I’m Corey Petty. If you’ve ended up here, it’s probably because you read something of mine somewhere, heard me on a podcast, or I sent you a link. This is the page where I try to explain who I am and what I do without making it sound like a LinkedIn bio.
What I do
My day job is at the Institute of Free Technology (IFT), where I focus on evangelizing Logos. The short version: Logos is building a technology stack aimed at digital sovereignty, and my job is to explain what that means and why it matters to anyone who’ll listen. In practice that bounces between protocol-level conversations, public talks, podcasts, writing, and helping the broader narrative cohere into something people can actually hold in their head. Mission-driven work that lets me wear a lot of hats, which suits me. The Logos Technology Stack pulls together what used to be a constellation of separate-feeling efforts, so when I talk about Logos these days, I’m talking about the whole thing.
On the side, I co-host The Bitcoin Podcast, which is currently my main show and has been running for a long time in crypto years. We’re still playing around with what to do with Hashing It Out, the more technical show I’ve spent a lot of time on. All the content from across the network lives on the same site, so anything we put out ends up there. I’ve also been a guest on a lot of other shows over the years, and the press page keeps the running tally.
I do some advisory and mentorship work too. I’m an advisor at Spearbit / Cantina, a mentor to the Secureum program, and I used to run the Security track at KERNEL. I still care a lot about helping people find their way into Web3 security without getting chewed up by it. There’s a WIP note on that path I’m slowly writing down.
Building asshole-resistant technology
If there’s a phrase that ties the whole thing together, it’s that one. Plenty of tech gets built without thinking about what happens when bad actors show up: extractive companies, censoring governments, opportunistic exploiters, the usual suspects. The stuff actually worth building is the stuff that holds up under those conditions and still treats its users with respect. That’s the thread running through the security work, the protocol research, the Logos evangelism, and the consulting I do on the side. More on the consulting and the thinking behind it over at petty.services.
Background
Before all this, I did a PhD in computational chemistry. The pubs page has the details, mostly old work on O3, SO2, and neon clusters. How I got from molecular physics to blockchain is a longer story involving a post-doc, a Bitcoin rabbit hole around 2013, and realizing I cared more about decentralization than academic tenure. Maybe I’ll write that one up eventually.
The PhD work is what actually shaped how I think. The discipline of building rigorous mental models, sitting with uncertainty, and chasing things down to first principles is what’s carried me through everything since: crypto, blockchain, security, risk, consulting, education, podcasting. Same operating system, different problem domains. It also bleeds into how I see and interact with the world more broadly, including the very human parts of life. The Shape of Intimacy is one example of where that ends up.
Why this site exists
The name, Bayesian Persuasion, is a play on Bayesian inference. The idea: you have priors, new evidence updates them, and you should be honest about what those priors are and how much weight you’re putting on them. I try to write that way.
The site itself is a digital garden. Not a blog exactly, not a feed, just a collection of linked notes and longer posts that grow over time. Some of what’s here is polished, a lot of it isn’t, and that’s the point. Writing is how I think. If I waited until everything was perfect, nothing would be here at all.
What I write about
A rough list of the things I keep returning to:
- Blockchain and crypto: protocol design, security, tokenomics, the industry’s recurring self-inflicted wounds
- Security mental models: how to think about threats, trust, and tradeoffs
- Epistemology and writing: thinking clearly, updating priors, the mechanics of writing itself
- The emotional and human stuff: intimacy, modern masculinity, relationships, outrage, expertise, the way modern life pulls at people
- Poetry, when I need a container big enough to hold the emotions I’m working through
- Reports: data-journalism style deep dives, some of them interactive, where I sit with a topic long enough to actually look at it and try to convey what I think matters about it
- Whatever else is annoying me that week, like why everything is expensive
If you want a starting point, posts are the longer-form stuff and notes are the rougher thinking. The future articles note lists things I want to write about eventually.
A note on AI
I use AI as part of my writing process. I’ve written about how I do it without producing slop. Short version: I do the thinking, the outlining, the constraints, and the fact-checking. AI helps me get from structured input to prose faster, and I keep rewriting until it sounds like me. When something reads as mine, that’s because I’ve done the work to make it so. When it doesn’t, that’s on me. Holler and I’ll fix it.
Disclaimers and contact
I don’t give financial or legal advice, and nothing on this site is investment advice. I also don’t speak for any of my employers or affiliates. See the disclosures for the formal version.
Best way to reach me is Twitter/X. More options on the contact page. Fair warning: I’m often drowning in messages and don’t always respond in a timely fashion, but I try.