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LOKI

loki

Recently in my practice, I faced a significant challenge: extracting application logs per day from Loki in the Kubernetes environment. When cold, the application writes about 60 lines per minute, and when someone interacts with the application, it can write 2000-5000 lines of logs per minute – it turns out that was necessary to get more than 300,000 lines of logs. The setup did not include a configured log export, and the primary log viewing tool was Grafana, which imposes a 5000-line limit on log retrieval. Increasing this limit was not feasible as it would significantly strain our resources and was unnecessary for this one-time task. Additionally, accessing logs directly from the Kubernetes pod was not an option due to storage limitations within the pod itself. So, I need to download logs directly from Loki without changing configurations. Preparation Used tools LogCli
Kubectl Additional steps To ensure that the query will use to search for logs is correct, follow these steps: Navigate to Grafana explore:

Go to Grafana > Explore


Set the required label:

Apply the necessary label to filter logs by the service.


Filter by date:


Use the operation filter to display lines containing the desired date. Example query: {instance="our-service"} |= `2024-07-12` Execution Install LogCli:

Download the LogCli binary from the Loki releases page



Set Loki address:

Configure the Loki address for LogCli using an environment variable:

export LOKI_ADDR=http://localhost:8000



Port forwarding:

Forward local ports to the Loki pod to allow local access:

kubectl --namespace loki port-forward svc/loki-stack 8000:3100



Extract logs:

Use LogCli to query and save the logs to a file:

logcli query '{instance="our-service"} |= `2024-07-12`' --limit=5000000 --since=72h -o raw > our-service-2024-07-12.log


In this command:


--limit is set with a high value to ensure all logs are captured.


--since is set to 72 hours to cover a sufficient time range. Conclusion This entire process took approximately 10 minutes, resulting in a file with the complete application logs for the specified date. If needed, this process can be further optimized or automated. Recently in my practice, I faced a significant challenge: extracting application logs per day from Loki in the Kubernetes environment. When cold, the application writes about 60 lines per minute, and when someone interacts with the application, it can write 2000-5000 lines of logs per minute – it turns out that was necessary to get more than 300,000 lines of logs. The setup did not include a configured log export, and the primary log viewing tool was Grafana, which imposes a 5000-line limit on log retrieval. Increasing this limit was not feasible as it would significantly strain our resources and was unnecessary for this one-time task. Additionally, accessing logs directly from the Kubernetes pod was not an option due to storage limitations within the pod itself. So, I need to download logs directly from Loki without changing configurations. Preparation Used tools LogCli Kubectl LogCli LogCli LogCli Kubectl Kubectl Kubectl Additional steps To ensure that the query will use to search for logs is correct, follow these steps: Navigate to Grafana explore:

Go to Grafana > Explore Set the required label:

Apply the necessary label to filter logs by the service. Filter by date:


Use the operation filter to display lines containing the desired date. Navigate to Grafana explore: Go to Grafana > Explore Go to Grafana > Explore Go to Grafana > Explore Grafana Explore Set the required label: Apply the necessary label to filter logs by the service. Apply the necessary label to filter logs by the service. Apply the necessary label to filter logs by the service. label Filter by date: Use the operation filter to display lines containing the desired date. Use the operation filter to display lines containing the desired date. Use the operation filter to display lines containing the desired date. Use the operation filter to display lines containing the desired date. operation Example query: Example query: {instance="our-service"} |= `2024-07-12` {instance="our-service"} |= `2024-07-12` Execution Install LogCli:

Download the LogCli binary from the Loki releases page Set Loki address:

Configure the Loki address for LogCli using an environment variable:

export LOKI_ADDR=http://localhost:8000 Port forwarding:

Forward local ports to the Loki pod to allow local access:

kubectl --namespace loki port-forward svc/loki-stack 8000:3100 Extract logs:

Use LogCli to query and save the logs to a file:

logcli query '{instance="our-service"} |= `2024-07-12`' --limit=5000000 --since=72h -o raw > our-service-2024-07-12.log


In this command:


--limit is set with a high value to ensure all logs are captured.


--since is set to 72 hours to cover a sufficient time range. Install LogCli: Download the LogCli binary from the Loki releases page Install LogCli: Download the LogCli binary from the Loki releases page Download the LogCli binary from the Loki releases page Loki releases page Loki releases page Set Loki address: Configure the Loki address for LogCli using an environment variable: export LOKI_ADDR=http://localhost:8000 Set Loki address: Configure the Loki address for LogCli using an environment variable: Configure the Loki address for LogCli using an environment variable: export LOKI_ADDR=http://localhost:8000 export LOKI_ADDR=http://localhost:8000 Port forwarding: Forward local ports to the Loki pod to allow local access: kubectl --namespace loki port-forward svc/loki-stack 8000:3100 Port forwarding: Forward local ports to the Loki pod to allow local access: Forward local ports to the Loki pod to allow local access: kubectl --namespace loki port-forward svc/loki-stack 8000:3100 kubectl --namespace loki port-forward svc/loki-stack 8000:3100 Extract logs: Use LogCli to query and save the logs to a file: logcli query '{instance="our-service"} |= `2024-07-12`' --limit=5000000 --since=72h -o raw > our-service-2024-07-12.log In this command:


--limit is set with a high value to ensure all logs are captured.


--since is set to 72 hours to cover a sufficient time range. Extract logs: Use LogCli to query and save the logs to a file: Use LogCli to query and save the logs to a file: logcli query '{instance="our-service"} |= `2024-07-12`' --limit=5000000 --since=72h -o raw > our-service-2024-07-12.log logcli query '{instance="our-service"} |= `2024-07-12`' --limit=5000000 --since=72h -o raw > our-service-2024-07-12.log In this command:


--limit is set with a high value to ensure all logs are captured.


--since is set to 72 hours to cover a sufficient time range. In this command: --limit is set with a high value to ensure all logs are captured.


--since is set to 72 hours to cover a sufficient time range. --limit is set with a high value to ensure all logs are captured. --since is set to 72 hours to cover a sufficient time range. --limit is set with a high value to ensure all logs are captured. --limit is set with a high value to ensure all logs are captured. --since is set to 72 hours to cover a sufficient time range. --since is set to 72 hours to cover a sufficient time range. Conclusion This entire process took approximately 10 minutes, resulting in a file with the complete application logs for the specified date. If needed, this process can be further optimized or automated.

