anonymous account deposited hundreds of thousands of FLO coins into Bittrex, traded that FLO for the 25 bitcoins, withdrew the 25 bitcoins and then rewrote about 480 FLO blocks. In this way, the FLO deposit was reversed and the hacker was able to reclaim the hundreds of thousands of FLO they had initially deposited and was also out with the bitcoin as well. The wallet at the exchange then didn’t have the FLO to deposit into the accounts that had bought the altcoin.

When Bittrex’s system detected this, it shut down FLO trading for about a month, until the developers fixed the issue.

“And by fixed it, I mean we paid 700,000 FLO to Bittrex,” Fiscella said, adding:

“And by we, I mean me.”

Bittrex did not respond to requests for inquiry.

Joey used the FLO he had been mining since the beginning to pay back the exchange and other FLO developers set up a “Big Mac Fund” for Joey, where community members have donated about half of the 700,000 to Joey for his ongoing work on the protocol.

Before the attack happened, Fiscella had been discussing the issue with Alexandria’s Devon Reed, saying they needed to increase the hash rate before something like this happened. But it was too little, too late.

After the attack, the developers working on the protocol decided that FLO needed to add some additional security measures to the scrypt-based mining algorithm (an alternative to bitcoin’s SHA-256 algorithm) since scrypt-based mining made it easier for an attack to take place.

The developers decided to add an extra rule to the consensus algorithm, a so-called max reorg depth limit feature. This feature requires large reorganizations of the blockchain be rejected, and it’s a similar feature to that used by bitcoin cash and ravencoin.

If that sounds like something that could kill a cryptocurrency, make people so skeptical of its security and value that they sell off their bags and leave it to die, it’s definitely happened before.

But FLO has endured and actually, it’s developers learned from its mistakes and evolved.

“The people who have joined have not asked to be paid, they’re just activists or investors,” Fiscella told CoinDesk, adding: “Everyone joined organically and they’re using their skills and network to grow the community. I think that’s really important.”

Today, there are about 10 active mining pools and another 10 that sometimes mine FLO, which increases the robustness of the coin. Also in early 2018, FLO’s code was updated to Segregated Witness, a protocol change that adjusts the way data is stored, making blockchains more scalable.

Echoing Fiscella’s comments about FLO being successful because of its determined developer community, Buddenhage concluded:

“They all appear to know what they’re doing and why they’re here putting in the effort whenever/wherever life/work allows the opportunity being that it’s a side project and volunteerism keeping it going, perhaps slowly at times but always moving forward with dedication and purpose.”

FLO coins featured image via gunkworks.no; images in the article via Joey Fiscella

Source: https://www.coindesk.com/florincoin-the-2014-altcoin-you-dont-remember-is-attracting-real-users

source https://www.initialcoinlist.com/florincoin-the-2014-altcoin-you-dont-remember-is-attracting-real-users/

[click2watch]

Florincoin – the 2014 Altcoin You Don’t Remember – Is Attracting Real Users

One of the most recognizable names in the crypto space (and perhaps even outside of it) is using one of the least recognizable blockchains.

Overstock.com subsidiaries Medici Ventures and tZERO have been utilizing the FLO blockchain for some time in work aimed at re-organizing property rights. At one time, a video of the tZERO homepage even showed the little-known blockchain at work.

Still, if you haven’t heard of FLO before, you won’t be alone. Maybe Florincoin, the blockchain’s moniker when it first launched in 2013, shortly before the 2014 altcoin boom – will ring a bell, at least those who were in New York at the time.

Joey Fiscella was a staple in the growing New York City crypto community during that area. A young, extroverted programmer, he had the ability to schmooze with the best of the business types. While the rest of the scene was focused on bitcoin, to a certain extent litecoin and for the lolz dogecoin, Fiscella was instead always talking Florincoin – a coin that’s visage bears a golden fleur-de-lis.

He was a regular at the New York Bitcoin Center and was always handing out thin strips of paper with Florincoin private keys (I used to have one, but as is the nature of small scraps of paper, it has been lost).

The idea was simple: Florincoin was bitcoin but with additional room for transaction comments, 140 characters at that time. And those characters would allow a decentralized social media (what else had a 140-character limit back then? Twitter), one that couldn’t be censored or stopped.

It’s a dream that’s still being toyed with today – from Steemit to Peepeth to Minds – but since then Florincoin, now FLO, has moved on.

