The extreme cyclicality of crypto is something that all new entrants ought to understand, for the difference between investing at the right and wrong stage of the cycle isn’t just a matter of optimising returns, but often life and death (financially speaking). If you’re investing early in a bull market, given the high correlation between assets, the market can be extremely forgiving. Often even if you’ve bought veritable dogshit, so long as the risk appetite is there, and the majors are pumping, you’ll likely do just fine (and sometimes considerably better than just fine). On the other hand, if the market’s done, and the bull market’s over, no matter how incredible your coin, how magical the tech, you’re almost certainly destined for pain -- and lots of it.

Given all this, one of the most common introspections of the crypto community is the question, “Where are we at in the cycle?”. If prices have shot up substantially and then retraced 20-30%, folks will then begin to ask, “Have we topped?”. As in, “Is the cycle over?”. Unfortunately, just as there’s no magic ball for ascertaining the day-to-day fluctuations of prices, there’s no magic ball for divining where precisely you are in a cycle. That said, there are signs.

While there’s some debate around what exactly constitutes a “bull” or “bear” market, in both cases, it’s like the comment of former Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, Potter Stewart, when asked to define “hardcore pornography”: You know it when you see it. For example, if the prices of the major cryptoassets are consistently ripping, up multiples on the year, it’s fairly safe to say you’re in a bull market. If, however, prices have been steadily (or precipitously) falling for many months on end, you can reasonably call that a bear market.

However, identifying what kind of regime you’re in is the easy part. The hard part is knowing where you’re at in the respective regime, how long the status quo will continue. If prices are up exponentially from where they were at a year ago, you can conclude you’re in a bull market, but what if you’re at the very end of said bull market, unknowingly staring into the face of a catastrophic bear? Similarly, even if prices are down 75% from their bull market highs, how do you know whether prices won’t continue to decline another 50%?

The short answer is: you don’t. Nonetheless, one can make a somewhat informed bet by looking at the past. As an asset class, crypto has been through a handful of market cycles that largely rhyme in their temporal character. Historically, a full market cycle consists of roughly two years of bull market action followed by roughly 18-24 months of bear. While the data is limited, with a sample size of 3-4, the consensus bet is that the next cycle/s will look somewhat similar in nature. Of course, the future could and often does look very different from the past, however, as a base case, this 4 year cycle structure serves as a reasonable guide to how things might go.

The next thing you can look at to inform where you’re at in the cycle (and this has become more popular recently) is by looking at where you’re at in the global liquidity cycle. Liquidity is basically just a proxy for how much money is roaming the world. And as more money enters the global financial system, crypto is highly responsive to the upside. As monetary conditions tighten, crypto sees the life sucked out of it (and fast). For this reason, crypto has been referred to as “the world’s liquidity sponge”.

Another, far more subjective, sniff test for where you’re at in the cycle is to simply observe how manic things are. If coins have been Up_Only for months on end, with majors smashing through all time highs, and monkey pictures selling for millions, you’re almost certainly closer to the end than the beginning. However, the trouble with using measures of euphoria as a signal in crypto is that things can stay far crazier for far longer than any reasonable mind would expect. In any case, even if euphoria doesn’t mark a global cycle top, it often does mark a “local top”, and is a fairly reliable signal for taking at least some chips off the table.

Whatever your preferred heuristic for ascertaining where you’re at in a cycle, it’s important to acknowledge that, unless your some kind of omniscient deity, the chances of you successfully picking the “pico top” are slim-to-none. Instead, when things get “toppy” you want to start progressively scaling out, especially given how returns are highly compressed in crypto, with disproportionate gains being had right at the very end, just as dawn turns to dusk.

Another way of reckoning with uncertainty in this context is to simply zoom out. While predicting the movement of markets over the short term is notoriously difficult, by adopting a longer time horizon you have a far better shot at being directionally right. Instead of having to predict the precise daily or weekly movements of the market, by zooming out, you can ride the tailwinds of certain larger and more fundamental forces that might be at play. And ultimately, it’s these larger forces that matter. Take investing in crypto, for example. While the volatility is immense, if you zoom out far enough, what you see is an economy and asset class that’s been growing rapidly (> double digit KAGRs) since its inception. As a result of this growth, so long as you held long enough (and picked the right coins), even amidst the staggering volatility, you’d still be in the green. That’s because, on a long enough time frame, the random noise and consistent and often horrendous drawdowns pale in comparison to the might of the generational, socioeconomic trend that is this new asset class.

DNA encodes RNA which encodes proteins — which in turn comprise all that you are. The same goes for every living organism. This is the so-called “central dogma of biology”, and the term is apt, for it is at once central to the modern conception of life, and dogmatic, in that it to even question its practical significance is tantamount to heresy.

A natural implication of the central dogma is that you are, in some basic sense, your genome (that is, your full suite of genes). This basic assertion / insight informs the contemporary biomedical paradigm as well as our popular understanding of the human condition. Since genes encode proteins and proteins encode you, it stands to reason that a deeper understanding of the relationship between your genes and its expression (i.e. your phenotype) is the key to a more powerful and precise capacity for medical intervention, and, by extension, medical enhancement. One sees this ‘gene’s-eye’ view of things pop up all the time in everyday conversation. When someone has some kind of quirk or condition, it’s common to here it claimed “oh, it’s probably just genetic”. After all, we are, according to the dogma, genes all the way down.

The genetic revolution was kicked off by Gregor Mendel in the 1800s and reached fever pitch with the elucidation of the structure of DNA by Crick and Watson in 1953. The first human genome was then sequenced in 2003, as part of the Human Genome Project, and it was hailed — rightly — as a breakthrough on the order of sending man to the moon. The success of the project was celebrated by no less than the then president, Bill Clinton, in a televised address. Today,” he said, “we are learning the language in which God created life.” Grand stuff indeed.

The expectation following the Human Genome Project was that we would in short order understand the bases of all major human disease along with the means of remedying them. By force of our scientific might, our own condition would finally succumb to human understanding (and therefore reliable intervention). Or so it was thought. As it happens, such has not come to pass. Some twenty years later, even with the advent of advanced forms of genetic engineering — most notably, CRISPR — we are scarcely any closer to understanding ourselves, let alone curing all disease.

It’s tempting to conclude from the past couple decades that we’re still just “early”; that eventually we will map the relationship between genes and disease to such an extent, and that this will provide the basis of new forms of intervention, such that all our hopes and dreams of the genetic revolution will one day be realised. On this view, all we need is more data and more patience, less any new, fundamental theoretical insights.

As the title of this post suggests, I take the other side of this view. While the idea that “you are your genome” is true, it’s true in the same way as the notion that “you are your atoms”. Both are true in an ultimate or fundamental sense, but they’re highly limited epistemic frameworks when it comes to understanding, and ultimately engineering, what is is that we are. To privilege genes, as a causal mechanism, is, I suggest, to privilege an ultimately arbitrary level of abstraction that has no fundamental, epistemic justification. Ultimately, we went after genes because we thought the relationship between genes and various disease states would be simple enough as to afford a means of intervention. In practice, we already know this to be untrue. The relationship between genes and their expression is far hazier, far more complex, than we initially realised. While it would be too strong to call genes and genomics a ‘dead-end’, given its disproportionate focus, it’s at the least a distraction.

If progress is to be made in biology over the next decade/s, it will be made, I suspect, as a result of the investigation and discovery of certain higher-order, emergent biological principles. If genes and their respective proteins represent the lowest level language of biology (the “machine code” of life) breakthroughs will come as a result of understanding the higher-level abstractions that mediate biological systems (the Python or JS of life). In this vein, the work of Michael Levin on bioelectrical networks and cellular intelligence is illustrative of this new paradigm I believe we’re just now entering; one that respects the role of genes but appreciates they’re far from determinative in terms of the physiological manifestations we actually care about.

Although memecoiners are many and varied, and their personal situations equally so, what unifies them is their desire to make a dollar. In this respect, memecoiners are synonymous with investors or speculators generally. Fundamentally, they are economic agents acting in accordance with economic interests. In this sense, nothing is new under the sun. What separates memecoiners from traditional investors, however, is the fact that they have the audacity to believe that their “intrinsically valueless” magic internet coins might actually be worth something -- and hopefully more tomorrow than they are today. Of course, this notion of ‘intrinsic value’ that is so often levelled against crypto as a whole -- and memecoins, especially -- is ultimately naive, grounded, as it is, in a terribly constrained conception of value itself (as if value were somehow synonymous with discounted cash flows or industrial utility). In defiance of such a conception, what memecoiners grok, if only intuitively, is that there exists an underlying economic value to attention itself -- and in the case of memecoins, the community that underpins and facilitates the flow of attention. More broadly, all tokens, BTC and ETH included, can be seen as mechanisms for capturing the economic value of Internet communities. Memecoins simply take this logic to the extreme, having no claim on any additional utility or functionality beyond representing the interests or values -- i.e. culture -- of a particular online group. In the context of an Internet dominated by the logic of surveillance capitalism, what could be more fundamentally optimistic than this? That is, Internet communities coordinating around their own assets to co-construct value, independent of any intermediating authorities.

It’s not all so lofty though, of course. There is a sense in which memecoins are simply another manifestation of the human penchant for gambling. But here it’s important to appreciate that there is a far more porous boundary between gambling -- of the degenerate sort which we might deride -- and speculation, which fundamentally drives the techno-capital system, than we might appreciate. Instead of a binary dichotomy, the difference between gambling and speculation is, as with most things, more of a spectrum. However, even if we reduce the current memecoin meta to gambling, it’s interesting that we should attribute financial nihilism as the cause of memecoins where we ordinarily understand and perceive gambling as a form of entertainment. Except for the truly degenerate, most folks who bet on a sporting event or a few chips at the casino aren’t doing so because they have no other shot at financial freedom. Instead, they do it for the thrills -- the dopamine.

All this being said, it’s interesting to consider just why financial nihilism, of all the possible explanations, is the reflexive rationale for memecoins. On some level, it’s surely just a memetic, self-reinforcing phenomenon -- i.e. someone on Twitter made the case and now everyone repeats the dogma and the dogma becomes gospel. On another level, though, it might be seen as a reflection of the modern impulse to pathologise, or perhaps the implicit shame and self-hatred of the West. In any event, while there are plenty of positive explanations for why memecoins have popped off the way they have, we’ve latched onto the most cynical. Whatever it is, there

Media networks are, as the name suggests, networks that deal in the supply and distribution of media (or information more abstractly). Newspapers are an example of a media network. So, too, radio and television stations. Of course, the dominant media networks of today are “social media” networks, and what sets them apart from their analog counterparts is the fact that they rely, almost exclusively, upon ‘user generated content’ -- that is, the uncoordinated, bottoms-up contributions of the network’s participants as a whole -- rather than the efforts of any single company or entity. Similarly, the media that blockchain networks facilitate the exchange of is entirely user generated in nature. However, where blockchains begin to diverge from traditional social media is that there is no single company responsible for the provision of the underlying service. There is no Ethereum company “running” the blockchain. Instead, the network is provisioned by thousands of independent node operators around the planet.

Beyond this difference in architecture, though, the core difference between social media and blockchain networks, is the type of media these networks deal in. Social media as it exists is predicated upon “free media” that takes the form of ordinary digital files of various formats, that is monetised, indirectly, via advertising. Blockchain networks, in contrast, deal in financial -- aka ‘tokenized’ -- media; that is, media that has, by default, ownership rights and associated economic value. As a consequence of these properties, this ‘socioeconomic wrapping’, blockchain-based media -- ‘cryptomedia’ -- enables a radically alternative economic logic to social media. That is, rather than monetising media indirectly through advertising, cryptomedia can be monetised directly, capturing and representing value in the form of its underlying token. In other words, where social or traditional digital media is valuable insofar as it commands attention, cryptomedia can be valuable in and of itself, analogous to art or real estate or traditional IP. Moreover, by virtue of the fact that cryptomedia exists in the context of open data repositories -- i.e. blockchains -- they enable the possibility of a free market for the discovery, curation and distribution of content, as opposed to the walled gardens of the past and present.

