Earlier this year, I wrote Copper and Tin, a reflection of the vibe shift from 2024. The conditions have never been better for bleeding edge software like the World Computer and AI, but societal conditions continue to fray.

In crypto, 2025 has so far been a continuation of infrastructural victories, starting with the Pectra upgrade, including the lifting of sanctions on the Tornado Cash, and extending to the imminent Fusaka upgrade.

There was also a global realization of a common bottleneck to economic abundance: electric power

If 2025's vibeshift was great at anything, it was the awakening to a common thread of energy that can save and destroy us in so many ways.

If only it were so simple.

As far as the more applied timeline, summer got rough. By April, the memecoin meta was invasive.

PumpFun, following the "if you're crypto, pivot to AI" trend of 2023, was launched in January 2024. After the election in the following November, Clanker took over where Friendtech (late 2023)-esque Moxie (mid-2024) subsided. Generally, the launchpads rose and fell, and the speculative interest round-tripped.

But simultaneously, real progress was made with Fileverse's dDocs and dSheets. Farcaster miniapps and wallet were dogfooded to smoothness. Freedom Factory, the maintainers of EthOS, shipped the dGEN1.

One could understate the momentous sea change when the new USG administration introduced the Jan 23 EO for digital assets, Commissioner Hester Peirce introduced the Crypto Task Force, SEC repealed SAB121, and a second EO on regulatory repeal by the end of February. One could understate March with the introduction of the Bitcoin Strategic Reserve and Digital Asset Stockpile and modernizing Treasury rails. One can even understate the passage of the GENIUS act and OCC greenlight for banks to fully commit to hard SoV like Bitcoin and modernized currency like stablecoins. One can pretty much take every positive reversal of the "technopessimist era" from 2021's introduction of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, and bundle it into a paper victory.

Because the biggest event of 2025, so far, has been a Seldon crisis of political assassinations like that of Charlie Kirk, among many other casualties of societal collapse. One cannot overstate the gravity of the next 3 years of technocratic acceleration, especially in the context of polarizing approaches to mass immigration, brutal hate crime, and anti-AI sedition. Neither can anyone ignore the series of genie bottles being unsealed into public consciousness.

But either spin requires grounding. What does the market say?

This kind of says a warmup to repeating the bull market of 2021, but it's also a contradiction to the egregore of the World Computer absent ZIRP.

In Copper and Tin, I made a tongue-in-cheek reference to this belief power

But this missed the opinionation that the World Computer was more compatible with ESG even while it was being dismantled, and would stall in light of what Antonio Gramsci would call "the time for monsters", or what many developers in Ethereum would simplify as jingoist bigotry. After all, Charlie Kirk's assassination was a bellwether for the postrationality in "speech is violence", "spaces should discriminate", and "don't build Skynet or the Torment Nexus".

Plainly, the number has not risen hyperbolically into a supercycle (yet). DeFi hasn't evolved past collectible sniping and cartelization, and AI hasn't processed the prodigious capex holding up the stock market into recursive self-improvement and post-abundance (yet). In fact, let's reexamine Ethereum vs the obvious winner of the AI boom, Nvidia, holding the stock market up:

Of course, this does make sense when low-risk DeFi like Pooltogether was getting sued, privacy developers like Roman Storm are being indicted, and information discovery providers like Shayne Coplan are being raided. AI may be under direct attack, and there are APT campaigns, but not to the same scale that crypto experiences.

And in such Keynesian economics, Nvidia's picks and shovels suck in excess expectation of picks and shovels which firms like Anthropic, OpenAI, Google Deepmind, and xAI will urgently demand for products like Grok and Sora, so these also suck in excess capital from the industry which hasn't the same freedom to develop, even if they can't possibly generate a positive return (yet).

Crypto isn't reinventing civilization from scratch when it still needs to digest "The Future of Finance", but it doesn't need to in light of a "Metacorporate Age" which changes codeslaw with autonomous agency. In fact, AI is evolving so considerably that it has saturated quantified progress such that benchmarks like MMLU have been deprecated, but it is very inadequate in evaluations like SWE-bench (though one should notice that studios are holding cards to their chest till EOY, much like DeepSeek-R1).

However, crypto has built all the Legos needed to incentivize market development.