Today, most of the developers and businesses involved in FLO are interested in it as an indexing tool, something that could provide the backbone of a blockchain-based Google.

Not only has Medici Land Governance begun adding property records on the FLO blockchain (and partnered with the state of Wyoming, the city of Tulum in Mexico and a government official in Zambia), but T-zero is adding digital locate receipts, which locate the ownership of a stock, into FLO to mitigate naked short selling.

On top of that, FLO is being utilized by the Open Index Protocol (OIP), a database for decentralized publishing of all kinds, and an app on top of OIP called Alexandria, which allows users to search and browse info in that database.

The list of users goes on too.

The California Institute of Technology, also called Caltech, uses FLO to store more than 17,000 records of information gathered with microscopes, and just recently announced the creation of another repository of microscope data.

So how, a crypto enthusiast might ask, did FLO become a blockchain with actual users (and seemingly without gloating in the hopes of sparking a price pump)?

According to Chris Chrysostom, a senior software developer at Medici Ventures, “As a developer I’m always open to looking at other solutions; people mention bitcoin a lot because right now it’s a good starting point for communicating concepts.”

But, he continued:

“One thing that FLO provides that bitcoin doesn’t is, right now, it has the ability to accept 1,040 bytes of metadata. FLO is able and willing to take on the blockchain bloat that many people are critical of in bitcoin.”

The bytes and the bloat

To understand how one of the most-anticipated and regulated token projects in the space came to use a blockchain that most people don’t even know about, you have to start with its first real business case.

Utilized by husband and wife team, Devon and Amy Reed, Florincoin became the underlying technology of the Decentralized Library of Alexandria (DLOA).

A blatant nod to the ancient world library that was burned down (while it’s become a modern-day symbol for the loss of cultural knowledge, the crypto project used it as a way to illustrate the problems inherent to centralization), the project was initially touted as a decentralized library. According to Amy, the co-founder of the project, in an earlier interview, all types of content, including books, blogs, video, audio and art could be added to the blockchain and secured from censorship.

DLOA was the forefather of today’s decentralized content platforms, hoping to untangle the messy distribution models that currently exist for content creators and viewers online.

The project chugged along for a couple of years quietly, until Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web and the founder of the W3C, a standards organization for the web, was given a demo of the app.

According to Amy, Berners-Lee loved it, but said: “change the name.”

So the application – a Google-like search for the data, became just Alexandria and the protocol, which allows content creators to decide how their content is categorized before adding it to the FLO blockchain, became known as the Open Index Protocol (OIP).

And as that change happened, the number of bytes that could be stored in a transaction was increased as well – from 140 to 528 and then to 1,040, the limit today. But what’s perhaps the most fascinating about OIP is that in a mess of new competition, the project has stuck with FLO.

From Storj to Filecoin or even more broadly ethereum or EOS, there’s a slew of blockchain projects looking to tackle a similar use case – decentralized file storage – and these new players tout advanced architecture that makes their platforms faster, stronger, overall better.

But Devon remains unphased by the shiny new toys.

“When we started the project, our goal was to build a shared data layer that is censorship-proof, persistent and as interoperable as possible,” he told CoinDesk. “This required certain technical choices, which FLO fit perfectly – and even though other things have been launched since which do a variety of things, they don’t meet those needs better than FLO does.”

For that index that OIP is, Devon contends, the project needs full global state replication (to make censorship attempts transparent), proof-of-work consensus (to make censorship attempts expensive and defensible) and the ability to directly benefit from bitcoin’s developer community (a fork of bitcoin).

According to Devon Reed, sure, OIP could instead store its index on ethereum, and with that gain a different developer community and plenty of hype.

But, he said, the project would lose in other ways. For instance, after sharding is implemented, the project wouldn’t any longer get full global state replication; and after Casper – ethereum’s switch to a proof-of-stake consensus algorithm – the project wouldn’t have the security of proof-of-work.

On top of that, the publishing fees would no longer be decided by the OIP working group, and would instead, entirely be a function of the gas costs – priced by the ethereum core developers – of certain operations.

For many intents and purposes, FLO has become a kind of single purpose blockchain specifically for OIP. And that wasn’t a bad thing for FLO. While other institutions are starting to use FLO now, for many years Devon and Amy were the only ones really focused on FLO and they brought in a significant number of the developers that work on the blockchain to this day.

