nullchinchilla’s blog

This is the personal blog of Eric Tung (aka “nullchinchilla”, “ithisa”), where I share some of my ideas in various stages of formation.

(And yes, a Substack is a blog)

About me

I am a Catholic, a cypherpunk, and generally fascinated by various “systems”: historical linguistics, software stacks, theologies, ideologies…

I grew up between Beijing and Toronto, and currently live in Miami with my wife Lisa and baby Samuel.

A reasonably up-to-date CV can be found here.

What I am building

My software projects generally focus on protecting privacy, autonomy, and free coordination online.

I am the creator and maintainer of Geph, an open-source VPN focused on privacy and resisting network-level censorship. In short, it’s a VPN for places that really don’t want you to use a VPN, like China and Iran. Geph can be self-hosted, but most people (~400k weekly users from censored regions) use the default freemium service.

I am also building Mel, a minimal, light-client-first blockchain designed to enable ordinary network protocols to easily acheive decentralized security and consensus. The main thesis of Mel is that non-financial network protocols, like end-to-end encryption, social networking, and private publishing, need “blockchain magic” like decentralization and incentives way more than the tokenomic financial games that currently pass for “crypto” or “Web3”.

An example of the sort of protocol Mel will enable is Earendil, an experimental peer-to-peer network that allows free communcation while resisting network censorship and generating incentives that make internet shutdowns economically infeasible.