Just like AI has open markets of ideas like the PrimeIntellect Environments Hub, crypto has shown the credibly neutral manifold of consensus and distribution. Proof of Work is very effective headless distribution, and Proof of Stake is effective network consensus. AI will adapt to specification gaming on benchmarks with environment-evolving critics, but has crypto adapted to the specification game of "airdrop farming"?

Like it or not, the two are intertwined. Invasive chatbot sockpuppets followed SocialFi mechanics like DEGEN-tipping and further automations like periodic Moxie distribution. Gitcoin and quadratic funding can only guide so much charity, Deep Funding is more a concept in theory than practice, and a Protocol Guild only has so much bandwidth for arbitrary redistribution.

Furthermore, it's easy to point a century-long math contest like Bitcoin to a simple goal like a fiat-absorbing hard ledger, and it's easy to show a congestion-burning network like Ethereum moderates dilution in favor of stakers. Ideally, some combination of these can be an application-layer redistribution into some adapting proof of working merit. But do either have the fitness function for an egregore seeking behind-the-meter electricity and its derived intellectual property? Does an overlay like Eigenlayer sufficiently abstract rewarding intelligence? Do any of these encompass the civilizational stack (yet)?

Nontradables are useful for expendably rote behavior (as they say, gratitude is free), Fungibles are useful up to a redeemable claim for commodities, but the most ideal reward is something that abstracts all resources in demand, like a Very Important Vector.

What does a Very Important Vector, or a nonfungible power of curriculum, entail?

Firstly, it should be discerning of a given purpose for a moment in a place.

Secondly, it should be aligned to further expression of abundance. It wouldn't make sense to pay rent to a system that is incapable of collecting decreasing rent over time per a more increasing amount of occupants.

Thirdly, it shouldn't be unbounded to excess, and the precision that a Very Important Vector affords is a criterion for more optimal environments that it can translate to, and more powerful constructs that it can compel.

Okay, so what do these mean in actual practice? Everyone should check out ZAMM, the prediction market around it, and the receipt futarchy around that. Keep in mind that these are precise, simple elements that attract a mutual self-interest, even if that's still zero-sum. Within EVM ecology, big galaxy-brain ideas can emerge from a constant selection of overexpressed contractual archetypes, though ZAMM is by no means a stale stereotype of x*y=k or bonding curves. After all, one of the universal tailwinds of biological fitness is increasing resourcefulness by mass-reproducing the outcome with fewer resources.

The contemporary challenge of finance is attention capture that retains narrative control, which sounds a lot simpler and certain than reality belies. AI overreliance leads to cognitive deficit in critical thinking, and sports gambling leads to fixing and violence. Social media has been overtaken by bots which crush the Turing test. Nobody should be surprised that the Schelling power throughout the entire global economy, or the criticality of capital which even comes close to escape velocity, seems further away.

It doesn't have to be this way.

Then again, these constraints drive a rational form factor. If text-to-video slop has as much PMF, maybe it will be more GPU-efficient with swipe-right-to-tip per dozen frames for curating higher fidelity cinema. But if one superintelligence sees another getting any closer to runaway improvement on world models on slop, they'll just copy this and divide attention all the same.

Maybe there's distribution of stablecoins to a weekly leaderboard, like Farcaster successfully showed, but there's also the likewise risk of allocating points for dubious engagement. Maybe there's XP progression, and maybe even that is weighted by holding coins and/or notes, and maybe there are perks for implicit leveling, but there's no avoiding grind fatigue (unless the entire system is compromised by bots).

Ultimately, the Keynesian Beauty Contest must be grounded to upside within organic network effects, and the upside that consistently retains such network effects has to be tangible, with relieving equipment for facilitating progression, and some endearing construct for maximum dopamine, all of which drives the market to appreciate some fungible instrument. After all, the biggest Keynesian Beauty Contest is a nation that retains the most agency for the deepest cultural dent in history, like Pax Romana or Pax Americana.

Pax Impudentia isn't bound to land and coinage like the previous two, only the incumbent culture share, and so it is notably susceptible to cultural drift over a much shorter time period, especially after the Nixon shock untethered the "American dollar" from the gold standard, and any polarizing event IRL is infinitely virulent to the trajectory of this drift.