The original angel

Take Sky Young, a senior full stack developer at Alexandria.io, who started working on the FLO protocol because of her role with Alexandria in August 2015.

Or Jeremiah Buddenhage, also known as bitspill, who began developing on the FLO blockchain after he completed and claimed a bounty posted by the Alexandria team to update the protocol. After that, Buddenhage told CoinDesk, Alexandria offered him contract work until hiring him as a full stack developer in the summer of 2017.

Both developers get paid to work on OIP, which many times involves the development of FLO, keeping the blockchain up-to-date, probably more so than it would be were there not a company so tied into its success.

Before OIP and Alexandria, there was only FLO’s (then Florincoin’s), creator, a pseudonymous developer going by the moniker SkyAngel. It’s pretty similar to bitcoin’s Satoshi Nakamoto, although SkyAngel remains around here and there, said Fiscella.

SkyAngel did not return requests for comment.

In June 2013, Fiscella was trolling crypto forums looking for altcoins to mine and stumbled on FLO – hours after the software was released, he began mining the cryptocurrency and after noticing a couple of bugs (nothing consensus-related) in the code, he contacted SkyAngel within a week of its release. He’s been volunteering his time towards development ever since.

And while Fiscella got his fair share of shit for messing around with FLO – this was back in the day when people thought all altcoins were useless or worse, scams – there’s a sense of pride now.

“FLO is one of the oldest altcoins that is still actively traded and developed,” he told CoinDesk.

And it’s done so, he continued, without a pre-mine for developers, without raising huge amounts of money in an initial coin offering (ICO), without even a million dollars from a venture capitalist. Although, the FLO developers have raised $50,000 from the community over the past six years and the OIP and Alexandria team have raised a few $100,000 here and there, which they used to continue FLO development.

As such, many of the developers working on FLO right now are also pretty happy with the way it’s all turned out.

For instance, Young describes FLO as “hidden” and “undervalued.” And although Buddenhage was initially only attracted to FLO as a way to make money from small programming gigs, his “appreciation and understanding” has grown significantly over the years.

He told CoinDesk, “The big idea that made me want to keep working on this project is the idea of building a public space – allowing users to determine the worth of their own work and for the consumers to determine if it’s appropriate (rather than being held to the mercy of rates decided by a private company or a vague definition of ‘advertiser friendly’).”

In describing my story, meeting Fiscella years later at a crypto meetup and thinking, ‘Holy shit, Florincoin still exists,’ Buddenhage, who’s been in the space since 2013, laughed, saying:

“It’s great to see people react when they re-discover that FLO/Alexandria have not joined the ranks of shitcoin yet nor is it merely idling on but has actually grown in the shadows.”

Enter tZERO

It was Chris Chrysostom, a developer that was looking to build a simple application called a bill of sale on a blockchain, that found FLO and eventually brought it into the Medici ranks.

While he began the project hoping to utilize bitcoin’s OP_RETURN feature, Chrysostom quickly became frustrated with that because cumbersome to use and doesn’t hold enough data to create anything substantial. So he started looking around, reading through some content about Factom and the Storj white papers, both of which mention FLO (again Florincoin at that time).

That led Chrysostom to Alexandria, where he worked alongside Devon and Amy, building out the project’s payment capabilities.

Then in July 2017, he was picked up by Medici Ventures.

Now a senior software developer at the venture capital subsidiary of Overstock.com, Chrysostom brought to the job his interest in FLO. Chrysostom was assigned to a project within Medici Ventures focused on property rights – the idea being a global property rights registry – and FLO and the work being done by the Open Index Protocol seemed like a natural fit there, he told CoinDesk.

“We use it specifically for projects, proofs-of-concept and research for this property rights project,” he said.

While Patrick Byrne, the founder and CEO of Overstock, announced a partnership in late 2017 with Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto with a similar intent, Chrysostom said his work using FLO at Medici Ventures was different, yet could easily support the De Soto project if necessary.

According to Chrysostom, he was looking for a proof-of-work blockchain with similarities to bitcoin, so many similarities that the development work on bitcoin’s core team could then be applied to the other blockchain as well. For instance, security measures and scaling technologies like Segregated Witness.