Consider Bitcoin as the canonical cryptomedia network. While it’s not generally appreciated as such, the token itself is a form of media, as is the underlying technical implementation (the software). At the foundation of this network exists a whitepaper (a PDF); an expression, not only of the technical details of the Bitcoin system, but also an implicit set of values, beliefs, and ideas (i.e. memes) that serve as a kind of cultural foundation or framework that shapes the community of evangelists as it evolves. The network as a whole can then be viewed as a global media network that shares in the evangelisation of the network’s core memes -- i.e. digital gold, non-sovereign money, decentralized finance etc. -- and captures the value associated with the memes in the form of the underlying asset, BTC. Participants in the Bitcoin network, on this view, are not only those that hold some amount of BTC but anyone who is promoting or otherwise talking about Bitcoin, whether IRL or some explicit media platform (new-world or old). That is to say, the ‘media network’ that is Bitcoin extends to include, not only the active users of the Bitcoin network, but the entire social and cultural apparatus that surrounds it -- the ‘layer 0’.

Now consider Ethereum as the logical extension of this same concept. Where Bitcoin has historically been the domain of a single asset, BTC, Ethereum enabled the creation and exchange of any arbitrary piece of cryptomedia, fungible and non-fungible alike. Thanks to Ethereum, and other general purpose smart contract platforms, anyone anywhere can issue a piece of media and fractionalize and financialise it however they so choose. Put slightly differently, where Bitcoin was a content platform designed solely for the exchange of a single piece of content, BTC, Ethereum is a general purpose content platform, designed to facilitate the creation and exchange of any arbitrary content. However, in both cases, there is a single commodity-like asset or “money” that is used to pay for access to the network’s compute resources.

Interestingly, though, in spite of its original conception and associated technical limitations, Bitcoin has recently begun to converge on the same functionality as Ethereum, with its own standard for creating various kinds of media in BRC20’s, ordinals and now runes. And while, as a system, it’s not nearly as performant as Ethereum, and certainly other “next generation” blockchains, like Solana and Sui, it’s illustrative of the ultimate utility, the overarching “use case”, of these networks that Bitcoin should evolve the way it has. They are, as I’ve argued, media networks! And as with any other media network, the more media the better.

In the end, blockchain networks represent a new form of community owned, digital media network, built around a new conceptual schema and associated vernacular. At the centre of this new schema are notions such as “minting”, “collecting” and “earning” that, together, supplant -- or at least augment -- traditional social primitives like views and likes. Underlying these new constructs is, of course, the concept of ownership. However, while blockchains serve as a new socioeconomic substrate for content, what remains to be developed -- or what we’re in the very early innings of -- is the consumer interfaces that sit ontop of these networks that facilitate delightful experiences of these new features and constructs. Blockchains provide the database and underlying monetary system of these emerging digital networks, but where is the Facebook and Instagram?

When people are asked how they got into crypto, the response is usually self-aggrandising; an effort to assert one’s dazzling intellect, their preternatural prescience. “It all began with the Bitcoin whitepaper,” many a podcast guest will answer. “I realised straight away that this was the future of the Internet, money and society”. While for some small number of people, this response represents a bona fide experience, for many more it’s a post-hoc construction, an affectation, if not an outright lie. Here I hope to be more candid. When I first read the Bitcoin whitepaper, I hadn’t the slightest clue what it was on about. Even the title stretched my neurons. Although by the time I read the whitepaper I’d almost certainly heard enough about Bitcoin to know it was some kind of magic internet money, the term “digital gold” might have even been in use by then, but it was still hazy, hard to pin down. It was around 2013 or 2014 and my friends were using it to buy illicit recreational substances on Silk Road, some kind of marketplace on the ominous-sounding ‘dark web’. Listed next to compounds that made you chew your face off and dance all night were far darker manifestations of the lord’s chemistry, along with ammunitions and fake IDs and everything else you might imagine could be bought and sold in the corner of the web that is so-called ‘dark’. And all of this was bought and sold with this thing --- almost certainly illicit itself -- called “Bitcoin”. So I had some context. But still, when I first read the paper, it all went straight over my head. I remember seeing some math in there, astonished that someone, somewhere out there, actually understood it. I was ~19, a couple of years out of high school, doing not a whole lot.

Maybe a year later, I found myself hearing more about this Bitcoin thing, this ‘dark web money’. Having appreciated in value considerably, people were obviously finding it interesting, and speculating that it might be worth quite a bit more in the future. I remember an interview with Chamath Palihapitiya on Youtube where he seemed pretty pumped up about it. Maybe this thing has legs, I thought. Maybe there’s money to be had. Maybe it’s the future.

I studied Bitcoin further. It became a minor, albeit short-lived obsession. I remember pitching it to my old-man at the time (I obviously wasn’t especially convincing as he never bought any). “One day a single BTC could be worth hundreds of thousands,” I claimed. I even wrote a blog post where I tried to grapple with the underlying concepts and concluded that it might be worth a lot in the future. I still had only an elementary understanding of the core concepts, but I found it all immensely compelling, even if I couldn’t fully articulate why.

I first bought Bitcoin to buy some Modafinil (it was all the rage in SV at the time) as a study aid from a site called ‘Modafinil Cat’. They were advertising a 20% discount for orders that paid in BTC. I figured that was incentive enough and so I bought some off a local exchange and wired through the BTC. It was my first ever cryptopayment, and I think I paid ~2BTC for a fairly large amount of Modafinil. As it turns out, it wasn’t the best deal. Not only did it cost me approx. $100k (in today’s terms), I didn’t like the Modafinil, either (it gave me migraines), and ended up giving most of it away to a friend.

Interestingly, I never thought to invest my own money in Bitcoin, not back then. It was something I found intellectually curious, and wouldn’t mind evangelising to other people or making grandiose price predictions about. But somehow it didn’t occur to me that I should buy and hold some for myself. I didn’t have anything to my name, for starters, and I guess the thought of it being worth a lot someday was too distant, not real enough, only a vague and distant possibility. Above all, I think it was the passivity that put me off. That is, if I was going to do something with money, if I was going to invest it in something, I wanted it to somehow reconfigure my life in the present. Give me something to do. Something to sink my teeth into. The prospect of taking money I didn’t have and parking it in something I couldn’t do anything with didn’t light me up. So I didn’t (much to my future self’s regret).

I then became interested in other things and Bitcoin became something of a memory. It was an intellectual fling, a brief affair, satisfying but not enough to keep me faithful. Eventually I started an agricultural business and that became my obsession. It wasn’t until a few years later that I started thinking about “crypto” again, although at that time I’m not even sure if I’d heard the term. It was around 2017, and Ethereum was going through ICO mania. I wasn’t quite sure what Ethereum was so I watched a TechCrunch interview with Vitalik. I can’t remember what I made of the interview but the general notion of using this decentralized platform to facilitate crowdfunding campaigns I found fascinating. The rainbows and unicorns was an interesting look, too.

As all entrepreneurs invariably do, I’d developed an appreciation for the essentiality of capital, how it harboured the capacity to make or break dreams. While venture capital was the default means by which an ambitious founder sought to finance their startup, there were some fairly obvious compromises that such capital necessitated, I’d concluded. For starters, venture capital is predicated on the prospect, and sometimes reality, of excess returns. VC doesn’t go after 2-3x returns, it chases 10, 100, 1000x multiples. It wasn’t a function of greed, as was typically assumed (though certainly there’s no shortage of it, either). Rather, because of the nature of the business, the power law distribution of startup success, they require disproportionate returns, as a matter of survival. In the cases where an entrepreneur and a VC seek the same thing, this arrangement works just fine. However, I wasn’t so sure that’s what I wanted for my business. I’d become, as it were, idealistic. I’d been drinking the Yvon Chounaird ‘responsible company’, business-as-a-force-for-good kool-aid. The business I was building was intended to help pay the food system forward, to render it at once more sustainable and equitable. Perhaps this mission was commensurate with exponential growth. Perhaps exponential growth was even a moral imperative. But I wasn’t sure at the time and didn’t want to gamble the integrity of the cause for the sake of some funding. At the same time, though, more money would’ve been great.

A few things struck me about ICOs. First, and most fundamentally, it represented an alternative means of financing a project that wasn’t beholden to the logic of venture capital. Moreover, it broadened the space of possible investors to include the entire Internet. This was of course the proposition of crowdfunding, in general, but Ethereum and ICOs seemed to take this principle to the extreme by making it truly Internet-native, issuing -- in exchange for capital -- assets (i.e. tokens) that weren’t (yet) subject to the same securities regulation that stymied, in my opinion, traditional crowdfunding platforms. Most idealistically, it also represented a means of financing a project in a way that was, potentially, far more aligned with a business or brand’s customer base -- by enabling customers to become investors; to own, before the majority of the returns had already been realised, their favourite companies. In this sense, ICOs seemed radically egalitarian. It seemed to portend a world of truly customer-owned brands. At the time, I was building a consumer brand, and so all my thinking was brand-centric. ‘Imagine Nike if Nike was owned by all its early customers,’ I thought.

With these thoughts already in mind, I remember going for a hike with some friends, in the Tasmanian wilderness, under the influence of ~100mg of lysergic acid. After the sun had set, I found some moments to myself while starring at the stars, and found myself making contact with the prospect of listing this new-age brand of mine on this open, decentralized platform that was Ethereum. As psychedelic visions tend to be, the experience was cosmic in its grandiosity. It felt revolutionary. Fundamentally novel. A new paradigm. Instead of eventually listing on something like the Nasdaq, which felt so parochial, mired in the trite politics and false boundaries of nation states, I’d open up my enterprise to the entire world. A brand for the Internet. I went to sleep that night deeply content, convinced I was onto something, though when I woke I returned to the sober realities of trying to make a business a business.

Around this time I’d also been digging into Austrian economic canon, reading the likes of Rothbard and Hayek. Hayek, with his notion of the ‘denationalisation of money’ was especially relevant to the emerging crypto context. Indeed what seemed to be taking place, in crypto, was precisely Hayek’s ideal of a competitive, private market for non-sovereign monies. Bitcoin and Ethereum were the early instantiations, but surely new monies would emerge, and it was my suspicion that the monies of the future would be tied, in some way, to global brands. Imagine Apple or Nike coin. It all seemed so obvious, inevitable even.

As exciting and subversive as these thoughts were at the time, nothing much came of them. It wasn’t until mid 2021 that I finally dove deep into crypto in earnest. There was a couple of catalysts. First, the market was pumping. Prices were skyrocketing and talk of crypto was inescapable. It wasn’t that I particularly cared about the prices, as I didn’t own anything and wasn’t planning on buying, but it seemed to affirm that something genuinely interesting was going on here. The market was, I figured, signal. Secondly, NFTs were taking off. Cryptopunks were my first study. And what I found interesting about them was how they might be used, again, in the consumer brand context. What I had been trying to build was a digitally-native brand, and NFTs seemed to represent a fundamentally new category of digital object that could be used in various ways by digitally savvy brands. They could, I figured, be used to complement physical products -- i.e. buy a physical and receive a digital -- or to represent, in some fashion, community and culture.

In the background of all this, I was working on a rebrand for the business. There was to be a new site, new product lines, new packaging. A fresh new look. There were, to my mind, some obvious complementarities between what I was seeking to build, and what crypto was coming to represent: something futuristic, subversive, digital. But the essential idea was this: as an aspiring Internet-native brand, wouldn’t it be interesting if we were to attach ourselves to crypto -- as emerging Internet culture -- in some fashion? While we were selling, of all things, health food products, I figured we could, by incorporating crypto, carve out a really interesting, future-forward aesthetic niche. The most obvious idea was to accept crypto as a form of payment, and, in so doing, assert ourselves as a bona fide “crypto-company”. I was following the success of Foundation at the time and dug the vibe of the Ethereum symbol, so I decided we would prioritise $ETH.