Fetching Large Logs from Loki in Kubernetes

One of my current talks focuses on Observability in general and Distributed Tracing in particular, with an implementation. In the demo, I show how you can see the traces of a simple distributed system consisting of: the API Gateway, a Kotlin app with Spring Boot, a Python app with Flask, and a Rust app with Axum. OpenTelemetry Apache APISIX Earlier this year, I spoke and attended the Observability room at FOSDEM. One of the talks demoed the Grafana stack: Mimir for metrics, Tempo for traces, and Loki for logs. I was pleasantly surprised how one could move from one to the other. Thus, I wanted to achieve the same in my demo but via OpenTelemetry to avoid coupling to the Grafana stack. In this blog post, I want to focus on logs and Loki. Loki basics and our first program At its core, Loki is a log storage engine: Loki is a horizontally scalable, highly available, multi-tenant log aggregation system inspired by Prometheus. It is designed to be very cost effective and easy to operate. It does not index the contents of the logs, but rather a set of labels for each log stream. Loki Loki provides a to store and read logs. Let's push a log from a Java app. Loki expects the following payload structure: RESTful API I'll use Java, but you can achieve the same result with a different stack. The most straightforward code is the following: public static void main(String[] args) throws URISyntaxException, IOException, InterruptedException {
 var template = "'{' \"streams\": ['{' \"stream\": '{' \"app\": \"{0}\" '}', \"values\": [[ \"{1}\", \"{2}\" ]]'}']'}'"; //1
 var now = LocalDateTime.now().atZone(ZoneId.systemDefault()).toInstant();
 var nowInEpochNanos = NANOSECONDS.convert(now.getEpochSecond(), SECONDS) + now.getNano();
 var payload = MessageFormat.format(template, "demo", String.valueOf(nowInEpochNanos), "Hello from Java App"); //1
 var request = HttpRequest.newBuilder() //2
 .uri(new URI("http://localhost:3100/loki/api/v1/push"))
 .header("Content-Type", "application/json")
 .POST(HttpRequest.BodyPublishers.ofString(payload))
 .build();
 HttpClient.newHttpClient().send(request, HttpResponse.BodyHandlers.ofString()); //3
} This is how we did String interpolation in the old days Create the request Send it The prototype works, as seen in Grafana: However, the code has many limitations: The label is hard-coded. You can and must send a single label Everything is hard-coded; nothing is configurable, e.g., the URL The code sends one request for every log; it's hugely inefficient as there's no buffering HTTP client is synchronous, thus blocking the thread while waiting for Loki No error handling whatsoever Loki offers both gzip compression and Protobuf; none are supported with my code Finally, it's completely unrelated to how we use logs, : e.g. var logger = // Obtain logger
logger.info("My message with parameters {}, {}", foo, bar); Regular logging on steroids To use the above statement, we need to choose a logging implementation. Because I'm more familiar with it, I'll use SLF4J and Logback. Don't worry; the same approach works for Log4J2. We need to add relevant dependencies: <dependency>
 <groupId>org.slf4j</groupId>
 <artifactId>slf4j-api</artifactId> 
 <version>2.0.7</version>
</dependency>
<dependency>
 <groupId>ch.qos.logback</groupId>
 <artifactId>logback-classic</artifactId> 
 <version>1.4.8</version>
 <scope>runtime</scope>
</dependency>
<dependency>
 <groupId>com.github.loki4j</groupId>
 <artifactId>loki-logback-appender</artifactId> 
 <version>1.4.0</version>
 <scope>runtime</scope>
</dependency> SLF4J is the interface Logback is the implementation Logback appender dedicated to SLF4J Now, we add a specific Loki appender: <appender name="LOKI" class="com.github.loki4j.logback.Loki4jAppender"> 
 <http>
 <url>http://localhost:3100/loki/api/v1/push</url> 
 </http>
 <format>
 <label>
 <pattern>app=demo,host=${HOSTNAME},level=%level</pattern> 
 </label>
 <message>
 <pattern>l=%level h=${HOSTNAME} c=%logger{20} t=%thread | %msg %ex</pattern> 
 </message>
 <sortByTime>true</sortByTime>
 </format>
</appender>
<root level="DEBUG">
 <appender-ref ref="STDOUT" />
</root> The loki appender Loki URL As many labels as wanted Regular Logback pattern Our program has become much more straightforward: var who = //...
var logger = LoggerFactory.getLogger(Main.class.toString());
logger.info("Hello from {}!", who); Grafana displays the following: Docker logging I'm running most of my demos on Docker Compose, so I'll mention the Docker logging trick. When a container writes on the standard out, Docker saves it to a local file. The command can access the file content. docker logs <CONTAINER> However, other options than saving to a local file are available, , , Google Cloud, Splunk, etc. To choose a different option, one sets a logging driver. One can configure the driver at the overall Docker level or per container. e.g. syslog Loki offers its own . To install it: plugin docker plugin install grafana/loki-docker-driver:latest --alias loki --grant-all-permissions At this point, we can use it on our container app: services:
 app:
 build: .
 logging:
 driver: loki #1
 options:
 loki-url: http://localhost:3100/loki/api/v1/push #2
 loki-external-labels: container_name={{.Name}},app=demo #3 Loki logging driver URL to push to Additional labels The result is the following. Note the default labels. Conclusion From a bird's eye view, Loki is nothing extraordinary: it's a plain storage engine with a RESTful API on top. Several approaches are available to use the API. Beyond the naive one, we have seen a Java logging framework appender and Docker. Other approaches include scraping the log files, , Promtail, via a Kubernetes sidecar. You could also add an Opentelemetry Collector between your app and Loki to perform transformations. e.g. Options are virtually unlimited. Be careful to choose the one that fits your context the best. To go further: Push log entries to Loki via API Loki Clients Originally published at on August 27th, 2023 A Java Geek