“FLO was really appealing – bitcoin wants its use case to be focused on value transfer (and that’s fine); FLO has taken it upon itself to have a lot of similarities to bitcoin but with the added feature of application data,” Chrysostom said. “Which is more suited for the property rights use case.”

And sure enough, Chrysostom has similar things to say about the project’s ethos and morals.

“It’s really appealing that FLO hasn’t gone down the path of turning itself into an ICO; it didn’t try to segregate coins in a certain way, like the staking mechanisms; it’s quite admirable that it has remained an open-source project,” he said, adding:

“Four to five years have gone by, and it’s still about what its founding was all about – an open blockchain with a little extra use case. I just find it admirable that it’s stuck to that.”

And as for OIP and Alexandria, those teams get Chrysostom’s praise too since, according to him, they focused on building out the software instead of hyping the coin.

Chrysostom said:

“FLO has been quite the stealth coin in my opinion.”

While Chrysostom would, of course, love to see the developers and projects building on FLO get rewarded for their work, he understands that with investment comes responsibilities that might divert the focus away from the open index goal.

For Medici Ventures part, it does not provide investment to FLO developers, Chrysostom explained, although he continued, “If the day comes that someone wants to make a pitch to Medici Ventures … I think they’d listen. They listen to all kinds of things.”

Keeping it afloat

Still, that’s not to say everything has run smoothly in the FLO community.

For instance, toward the end of 2015, customers of Cryptsy, the only digital currency exchange that listed FLO, began having withdrawal issues, and shortly after the exchange claimed it was insolvent after a July 2014 hack.

While a class action was mounted at Cryptsy in the aftermath, the parties that brought the class action against the exchange didn’t list FLO as one of the coins you could redeem. According to Fiscella, there are 11.5 million FLO coins in one Cryptsy wallet that haven’t moved since February 2014, so he suspects not that the exchange’s founders ran away with the coins (because then they probably would have sold them off at some point) but that these coins could not be recovered by any party, the exchange or even law enforcement.

“It wasn’t worth anything at the time,” Fiscella said. “But FLO was once around 40 cents.”

At that price, the coins lost in Cryptsy would have been worth more than $4 million.

Since then Bittrex and Poloniex have also listed FLO (actually on the same day in March 2015), although Poloniex removed it shortly after the exchange was acquired by Circle. Poloniex didn’t give a reason for the delisting of FLO, though the coin was taken off the site with a handful of other altcoins.

While some thought the reason was low volume, Fiscella argues that other coins that were not delisted had lower volume than FLO, so really he speculates the delisting was about FLO’s low hashrate, which meant that FLO could be relatively easily 51% attacked.

This was right around the same time that Crypto 51, a website calculating the cost of 51% attacking (and then double spending) cryptocurrencies, appeared. Once that website was up, a number of cryptocurrencies, including bitcoin gold and vertcoin, began dealing with attacks.

And FLO, which was on the Crypto51 list with an attack price of only $300, was exploited on Bittrex in September 2018 and 25 bitcoins were stolen. The attack works like this: an anonymous account deposited hundreds of thousands of FLO coins into Bittrex, traded that FLO for the 25 bitcoins, withdrew the 25 bitcoins and then rewrote about 480 FLO blocks. In this way, the FLO deposit was reversed and the hacker was able to reclaim the hundreds of thousands of FLO they had initially deposited and was also out with the bitcoin as well. The wallet at the exchange then didn’t have the FLO to deposit into the accounts that had bought the altcoin.

When Bittrex’s system detected this, it shut down FLO trading for about a month, until the developers fixed the issue.

“And by fixed it, I mean we paid 700,000 FLO to Bittrex,” Fiscella said, adding:

“And by we, I mean me.”

Bittrex did not respond to requests for inquiry.

Joey used the FLO he had been mining since the beginning to pay back the exchange and other FLO developers set up a “Big Mac Fund” for Joey, where community members have donated about half of the 700,000 to Joey for his ongoing work on the protocol.

Before the attack happened, Fiscella had been discussing the issue with Alexandria’s Devon Reed, saying they needed to increase the hash rate before something like this happened. But it was too little, too late.

After the attack, the developers working on the protocol decided that FLO needed to add some additional security measures to the scrypt-based mining algorithm (an alternative to bitcoin’s SHA-256 algorithm) since scrypt-based mining made it easier for an attack to take place.