As it happens, accepting crypto, at the time, was far from an easy proposition. Especially in exchange for physical products. In the process of my research, though, I find myself captivated by the ideas circulating the cryptosphere. There was the philosophical conversation around money, i.e. what makes money “money”, and the idea of its reinvention, the idea of “imbuing money with values”. That was exciting. Above all, though, there was (and remains) this notion of a blockchain as a coordination technology; a tool for facilitating human cooperation.

While it’s a relatively abstract notion, the idea of ‘human coordination’ was something I’d already become rather interested in, prior, that is, to my foray into crypto. At some point, it occurred to me -- however banal or self-evident the thought might seem -- that the fundamental predicament of the human condition, the existential dilemma, is a matter of coordination. At the individual and societal level, the essential question is this: What are we to do? With all this time, attention, energy, money. Steering the world towards ‘better’ or ‘progress’, I’d come to appreciate, is ultimately an issue of effective coordination; that is, of putting our resources towards those things which promote the Good, and avoiding those which bring about its opposite. By implication, effectively all of the problems we grapple with, as a society, can be reduced to our failure to coordinate; our failure to do what needed to be done to avoid such problems in the first place, or remedy them once they had arisen.

This is of course a great abstraction, but it is, I’ve found, a helpful one nonetheless. On this view, the entire arc of human progress can be viewed as the continual evolution of increasingly sophisticated coordination technologies. Money. The State. Rule of law. The corporate form. All of these constructs are institutions (in the broad sense) that help facilitate the voluntary cooperation of human beings.

This notion of coordination struck me as especially powerful as it was precisely what I was trying to do with the company of my own. In the abstract, I was trying to leverage the company to effect some positive impact in the world; to work at the intersection at what was profitable, as a business, and what was socially and environmentally important. However, what struck me was how there was, amongst the space of possible impact, a thinner-than-ideal overlap between what was commercially viable and what would be most impactful. Many things that would be impactful would not be profitable, and vice versa. For everything that existed outside of this nexus, there was the non-profit. But as a construct, the non-profit was even more limited in what it could do, dependent upon external sources of funding as they are. Surely there are more flexible institutional constructs, some amalgam of non-profit and profit that was better adapted to the set of problems the world is facing?

What I discovered in blockchains, or what I think I have discovered in them, is an institutional form that obeys an entirely alternative, and far more flexible, social and economic logic to that of more traditional structures. Where companies and NGOs are relatively constrained in terms of their financing -- either they make a profit or they receive donations -- blockchains, enabled by tokens, were able to realise a far broader space of economic configuration. I came to see tokens as a fundamentally novel and infinitely flexible technologies for capturing and representing value. By virtue of their programmability, their being instantiated purely in software, they could represent, in principle, a far broader set of possible value constructs and economic arrangements. They could represent social, cultural, even environmental value -- in a tangible, economic sense -- in fundamentally new ways. By expanding the space of what we can value, perhaps we could more reliably represent, in our economics, that which we ought (or purport) to value. Such things as planetary health, for instance. Viewing the existence of ‘negative externalities’ as the fundamental flaw of free market economics, as I did (and continue to), perhaps this new means of representing and distributing value was the missing piece, I figured.

People talk about being ‘nerd-sniped’ by crypto. And indeed I was. After ~6 months of working, effectively full-time, to incorporate crypto in some fashion into my existing business, I decided I was better off reimagining the business, from the ground up, in light of these new ideas. Instead of building a business, I would build a blockchain (or something on a blockchain). After some negotiation, I sold my share of the business back to my co-founder and set-out to realise this new, crypto-inspired vision. And here I am, still trying to figure it out, some couple of years later.

Since first deciding to commit to this crypto thing, my thinking has evolved substantially. The ideas that got me here are still there, but there’s also a new set of constantly evolving concepts that keep me going. Ultimately, I think crypto represents a socioeconomic shift at the very heart of the web; a shift that will fundamentally transform the nature of money and finance, as well as the dynamics of Internet products / services, generally. If this holds true, what we build here and now will define the balance of digital power, the nature of Internet life, for decades (perhaps centuries) to come. Naturally, given this view, I consider working in crypto today something of an opportunity of a lifetime. While this is a conviction that has taken years to develop -- that is to say, it’s not exactly what got me interested, in the first place -- it’s nonetheless what keeps me here, what keeps me going.

When it comes to anticipating the future, it pays to consider the past. And if we take a look at crypto’s past, its short ~15 year history, one thing is clear: money has been the killer app. As the original instantiation of crypto, Bitcoin -- what is a novel money / payments network -- remains far and away the most widely adopted product in crypto, accounting for around 50% of its total market share. Ethereum, as a money and ‘general purpose smart contract platform’, accounts for another 15-20%, while stablecoins represent ~10%, with a long tail of digital assets making up the rest.

While the popular narrative of the moment is that crypto is about much more than ‘magic internet money’, and will serve as the underlying substrate of a new, more open Internet, the reality is that money and its basic infrastructure remains crypto’s killer application -- and it’s not even close. Even in the case of smart contract platforms, it is the speculative asset (i.e. money) -- and the ecosystem of (mostly financial) services built around it -- driving the adoption and subsequent valuations of these networks (as opposed to more traditional notions of cash-flows and p/e ratios). Of course, the future may diverge from the past here, and money may ultimately prove but a stepping stone in the evolution of crypto as an industry. Possible though this may be, I consider it highly unlikely. Indeed, I expect ‘money’ -- broadly construed -- to remain the dominant use case of crypto far into the future. Here’s why.

Fundamentally, crypto represents the emergence of an Internet-native financial system. And money represents the foundation of finance. Without money, there is very little that looks like modern finance. Indeed, it’s no coincidence that this emerging financial system was catalysed by the genesis of a new money in the form of BTC. Moreover, though it’s rarely considered a market as such, money is effectively the largest market on earth; the medium through which all other markets move. And what crypto represents is a radical broadening of the space of possible monies, the introduction of a whole new order of competition into the global money market.

Next to the opportunity that the global market for money represents, the rest of crypto’s potential applications -- however significant or revolutionary -- are relatively underwhelming in scale. So when I say that money will remain crypto’s killer app, it’s neither cynical nor pessimistic; in fact, it’s supremely optimistic. For while crypto is already taking on money, in the broad scheme of things, at $1.7T, it is but a rounding error in the overall market for monies. Therefore, if money is to remain crypto’s killer app, given everything else that crypto could conceivably be used for, it would imply that crypto was able to become a major player in the market that matters most.

Ultimately, I view networks like Ethereum and Bitcoin -- along with every other cryptonetwork worthy of mention -- as new kinds of financial institutions -- ‘Internet banks’ -- and their primary product as money (and its safe storage i.e. property rights). Everything else we witness in crypto is an emergent consequence of these new moneys being distributed and speculated on; a happy accident that results from the properties of the underlying technology (as it happens a shared hard drive is useful for more than just money). The astonishing valuations of these networks become far more credulous within this frame. Indeed, the reason cryptonetworks trade at such seemingly absurd valuations is because the market values them, correctly, as monies. Now, to be sure, most of these monies will ultimately go to zero, or close enough to, but the market nonetheless pays a speculative premium for them because the potential upside, if they are to reach ‘money status’, is so great.

Finally, there’s a popular assumption in crypto that there will only be a couple of monies that win out -- i.e. ‘BTC, ETH, maybe SOL’. Personally, I expect a much broader set of valuable monies to emerge. While there might be a power law dynamic that plays out, I expect a diverse landscape of non-sovereign monies competing against one another, as per Hayek’s vision. Indeed, I take the view that the surface of possible monies -- and possible distribution mechanics -- has barely been scratched. After all, money is a kind of game, and its hard to imagine that we’ve already exhausted the most compelling forms of such. Just as Bitcoin and Ethereum leveraged proof of work as the incentive mechanism at the heart of their respective money games, I expect new and similarly novel mechanisms to drive the growth and adoption of new monies in the future to come. In short, we’re not about to mature beyond the ‘currency’ phase of crypto; it’s only just begun.

Although there are many ways we might conceive of and conceptualise blockchain networks, if we turn our heads but a few degrees, they begin to look a lot like nation states ‘in the cloud’. They are, among other things, comprised of a citizenry, coordinating around a native asset (i.e. a sovereign money) in accordance with some set of predefined, preprogrammed rules (i.e. rule of law). And while today’s blockchains -- certainly the smart contract varieties -- are marketed as ‘general purpose technology platforms’, it’s not hard to conceive of a world where blockchains are constructed explicitly around some social or political objective rather than any specific technological agenda. To some extent, this is already true of the two most valuable cryptonetworks -- Bitcoin and Ethereum. Not only are they technological systems, they are, equally, ideological systems; potent meme complexes that ignite a sense of mission and purpose, community and belonging. And that’s precisely what makes them so valuable.

While blockchain networks represent the most cogent analogy to the nation state, one needn’t look further than today’s social media to understand how digital networks, in general, have become a powerful political force in the world. However overplayed these examples may be, consider Twitter and the Arab Spring, or the role Facebook is considered to have played in the 2020 election. More fundamentally, though, simply consider how much of our collective time and attention is being concentrated in these systems; how our sense of community and identity are increasingly being defined by the online spaces we colocate in. Where blockchain networks diverge from ‘social’ networks, however, is in the underlying structure of their network design. Platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram concentrate power in the centre, in the corporate entities that single-handedly oversee their development. Blockchain networks, in contrast, distribute power to the edges, to the people and projects that collectively facilitate their evolution. Accordingly, they represent a very different, more ‘democratic’, social and economic logic than their web2 counterparts. In this sense, blockchain networks are much closer in essence to the architecture to the Internet itself.

Above all, what makes blockchain networks so powerful is the way in which they leverage a native asset -- i.e. a token -- to effectively ‘self-fund’ the development of their infrastructure. Where social networks depend upon a central company to finance the development and maintenance of their services, blockchains circumvent this necessity by employing an Internet-native mechanism for ‘crowdsourcing’ the provisioning of resources. And instead of traditional marketing, by distributing ownership across the network as a whole, anyone who holds the blockchain’s native asset is incentivised to market and evangelise the network, thereby contributing to its underlying value.

What this amounts to, or so I suggest, is a fundamentally novel economic model; one that could, in principle, be leveraged for far more than simply bootstrapping a smart contract platform. It could be used, as Balaji suggests, to form a community around a vision for a new State and eventually crowdfund the purchase and development of physical territory. But it could also be used for so much more. You could imagine, as I already have, a blockchain that coordinates around the mission of solving climate change; managing a shared treasury which its members collectively allocate to certain pro-climate causes. Moreover, you could imagine existing highly online communities like EA or e/acc spinning up blockchain networks with their own tokens that fund causes they consider meaningful. In the case of EA, for every token minted from their smart contract, you could imagine $10 dollars going towards the purchase of mosquito nets in Africa (however problematic that may or may not be). And in the case of e/acc, perhaps they find a way to finance the development of fusion or new AI paradigms. Less overtly revolutionary, but equally interesting, you could also imagine a blockchain that amounts to some form of ‘headless lifestyle brand’; a decentralized Nike, say, which shares IP and depends upon user generated content and products, and accrues value via a token. Whatever the particular instantiation, the essential point is that in blockchain networks, we have a new means of coordinating resources at a global scale; an organisational structure native to the Internet; a third option beyond the profit vs non-profit dichotomy; what I refer to as ‘Institutions for the Digital Age’.

However remote from Balaji’s Network State these notions may be, the common thread that unites a hypothetical Effective Altruist blockchain and a Praxis is the coming together of a group of people online to do something meaningful, and sharing in the economic value of that something together. Amidst a landscape of ‘parasocial media’, and broader existential angst, it’s this notion of coordinating around something that evokes a sense of purpose, that produces meaning and belonging, that makes the idea of the Network State so compelling. After all, what could be more compelling than starting your own country? However, as I’ve been implicitly suggesting, I think a lot of the value of inherent to the Network State notion could be realised without the ‘State’ piece. With or without diplomatic recognition, it’s the notion of designing networks of value, networks of meaning, that matters.