Why You Should Send Loki All Your Logs

Grafana Loki is a log aggregation system that stores and queries logs from applications and infrastructure. Although commonplace, logs hold critical information about system operations and are a valuable source of debugging and troubleshooting information. Logs are frequently used to identify and track malicious activity, or simply to track user activity to provide business intelligence. In an earlier blog post, , we provided an overview of Loki’s components and their overall architecture. Think of Loki for logs as analogous to Prometheus for metrics. Loki is lightweight and cost-effective because it only indexes and queries metadata. Promtail agents collect, label and transform logs before sending them to Loki. Then Loki indexes metadata and groups entries into streams that are indexed with labels. Grafana is then used to visualize and query log information from Loki. As of version 2.0, Loki stores data in a single object storage backend, such as MinIO. Whereas the previous blog post explained the advantages of saving Loki data to MinIO, this blog post is a tutorial that teaches you how. Logging with Grafana Loki and MinIO First, we’ll teach you how to deploy Loki and MinIO using Docker containers, followed by instructions on how to install from source. Learn Loki and Master MinIO Using Docker Containers We built a demo using Docker containers, some scripting and a Git repository. We started with the Grafana Loki repository, and added configuration yaml and containers for MinIO and a script to create and expose a MinIO bucket for Loki data. The following steps will result in these five images running locally in Docker containers: Loki Promtail Grafana MinIO Create buckets The first three are obviously needed for Loki, Promtail and Grafana. They were already available from Grafana under the (there is a short ). MinIO is object storage for Loki, and the final container will run a script that creates buckets as Loki targets. Loki repository video explainer Loki has been configured to save log data to MinIO using . Of particular importance is the section: loki.yaml storage_config:
 boltdb_shipper:
 active_index_directory: /loki/index
 cache_location: /loki/index_cache
 resync_interval: 5s
 shared_store: s3
 aws:
 s3: http://minioadmin:minioadmin@minio.:9000/loki
 s3forcepathstyle: true Note the dot in the S3 address for MinIO. This is used because there is no need to specify AWS Region. We create a Docker environment using the file. We will configure containers, volumes, ports, networks and provide startup commands. docker-compose.yaml In order for the image to run as a container with access to Loki configuration via volumes: loki services:
 loki:
 image: grafana/loki:latest
 volumes:
 - <your-local-path>/loki/production:/home/loki/production
 ports:
 - "3100:3100"
 command: -config.file=/home/loki/production/loki.yaml
 networks:
 - loki The first configuration you’ll need to make is to make sure that your local folder of is being shared with the container. Please edit the section of your to refer to the local folder on the host system where you have downloaded the folder. We are mapping the host path to the container path in order to read . production volumes docker-compose.yaml production loki.yaml In , we also define a network and expose ports of the container running MinIO server. In this case, port 9000 and 9001 will be exposed to your local machine in order for you to access MinIO server with a browser. docker-compose.yaml Console UI:
 minio:
 image: minio/minio:latest
 ports:
 - "9000:9000"
 - "9001:9001"
 networks:
 - loki
 command: server ~ --address ':9000' --console-address ':9001' We configure the network with all containers sharing a network. Each container can ping the others and use their APIs. Don’t use fixed IP addresses for your containers. To make it easier, we’ve configured and in our environment to resolve to the appropriate container. For example: loki loki minio http://minio:9000 for MinIO
http://loki:3100 for Loki
http://loki:3000 for Grafana The next action taken by is to run MinIO Client (mc) in a container to configure MinIO Server, create the destination bucket for Loki data and set the access policy to as required. docker-compose.yaml public createbuckets:
 image: minio/mc
 networks:
 - loki
 depends_on:
 - minio
 entrypoint: >
 /bin/sh -c "
 /usr/bin/mc config host add myminio http://minio:9000 minioadmin minioadmin;
 /usr/bin/mc rm -r --force myminio/loki;
 /usr/bin/mc mb myminio/loki;
 /usr/bin/mc policy set public myminio/loki;
 exit 0;
 " Promtail, a small Go program, is used to tail or collect the distributed log files and deliver them to Loki.  For this demo Promtail is deployed in its container with a configuration file that scrapes the /var/log directory.  No changes are required in order to run this demo and have it process the log files at that location - /var/log. At the end of this tutorial we will cover how to have Promtail scrape other locations on the system for log files. Steps Now that you understand how to configure Loki, Promtail and your Docker environment, please  follow these steps to configure and run the demo environment. The following steps use the , and the default Promtail configuration to demonstrate how Loki works with MinIO. After downloading our files, edit them for your environment. docker-compose.yaml loki.yaml Clone this repository : https://github.com/cniackz/loki git clone https://github.com/cniackz/loki.git minio-loki-tutorial Change directory to your local folder: production https://github.com/cniackz/loki/tree/main/production cd <your-local-path>/minio-loki-tutorial/production
Edit docker-compose.yaml to reference your local home directory
If necessary, edit promtail.yaml Build your local Docker environment: docker-compose build --no-cache Launch local Docker containers: docker-compose up -d To confirm that Loki data is being saved to MinIO, log into MinIO Console at or . This tutorial uses the following credentials: http://localhost:9001 http://minio:9001 user: minioadmin
password: minioadmin After logging in, click Buckets. You should see that the Loki bucket has been created. On the right side, click Browse to see the contents of the newly created bucket. You should see the directory under . This is where Loki will save data. fake loki Click its name to open the directory. Loki holds logs in memory for a configured interval and then writes them to object storage. The default is an interval of 5 minutes, so please wait 5 minutes for data to appear in your bucket. fake At this point, Promtail is sending logs to Loki and Loki is saving data to MinIO. Now, let’s set Grafana up to view Loki logs. Grafana 6.0 and higher include built-in support for Loki. Grafana 6.3 and higher includes support for functionality. LogQL Log into Grafana at (default credentials are admin:admin). http://loki:3000 In Grafana, click the cog icon on the left sidebar to go to Configuration and then Data Sources. Click the big Add Data Source button and then select Loki. Edit the http URL field to be for our Loki server running locally using Docker port mapping: . http://loki:3100 Then click Save & Test. To view logs immediately, click explore. You can also view logs by clicking Explore in the left sidebar. However you explore, then select the Loki datasource in the top-left dropdown, and then choose a log stream using the Log Labels button. You can type a LogQL query and click on Run Query. However, if you don’t yet know LogQL, you can use the GUI to select a log and query parameters. To quickly see the logs that are in Loki, click Log browser, then under and choose , then under click the name of your job (from ). In this case I’ve clicked on . Then click the Show Logs button. 1.  Select labels to search in job 2. Find values for the selected labels promtail-local-config.yaml varlogs You can select the time range and set the refresh interval of the query on the top right of the browser window. To see more details of the logs, scroll down and click on one of the log entries, it will provide additional information related to the log entry. A really powerful feature is the ability to filter or see statistics about and directly from log details by clicking on the icons. This simplifies troubleshooting as it makes it easier to look for recurring errors and pivot between search terms. labels fields Extending the Demo Once the demo is running, the next step is to have Promtail scrape a different set of files that might be more interesting for your use case. In order to do this we need Promtail to run using a configuration file that we can edit. One way to achieve this is using volumes in Docker. Edit the file to create 2 new volumes accessible from the Promtail container. The first provides access to the directory on the host system where the new config file will be created. The second provides access to a directory that will contain the log files of interest.  Additionally, Promtail will be launched referencing the new config file, which we have called : docker-compose.yaml promtail-local-config.yaml version: "3"

networks:
 loki:

services:
 loki:
 image: grafana/loki:latest
 volumes:
 - <your-local-path>/loki/minio-loki-tutorial/production:/home/loki/production
 ports:
 - "3100:3100"
 command: -config.file=/home/loki/production/loki.yaml
 networks:
 - loki

 promtail:
 image: grafana/promtail:2.4.2
 volumes:
 - /var/log:/var/log
 -- <your-local-path>/loki/minio-loki-tutorial/production:/home/loki/production
 -- <your-local-path>/access_logs:/home/loki/access_logs
 command: -config.file=/home/loki/production/promtail-local-config.yaml
 networks:
 - loki

 grafana:
 image: grafana/grafana:latest
 ports:
 - "3000:3000"
 networks:
 - loki

 minio:
 image: minio/minio:latest
 ports:
 - "9000:9000"
 - "9001:9001"
 networks:
 - loki
 command: server ~ --address ':9000' --console-address ':9001'

createbuckets:
 image: minio/mc
 networks:
 - loki
 depends_on:
 - minio
 entrypoint: >
 /bin/sh -c "
 /usr/bin/mc config host add myminio http://minio:9000 minioadmin minioadmin;
 /usr/bin/mc rm -r --force myminio/loki;
 /usr/bin/mc mb myminio/loki;
 /usr/bin/mc policy set public myminio/loki;
 exit 0;
 " There’s a lot more that you can do with log data in Grafana. For starters, you can install promtail in more places to tail more logs to Loki. Copy the executable and to other machines/instances/containers, edit the configuration as described in and run it. promtail-local-config.yaml Promtail Configuration We now need to create the Promtail config file, to send local system logs to Loki. Download and edit a from Grafana. The section to focus on is because this is where promtail is told which logs to pull, how to format them and where to send them. Please see for more information about configuring promtail. promtail-local-config.yaml sample config file scrape_configs Get logs into Loki The section includes the following: scrape_configs job_name - This differentiates the logs collected from other log groups. targets - Optional for . However, is often defined because in older versions of Promtail it was not optional. This was an artifact from directly using the Prometheus service discovery code, which required this entry. static_configs labels - Static label to apply to every log line scraped by this definition. Good examples include the environment name, job name, or app name. path - The path to where the logs that Loki is to consume are stored. server:
 http_listen_port: 9080
 grpc_listen_port: 0

positions:
 filename: /tmp/positions.yaml

clients:
 - url: http://loki:3100/loki/api/v1/push

scrape_configs:
- job_name: apache
 static_configs:
 - targets:
 - localhost
 labels:
 job: access_logs
 __path__: /home/loki/access_logs/*log It’s important to understand different configuration options for scraping in Promtail, and Grafana provides . plenty of details It may be helpful to consult the full to see the application’s full capabilities. promtail configuration reference Finally, place some Apache web server access logs in the directory specified in the file on the host system.  These are the logs that Promtail will ingest and send to Loki for processing: docker-compose.yaml -- <your-local-path>/access_logs:/home/loki/access_logs Once the edits have been made and the sample Apache access logs put in place, bring the containers down and back up with docker compose: docker-compose down
docker-compose up -d Promtail will subsequently load the new Apache access log files and make them available to Loki. The environment that we’ve created in this tutorial is helpful for getting started with Loki, but it is not production-ready. Next steps would be to leave Docker for Kubernetes and use distributed MinIO instead of a single instance. Eventually, Loki data gets big enough that it benefits from an external database for quick index searches. Please see for more information. Scalability - Scaling with Grafana Loki Conclusion The observability stack of Grafana, Prometheus and AlertManager gained a powerful addition with Loki (BTW, we also have a tutorial for ). Distributed systems, especially when containerized and orchestrated by Kubernetes, have many logs for their applications and microservices. Loki combined with MinIO is a cost-effective way to collect, store and query logs. Grafana, Prometheus and AlertManager on MinIO If you have any questions, please send us an email at , or join the and ask away. hello@min.io MinIO slack channel Also published . here