The developers decided to add an extra rule to the consensus algorithm, a so-called max reorg depth limit feature. This feature requires large reorganizations of the blockchain be rejected, and it’s a similar feature to that used by bitcoin cash and ravencoin.

If that sounds like something that could kill a cryptocurrency, make people so skeptical of its security and value that they sell off their bags and leave it to die, it’s definitely happened before.

But FLO has endured and actually, it’s developers learned from its mistakes and evolved.

“The people who have joined have not asked to be paid, they’re just activists or investors,” Fiscella told CoinDesk, adding: “Everyone joined organically and they’re using their skills and network to grow the community. I think that’s really important.”

Today, there are about 10 active mining pools and another 10 that sometimes mine FLO, which increases the robustness of the coin. Also in early 2018, FLO’s code was updated to Segregated Witness, a protocol change that adjusts the way data is stored, making blockchains more scalable.

Echoing Fiscella’s comments about FLO being successful because of its determined developer community, Buddenhage concluded:

“They all appear to know what they’re doing and why they’re here putting in the effort whenever/wherever life/work allows the opportunity being that it’s a side project and volunteerism keeping it going, perhaps slowly at times but always moving forward with dedication and purpose.”

FLO coins featured image via gunkworks.no; images in the article via Joey Fiscella

This news post is collected from CoinDesk

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The post Florincoin – the 2014 Altcoin You Don’t Remember – Is Attracting Real Users appeared first on Click 2 Watch.

More Details Here → https://click2.watch/florincoin-the-2014-altcoin-you-dont-remember-is-attracting-real-users-2

[click2watch]

Florincoin – the 2014 Altcoin You Don’t Remember – Is Attracting Real Users

One of the most recognizable names in the crypto space (and perhaps even outside of it) is using one of the least recognizable blockchains.

Overstock.com subsidiaries Medici Ventures and tZERO have been utilizing the FLO blockchain for some time in work aimed at re-organizing property rights. At one time, a video of the tZERO homepage even showed the little-known blockchain at work.

Still, if you haven’t heard of FLO before, you won’t be alone. Maybe Florincoin, the blockchain’s moniker when it first launched in 2013, shortly before the 2014 altcoin boom – will ring a bell, at least those who were in New York at the time.

Joey Fiscella was a staple in the growing New York City crypto community during that area. A young, extroverted programmer, he had the ability to schmooze with the best of the business types. While the rest of the scene was focused on bitcoin, to a certain extent litecoin and for the lolz dogecoin, Fiscella was instead always talking Florincoin – a coin that’s visage bears a golden fleur-de-lis.

He was a regular at the New York Bitcoin Center and was always handing out thin strips of paper with Florincoin private keys (I used to have one, but as is the nature of small scraps of paper, it has been lost).

The idea was simple: Florincoin was bitcoin but with additional room for transaction comments, 140 characters at that time. And those characters would allow a decentralized social media (what else had a 140-character limit back then? Twitter), one that couldn’t be censored or stopped.

It’s a dream that’s still being toyed with today – from Steemit to Peepeth to Minds – but since then Florincoin, now FLO, has moved on.

Today, most of the developers and businesses involved in FLO are interested in it as an indexing tool, something that could provide the backbone of a blockchain-based Google.

Not only has Medici Land Governance begun adding property records on the FLO blockchain (and partnered with the state of Wyoming, the city of Tulum in Mexico and a government official in Zambia), but T-zero is adding digital locate receipts, which locate the ownership of a stock, into FLO to mitigate naked short selling.

On top of that, FLO is being utilized by the Open Index Protocol (OIP), a database for decentralized publishing of all kinds, and an app on top of OIP called Alexandria, which allows users to search and browse info in that database.

The list of users goes on too.

The California Institute of Technology, also called Caltech, uses FLO to store more than 17,000 records of information gathered with microscopes, and just recently announced the creation of another repository of microscope data.

So how, a crypto enthusiast might ask, did FLO become a blockchain with actual users (and seemingly without gloating in the hopes of sparking a price pump)?

According to Chris Chrysostom, a senior software developer at Medici Ventures, “As a developer I’m always open to looking at other solutions; people mention bitcoin a lot because right now it’s a good starting point for communicating concepts.”

But, he continued:

“One thing that FLO provides that bitcoin doesn’t is, right now, it has the ability to accept 1,040 bytes of metadata. FLO is able and willing to take on the blockchain bloat that many people are critical of in bitcoin.”