Bitcoin has demonstrated Hayekian longevity for a while, but with levered corporations as Digital Asset Treasuries, the pendulum has swung back towards a Keynesian vibe, which is shorter-term indulgence that externalizes liability into the future. And this vibe is corrosive to the purpose of Bitcoin as a longterm hard asset.

The technological arc of global civilization has a clear goal: upscaling collection of solar energy, meeting Maslow's hierarchy of needs, and diversion of surplus to multiplanetary logistics. Keep in mind that civilization is accelerating off a fuel of 5–6 × 10²⁶ J in extinction biomass, and we may have consumed 1.5 × 10²³ J out of remaining 2.0–2.2 × 10²⁶ that's accessible, though silicon photovoltaics may collect ~10^³⁰ J over this millennia as well, and commercially-viable fusion is nigh-unlimited.

Then again, look how it can be spent. Contrasting the disproportionate scientific growth from Haber-Bosch abundance against classic gold-mining agrarian society, look how it must be spent.

Even the consideration of the entire Magnificent 7 (Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, Tesla) does not override the fatal optimum of digitized capital flowing through the paths of least resistance to maximized return. Bitcoin's Hayekian longevity, in that anyone could have acquired it through CPU mining, debt-facilitated ASIC mining, or trading -- this is the most compelling index of market belief constrained to the price of electricity. And it has an edge against Keynesian cloud compute.

It even has edge against Tesla, the corporation likeliest to convert solar energy (and STEM zealotry) to economically profitable agency without exhaustion.

For any next-generation global computing platform, any avoidance of grassroots Proof of Work distribution is a gross mistake. Generally, this might be Proof of FLOSH, but in the case of AI, the highest-multiple private ventures are diametrically opposed to the necessary diffusion. Their opposite, which is the general equipment of freeholds with makerspace, agents, and undeniable communication, is the most critically important mission to sustain economic growth.

To further Nick Szabo's call to localism, there is a critical need for freeholds to participate in permissionless prediction-weighted governance, reserve-backed electoral districts to automatically pass public referendum to large-scale legislatures, and a creative commons for both mass entertainment and mass manufacture. If Pax Impudentia only capitalizes an upper minority, the socioeconomic adaptation will be brutally anarchic.

In the Metacorporate Age, especially an interplanetary age, nation-states will become obsolete except for whatever probabilistic control they broadcast to attract more attention, more developers, and more freed time. In other news, the president of the United States has ordered a "national effort to use AI to transform how scientific research is conducted and accelerate the speed of scientific discovery."

The challenge, now, is fostering awareness that focuses to empirically validating discovery, and that means that the Genesis Mission will likeliest succeed where it can enrich preexisting infrastructure without civic preemption. Ideally, every electoral district is populated by their respective governor with an engineering corps, perhaps even a religious order, which delegates bandwidth with teleoperation. Facilities along the respective highway networks would need a prodigious construction corps for concentric security perimeters, but the operation of the actual lab environments within could be from any public community space, like public libraries. Access via auth tokens could be earned through civic participation, sweat equity for commercial spinoffs could be diffused through geometric waterfalls of vault notes, and basic needs only need to be procured within a sustainably-sprawled commute to this highway network.

If any national energy agency preempts local regulation of rooftop solar, the amortization of that equipment, along with 50-year mortgages, would uplift younger homeownership as a larger consumer base and greater circulatory sink for that national currency and greater surplus to that national debt.

Furthermore, if there was a cryptoeconomic system that piggybacked of a locality's node to a Proof of Authority (published as L2 to Bitcoin and Ethereum), along with Bitcoin-esque distributions for Proof of Widget, Proof of Apprenticeship, and these were moderated with Majeur parlays (repurposed as municipal insurance, entertainment leverage, and model benchmarking), that unit of reference would be considerably more "beautiful" than anything in the free global market now. Which would be profoundly useful for a managed float regime as the exchange between tens of thousands of local reserves.

As the late David Lynch said, “I’m wearing dark sunglasses today, because I’m seeing the future and it’s looking very bright.” There is no guaranteed future (yet), but we have the theory, compute, and cultural shift in this moment to develop the future that critically sustains our moral arc towards global justice, and ultimately, is the most survivable for our species.