Blockchains are not only new computing platforms. They are, above all, new kinds of Internet-native institutions; socioeconomic protocols uniquely fit for the dynamics of the digital age. As a novel technology for the coordination of financial and human capital, their invention is analogous to the invention of the joint-stock corporation some few centuries ago. Where corporations are constituted by equity and shareholders and codified in law, blockchains have tokens and token-holders and are codified by code. Both are fundamentally social structures for facilitating capital formation and the coordination of collective human behaviour. However, just as personal computing and the Internet liberated human agency from the constraints of physics and geography, blockchains liberate human coordination from the constraints of physical jurisdiction and legacy legal and financial instruments.

By virtue of their being radically distributed and instantiated in software -- i.e. digitally-native -- blockchains are social organisms uniquely fitted to the evolving dynamics of Internet society. As mechanisms for incentivising behaviour at Internet-scale and Internet-speed, they are without rival. While there are fundamental constraints on how and to whom equity can be distributed, tokens represent an infinitely more flexible financial technology, far better suited to the demands of Internet products and Internet communities (where blockchains are the substrate for mediating their issuance and exchange).

While it’s so embedded in the fabric of life so as to be taken for granted, the majority of the world works for companies, in service of shareholders, in exchange for money. Spelling this fact out is to assert one of the most banal and mundane realities of the 21st century. And yet it is nevertheless utterly fundamental to how the world works today. More to the point, however, it’s all an elaborate social contract we’ve constituted together; a shared story. Blockchains, I argue, represent the emergence of a new narrative; a world where, instead of companies, Internet-native folk work for Internet-native institutions in exchange for Internet-native monies. If this holds true, I expect blockchains will be to the the information age what the company was to the industrial age.

This is all bound to sound awfully abstract and hypothetical but we already have fairly strong validation of this overarching thesis in the form of Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana and the long tail of blockchains today. These systems are already coordinating millions of people and trillions of dollars. However, where we will see a shift, I predict, is away from propositioning blockchains as general purpose technology platforms, and towards this more Institution or community-centric frame. Blockchains will be constructed and presented, not as credibly neutral platforms for whatever people might conceive of using them for, but as organisations / institutions in their own right. Where blockchains today take an unopinionated view of what they should be used for, blockchain networks of the near-future will have a far more concrete sense of purpose. Moreover, where the underlying economics of blockchains -- their monetary order -- today is designed solely for the purposes of securing the blockchain itself, the economics of blockchains in the future will be constructed to reward arbitrary behaviours that serve to advance their overarching purpose. You could, for instance, imagine a blockchain that sets out to solve climate change and which manages a shared treasury which gets allocated to various climate-related projects. Alternatively, you could imagine a blockchain which sets out to design a new brand of social media and coordinates its economic engine to incentivise adoption and reward contributions of various kinds. In such a world, the average blockchain will be marketed, less around their performance or ‘scalability’ qualities, than their social mission or agenda. To be clear, in this imagined future, I still expect a couple of large, general purpose platforms. However, I anticipate they will be greatly outnumbered by a long tail of mission or product-specific chains -- i.e. institutions -- that are constructed bespoke for purpose.

The most famous cryptoeconomic game is, of course, Bitcoin. It is, as I’ve previously noted, an awfully simple construct: point some computer power at the network and in turn earn some BTC. As simple as this game is, it’s nonetheless one of the most compelling economic games ever devised, responsible for coordinating -- at the time of writing -- trillions of dollars in economic value and catalysing an entire net-new industry: crypto. What makes Bitcoin such a remarkable system, from the game design perspective, is how radically egalitarian it is/was. Contra to many projects today, when it launched, everyone was on equal footing. So long as you had the necessary hardware, you were afforded the opportunity to earn some BTC. Of course, as the system became increasingly popular, mining became increasingly competitive, conferring an advantage upon those with the capital resources to invest in serious mining operations. While this represents a kind of plutocracy, the fact remains that early adopters of the network were afforded disproportionate rewards for participating in the game and ultimately helping contribute to the success of the game as a whole. And so while you might need immense resources to profitably mine BTC today, if you had the intellectual resources and foresight years ago, you’d be smiling -- and that’s a kind of meritocracy.

Fast-forward to today: while cryptoeconomic systems have become increasingly sophisticated, and the underlying technology increasingly powerful and performant, the overarching game design meta, relative to Bitcoin, remains woefully uninspiring. Where Bitcoin was an egalitarian, open-access game from day 1, the status quo in crypto today is characterised by privileged investors who get the first bite of the apple before the game goes live. Sure, one can claim that this represents a necessary evil, the price of progress, but it is nevertheless a brand of evil all the same. Moreover, with the rise of Proof-of-Stake, all the games are disturbingly similar in nature: buy a coin, then lock it up to earn more.

I can’t help but wonder why there hasn’t been more cryptoeconomic experimentation, why everything seems so derivative. Part of it is human nature, memesis, but there’s also this sense in which tokens -- the most fundamental cryptoeconomic primitive -- are simply underappreciated as a social technology in their own right. People and projects have become enamoured with blockchains and infrastructure -- the technological piece -- and relatively ignorant to the power and potential of the economic side of the equation. Instead of starry-eyed imagination, tokens are issued almost begrudgingly, as an inconvenient necessity if not afterthought. This is an especially curious fact when you consider that the token is precisely what started this whole revolution. Indeed, in the case of Bitcoin, the entire construct is just an elaborate system for distributing a token.

A refreshing exception to the current uninspired meta is the rise of DePin, most notably on Solana. Where Bitcoin leveraged a token to incentivise people to solve computationally expensive puzzles, and thereby secure the network, DePin projects incentivise people to invest in physical hardware to provide some generally useful service -- i.e. cellular coverage. DePin is a perfect exemplar of the unique capacity of crypto to leverage a speculative asset to encourage and reward any arbitrary behaviour. As interesting as DePin is, though, what I’m personally interested in is figuring out how we might leverage intelligent cryptoeconomic design to fundamentally improve the economics of the web as a whole; to replace the surveillance economy with a business model that is both more generative and humane. In order to get there, however, it will require treating tokens -- as the ‘native asset of information networks’ -- as a first-class citizen of cryptoeconomic systems.

While it’s probably hard for the average extremely online person to appreciate today, nation states have also served this quasi-religious function since their inception some couple hundred years ago. Just as cryptonetworks are beginning to, nation states have historically acted as a kind of cultural glue that bound different human beings together around some shared set of values and beliefs. They’re both ‘Imagined Communities’; systems that unite disparate peoples via some captivating narrative -- i.e. ‘America is a world of freedom and economic opportunity’, ‘Bitcoin is a fair and just financial order’, ‘Ethereum is a decentralized world’. Although people have spoken to the apparent religious dimension of crypto, it’s nevertheless a fundamentally underappreciated piece of what’s driving this whole affair. People aren’t just buying Bitcoin or Ethereum because of the number_go_up_ technology -- compelling as such is -- they’re buying them, equally, because they represent ‘something to believe in’, as it were. This fact is evidently lost by the nth blockchain project that simply offers some new technological advantage; they offer technology where the heavy-hitters offer salvation.

The notion of verifiability is just as it sounds -- it’s the capacity to verify things, to make sure a claim on reality is veridical. In the context of Bitcoin, verifiability means the capacity to verify the ledger of record, to ensure who owns what is in fact who owns what. What makes Bitcoin so powerful, indeed so revolutionary, is that it affords anyone who downloads the source code -- with very modest hardware -- precisely this capacity. This is what makes Bitcoin “trustless”. That is, it doesn’t demand one defer to the accounts of others or otherwise take a leap of faith. Simply run the code and see for yourself. It is in this sense that everyone in Bitcoin-land is a ‘first-class citizen’. There is no privileged authority with special access to state, which contrasts to the status quo of finance and money, where we remain subservient to the whims of banks and governments alike.

Verifiability -- specifically, end-user verifiability -- is thus a fundamentally egalitarian principle. It’s at the very core of what ought to set crypto apart from the fiefdoms of fiat and Web2. However, with the rise of next generation blockchains, like Solana and Sui, we’re seeing the real-time erosion of this essential value / feature. To be sure, this isn’t a knock on them, for end-user verification has historically come at a cost: throughput. Typically speaking, the easier you make it for anyone to run a “full node” and verify a chain, the less performant your system is bound to be. That’s because the primary way to make one’s chain easy to verify is to throttle the amount of throughput the system is capable of handling. For if a system isn’t dealing in significant data or computation, the system can be run on cheap hardware. This ensures end-user verification, but it also greatly restricts a blockchain’s performance characteristics (and blockchains are already inherently underperformant relative to their centralised counterparts, having to distribute state and all).

Ethereum has sought to reconcile this tension by pushing execution up one level of abstraction. With L2s, Ethereum can scale throughput and other performance characteristics all while retaining end-user verification of the base chain. While this is a clever hack, it comes at a cost of its own -- namely, fragmentation; of liquidity, state, and, to a lesser but nevertheless real enough extent, community. On the other hand, so-called ‘high-throughput’ chains, like the ones mentioned above, are unwilling to make this compromise, and have decided to optimise for performance and single-state instead. What this means in practice is that end users are dependent upon an honest majority assumption; that is, that the majority of block-producing nodes are reporting the correct state of the world. To be sure, this is an entirely legitimate tradeoff, and still a far better guarantee than the centralised world provides, but it nonetheless undermines this property that made crypto so democratic, and, ironically, subversive in the first place.

Fortunately, this historical tradeoff is not an inviolable law of nature. With technologies like data availability sampling and light clients, we already have the technology to thread the needle between performance and verifiability. With DAS and light clients, you can construct a system where the block producing / consensus nodes run arbitrarily powerful hardware, but still allow end-users to verify the state is as purported. That is to say, we can have our cake and eat it too.

Ultimately, verifiability is a concept that is easy to overlook amidst the far sexier notions in crypto. But it is nevertheless essential to a maximally just and democratic financial system; the noble north star towards which we’re all apparently building. Accordingly, we ought to assert this value wherever we can, so that it doesn’t go the way of so many good things before: gently into the good night.

Right now, we have at least two technologies that portend the possibility of a revolution, a new societal “common sense”, and their respective sub-industries aren’t shy about voicing the claim. Taking up most of the current oxygen in the room is, of course, AI, the technology that at once represents the next industrial revolution and the end of the human story entirely. In the shadow of this new Prometheus currently lurches “crypto”, a set of technologies that promise the future of finance and the Internet, respectively, together constituting the soon-to-be operating system of the nebulous but nevertheless emerging “metaverse”.

However, where crypto was an obviously important technology, the consensus future as of ~18 months ago, a confluence of events have cast doubt over its expected value, its place in our increasingly digital lives. What was once an inevitable crypto-centric future has thus become, in the minds of many, far less assured. In fact, not only has crypto simply lost favour outside it’s little bubble of highly-online believers -- that is, CT -- to much of the world, it’s already a failed experiment; “crypto… wasn’t that that thing with that SB-something dude?”. No matter how sympathetic you are to the cause, it ain’t pretty.

On the other hand, AI -- which at this point is almost synonymous with ChatGPT -- has captured the imagination of the world, and the dollars of investors, as the most fantastical notions of AGI have begun to seem distinctly lacking in ambition. The contrast couldn’t be more stark. Crypto is definitively out while AI is emphatically in, as even the most cursory engagement with MSM -- or a mere glance at the charts -- will inform you.

It’s against this backdrop -- this acknowledgement of tech’s often deluded sense of self-importance, and the current plight of crypto -- that I shall endeavour to make the claim that crypto is _in_fact a veritable revolution, a new “techno-economic paradigm”, as Perez puts it. More Internet than fax machine, as it were.