The bytes and the bloat

To understand how one of the most-anticipated and regulated token projects in the space came to use a blockchain that most people don’t even know about, you have to start with its first real business case.

Utilized by husband and wife team, Devon and Amy Reed, Florincoin became the underlying technology of the Decentralized Library of Alexandria (DLOA).

A blatant nod to the ancient world library that was burned down (while it’s become a modern-day symbol for the loss of cultural knowledge, the crypto project used it as a way to illustrate the problems inherent to centralization), the project was initially touted as a decentralized library. According to Amy, the co-founder of the project, in an earlier interview, all types of content, including books, blogs, video, audio and art could be added to the blockchain and secured from censorship.

DLOA was the forefather of today’s decentralized content platforms, hoping to untangle the messy distribution models that currently exist for content creators and viewers online.

The project chugged along for a couple of years quietly, until Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web and the founder of the W3C, a standards organization for the web, was given a demo of the app.

According to Amy, Berners-Lee loved it, but said: “change the name.”

So the application – a Google-like search for the data, became just Alexandria and the protocol, which allows content creators to decide how their content is categorized before adding it to the FLO blockchain, became known as the Open Index Protocol (OIP).

And as that change happened, the number of bytes that could be stored in a transaction was increased as well – from 140 to 528 and then to 1,040, the limit today. But what’s perhaps the most fascinating about OIP is that in a mess of new competition, the project has stuck with FLO.

From Storj to Filecoin or even more broadly ethereum or EOS, there’s a slew of blockchain projects looking to tackle a similar use case – decentralized file storage – and these new players tout advanced architecture that makes their platforms faster, stronger, overall better.

But Devon remains unphased by the shiny new toys.

“When we started the project, our goal was to build a shared data layer that is censorship-proof, persistent and as interoperable as possible,” he told CoinDesk. “This required certain technical choices, which FLO fit perfectly – and even though other things have been launched since which do a variety of things, they don’t meet those needs better than FLO does.”

For that index that OIP is, Devon contends, the project needs full global state replication (to make censorship attempts transparent), proof-of-work consensus (to make censorship attempts expensive and defensible) and the ability to directly benefit from bitcoin’s developer community (a fork of bitcoin).

According to Devon Reed, sure, OIP could instead store its index on ethereum, and with that gain a different developer community and plenty of hype.

But, he said, the project would lose in other ways. For instance, after sharding is implemented, the project wouldn’t any longer get full global state replication; and after Casper – ethereum’s switch to a proof-of-stake consensus algorithm – the project wouldn’t have the security of proof-of-work.

On top of that, the publishing fees would no longer be decided by the OIP working group, and would instead, entirely be a function of the gas costs – priced by the ethereum core developers – of certain operations.

For many intents and purposes, FLO has become a kind of single purpose blockchain specifically for OIP. And that wasn’t a bad thing for FLO. While other institutions are starting to use FLO now, for many years Devon and Amy were the only ones really focused on FLO and they brought in a significant number of the developers that work on the blockchain to this day.

The original angel

Take Sky Young, a senior full stack developer at Alexandria.io, who started working on the FLO protocol because of her role with Alexandria in August 2015.

Or Jeremiah Buddenhage, also known as bitspill, who began developing on the FLO blockchain after he completed and claimed a bounty posted by the Alexandria team to update the protocol. After that, Buddenhage told CoinDesk, Alexandria offered him contract work until hiring him as a full stack developer in the summer of 2017.

Both developers get paid to work on OIP, which many times involves the development of FLO, keeping the blockchain up-to-date, probably more so than it would be were there not a company so tied into its success.

Before OIP and Alexandria, there was only FLO’s (then Florincoin’s), creator, a pseudonymous developer going by the moniker SkyAngel. It’s pretty similar to bitcoin’s Satoshi Nakamoto, although SkyAngel remains around here and there, said Fiscella.

SkyAngel did not return requests for comment.

In June 2013, Fiscella was trolling crypto forums looking for altcoins to mine and stumbled on FLO – hours after the software was released, he began mining the cryptocurrency and after noticing a couple of bugs (nothing consensus-related) in the code, he contacted SkyAngel within a week of its release. He’s been volunteering his time towards development ever since.