How To Deploy Grafana Loki and Save Data to MinIO Using Docker Containers or Direct from Source

Cómo implementar Grafana Loki y guardar datos en MinIO usando contenedores Docker o directamente desde la fuente

Comment déployer Grafana Loki et enregistrer des données sur MinIO à l'aide de conteneurs Docker ou directement depuis la source

ग्राफाना लोकी को कैसे तैनात करें और डॉकर कंटेनरों का उपयोग करके या स्रोत से सीधे डेटा को मिनियो में कैसे सहेजें

Grafana Loki をデプロイし、Docker コンテナーまたはソースから直接使用してデータを MinIO に保存する方法

Como implantar o Grafana Loki e salvar dados no MinIO usando contêineres do Docker ou direto da fonte

Cách triển khai Grafana Loki và lưu dữ liệu vào MinIO bằng Docker Container hoặc trực tiếp từ nguồn

如何使用 Docker 容器或直接从源代码部署 Grafana Loki 并将数据保存到 MinIO

Grafana Loki: Architecture Summary and Running in Kubernetes

It has been God backing the global financial system, if US Dollars can be trusted. The medieval sentiment ‘ ’ snuck into the original 1776 design of the Great Seal of the United States and was raised to adorn the currency during the height of the United States economic power in 1956. In God We Trust Although the most famous pronouncement of Gods death was in 1882 in Friedrich Nietzsche’ ‘The Gay Science’, the death of God had been discussed earlier in the 19th century, notably by the lesser-known Max Stirner whose philosophies were a similar type of existentialist psychology. Regardless of potentially spooky similarities between the two, that God may no longer be with us was something they both agreed upon in the 19th century. So it was a strange addition to the currency of the global superpower, strange enough to feel as if it may potentially have been in bad faith. Potentially that the money was the God and there was little behind that but puppets and shadows. So is it coincidence that the sentiment matches the neo-liberalism of the United States in the second half of the 20th century, which placed the power of money at the centre of social, cultural and political objectives. The pursuit of money was an end unto itself, a self-realising end, that if pursued, would make-right for its imperfections accrued along the way – after the fact. With money achieving a transcendence above scrutiny from its physical realities (that the pure pursuit of money was not self-realising, that there could be negative consequences of material greed) before the fact in the late 1940’s, it was money we trusted in 1956, having achieved a supernatural status. What had been implicit then went on to formally enter culture in the 1980’s, when Gordon Gekko announced that ‘Greed was good’. Money, US Dollars to be precise, was God, and the blind pursuit of Gods will – neo-liberalism – was morality. Having earned an absolute moral right in neo-liberalism over the course of 50 years, money was almost immediately degraded in a series of arrogant responses to events that set the global financial system on a course to total failure. After a large and compelling flag was raised in the Global Financial Crises, Bitcoin emerged shortly afterwards as an anarchistic type of money, uncontrollable and de-centralised and seemingly to make fun of the entire enterprise of finance. Finance in kind, has rarely taken Bitcoin, Cryptocurrencies or Digital assets seriously, seeing them as a kind of bad joke. Myth Mythological stories are supposed to reach across time, through culture and to express universal human experiences in nuanced ways that continue to hold value after the zeitgeist has changed. Mythology is supposed as unavoidable, the tragic or comedic boundaries of the human experience through which we bounce off like a pinball careening from Icarus to Theseus, King Arthur to Scheherazade. Mythology had embedded itself into the human experience with its 1000 illustrious fables until Christianity began to dominate myth with its own powerful take that included a commandment that instructed ‘thou shalt have no other Gods before me’. Soon after the death of God, first Nietzsche and then Freud brought the non-Christian abstract reality back to life with the radical subjectivity of Nietzsche and the ‘unconscious mind’ of Freud. But it was in Carl Jung, one of Freud's young contemporaries, an intelligence he thought would be an heir to his ‘new science’ of psychoanalysis, that resurrected Mythology, returning it to its previous glory in his work. After a fierce intellectual union the two encountered irreconcilable differences. One of these differences was Freuds inability to escape his conditioning, promoting a judeo-christian, monothestic view of reality that saw humans as base animals with vaguely suppressed violent tendencies and sexual obsessions, where Jung took a less dichotomous approach to psychology and developed foundational ideas of the human experience that led to interpretations of mythology – to understand myth with the broad and universal rules of his ‘collective unconscious’. The first thing that Jung had done was to take Freud's unconscious mind and view it outside of the dichotomy of good and evil – a post-religion take.  Within the individual unconscious mind, Jung proposed a ‘collective unconscious’ in which a shared human experience played itself out at the level of archetypal metaphysical models, of the mythological boundaries re-emerging to guide and fortell a recurring human experience. Jung’s archetypes were recurring cultural manifestations, from events and characters to motifs. For example, a masculine force was a single thing with its own essence, its own identifiable thread of consistency embedded in masculine things called the anima with a similar force for femininity he called the animus. His archetypal characters included the great mother, father, child, devil, god, wise old man, wise old woman, the hero and The Trickster. Modern story-telling, especially todays movies have Jungian archetypes (as well as Joseph Cambell’s heroes journey story-telling structure) consciously embedded into them - as recipe now for hollywood - but they also turn up as Delueze’ Rhizomes, a recurring, broad, stateless phenomenon that takes form in the nature of reality, within subjectivity rather than as a result of subjectivity. The Trickster According to Jung, the trickster is ‘ ’ and for Byrd Gibbens – Professor at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock ‘ .’ an archetypal psychic structure of extreme antiquity Many native traditions held clowns and tricksters as essential to any contact with the sacred. People could not pray until they had laughed, because laughter opens and frees from rigid preconception. Humans had to have tricksters within the most sacred ceremonies lest they forget the sacred comes through upset, reversal surprise The Jesters role is to create the comedic moment, where comedy is the moment of relief from a set of social and cultural realities that, taken to their natural conclusion, would lead to inevitable tragedy.  The ability to perform this role is no small task and involves firstly a deep understanding of what those realities are, and secondly to be capable of disregarding all of its dire consequences to find the logic that can be reversed, the paradox to explore, the stupid detail to magnify or the unstoppable force to discount with a goal to manifest absurdity, comedy and existential reflection. The ability to take tragedy and turn it into something comedic is a type of shape-shifting and results in a fundamental and important change in state. Alchemists, who took elemental changes from chemical reaction as types of ritualistic changes in the nature of reality had imbued the chemical mercury with the qualities of the Roman trickster God – Mercurius. Mercury is highly transformative – interchangeable between seemingly radically different forms as if to undergo a ‘tortuous ordeal of purification and renewal’. Jung gives a concrete example of the trickster with alchemical Mercurius with ‘his fondness for sly jokes, malicious pranks, his powers as a shape-shifter, his dual nature, half animal, half divine’. But the trickster is also embodied in other objects and symbols as well. In Killorglin, Irelands oldest annual event is the 3-day ‘puck fair’, where pubs stay open longer than usual and in the town centre a goat is raised on top of a scaffold. That goat is ‘King Puck’ for the duration of the fair (a goat is known as a puck). The entire festival was borne of the bloodthirsty Oliver Cromwell’s conquest of Ireland during a period that Ireland did not have her own king. In raising a wild goat as their king, the inhabitants of Killorglin mounted a criticism of Cromwell as well as English rule, simultaneously making the idea of a King ridiculous. It is this abstract mechanism that is embodied in the trickster archetype. And to underwrite Jung while reiterating him, Jesters were consistent features of empires, from Ancient Egypt, the Roman Empire, Aztecs, Medieval Europe and so on, often with a special political role.  The archetypal tricksters way of viewing reality would be contextualised for each individual cultural reality but perform very similar tasks, as a universal human phenomenon. The dichotomous, paradoxical mind of the Jester could also be used to deliver bad news to a king. When the French fleet was destroyed by the English, Philllipe VI’s jester concluded that English Sailors ‘don’t have the guts to jump into the water like our brave French’. This type of role had been eventually taken over by satirists in plays and even later as newspaper cartoonists with their brand of political satire. The archetype was not lost on Dostoevsky either, who wrote a book titled ‘The Idiot’ with a goal to contrast the paradoxes of Christianity with Russian socio-cultural norms.  