Before we get into it, though, it feels worth noting that the current difference in standing between crypto and AI can be reduced to the fact that one should require, in the first place, something of a forceful articulation to defend its legitimacy, whereas the other is already received wisdom, an irrefutably important technological artefact, consensus. Indeed, while crypto’s most basic value propositions require argumentation, the only legitimate arguments around AI, presently, are whether or not it’s a force so powerful it ought to be considered an existential threat. The human juxtaposition tells the story well enough: While Altman does his celebratory world press tour, Armstrong is preparing for court.

Much of this relative difference has to do with recent, contingent events -- the crypto bubble and then blow up of FTX / Terra Luna, the launch of new GPT models etc. -- but also simply where each of these technologies are in their respective maturation processes (AI is at least 70 years old, where crypto is little over 10). Yet, this is only part of the story. For underneath these superficial, contingent features of these two -- apparently competing -- technologies lies a fundamental difference; a difference that sharply demarcates the two industries, and that attracts and repels talent on the basis thereof. That difference, in a word, is complexity. Let me explain.

For all the technological complexity inherent to it, AI is a fundamentally simple technology. However lofty its aspirations, the objective of AI is perfectly straight-forward. Indeed, it’s right there in the name: artificial intelligence.

While the history of AI, as a discipline, has been characterised by fundamental, ultimately philosophical, debates re the nature of intelligence, it’s now clear enough that there isn’t anything uniquely privileged about carbon as a substrate for it. Silicon, it would seem, is a perfectly fine foundation, too. That is to say, intelligence doesn’t care what it’s made of; all that matters is that it’s situated in a medium capable of performing the requisite computations.

Although people are still quarrelling about terms, what were once genuinely interesting open questions --- i.e. “can machines really think?” -- have become highly academic, to the point of banal. Once you remove the philosophical notions from the fore, what remains is the pragmatic fact that what we have long referred to as “intelligence”, and what we intuitively perceive to be such, is increasingly being exhibited by machines. Once you concede this -- that is, the existence of machine intelligence -- there’s more or less nothing left to argue. Of course AI will be revolutionary. Of course it will alter the fabric of the economy and society. We’re talking about infinite intelligence here, after all — the ultimate meta-technology. The rest is noise.

It’s in this logical sense in which AI is fundamentally simple; it’s a very basic line of reason that gets you from premise to oh_shit_this_is_big conclusion. Ultimately, AI is relatively simple, as far as information technologies go, because its value -- its utility -- isn’t contingent upon its relation to other human beings. That is to say, a human with an AI is benefited from said AI even if no-one else has an AI of their own. In fact, AI in such a context would be especially valuable, because of the asymmetric cognitive advantage it would confer the user. Further, even if there were no other humans alive, AI would still be useful. In this sense, AI is a fundamentally asocial technology. Like the computer itself.

Crypto, on the other hand, is different -- it’s a fundamentally complex technology. That’s because, in large part, it’s a fundamentally social technology. In essence, the core innovation of crypto is public, distributed, verifiable consensus. Now in the context of a single user, and a single machine, this innovation is entirely worthless. “Public, distributed, verifiable consensus” is of course non-sensical unless there is, in the first place, a “public” to distribute and verify consensus for. However, once you have a public, and all the emergent social complexity that entails, the concept of being able to coordinate otherwise uncoordinated computers to agree on a shared “state of the world” becomes rather powerful. It’s in this sense that crypto is much more like the Internet than the computer. In a vacuum, neither makes any sense. Only in the context of human society -- all its quirks and contingencies -- do they become potentially interesting.

We’re now at the core of the difference between these two, parallel revolutions: AI is inherently valuable, whereas crypto is valuable only insofar as it’s situated within a particular human context. To compress: the value of AI is intrinsic, while the value of crypto is relational. To be clear, this isn’t a knock on crypto. As it happens, humans are always situated within a particular context -- and, fortunately for crypto, it’s this particular context in which we’re presently situated that would seem to render crypto particularly valuable. What it does mean, though, is that crypto is -- by dent of this fact -- considerably more difficult to reason through than AI. Unlike AI, where one only has to take, as a premise, the inherent value of intelligence and its substrate independence, crypto demands one reckons with the full complexity of the contemporary human condition. Indeed, one cannot come to appreciate crypto without first reckoning with, among other things, such deeply ambiguous subjects as political science and economics.

By virtue of its inherently social nature, crypto is naturally laden with oughts in a way that AI simply isn’t. This explains why crypto has become such a polarising issue. Because it’s not just a technological issue; it’s a fundamentally moral / political one. Ultimately, crypto has provoked a conversation concerning how humans ought to coordinate; how such things as money, finance and the Internet ought to work. Crypto, through the philosophical lens, is thus an examination of the fundamental rules of the current human game, and a sometimes traumatic reflection on the status quo. That’s why, at least in the public conversation, there’s conspicuously little discussion re the technological merits of various crypto systems -- i.e. what IS and ISN’T -- and far more debate along moral and ideological lines -- i.e. what OUGHT to be. In other words, crypto isn’t just about facts, and how they pertain to the world, it’s just as much -- if not more so -- about values.

This point is often made as a rebuke of crypto as an enterprise. E.g. “It’s too ideological”. Now if your model of the human endeavour is of a blind stumble through the space of possibilities with no particular aims or agendas, then the idea that humans are, somewhere out there, intentionally instantiating ideology -- that is, ideas and values -- into technology ought to be shocking indeed. If instead you view the story of human progress as the process of actively embedding increasingly better ideas into the fabric of society, then the notion of intentionally imbuing technology with ideology — i.e. values — ought to seem entirely natural, indeed ‘based’.

This is all to say, the emerging cryptoeconomic paradigm isn’t just a technological vision; it’s a fundamentally new socioeconomic paradigm. And that’s precisely what makes it so promising. It’s also what makes it so provocative. So, with` this in mind, what exactly is this new cryptoeconomic paradigm? And why does it matter?

Crypto is enabled by public blockchains and public blockchains enable provable scarcity and legitimate digital ownership, which go hand-in-hand. While this mightn’t sound all too revolutionary, on the surface, as it happens, these two features together serve as the necessary foundation for a parallel financial system — the emerging ‘Internet Financial System’ — and, by extension, a radically different Internet society.

Ownership and property rights are features of physical society that we fundamentally take for granted. Without them, there would be no modern economy, no financial system to speak of, nor any coherent concept of money. Ultimately, crypto represents the porting of these features — and all their emergent manifestations — into the digital realm. With Bitcoin, we have the first instantiation of credibly neutral Internet money. With Ethereum, we have a general purpose property rights system that enables the creation and exchange of any conceivable digital asset. And with next generation, ‘high-throughput’ blockchains like Solana and Sui we have more performant variations of the same underlying concept.

Since the birth of the Internet, philosophically-minded folk have spoke of the Internet as representing a fundamentally new jurisdiction — “cyberspace”. However, without any notion of ownership, the Internet has lacked the essential feature that defines any legitimate political economy. Crypto changes this. With the addition of ownership and property rights, the Internet is evolving its own native political and economic substrate. It’s transforming from a medium of communication and consumption into a global society proper.

There’s often a point of confusion here when talking about ownership in the digital context. This is because there’s a certain sense in which digital ownership already exists. That is to say, the existing financial system has already digitized. Our wealth is recorded no longer in terms of the number of physical bills or gold bars we have stowed under our mattresses, but on digital ledgers displayed on digital screens. On this basis, it’s easy to dismiss the revolutionary claims of crypto as mere hyperbole. However, this form of digital ownership is much weaker than the brand that crypto represents. What the present financial system represents is a thin digital veneer over a system that was constructed in a fundamentally analogue — that is, pre-digital — context. Crypto in contrast represents an intrinsically digital brand of ownership, one that doesn’t depend on traditional centralised actors — i.e. banks — maintaining records of their own. It’s not a revision of a previously existent system, ala the present scheme, but a net-new one built around a radically different technology / trust model.

What the cryptoeconomic paradigm represents, vis-a-vis the existing system, is a radical broadening of the space of digital value, economic models and incentive schemes. For in the cryptoeconomic context, effectively any digital object can be made an asset and can be programmed to exhibit any conceivable logic. While there’s a technological difference that makes a difference here, a large part of this unlock is simply a function of disintermediation. That is to say, when you remove the gatekeepers from the system, a whole world of possibility portends.

So the cryptoeconomic paradigm is a new paradigm of Internet-native ownership. It’s easy to wax philosophical about these notions, to rattle off a bunch of highfalutin esoteric concepts, but what does it actually mean in practice? Well, as of the time of writing, it means a rapidly growing Internet-native economy worth ~$1.7T. It means a market for digital art and collectibles worth somewhere in the vicinity of $200B. It means a system of transacting value — of any size, to anywhere — below a fraction of a penny. It also means a fundamentally new mechanism for allocating and provisioning both capital and compute resources. Everything else beyond the present is of course, by definition, speculation, but it seems reasonable enough to assume that all of these trends will continue to accelerate and perhaps even define the global economy of the 21st century. Why? Because crypto is the world’s most powerful social technology (aka the Internet) — the fabric that binds >5 billion people in an otherwise disparate and disconnected world — evolving its own political and economic infrastructure. It’s akin to the largest nation on the planet all of a sudden spinning up its own financial and legal system in earnest. While it’s certainly possible that this experiment eventually fails spectacularly, I wouldn’t advise betting on it.

So this is what crypto is. Now why, if all it amounts to is a new system of digital ownership and value exchange, is it so wildly controversial? As one has probably noticed, crypto is rarely spoken about in the same fashion as, say, the microwave oven or the electric toothbrush. Such technologies arouse little existential concern or care. However, crypto really makes people feel a certain ways — in both directions. There are the diehards, the true believers, who claim it’s the future of society writ large, on one end, and those who claim it’s but a giant ponzi, on the other. So, what gives?

There are a few ways to reconcile or at least better understand the polarity of crypto, why it’s so deeply provocative. The easiest, however, is to appreciate that crypto is a collective effort to build an alternative financial system, and that an alternative financial system is, almost by definition, a threat to the existing financial system and the powers that define it. For if crypto is indeed an alternative, and if this alternative should come to challenge the incumbent system, it would represent one of the greatest redistributions of wealth, power and status in human history. Lofty, sure, but these are nevertheless the stakes at play.

Then there’s the more mundane fact of the world’s ignorance. While it’s easy to lose sight of the fact, if you’re close enough to the machine, most people haven’t the slightest clue what crypto is — and conventional media outlets haven’t been especially constructive in educating them. Indeed, in the minds of most, crypto is synonymous with Bitcoin alone, of which they haven’t the slightest real clue about either. They consider it a ponzi scheme if not outright scam.

A more philosophical take on things is that crypto represents a radical reimagining of the very nature of, among other things, money — and most humans have a rather complicated relationship to money. More to the point, many have a deeply uncomfortable relationship to money. Thus anything that touches on the subject is bound to provoke mixed and likely troubling emotion.

Then there’s the more ‘sophisticated’ class of arguments against crypto. For instance, some subset of the esteemed intelligentsia deride crypto as ultimately good for nothing — a ‘solution in search of a problem’. They compare crypto to other information technologies like AI and assert crypto has yet to provide anything remotely comparable in value. While I would argue this neglects the very real value that crypto already provides — for instance, near-free global payments at the speed of light, or the democratization of the present global reserve currency in the form of stable coins — it’s nevertheless an unfair comparison. Crypto isn’t a singular technology in the same way AI is. It’s a fundamentally social technology — akin to the Internet — that merely broadens the space of what humans can collectively do together. And that’s ultimately the virtue of any powerful technology — it expands the scope of human freedom; not in the libertarian sense of things, but in the sense of capabilities, that is what humans can do. As for the normative dimension, no technology is either inherently good or bad; their moral value depends on how humans elect to wield the technology in question, what they do with it. Claims that crypto is fundamentally capital-b bad neglect this essential insight: crypto is whatever we make it.