And while Fiscella got his fair share of shit for messing around with FLO – this was back in the day when people thought all altcoins were useless or worse, scams – there’s a sense of pride now.

“FLO is one of the oldest altcoins that is still actively traded and developed,” he told CoinDesk.

And it’s done so, he continued, without a pre-mine for developers, without raising huge amounts of money in an initial coin offering (ICO), without even a million dollars from a venture capitalist. Although, the FLO developers have raised $50,000 from the community over the past six years and the OIP and Alexandria team have raised a few $100,000 here and there, which they used to continue FLO development.

As such, many of the developers working on FLO right now are also pretty happy with the way it’s all turned out.

For instance, Young describes FLO as “hidden” and “undervalued.” And although Buddenhage was initially only attracted to FLO as a way to make money from small programming gigs, his “appreciation and understanding” has grown significantly over the years.

He told CoinDesk, “The big idea that made me want to keep working on this project is the idea of building a public space – allowing users to determine the worth of their own work and for the consumers to determine if it’s appropriate (rather than being held to the mercy of rates decided by a private company or a vague definition of ‘advertiser friendly’).”

In describing my story, meeting Fiscella years later at a crypto meetup and thinking, ‘Holy shit, Florincoin still exists,’ Buddenhage, who’s been in the space since 2013, laughed, saying:

“It’s great to see people react when they re-discover that FLO/Alexandria have not joined the ranks of shitcoin yet nor is it merely idling on but has actually grown in the shadows.”

Enter tZERO

It was Chris Chrysostom, a developer that was looking to build a simple application called a bill of sale on a blockchain, that found FLO and eventually brought it into the Medici ranks.

While he began the project hoping to utilize bitcoin’s OP_RETURN feature, Chrysostom quickly became frustrated with that because cumbersome to use and doesn’t hold enough data to create anything substantial. So he started looking around, reading through some content about Factom and the Storj white papers, both of which mention FLO (again Florincoin at that time).

That led Chrysostom to Alexandria, where he worked alongside Devon and Amy, building out the project’s payment capabilities.

Then in July 2017, he was picked up by Medici Ventures.

Now a senior software developer at the venture capital subsidiary of Overstock.com, Chrysostom brought to the job his interest in FLO. Chrysostom was assigned to a project within Medici Ventures focused on property rights – the idea being a global property rights registry – and FLO and the work being done by the Open Index Protocol seemed like a natural fit there, he told CoinDesk.

“We use it specifically for projects, proofs-of-concept and research for this property rights project,” he said.

While Patrick Byrne, the founder and CEO of Overstock, announced a partnership in late 2017 with Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto with a similar intent, Chrysostom said his work using FLO at Medici Ventures was different, yet could easily support the De Soto project if necessary.

According to Chrysostom, he was looking for a proof-of-work blockchain with similarities to bitcoin, so many similarities that the development work on bitcoin’s core team could then be applied to the other blockchain as well. For instance, security measures and scaling technologies like Segregated Witness.

“FLO was really appealing – bitcoin wants its use case to be focused on value transfer (and that’s fine); FLO has taken it upon itself to have a lot of similarities to bitcoin but with the added feature of application data,” Chrysostom said. “Which is more suited for the property rights use case.”

And sure enough, Chrysostom has similar things to say about the project’s ethos and morals.

“It’s really appealing that FLO hasn’t gone down the path of turning itself into an ICO; it didn’t try to segregate coins in a certain way, like the staking mechanisms; it’s quite admirable that it has remained an open-source project,” he said, adding:

“Four to five years have gone by, and it’s still about what its founding was all about – an open blockchain with a little extra use case. I just find it admirable that it’s stuck to that.”

And as for OIP and Alexandria, those teams get Chrysostom’s praise too since, according to him, they focused on building out the software instead of hyping the coin.

Chrysostom said:

“FLO has been quite the stealth coin in my opinion.”

While Chrysostom would, of course, love to see the developers and projects building on FLO get rewarded for their work, he understands that with investment comes responsibilities that might divert the focus away from the open index goal.

For Medici Ventures part, it does not provide investment to FLO developers, Chrysostom explained, although he continued, “If the day comes that someone wants to make a pitch to Medici Ventures … I think they’d listen. They listen to all kinds of things.”

Keeping it afloat

Still, that’s not to say everything has run smoothly in the FLO community.