Dostoevsky’s idiot held his own deeply felt values and explored his own experience of living upto those values in contrast with his surroundings. It is instructive in how the literary giant saw himself – as an idiot, a fool, as the trickster archetype who would emerge as one of the most important writers in history, influencing Nietzsche as well as Jean-Paul Sartre. One of the most famous and popular today is the Norse God Loki, of which recent movies have constructed his character in full light of these well-developed modern conceptions. Loki is taken as a trickster-God, as the archetypal trickster, pointing out the paradoxes of reality, of challenging the Gods, of breaking the rules and taking things to places that nobody thought possible Most tellingly, in Richard Wagners masterpiece ‘Ring of the Nibelung’, Loki sets Valhalla alight, destroying the Gods in the event of Ragnarok –  the cataclysmic destruction of the cosmos and everything in it. Not including the Gods, but especially the Gods. And perhaps this – the ability to destroy the Gods - is the most important quality of The Trickster. ‘In God We Trust’ So when the excesses of the US Dollar global financial system began to emerge in enormous moral hazard, creating existential systematic risk during the Global Financial Crises (and again after Covid-19) –we conclude that trust in the US Dollar God has failed because the US Dollar system has failed. After a period of corporate excess in the late 90’s and early 00’s, the Global Financial Crises was the final flag to be raised to realise that this Emperor was no longer wearing clothes – but it would take a Jester to point this out. And so out of the very serious, philosophical and absolute critique of the US Dollar global financial system that is Bitcoin, the Jester archetype fully embodied itself in Bitcoin, cryptocurrencies and digital assets. Bitcoin was a new form of money – intelligently designed! Ridiculous!  Secretly traded over the internet to purchase illegal goods! It boggled the mind! An industry of criminals and outsiders; how could it be money? It was for fools, ‘probably rat poison squared’ according to worlds greatest investor Warren Buffet who didn’t get it – neither did the eminent Jamie Dimon. But an enormous, global community did, who viewed the moral hazard of the US Federal Reserve banks control over the monetary supply as an existential threat.  They had an instinct that bailing out the politically connected Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan with billions of dollars while allowing Bear Sterns to fail was a corruption through which they could no longer trust in God. Although there were efforts to ‘occupy wall street’ and political intentions to slap banks on the wrist, some idiots, jesters and fools decided to do something crazy, to do a wild thing and start to build a new financial system.  This undertaking would undermine the ideological raison d’etre of the United States and its dominance of the global financial system with its paradoxes revealed far and wide, its excesses parodied, its nakedness laughed at. It was an announcement to burn down Valhalla, to invite Ragnarok. So if there is any doubt about the virility of the Jester archetype, take a look at crypto culture, especially its meme culture. It is in the duality of holding paradoxical, dichotomous views simultaneously. To take nothing about the very serious nature of finance seriously, to lampoon the US Dollar and offer a challenge to it called Doge. To joke, to ridicule and to offhandedly discount the omnipotence of the US Dollar, against most experts and especially against the eminent figures in global finance.  To completely disrespect and disregard it, and build a new system around it as if the global financial system could be so easily improved by outsiders. Ragnarok : Covid-19 ‘ ’. In Norse mythology, Ragnarok is a series of events, including a great battle, foretold to lead to the death of a number of great figures (including the gods), natural disaster and the submersion of the world in water. After these events, the world will resurface anew and fertile, the surviving and returning gods will meet and the world will be repopulated When the US Federal Reserve Bank announced that the Repo markets required $500 billion of liquidity late December 2019, this commentator took that to mean that the Quantitative Easing of the Global Financial Crises had not just failed, but had magnified the problem it had hoped to solve. It was simply a matter of time after that liquidity entered the system before more would be required. Extraneous liquidity had become an exponential requirement of insatiable global financial markets. God here is the absolute trust in the US Dollar, in its role in the Global Financial System, in its infallibility and the infallibility of its priests – Alan Greenspan, Ben Bernanke, Milton Friedman et al Their actions in the global financial system began to look more like the corruption of the system rather than an efficient and properly functioning system, creating points of interest for Loki, the trickster archetype. The lure was the infallible power of the system, of the emperor-making Federal Reserve Bank Governors, of Milton Friedmans monetarist economics and his and others neo-liberalism that was supposed to self-correct – that was suggested as inherently morally self-correcting! The trickster archetype gains momentum as the logic of the system is used against it, its deficiencies highlighted and its absolute pre-eminence challenged. As this rationale emerges, and especially when it is reinforced in practice, the archetype gains relevance and power. This has been highlighted in cryptocurrency recently where the mood is always at-arms-length to what is important.  The crypto community on twitter is indulgent to the point of hubris in playing the role of trickster. But there is more to consider on the subject. The tricksters role is to provide comedy – not in the modern sense of the word but in the true sense of what comedy is - of unlocking the rigid state of reality that leads to negative and terminal outcomes to create space for new horizons. The role is to glean comedy from tragedy, to facilitate a looping progression that underwrites the human experience – from tragedy to comedy and comedy to tragedy – a Sisyphean process endured for eternity. But from within the view of the trickster, this utility is neither sought nor gained.  After performing their task and achieving their end, tricksters are no longer required – their job is simply to view potential tragedy, illuminate the inconsistencies, laugh at the paradoxes, and make merry while the sun shines. After Ragnarok With some irony (and perhaps without any at all) the Norse’ Ragnarok, which translates to ‘Twilight of the Gods’, is a book title of Nietzsche, who was inspired by Wagner (before falling out).  For Nietzsche, after the death of God there would be a ‘revaluation of all values’ in which new ideals would be discovered, new value systems would be built. Similarly to the Norse Ragnarok, potentially new Gods to discover? For all of the historical sentiment of the crypto community and its value in the context of the Jester archetype, it is this new step that is most important now – to discover and build new value systems. For this, there are instructive elements already existing in crypto. De-centralisation Vs centralisation includes a socio-cultural theory of power. Bitcoin includes a philosophy of monetary value – to answer the question of what money is for the first time in history. The tokenomics incentive structures and systematic game theory are some of the most sophisticated systems of their kind that we have ever seen There are likely others as well as other ways to view things. So perhaps embedded within the trickster archetype and its ability to be a God-killer are some of the values we should consider in a revaluation of values – in the world after Ragnarok – after we realise in the coming period that the USD has failed as a global reserve currency. That we cannot trust in God. After all, it is an historical problem of authoritative hierarchies accruing power and consolidating it until power becomes a self-realising end-goal. Tragedy inevitably emerges from a reality unable to contradict itself, with too much power to be contradicted by others. This is how neo-liberalism, the belief in competitive free-markets as an inherently moral end-goal in itself requires trillions of extraneous liquidity to support the ‘free’ market. The moral hazard is in an action that utterly annihilates the foundation of the reasoning behind that action. A circular logic, a feedback loop within a system - an ideological inbreeding. Symbolised by the pyramid also represented on the US Dollar, authoritative hierarchy is inevitably degenerative, inevitably increasingly centralised. Through this process it always and must become ridiculous, highlighted by whomever is willing to ridicule – unless it employs some trickster/jester mechanism. So can maintaining a trickster archetype inoculate us against this ancient and recurring problem - that make realising the trickster necessary?