I’m starting to get bored of my own words, so I’d like to end this thing with some final thoughts and speculations. While crypto is an umbrella term used to refer to an expansive and fast-growing ecosystem of related technologies and ideas, in my not-so-humble opinion, the most fundamental idea one ought to wrap their head around is the notion of a ‘cryptonetwork’, the systems that underly and encompass all of crypto. Cryptonetworks are best embodied by the so-called L1 blockchains that serve as the ultimate substrate of crypto; they’re the ledgers, the virtual computers that “live in the sky”. What these cryptonetworks represent, as I see it, is the fundamental political-economic unit of the Internet; institutions for the Digital Age. These networks are, like the dominant social networks of today, collections of human beings interacting in digital space. Where they diverge from the likes of Facebook and Instagram, however, is in the fact that they’re not owned and controlled by any single entity. They are instead owned and operated by the network, its user-base, as a whole. Moreover, they are fundamentally open-access — all their data is public and transparent and protected by strong cryptoeconomic guarantees. In just the same way as legitimate legal systems provide certain guarantees to its citizens re what they can do and build, so too do cryptonetworks provide guarantees that make them especially hospitable environments for permissionless innovation and entrepreneurialism. Accordingly, they represent a much sturdier and equitable foundation for the Internet economy than the social networks of today.

The reason this is speculation is that cryptonetworks are not currently central to the average person’s Internet experience. And even for those who are participating in cryptonetworks, the actual social experience of cryptonetworks are still overwhelmingly mediated by Twitter. As of the present moment, cryptonetworks represent an extension of traditional social media rather than a wholesale substitution. What I’m expecting, and what I’m hoping, is that cryptonetworks and the applications built on top of them eventually subsume social media entirely. Although there exist early experiments, what remains to be imagined is a social experience built around this cryptoeconomic principle of ownership that can rival the experience of web2 incumbents. Introducing ownership and financialisation of social media represents a world of opportunity, but it also represents a whole suite of UX challenges. However, I’m optimistic we can figure out how to thread the needle here.

When one appreciates that the human condition is a fundamentally speculative one, that all of life is a gamble, one is inclined to cast a more sympathetic eye upon crypto. On this frame, crypto merely represents an extension of our capacity to speculate, and, by extension, the broadening of the space of possible futures we might actualise. In this respect, crypto is purest instantiation of the techno-capital machine; the existing system but without any of the same artificial constraints that come from being situated in physical jurisdiction, meatspace. It’s the most powerful future machine we have.

Of course, it isn’t all rainbows and butterflies. When you widen the Overton window of speculation, you widen it in both directions, normatively speaking. Without constraints, you will see better just as you will see worse. If one takes the Hobbesian view of human nature, the idea of removing the state and broader cultural apparatus that currently constrains speculation ought to be concerning. If, however, one takes the view that humans are fundamentally decent, creatures who progress only through the messy process of error-correction, the idea of broadening what we can and can’t speculate on is rather less terrifying.

In the end, it is only a cynic who is fundamentally alarmed by the degeneracy of crypto; for it is a cynic who is scared by the idea of humans doing what they want. Conversely, it is fundamentally optimistic to champion speculative freedom, to believe that humans ought to do, with their dollars, precisely what they choose (however degenerate).

The core tenet of Effective Altruism is rather straight-forward. Broadly speaking, it’s that we should aspire to do as much good in the world as we can, and that we should, in service of this objective, pay mind to the empirical efficacy of our actions rather than the mere “feels” of doing good. That is to say, rather than doing good in a way that services our own sense of self-righteousness or piety, we should seek to do good in the way that actually does the most good. To this end, we ought to look at the relevant data, to ensure our intentions align with the desired outcomes. Ultimately, it’s a pragmatic view of philanthropy, or simply being a Good human, where the ‘cash-value’ of our charity is the objective impact of our actions on the well-being of others.

Given how self-evidently positive this philosophy would appear to be, how is it possible that it has become the object of veritable contempt? In short, because the potency of the ideas contained within EA, the sense of purpose and mission, of right and wrong, emulate many of the same psychological dynamics as religion. And religions, for all their redemptive qualities, attract nuts. And nuts do nutty things, by definition. It is a mistake, however, to reflexively attribute the actions of nuts to the dogmas of the religion to which they apparently adhere. For instance, one of the greatest frauds in recent history was committed by someone who was famously an Effective Altruist. All of his actions were then interpreted within the context of Effective Altruism. But this is a category error. SBF didn’t defraud millions of people of billions of dollars in service of some greater good. He did so because he was an amphetamine-fuelled megalomaniac who leveraged the status of Effective Altruism to bolster his public reputation and advance his own agenda. To attribute his actions to the ideology of EA is to credit him with far too much character. And so it is with the recent OpenAI fiasco. Even if the actions of the OpenAI board were motivated by some commitment to EA, if we can agree that their actions were, in the end, normatively harmful, then they would have failed to meet even their own standard of Good.

It’s awfully convenient, and philosophically elegant, to reduce the actions of individuals to ideologies or philosophies. And sometimes, there is a straight-forward enough relationship between the two. Jihadism is a good example here. However, more often than not, the actions of individuals are far better understood in terms of the unique psychological dynamics of the individuals in question. And if the behaviour is abhorrent, it’s likely that some underlying pathology, rather than a sophisticated philosophical schema, is to blame. Clearly, there is some overlap between Effective Altruists and folks who are petrified by the prospect of the end of the world and do some pretty insane things on the basis thereof. However, we ought to be able to appreciate that for any sufficiently potent set of ideas, there will be a decent contingent of lunatics that go all-in. It’s unfair, however, to attribute the lunacy of lunatics solely to the ideas to which they claim to subscribe. For a more honest dialogue re Effective Altruism, its virtues and its pitfalls, we ought to hold this view in mind. Crazy people can do crazy things even under the pretence of some ultimately decent ideas.

While the OpenAI announcement was light on details, the general thrust appeared to be that Sam had been intentionally deceiving the board in some fashion — ‘lacking in candour” was the corporate line. Sam had gone rogue, it seemed. And yet, not even 24 hours after the announcement, the OpenAI board appeared to be recanting, and was/is apparently in talks to hire him back (this after a whole cast of OpenAI staff had tendered their resignation in a touching show of solidarity with Sam). Thus what at first appeared to suggest some act of corporate malfeasance by Sam had begun to hint at something else. As of this moment, the consensus bet as to the source of this whole drama is an ideological schism, with AI safety folk on one side (Ilya and co), and accelerationists (Sama and friends), on the other. Putting aside for a moment whether this is in fact the case, this apparent schism reflects a broader — and very real — ideological divide within the industry (and society as a whole), as hopes and fears re the impact of AI reach fever pitch.

Fundamentally, this divide can be reduced to the following: some folk (so-called ‘decels’) think that AI — and AGI, specifically — represents a technology so *potentially* powerful that we ought to be conservative in our approach to its development, err on the side of caution, take our time with things. While today’s instantiation of AI is benign enough, a far more capable instantiation of AI — and certainly AGI proper — might conceivably dislocate the economy, further fracture our epistemic landscape, and, in the worst case, violently kill us all. On this view, naturally, the prudent thing to do is prioritise safety and alignment above capabilities. Conversely, the accelerationists believe that, given the inevitable positive impact of AI/AGI, we ought to do everything we can do develop capabilities as fast as we can, and simply figure out safety / alignment as we go. While there are plausible enough risks of AI, there already exists highly concrete, civilization-scale problems, from poverty to global warming, that can be solved with AI — if not today, tomorrow —and so we have a moral imperative to put our collective foot on the gas. Or so the accelerationist line goes. Of course, there exists nuanced, middle-ground positions that people straddle here, but broadly speaking these are the two buckets people tend to fall into. Either you’re pro-safety or pro-capability. Deceleration or acceleration.

When you consider this schism, OpenAI is a curious case. After all, it was founded on the premise of ensuring “artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity.” Although this seems like a reasonable enough mission, on its face, at the core of it lies a fundamental paradox; a paradox that almost certainly underpins the recent turmoil. You see, in order to ensure AGI benefits all of humanity, one must first build said AGI. For no matter how noble one’s intentions or sophisticated one’s imagined alignment plans, if someone else develops AGI first, it’s all for naught. At such point, the future is forever out of one’s hands.

Already we’ve seen this tension reflected in the evolution of OpenAI’s organisational structure. Infamously, what was originally a non-profit rather quickly became a very much for-profit (even if it’s capped). A cynic here would suggest that this flip simply represents the corruptibility of the human spirit, Sama and co’s lust for money and power. When it was all theoretic, they were a non-profit, but as soon as the potential for profit revealed itself OpenAI betrayed its original mission and decided to cash-in instead. However, a more charitable — and I would argue, equally reasonable — interpretation would be that this shift was actually implied by an earnest commitment to the mission. Developing AGI would obviously require immense resources, it was concluded, and in order to realise said resources, OpenAI realised it would need to employ the use of some explicit financial incentive. And so, valiant missionaries that they are, they did — and now the company is valued at ~$80B dollars and owns and controls the most powerful LLM and strongest AI talent going.

As a result of this organisational pivot, OpenAI has done more than any other organisation to accelerate the development and deployment of AI. While alignment alarmists and AI doomers spend their days waxing philosophical about the existential threat of AI, OpenAI ships products and raises billions to develop capabilities further. The contrast is stark.

Against this backdrop, it’s not hard to imagine that some subset of the company has grown uncomfortable with its direction. After all, if you’re at OpenAI and genuinely concerned about existential risk, it’s not unreasonable to feel a little conflicted about the day-to-day work of rapidly advancing capabilities. Even if you’re intent on summoning the demon, it’s one thing to slouch towards Bethlehem, quite another to sprint.

Irrespective of which side of the divide you find yourself on — decel or e/acc — it ought to be acknowledged that at the foundation of this whole ideological battle lies a fundamental uncertainty. That is, the outcome of AI. However disconcerting it is to admit, whether AI will be a boon to the human condition or the end of it entirely no-one knows. As of this moment, anyone’s guess is as good as the next. We can have intuitions, sure, even develop complex systems of logic and belief and, as good Beyesians, assign probabilities to the various outcomes on the basis thereof. However, the inconvenient fact remains that the future is fundamentally unknowable. Things might go good. Or they might not. It’s a flip of the coin.

As disturbing as this reality is, the situation is not unique to AI. Every day we take actions based on uncertain facts, and uncertain knowledge of the future. Without thinking, we get onto planes not knowing if they’ve been serviced. We drive our cars not knowing if we’ll be t-boned pulling out of our driveways. Perhaps most optimistically of all, we swear our lives to relationships that could end at any moment. The most remarkable fact of all this, however, is not that we play dice with our lives in the first place, but that we do so (for the most part) with so little existential angst. Any remotely well-adjusted human accepts the fundamental uncertainty of life and insists on playing anyhow. It’s simply how the game goes.

Where AI differs from the banalities of everyday uncertainty is of course in its normative significance. We’re not just talking about the fate of our own respective lives, small as they are. Instead, we’re talking about the fate of the entire moral sphere — the ‘light cone’ of all present and future value in the universe. Accordingly, the actions we take here shall ripple through eternity. This all to say, the stakes are rather high.

The question, then, provided the fundamental uncertainty and stakes at play, is what to do? Specifically, how should we relate to this technology, how should we orient towards its development, given we have no ultimate idea as to how it will unfold? If it really is a flip of the coin, and the whole world hangs in the balance, is it really justified to stay the course, to move forward knowing we may just be summoning a veritable demon? But what if AI is the precursor to a world of abundance in earnest, of heaven on Earth? The essential precondition to utopia.