For instance, toward the end of 2015, customers of Cryptsy, the only digital currency exchange that listed FLO, began having withdrawal issues, and shortly after the exchange claimed it was insolvent after a July 2014 hack.

While a class action was mounted at Cryptsy in the aftermath, the parties that brought the class action against the exchange didn’t list FLO as one of the coins you could redeem. According to Fiscella, there are 11.5 million FLO coins in one Cryptsy wallet that haven’t moved since February 2014, so he suspects not that the exchange’s founders ran away with the coins (because then they probably would have sold them off at some point) but that these coins could not be recovered by any party, the exchange or even law enforcement.

“It wasn’t worth anything at the time,” Fiscella said. “But FLO was once around 40 cents.”

At that price, the coins lost in Cryptsy would have been worth more than $4 million.

Since then Bittrex and Poloniex have also listed FLO (actually on the same day in March 2015), although Poloniex removed it shortly after the exchange was acquired by Circle. Poloniex didn’t give a reason for the delisting of FLO, though the coin was taken off the site with a handful of other altcoins.

While some thought the reason was low volume, Fiscella argues that other coins that were not delisted had lower volume than FLO, so really he speculates the delisting was about FLO’s low hashrate, which meant that FLO could be relatively easily 51% attacked.

This was right around the same time that Crypto 51, a website calculating the cost of 51% attacking (and then double spending) cryptocurrencies, appeared. Once that website was up, a number of cryptocurrencies, including bitcoin gold and vertcoin, began dealing with attacks.

And FLO, which was on the Crypto51 list with an attack price of only $300, was exploited on Bittrex in September 2018 and 25 bitcoins were stolen. The attack works like this: an anonymous account deposited hundreds of thousands of FLO coins into Bittrex, traded that FLO for the 25 bitcoins, withdrew the 25 bitcoins and then rewrote about 480 FLO blocks. In this way, the FLO deposit was reversed and the hacker was able to reclaim the hundreds of thousands of FLO they had initially deposited and was also out with the bitcoin as well. The wallet at the exchange then didn’t have the FLO to deposit into the accounts that had bought the altcoin.

When Bittrex’s system detected this, it shut down FLO trading for about a month, until the developers fixed the issue.

“And by fixed it, I mean we paid 700,000 FLO to Bittrex,” Fiscella said, adding:

“And by we, I mean me.”

Bittrex did not respond to requests for inquiry.

Joey used the FLO he had been mining since the beginning to pay back the exchange and other FLO developers set up a “Big Mac Fund” for Joey, where community members have donated about half of the 700,000 to Joey for his ongoing work on the protocol.

Before the attack happened, Fiscella had been discussing the issue with Alexandria’s Devon Reed, saying they needed to increase the hash rate before something like this happened. But it was too little, too late.

After the attack, the developers working on the protocol decided that FLO needed to add some additional security measures to the scrypt-based mining algorithm (an alternative to bitcoin’s SHA-256 algorithm) since scrypt-based mining made it easier for an attack to take place.

The developers decided to add an extra rule to the consensus algorithm, a so-called max reorg depth limit feature. This feature requires large reorganizations of the blockchain be rejected, and it’s a similar feature to that used by bitcoin cash and ravencoin.

If that sounds like something that could kill a cryptocurrency, make people so skeptical of its security and value that they sell off their bags and leave it to die, it’s definitely happened before.

But FLO has endured and actually, it’s developers learned from its mistakes and evolved.

“The people who have joined have not asked to be paid, they’re just activists or investors,” Fiscella told CoinDesk, adding: “Everyone joined organically and they’re using their skills and network to grow the community. I think that’s really important.”

Today, there are about 10 active mining pools and another 10 that sometimes mine FLO, which increases the robustness of the coin. Also in early 2018, FLO’s code was updated to Segregated Witness, a protocol change that adjusts the way data is stored, making blockchains more scalable.

Echoing Fiscella’s comments about FLO being successful because of its determined developer community, Buddenhage concluded:

“They all appear to know what they’re doing and why they’re here putting in the effort whenever/wherever life/work allows the opportunity being that it’s a side project and volunteerism keeping it going, perhaps slowly at times but always moving forward with dedication and purpose.”

FLO coins featured image via gunkworks.no; images in the article via Joey Fiscella

This news post is collected from CoinDesk

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