Cryptocurrencies and Loki's Part in the Current Global Financial System

As many of you may have been tracking, the Australian Parliament has been deliberating on a piece of legislation for the last couple of months called the . This bill seeks to give Australian law enforcement and intelligence agencies powers to force tech companies and telcos operating in Australia to do any number of things. Here’s a partial list: Telecommunications and Other Legislation Amendment (Assistance and Access) Bill 2018 (a) removing one or more forms of electronic protection that are or were applied by, or on behalf of, the provider; or (b) providing technical information; or © installing, maintaining, testing or using software or equipment; or (d) ensuring that information obtained in connection with the execution of a warrant or authorisation is given in a particular format; or (f) assisting with the testing, modification, development or maintenance of a technology or capability; or (h) modifying, or facilitating the modification of, any of the characteristics of a service provided by the designated communications provider; or (j) an act or thing done to conceal the fact that any thing has been done covertly in the performance of a function, or the exercise of a power, conferred by a law of the Commonwealth, a State or a Territory, so far as the function or power relates to: (i) enforcing the criminal law and laws imposing pecuniary penalties; or (ii) assisting the enforcement of the criminal laws in force in a foreign country; or (iii) the interests of Australia’s national security, the interests of Australia’s foreign relations or the interests of Australia’s national economic well-being. Pretty scary stuff, huh? We thought so too. We’ve been tracking the progress of the bill and have been trying to analyse it to work out what the implications might be for software companies both inside and outside of Australia, and especially for Loki. The Assistance and Access Bill 2018 (Shortened to AAA18 for the rest of the article) gives Australian agencies the ability to issue 3 types of notices to ‘communications service providers.’ The definition of ‘provider’ in the legislation is very broad. Pretty much anyone that provides any service or product that involves the internet could fall under its scope, and the notices that can be issued increase in scope and obligation, and are called Technical Assistance Requests (TARs), Technical Assistance Notices (TANs), and Technical Capability Notices (TCNs). The latter is a legally enforced instruction to create or modify features to give an agency a new technical capability. Although this notice must come from the Attorney General of Australia, the scope for new espionage tools to be created by this notice is extremely broad. The scariest thing about this bill is the penalties given to providers who leak information about the investigation or notice, or refuse to comply with the notice. Jail sentences as long as 10 years could apply to a whistleblower, and given that these notices could be issued to companies and individuals that provide services to Australians, these notices could be issued to almost anyone around the world. With strong extradition treaties, this legislation could reach people across the nations of the Five Eyes Alliance (UK, US, AU, NZ, CA) and beyond. Some, myself included, strongly suspect that this is a coordinated effort by the Five Eyes alliance to gain access to the world’s most popular applications, as the UK recently to the already controversial Investigatory Powers Act of 2016, so that it is now quite closely aligned with this new Australian legislation. They even use similar terms, with the main similarity being the Technical Capability Notice. pushed through an amendment Thankfully, AAA18 does explicitly state that these notices cannot be used to force a company to break its own encryption, introduce security flaws, or deliberately ignore existing flaws. It also explicitly says that these notices cannot be used to introduce a ‘systemic weakness’ into the product or service. There were a great many concerns about the definition of ‘systemic weakness’ being too vague in the legislation. The final amendment to the bill gave us the following definitions: systemic vulnerability means a vulnerability that affects a whole class of technology, but does not include a vulnerability that is selectively introduced to one or more target technologies that are connected with a particular person. For this purpose, it is immaterial whether the person can be identified. systemic weakness means a weakness that affects a whole class of technology, but does not include a weakness that is selectively introduced to one or more target technologies that are connected with a particular person. For this purpose, it is immaterial whether the person can be identified. target technology : (a) for the purposes of this Part, a particular carriage service, so far as the service is used, or is likely to be used, (whether directly or indirectly) by a particular person, is a target technology that is connected with that person; and (b) for the purposes of this Part, a particular electronic service, so far as the service is used, or is likely to be used, (whether directly or indirectly) by a particular person, is a target technology that is connected with that person; and © for the purposes of this Part, particular software installed, or to be installed, on: (i) a particular computer; or (ii) a particular item of equipment; used, or likely to be used, (whether directly or indirectly) by a particular person is a target technology that is connected with that person; and (d) for the purposes of this Part, a particular update of software that has been installed on: (i) a particular computer; or (ii) a particular item of equipment; used, or likely to be used, (whether directly or indirectly) by a particular person is a target technology that is connected with that person; and (e) for the purposes of this Part, a particular item of customer equipment used, or likely to be used, (whether directly or indirectly) by a particular person is a target technology that is connected with that person; and (f) for the purposes of this Part, a particular data processing device used, or likely to be used, (whether directly or indirectly) by a particular person is a target technology that is connected with that person. For the purposes of paragraphs (a), (b), ©, (d), (e) and (f), it is immaterial whether the person can be identified. What this effectively means is that providers can not be forced to make changes to their products that negatively affect every user of that product. Instead, they can only be ordered to create the means by which they could selectively inject weaknesses or vulnerabilities into a specific product in use by a specific targeted person. However, AAA18 gives the legislative authority for agencies to create and install monitoring tools and other intrusive mechanisms into all kinds of software and hardware. For this iteration of the bill, these tools can only be switched on and used to target crimes with minimum sentences of 3 years or more. However, there is nothing to say that won’t change and very little oversight is required by this bill. It is also extremely problematic that these tools will even exist in the first place. If they fall into the wrong hands, the effects will be devastating. The NSA in the US developed a range of surveillance techniques that were eventually leaked and used against American interests by criminals and foreign governments, and the same will likely happen here. The introduction of AAA18 and its UK equivalent means that applications such as WhatsApp, Signal, Facebook Messenger, Gmail, and any other popular communications medium can silently turn into a monitoring device for ASIO, ASDS, AFP, GCHQ, MI5, and so on. The companies behind these products can’t utter a peep about these notices or their repercussions, or