It’s hard to conceive of any hard and fast rules here. However, one principle that seems sound enough, is to maintain and embody a bias towards empirical reality over abstract theoretical / probabilistic arguments. While there exists some cogent enough arguments for the existential risks of AGI, the on-the-ground Reality of things, presently, is that AI is conferring far more value upon society than it’s undermining or positively destroying. LLM’s, like ChatGPT, and image generation models, like Midjourney, are powerful augments to human capabilities. That is, they extend the reach of what any given human, or humans, can do. In this sense, AI is analogous to the personal computer itself — a technology which, however problematic, we’d hardly consider doing away with. Of course, this isn’t to suggest that AI, as it becomes (if it becomes) exponentially more powerful, won’t begin to flip from positive to negative. However, as a matter of practice, the only reliable feedback mechanism we have for informing our actions is Reality in-the-present. Indeed the present is the only firm epistemic ground we ever stand on. Therefore, the only prudent thing to do, it would seem, is base our actions on the way thing already are, not how they might be provided some series of conditionals. While speculations as to how things might be are worth considering, to be sure, we shouldn’t allow them to override the signal of empirical reality. On this point, there is a long list of speculations and arguments pertaining to far-off possibilities that have aged very poorly. Consider Ehrlich’s population bomb, for example. What Ehrlich underestimated, as so many doomers before him, is the reach of human ingenuity, the capacity of the human condition to rise to the challenges it invariably faces. Perhaps more fundamentally, though, Ehrlich’s prediction ought to remind us of the overhelming complexity of the world, and the utter unpredictability of non-linear, dynamical systems. Amidst this staggering complexity and unpredictability, the only tether to sanity we have is the present. As such, it pays not to get too far ahead of it.

Now even if you buy the existential risk argument(s), there remains the pragmatic fact that we will unquestionably continue to develop AI capabilities. If ever there was a certainty this is one. For every team that elects to halt development or even shut down shop entirely, there will be ten more that will pick up the slack. Moreover, it’s not clear at all that slowing development is actually consistent with improving our prospects of aligning it. Indeed it seems entirely reasonable to believe that they only effective way to align AI is to remain in constant dialogue with it, to build the safety rails as its evolving. After all, how could we possibly align a technology that doesn’t yet exist? Given the unpredictability of the world, we can never know in advance how things will precisely play out. We can only ever respond to them as they do. Turn off AI development and you turn off the very feedback mechanism by which we could optimise its safety. As such, the only way to effectively align AI is to swiftly respond to the challenges as they arise. To build the plane while we fly it. However daunting this task may seem, it is nevertheless, I suggest, the task we’ve been handed. To pretend like we have a choice is to engage in nothing but a flight of fancy.

However, if there was one thing that the recent OpenAI drama has highlighted, something that really should give us cause for concern, it’s just how fragile the present institutional structure that’s currently developing the technology is. Notwithstanding OpenAI’s apparent attempt to innovate at the level of its corporate structure, to ensure its aligned, clearly it is less robust than we would like; liable to disintegrate under the most modest of strains. What this would seem to suggest is that the highest leverage thing we can do to ensure the long-term alignment of AI/AGI is to see that the social containers in which it’s developed and deployed are themselves congruent with our broadest interests, capable of enduring the stress-tests that will inevitably arise. This should be cause for optimism. For while we have very little ultimate control over the advancement of the technology itself, improving the underlying organisational architecture that facilitates it seems — even if immensely challenging — relatively more tractable.

Unless they’re making you stupidly rich, memecoins are obviously and undeniably stupid; a violent affront to any self-respecting incarnation of intelligence. Besides the inevitable envy that follows from seeing a bunch of people print millions out of nowhere, that’s why so many within crypto, specifically, find themselves so viscerally aggrieved by the recent memecoin mania.

The idea that someone could spin up a coin called $PEPE (named after the Internet frog) and that it would, in very short order, find itself with a market cap of >$1B is so egregiously low-IQ that one could be forgiven for thinking that by simply engaging with the idea one would be at risk of brain damage. While there’s as of yet no definitive medical evidence suggesting either way, it’s nevertheless a reasonable enough concern on its face. And so we proceed with caution.

While memecoins stress the tolerance of the entire bell-curve of intelligence, they’re particularly offensive to the crypto intelligentsia -- those gigabrains working on the frontier of the cryptoeconomy, doing super serious stuff, working on the bleeding edge of cryptographic and distributed thingy-ma-jiggys, not to mention reinventing political economy from the ground up! Over recent times, such gigabrains have been discussing the merits of decentralized sequencers, the concept of restaking, and the ever-existential topic of US regulation. Meanwhile, the biggest news in crypto this week is a coin named after a frog! The idea is triggering, even if you have a smol brain, so it’s not hard to sympathize with the plight of those more cognitively endowed.

Of course, the highly allergic reaction to the current memecoin meta is, at least in part, an entirely justified response from an industry struggling to maintain any semblance of outside credibility, especially as the Damocle’s sword of regulation looms. In the eyes of the world, crypto is yet to establish itself as a legitimate enterprise, and the past ~18 months would appear to have set the whole affair back at least twice that. Though the space is quick to draw the distinction between such shitshows as Terra-Luna, FTX and crypto in earnest, it’s far from a good look however you slice it, and so the infidels ought to be pardoned for their lack of faith. Indeed, if the future of finance really is crypto, given recent events, the future would appear to be -- to all but the most convicted -- decidedly bleak. Against this backdrop, the past week’s events have been received by many as an entirely unnecessary and awfully unwelcome insult; another depressing setback to be added to an already impressive list of such.

While this response is understandable, and not at all disconnected from the underlying Reality, the question we ought to ask is whether there isn’t something this response is missing? Is there, one wonders, a more subtle and redeeming quality of memecoin mania that lies below the surface of the glaring greed and stupidity?

No matter how unimpressed one is by the phenomenon, it’s not hard to appreciate how remarkable is our ability to co-construct value -- to the tune of $1B -- around something as patently absurd as a frog named Pepe who lives on the Internet. Not to mention in only a few months. This is the power of tokens, the world’s first Internet-native asset. With respect to Pepe, specifically, the notion of taking what is arguably the most potent Internet meme and crystallising cultural value around it, such that anyone can “own” part of this meme, is -- even if not universally compelling -- certainly an interesting one. If one permits the idea a little flexibility, owning some $PEPE can be viewed as akin to owning a piece of Internet culture itself. Even if you’re not a fan of the degeneracy that propels this Reality into existence, you have to admit it’s kinda cool.

Of course, this notion isn’t limited to memecoins. The idea of cultural ownership is one of the long-espoused value propositions of crypto, and is most obviously expressed in the form of NFTs. However, memecoins appear to be a particularly potent expression of this concept and evidently there is something about the form factor (the tokens without a picture) that makes them at once capable of capturing the imagination, and pissing people off, such as they have.

In many ways, memecoins capture the essence of crypto better than most “serious” projects. Unfettered, bottoms-up expression of financial value, community ownership, community currency, community coordination. Did I mention cOmMuniTy? In the context of a bunch of overhyped L2s and new, definitively soulless and self-serious L1s with opaque token distributions, one can’t help but empathise with those who consider the honest absurdity of memecoins a breath of fresh Internet air. Indeed, what was once a community that prided itself on its defiance and rebelliousness has since become a veritable “industry” (even if not quite a respectable one). In this context, where acceptance from the establishment has become the primary objective, memecoins are just about the only punk thing going, a reminder that crypto does whatever the f*ck it wants, a middle finger to the very idea of legitimacy.

The beautiful thing about memecoins is that they reminds us that value is something subjective, a shared construct that we constitute voluntarily as communities of sentient carbon-based bi-peds. It doesn’t matter how fancy your tech stack is, how credible your investors are, sh*t you could even invent your own programming language. No matter how meritorious you deem yourself to be, unless people find a reason to care, your thing won’t be worth a single #PEPE. Conversely, no matter how prima facie absurd your thing is, if people care, your thing will be worth many. That’s just how it goes.

For those left dissatisfied by this -- admittedly lazy -- attempt to reconcile the virtues of memecoins, it’s worth appreciating that they nevertheless hint at an opportunity that, as of yet, remains largely unrealised. That is, the opportunity to represent, in the form of a token, some valuable social or cultural cause -- and to take the value captured therein and direct it towards said cause. Where memecoins are hardly about to reconfigure the world for the better, they represent something of a blueprint that just might. Before tokens, never have we had a truly Internet-native means of coordinating the world to produce real value around some sense of shared meaning. Now that we do, the question becomes, what should we use it for? What should we value? Memecoins are the current meta, but perhaps we can do something even better.

With Bitcoin, the Internet begot digital gold. With DeFi, we’re seeing the Internet evolve its own full-fledged financial system. And with NFTs, we have on our hands a new standard for content monetisation and ownership. Certainly, this all represents a massive development in the social and economic potential of the Web. However, for all the promise and potential of this new technological paradigm, it will remain largely thus until such time as it finds a way to affect how we interface with the Internet’s ultimate commodity. That is, of course, content.

In the present meta, NFTs have found a fit in digital art and collectibles. While this is already growing the creator economy pie, it’s not in itself about to transform the underlying economics of the Web. To realise the potential of NFTs, as a new rights-based file standard, we’ll need to figure a way to incorporate them into the more mundane, bread and butter brand of content the Web is known for; the kind of material one scrolls through mindlessly much to one’s own self-disgust. What we unironically call “social media”.

Given the speculative nature of the existing NFT space, and the financial bent of the community who gave birth to it, it’s not surprising that digital art and collectibles are the primary use-cases driving the initial adoption of the technology here. But now, it would seem, these initial use-cases are limiting further adoption and new use-cases, having defined — as they have — the primary interfaces that govern our interaction with NFTs. Namely, the wallet and the marketplace.

With the wallet and marketplace as the primary touch-points mediating our relationship to NFTs, we’re stuck in an endless cycle of uninspired PFP projects; “content” that no-one would care for absent the casino that surrounds them. To be clear, the casino is important — our philosophical interest here is in the potential of crypto to reconfigure the economics of the Internet, after all. Thus it’s not that we need to do away with the casino. Rather, we simply need to figure out how to instrument it such that it serves content that would be worthwhile independent of explicit financial incentives.

What I imagined and argued for in the previous essay was an “Internet of NFTs”; that is, an Internet where content were tokenised effectively by default. By definition, this implies a much broader universe of NFTs than what we see at present. In order to make this imagining a reality, however, it will necessarily require new interfaces — for new interfaces define new user behaviours, and new user behaviours means new cryptocontent.

For anyone interested in exploring new possibilities for cryptocontent, the starting point ought to be, Why crypto in the first place? What does crypto — the whole suite of technologies —uniquely enable? What can it do that current social media can’t?

The fundamental unlock of crypto is digital ownership. That is its distinguishing feature, and something “web2” simply can’t compete on. But what exactly is ownership? and what — if anything — is it actually good for? That is to say, what does it functionally provide that existing content platforms don’t?

Ownership is ultimately a social construct, a human abstraction. By some feat of intellectual gymnastics, we perform a kind of geometry between persons and things in the world, and confer certain rights (“property rights”) on the basis thereof. Ownership is more than mere abstraction, however. It’s just as much — and much more importantly, in this context — a felt experience. That is, it feels someway to own something.

People buy things for obvious utilitarian reasons. But we also buy for such deeply personal and uniquely human reasons as Identity and Belonging, for kinship and community. In other words, the way ownership makes us feel.

To own something is to stand in particular relation to a thing, and it’s this relationship, and the way in which it’s distinct from our existing digital relations, that ought to be the guiding principle for anyone interested in the frontier of cryptocontent. What might it mean, we ought to ask, to reconfigure our digital lives — and the world of content, specifically — around this principle of ownership? When we’re no longer mere consumers of content, but rather owners / collectors, how does this change our relationship to the creators of content? And what new interfaces might we imagine that respect and honour this new relationship?

There’s also an interesting set of questions for creators here. For instance, what does it mean to produce “collectible” content — content that people not only want to “consume”, but want to own; content that facilitates this hallowed sense of Identity and Belonging. Additionally, how ought creators to think about this new — far more direct — relationship to their audiences, where they’re no longer passive fans, but more akin to a community of patrons?

