Wednesday, May 13th, 2026
Last weekend my partner and I last minute decided to go camping in the South of Wales. We had a great day hiking around the coast, and rocked up to our campsite late, tired and hungry. We started to put up the tent, when my partner said "uhh, Ben, where are the tent pegs?"
I'd packed all the tent stuff, and was sure they were there. But, after a mad search of my car I had to admit I'd forgotten them.
It was 8pm, so no shops were open to buy replacements, and also very windy.
We retreated to the car to try and figure out whether to drive 100 miles home and give up on this camping thing.
In the end, we decided to MacGyver it. Instead of tent pegs we cobbled together 3 pens from my glove box and some twigs, then found a spot between some trees and a fence we could tie ropes to.
It wasn't pretty, and one person needed to guard the tent from blowing away at all times, but it worked! We survived the night without the tent collapsing or blowing away.
My current Zoneless subscription system is a lot like this tent. It ain't much to look at, but it works.
Subscriptions on blockchains are not straightforward, and required learning about smart contracts, Rust, and the Solana Blockchain. But I think I now have an MVP I can build out - I did a successful test of a 1 cent subscription every 30 seconds, which is actually doable due to the low fees!
My next goal is to work towards building an open-source checkout (and never forget tent pegs again).