warn their users. They are even given protections to indemnify themselves against any civil cases caused by any later discovery of eroded privacy. This bill does not require these companies to break the encryption of their systems, but there are plenty of other things these agencies could force companies to create and install, such as tools that would allow them to remotely pull information from a specific user’s device post-encryption, or gain access to these services’ servers where treasure troves of metadata could be harvested. Every ‘private’ messaging application out there could now be forced to send data back to intelligence agencies about who is communicating to who and when the communications are taking place. , and companies across the world can be compelled to follow them. This isn’t hypothetical anymore — these powers are now law We will not know how widely these powers will be deployed until the first annual report is released. All it takes is one TCN for each of Facebook, Google, and WhatsApp, and the vast majority of private communications will be corruptible at the whim of the UK/Australian Intelligence and Law Enforcement community. The information that they can gather from this can easily be shared across the Five Eyes Alliance, effectively giving these tools to the governments of the whole English speaking world. For advocates of digital privacy such as myself, this is a very concerning development. If anything, it only strengthens the need to shift the paradigm in communication tools so that they are decentralised, open source and private by default. If we succeed, laws such as these can’t dissolve our ability to collectively access private spaces online. I have said this before, but access to these online spaces is critical to a healthy 21st century democracy, and our governments are too quick to dismiss the need for widespread digital security. How it will affect Loki Obviously, we were terrified when we first saw this bill. The potential for the project to be entirely undermined by this legislation did not go unnoticed. We had begun to consider how we might set up failsafes to allow people to catch bad code being injected into our codebase, or to pay someone external to Loki to do regular inspections of our binaries that we release and ensure they are not leaking extra information or mismatching the codebase in some way. If we were to be issued a TCN, we would not be able to tell anyone about it. If we set up some sort of canary system, we could be imprisoned. So whatever failsafe we did set up would have to be external to Loki, and would have to be regularly auditing us to make sure we haven’t been compromised before a TCN was issued. We had also considered that we may have to leave Australia altogether. However, given the legislation allows them to target any company whether they are in Australia or not, and given most of the Loki team currently lives in Australia and has family here, this would be a very extreme and difficult move to make. None of us would ever be able to return home if we were issued a notice and refused to comply. We may have simply been extradited out of wherever we moved to anyway, so this option seemed extreme and ineffective. New amendments to the bill make this move unnecessary. Our analysis of the bill and its proposed amendments lead us to the following conclusions: With the addition of the amendment defining ‘systemic weakness,’ any modification to the Loki source code that gives authorities new capabilities would almost certainly be classed as a systemic weakness. Thus, we see it is a nearly impossible that we would be forced to implement any privacy degrading code into the software that we release to the public. It is feasible that we may be forced to develop an alternative client software for authorities to use with additional data collecting features or something of the sort. Thankfully, given the network is regulated by Service Nodes, the authorities would still need to own 40%+ of the entire Service Node network to make this effective for widespread surveillance. Given our economic assumptions as outlined in our , this is likely to be prohibitively expensive for the government, particularly if the usage of Loki is so high that it is worth the government issuing a TCN in the first place. Cryptoeconomics proposal As long as we are able to keep our code open source, we can guarantee that our code will always be auditable. As such, it may make sense to go over our existing licenses and convert them to GPLv3 to prevent closed source software derived from our implementation from appearing. We will require written permission from the copyright holders of the projects we have forked in order to achieve this. As Loki is a decentralised system with extensive privacy protections, there is very little we as the Loki team can do to de-anonymise our users even if we wanted to. The extent of the information we might be able to provide to authorities are all known attacks such as DPI and traffic shape correlation, however we don’t have any additional information at hand than any other node operator on the network. This means that if we are issued a notice, we won’t be much use to these agencies anyway. The chances that Loki will eventually be issued a notice are fairly high, however such a notice would not result in compromising the privacy that our system provides. The same can not be said of other communication platforms, where the service provider has central control over the data being transported. Your phone number is attached to your WhatsApp and Signal accounts, and all of the metadata that you create is now up for grabs. Only by decentralising the routing and storage of communications can it become truly private under this new legislation. The case for a system like Loki has never been stronger. What you can do to stay private on the internet With this new legislation, it is important to understand and be vigilant about our privacy on the internet. Wherever practical, using open source software is a good start to protecting one’s privacy. Open source software is much more trustworthy than closed source applications as the code is generally reviewed by people form all over the world. If any backdoors or questionable features are added to this software, alarm bells should be ringing shortly afterwards. Whenever possible, you should also always build the open source software you are using from source. This will remove another layer of trust, as you’ll know the application you build is running exactly what is in the codebase you want to use. Nothing extra, nothing less. It is entirely feasible that modified versions of applications can put in place instead of the real ones if a notice compels a developer to do so. Reproducible builds help to mitigate against this, and this is something we are now striving towards, but it is your responsibility to check you didn’t get served a fake version of the application you want to use. VPNs are a decent first step in protecting network privacy, but this legislation could severely undermine their utility. If the VPN you use is compelled to install monitoring systems in their service, you might just be handing your browsing and connection information straight over to the authorities and be none the wiser. A better approach is to use some sort of mixnet. Tor is the obvious choice for the time being, but when Lokinet is launched, you should use it, as you’ll will be able to use essentially any program you like straight out of the box (it’s both TCP and UDP friendly). You’ll enjoy low latency, and a dedicated network of incentivised nodes that you can reasonably trust to not be largely comprised of nodes run by surveillance agencies. I hope this article has clarified the situation for you, and given you some insight to why decentralised privacy is so important. If you’d like to follow what we’re doing at Loki, head to https://loki.network Originally published at loki.network .

Loki’s Response to the Assistance and Access Bill 2018

Net neutrality via blockchain: analyzing Loki Network’s onion routing mixnet

Five years ago, I co-founded a company — — with some friends. We raised some money and built a game — an iPhone-based Pokemon-esque creature-collecting game set in a world that dynamically evolved to match your real-world surroundings. (Yes, I pitched that >1000 times). We made a bit of money. We rented out a house in Silicon Valley (with a pool). And we were acquired by Yahoo in 2013. Loki Studios I’ve spent a lot of time processing the many, many things that happened. I finally sat down and wrote it all out, for my own records. What went right, wrong, what I’d do differently in the future, whatever. A lot of what’s written below may be well-known knowledge — clichés, even. But it’s a collection of my own learnings and growth, so I wrote it anyway. It’s written conversationally, as advice for future me. After spewing it all out, I thought I might as well share. On co-founders We started as four. We lost two. One to misalignment of goals, another to misalignment of lifestyle expectations. A year in, we added one. You don’t need to be best friends with your co-founders. But you do require mutual respect, and a lot of trust. Try finding a point on which you disagree — ethics, politics, religion, whatever. do you disagree? Would you be comfortable with that at 50x intensity, when everything around you is going down in flames? How You don’t need to co-found with clones of yourself, aligned on everything. Solo founding is difficult because has weaknesses. So when founding with someone else, do you balance one another’s strengths and weaknesses? Enough to get to the milestones you want to achieve? You may not need a financial controller now, but maybe one of you should know how to use Photoshop. And one of you should be decent at external communications. everyone And while skill sets are important, look beyond the obvious. Are you cautious and strategic? Can your co-founder be the voice of recklessness, pushing you forward? Are you loud and emotional? Is someone on your team thoughtful and quiet? But see above note on disagreeing with mutual respect. On ownership Don’t split ownership equally. Yes, everyone told us this. We did it anyway. We were 4 Stanford CS grads and nothing differentiated us in terms of experience. How could it have gone any other way?? Doesn’t matter, don’t do it. Work together a couple months, if you have to. See what you’re each ready to contribute to the company. On listening to users Your most vocal customers represent 1% of your company, within an order of magnitude in either direction. Either way, it’s a small minority. — they represent the early adopters who will spread the word; trumpet your triumphs; disavow and curse you on your mistakes. Listen to them — they represent the early adopters who represent extremes of your user base. We expected Geomon to be playable over the course of 2–3 months. Some users hit max level in the course of a weekend and thirst for more. . Don’t listen to them The end-game features for your fanatics will not be the ones to help your game grow (Fun fact: we took engaging our users seriously and replied to each user as an in-game character — the equivalent of Professor Oak. Each email started with: “Hey Field Agent! Thanks for reaching out to us…”) On users hating change Everyone knows this too. But I’ll re-iterate it here. Whether you’re adding a requested new feature or improving your graphics, some very vocal users will always eviscerate you. Very publicly. Take the feedback under consideration. Do what you think is best. Move on. On building games (mostly for you lifelong gamers, like me) It’s been a lifelong dream of mine to build games. Every game we played, my brother and I would ruminate on how to improve the game, or what kind of characters would make the game awesome. This is indicative of an awesome game foundation. When you have built a game inherently logical and fun, anyone — every 8 year old kids — can come up with great ideas on how to improve. We learned the hard way that building a fundamentally sound game is incredibly difficult. How many elements should exist? 12 sounds like a nice, round number. Nope! Way too complex, nobody remembers what counters what. How much experience should gathered level up, allowing for a nice feeling of progression while also not getting people to the end game too quickly? How much should the world be dynamic and responsive to your actions? What percent of the game should be “on rails” and scripted to ensure a good first experience? How do you ensure the single-player mode is fun for those who prefer PvE, while the multi-player mode is enjoyable in the long term? We spent hundreds of hours interacting with top players in the game who understand newly evolving strategies and tactics than we did ourselves. Gamers are clever and bright and, in the age of the internet and forums and guides, new edge case tactics spread like wildfire and can rapidly destroy the precarious balance of your game. There are a hundred aspects that require a dedicated game architect. We jumped into it headfirst slapping together a bunch of mechanics that sounded , and had to backtrack later to ensure a cohesive game. awesome On revenue I “grew up” in an era where it seemed sites and apps could seemingly ignore revenue. As long as you grew your user base like wildfire, there would be financial support from eager investors to get you to the next growth stage. ! We spent 18 months without putting much effort into revenue. We were growing comfortably. We were profitable on weekends and holidays, when people decided to spend. But this wasn’t the trajectory I promised my investors, my employees, or myself. This wasn’t the promised land of hockey sticks! You could IPO without ever having been profitable So we spent 6 months focusing on revenue. And through a lot of studying, experimentation and hard work we achieved ramen profitability (made enough money to feed ourselves pizza and instant ramen). Had we started this a year earlier, who knows what would have happened? Monetization may never have worked without the first 18 months we put into building the game. Then again, maybe we could have entered a healthy, profitable growth loop allowing us to create the series of games we had originally envisioned. Who knows?? On design So… design matters. A lot. We had a kickass idea and every gamer we pitched was sold in 3 words — “pokemon for iOS”. But honestly, when they saw our game, I distinctly remember the slightly scrunched faces concealing a thinly veiled disappointment. Our game was fun! But we turned away a lot of mainstream gamers when they saw the geeky graphics we had come up with. By year two, I understood it was very important to re-skin our game. But it was hard. There were dozens of pages to redo and a hundred thousand users we might lose (see “On users hating change”). Too little, too late, and no one was experienced with visual design. So… next time :) The concept was awesome (in my humble opinion). The design did not appeal to the mainstream. On startups We started this company because we were so excited about the concept of the game. We wanted it to exist. We wanted to play it. We spent a summer working on it, foregoing a summer internship and salary. It was so much fun we dropped out of school to keep working on it. We survived on prior internship savings. When one co-founder ran out, the rest of us chipped in. When that ran out, I raised some money. When we could no longer keep up with the work, we hired more people. That’s all to say… we didn’t do it all to . We did it because we wanted to create something we were really stoked about. And without that, I don’t think we’d have made it through the roadblocks, disappointments, and emergencies. I lived a decade in 2.5 years. I grew a lot of white hair (true story). If (when) I do another project in the future, it’ll be when I find another passion like this. do a start-up On teams It’s all true what they say. When you’re going through the toughest of times your team’s all you’ve got. A great hire is worth 20x a decent hire. Don’t settle for less. And to steal a quote from someone wise, when you’re interviewing someone “if there’s any doubt, there’s no doubt. Don’t hire.” On getting help I got help from so many people so many times. On every subject imaginable. And I don’t think I appropriately took steps to thank many of the people involved. Something I hope to take steps to remedy. Thank you Ravi for teaching me how to fundraise. Thank you Shawn for lessons in game design. Thank you James for teaching me a little about art — sorry we didn’t get to work together more. Thank you Katy, John, Kyle, Tim, Amy, Annlyn, Richard and Jeremy for your help in designing our creatures and world. Thank you Dan, Jessica and Jason for your help in testing the earliest versions of the game. Thank you Yu-kai on helping build our competitive scene. Thank you Damon and Alex for making the introductions that changed the course of our careers. Thank you Osuke, Arthur, Josh, Matt, Osman, David and Miguel for believing in a handful of nobodies. Thank you Pa, Ma, Chris, and all my relatives and friends I leaned on while going through this. Thank you to our users for supporting our dreams. And thank you to the team — Chris, Brian, Sam, Gene, Bart, Jess, Russ, Marco, Juan and Rico for a whirlwind of an unforgettable couple of years.

10 lessons from Loki Studios

True Anonymity, Privacy, and SNApps With Simon Harman of Loki

The year 2025 promises a cinematic surge with more studio releases than ever. Choosing which movies to see is daunting, given the myriad options. Here are my top picks for the most awaited films that deserve the big screen experience. 7. Karate Kids Legends This addition to the Mr. Miyagi universe sees Jackie Chan return as Mr. Han. Celebrating 41 years since The Karate Kid debuted, martial arts remains a cultural staple. Get ready for it to shine again. Mr. Miyagi Mr. Han The Karate Kid Trailer For Karate Kid: Legends Trailer For Karate Kid: Legends Martial arts fans, including me, will not miss the revamped classic on May 25th. 6. Thunderbolts Marvel's phase 5 brings renewed hope, and though not its first entry, Thunderbolts could energize it. Focusing on antiheroes and villains, the film follows the success of Loki on TV. Thunderbolts Loki Trailer For Thunderbolts Trailer For Thunderbolts The idea of villains working for the government is enticing. Expect packed theatres on May 2nd. 5. From The World Of John Wick: Ballerina John Wick’s universe expands with Ballerina, set between the third and fourth films. It also marks Lance Reddick's last appearance as Charon. Ballerina Charon Trailer For Ballerina Trailer For Ballerina Ana de Armas stars, thrilling audiences as familiar faces return. Expect a global rush to return to this world on June 6th. 4. The Accountant 2 Against all odds, The Accountant was a 2016 hit. Now, nine years later, the autistic accountant is back. Stories of overcoming challenges never get old. The Accountant Trailer For The Accountant 2 Trailer For The Accountant 2 Fans’ burning question, "What’s next for the brothers?" gets answered on April 25th. Ben Affleck and Jon Bernthal are back with a new threat. 3. Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning Closing in on thirty years, the excitement for Mission Impossible persists. It’s poised to be a blockbuster, with fans eager for another Ethan Hunt adventure. Mission Impossible Ethan Hunt Teaser Trailer For Mission Impossible — The Final Reckoning Teaser Trailer For Mission Impossible — The Final Reckoning Launching May 23rd, a day after the original’s 30th anniversary, expect Tom Cruise’s breathtaking stunts to dazzle audiences. 2. The Old Guard 2 Immortals battling for survival was a winning formula with The Old Guard. Released during COVID-19, it succeeded despite challenges, perfectly setting up a sequel. The Old Guard Teaser For the Old Guard 2 Teaser For the Old Guard 2 After delays due to Netflix’s changes, the long-awaited sequel arrives July 2nd, drawing millions back into the world of Andromache. Andromache 1. Superman James Gunn reinvigorates the DCEU. With hits like Peacemaker, expectations soar for his rendition of Superman. The "Man of Steel" remains a comic icon. Peacemaker Teaser trailer for Superman Teaser trailer for Superman The trailer’s glimpse of Nathan Fillon as Guy Gardener and Nicholas Hoult’s Lex Luthor heightens the excitement. Discover the mystery behind Superman’s plight on June 11th. Guy Gardener Lex Luthor Superman Honorable Mentions: Honorable Mentions Fantastic Four: First Steps, Novocaine, In The Lost Lands, Black Bag, Mickey 17, Sinners, and A Working Man.

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Stories, News & Mentions about LOKI

Loki’s Stories on HackerNoon

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