One of the exciting possibilities of the cryptoeconomy — or “ownership economy”, as it’s also being called — is the realisation of the so-called “1000 true fans” idea, first presented by Kevin Kelly of Wired magazine fame. What Kelly believed and suggested — with characteristic optimism — was that the Internet would enable an economy wherein artists and creators could sustain a livelihood — and more aspirationally, thrive — without the need for a mass audience, as has traditionally been the case across other mediums. All an artist needs, in Kelly’s imagined Internet economy, was — as you might guess — 1000 true fans.

Alas, this is not how things have played out. In the current context, with advertising the default business model of the Web, only those who are able to garner truly sizeable followings are able to eke out anything like a living. Indeed, the present circumstance amounts to a ruthless winner-takes-all situation, where a tiny slice of creators capture the overwhelming majority of attention, and, by extension, money.

NFTs help facilitate the 1000 true fans vision by enabling more meaningful and direct relationships between creators and their communities of fans, and, thereby, new forms of economic relation. But again, new interfaces — new social infrastructure — will be required to actualise the possibility here. Presently, NFTs are something of a sideshow for creators — something that complements their followings on existing social platforms but hardly alters the basic nature of their interactions with them. What will prove far more interesting, however, is when NFTs — i.e. cryptocontent — becomes the primitive around which our social technologies are constructed. Only then will the promise of cryptocontent be fulfilled.

What was once a relatively simple idea — i.e. magic internet money controlled by no-one in particular — has thus become something substantially greater and thereby infinitely less amenable to catchy one-line explanations. Indeed, crypto is now — as appears to be the fate of all popular terms — a veritable industry. And it’s growing (much to the chagrin of many).

Given the semantic evolution of “crypto”, its conceptual expansion, it’s worth asking whether it is any longer coherent as a singular concept, whether it makes sense to speak of it as a ‘thing’ at all, or whether it is now effectively devoid of legitimate meaning, intellectually defunct? If it is coherent, to what exactly does it now refer? If it isn’t, how ought we to refer to this thing — or set of things — instead?

To my mind, crypto ceased to mean anything meaningful as soon as it became incoherent to “believe in crypto”. See, once upon a time, that made sense enough. If one ‘believed in crypto’, one could infer from that — with some degree of reliability — some set of ideas that said person must have subscribed to. Now that no longer holds true. Today, if someone tells me they believe in crypto, I learn almost nothing about said person (except perhaps — and this is a stretch — something of their feelings towards existing institutional power). Maybe they believe in expensive monkey pictures, or perhaps they believe in the idea of a parallel, open and internet-native financial system instead. Either way I’d have to ask.

Recognising the increasing diversity of ideas that “crypto” was being used to represent, the term Web3 (or however the kids are now spelling it) arose. The term “crypto” having been politically and culturally captured, the move to Web3 was a clever piece of marketing that sought to reframe crypto as a more general aspiration towards the “redecentralization” of the web. Web3, subsuming crypto, became the more culturally acceptable cause to believe in. Where crypto was radical, subversive, cypherpunk, Web3 was (is?) a friendlier brand of revolution (less explicitly intent on the end of banks and nation states and so forth). Web3 was crypto, but in terms your mom and dad could appreciate — crypto with a smiling ‘gm’. Something substantially less hatable, in any case.

But Web3 has suffered the same fate as crypto. Not only has it been made an industry of (ew), it’s unclear, at this point, what (if anything) it actually means. In fact, Web3 is even worse than crypto, and *necessarily* — for it must contain, in its meaning, whatever crypto is supposed to mean, too. It’s an umbrella of umbrellas. The worst.

All this might smack as trivial — “too philosophical!” — or perhaps, to the more philosophically inclined reader, it simply points to a more fundamental issue inherent to language as a tool for representing — or producing?! — shared Reality. My personal sense is that it’s neither. Call me old-fashioned, but I happen to believe the words we use are important, and, should they be intended to represent important things, we ought to fight for them — for their descent into meaninglessness is never an inevitability, but a choice, something we acquiesce to.

And so it is with crypto and Web3 — terms that, though I’m critical of, I have a special (and alas sometimes regrettable) sympathy for. Indeed that’s precisely why I’m critical of them — these were things I once believed in, and so I care that they continue to mean something of real import. And so fight for them I intend to.

So when we say we’re fighting for crypto or — god forbid — Web3, what exactly is it that we’re fighting for? To be very clear, to fight for crypto isn’t to fight for Bitcoin or Ethereum, or any other single project, however much these projects may or may not capture the essence of these concepts, or even serve as proxies for the movement’s success. We may fight for such projects too, to be sure, but they’re only particular instantiations of the terms in question, singular conjectures. They’re examples of the movement in action, not the movement itself. Not the forest but the trees.

If one wanted to geek out, we might appeal to the power of ‘verifiable computation’ as the foundation of crypto / Web3. And while the concept may, in the end, get at the technical essence of things, it’s too abstract to really hit home. The human essence of the movement — for it is a quintessentially human movement — would appear to be this: we now have the tools by which we might, as citizens of the internet, collectively and voluntarily co-construct our own networks, our own communities, our own institutions. To be *for* this movement is thus to be for the basic freedom of humans to cooperate in ways they find meaningful — socially, economically, culturally and otherwise. Bitcoin is one expression of this new capacity to coordinate and cooporate on the internet. Ethereum is another. So, too, is the infamous and aforementioned monkey picture project.

Regardless of the merits (or lack thereof) of any of these particular projects, the profound point is this: humans are coming together, in real-time, to form their own internet-native political economies. Humans are starting to do, in the digital context, what we’ve effectively been doing forever IRL. New social structures, mediated by new technologies, are emerging. If it’s hard to imagine the implications, that’s because the implications would appear to be determined only by the limits of human imagination. Lofty, yes, but true all the same.

Now to be against this movement, on the other hand, is to be fundamentally opposed to the idea that humans ought to be able to choose when, how and why they construct and share in value together. It’s implicitly an endorsement of the existing power structures, for how else are we to challenge existing power but for the ability to construct power structures of our own?

So here is the claim: crypto is fundamentally a pro-freedom technology. If we abstract away the particulars, the projects and protocols, what we’re left with is human beings leveraging the power of computing and cryptography to do things, together. As a set of technologies, they expand the scope of what’s possible in the human context. Now whether this equates, in the end, to a fairer financial system, a new brand of social media, or — in the most hopeful scenario — a fundamentally improved Internet is, against this higher-order principle of freedom, quite incidental. What matters, ultimately, is that it represents the extension of human possibility (and whatever hope is contained therein).

The thing about freedom, though, is that it not only admits the possibility of “better” — however we may choose to define such a concept — but also the possibility of “worse”. In this way, there’s always a cost to advances in freedom, something we must give up. That’s why they’re always so hard-fought. And of course, that’s why new freedoms are always so tempting to deny. For to deny the forward increment of freedom is to reject possibility and uncertainty in favour of the known. Indeed, the denial of new freedoms is ultimately the denial of change. Crypto and Web3, as extensions of possibility — as extensions of freedom — necessarily expand our scope of Being, in both directions. In this sense, they’re like all technologies. And as with all technologies, there is nothing inevitable about the normative impact of crypto, in either direction. It is — as with the rest of things — entirely contingent.

Admittedly, I once found this line of criticism fairly compelling. If you’ve spent any time at all in crypto, you’ll have noticed that the social games being played are indeed almost always overtly financial in nature (the most notable being NFTs). People ‘shill’ their favourite token or NFT all while appealing to such warm and fluffy notions as ‘community’ and ‘vibes’. As a result, it’s not the kind of social game one imagines scaling to the rest of the world (and nor would doing so seem particularly desirable). Thus if the Internet — and social media, specifically — were to be recast in the mould of NFTs and NFT culture — or current “crypto” as a whole, for that matter — it would almost certainly amount to an even more dystopian environment than the Internet of today. Of that I’m fairly sure.    

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However valid this line of concern may be, its underlying premise is, I now believe, ultimately – and indeed, quite impressively – mistaken. While I continue to find the argument interesting, I now find it interesting *mostly* for how fundamentally wrong, and even harmful, it is. Indeed, the problem with the Internet, I’ve come to be convinced, is not that it’s over-financialised, but rather that it’s dramatically under-financialised. Let me explain.

First, it ought to be appreciated that the reason the Internet isn’t already more explicitly “financial” than it is isn’t because of some enlightened moral philosophy shared by the world’s Internet companies — some conviction, say, in the inherent corruptibility of money (wouldn’t that be ironic). Rather, money is largely absent from our experience of the Internet because we’re overwhelmingly — and very deliberately — excluded from its underlying economics. Of course, it’s not as if the internet isn’t already ‘financialised’. It’s just that the financial activity operates primarily in the background, in the dark. Similarly, that money isn’t in plain-view on the Web isn’t because there isn’t money being made. It’s only because it’s not being made by us, the Internet’s citizenry.

Likewise, the fact that we don’t have to pay to use the majority of Internet services isn’t because the Internet is some egalitarian, post-capitalist, post-scarcity utopia. Nor is it because of the altruism of Google and Facebook, some kind of noble corporate sacrifice. We don’t pay, simply, because we’re not the target customers of said services. Rather, we’re the product itself; our attention — and the insights they produce — a commodity sold to the highest bidder (and without so much as a thank you). 

Today’s Internet is characterised by a fundamental political and economic asymmetry between platforms and their users. And although the latter makes the former possible, with very little exception, they’re almost entirely excluded from their economic upside. True, some number of people are able to command a living from social media. The overwhelming majority, however, (>99%?) are not. 

It’s easy to dismiss the politics and/or economics of Internet platforms as trivial, or, if not trivial, certainly less consequential than other things worth worrying about (a growing list, to be sure). But the Internet is increasingly where we interact and transact, increasingly where we spend our lives. It really matters, it would seem, the political and economic rules by which it operates. Just the same as meatspace.

The problem with the current state of Internet affairs, and its centralisation of power, isn’t just the inherent inequity or injustice of the situation. The problem is also the missed opportunity. What we have with the Web is a global peer-to-peer network capable of transmitting information, effectively instantaneously, between nodes. If ever there were a technology capable of producing truly global economic benefit and distributing it fairly, it’s the Internet – and crypto is the payment rails that makes it possible. Imagine, for a moment, a world where the Internet is owned and operated by its users – a world where the five billion folk (and growing) who have access to the Internet actually share in its value. Crypto is the key to that future. 

There’s also a whole other class of problem that introducing money into the base-layer of the Internet could conceivably solve. Introducing some notion of user-side economic incentives could reduce the problem of spam, say, or bots on social media. It’s also conceivable that introducing certain financial incentives could improve our use of the Internet generally – encouraging us to direct our attention in ways that might be more aligned with our most important values, and less our baser instincts. The design space here is ostensibly infinite, with many promising avenues.

So why, then, if it’s such an obviously good direction, do the critics so staunchly oppose the movement? I have to think that the general disdain with which crypto is held by the InTelLiGenTsIa has something to do with the general intellectual bias against money. The intellectual establishment has, for a variety of reasons, long held money with something approaching contempt. Perhaps because it’s beneath them and their lofty thoughts; too crass, too vulgar. Whatever the case, it grossly neglects just how important money and its unobstructed flows are to the welfare of the human condition. Of course, it’s easy to cast judgment on money and diminish its essentiality from the comfort of the Ivory Tower. Such a position is considerably less seductive, however, from the trenches of abject poverty.

There is a valid critique of crypto and its complications, however. That is, that implementing money and economic incentives into the DNA of the Internet without simultaneously f*cking things up would be hard. Certainly, introducing money greatly increases the complexity of things. Especially in the social context, it’s hard to imagine how we might embed and distribute real financial value, without also creating a new set of incentives that could prove harmful or otherwise distort the social experience. And yet, hard though it may be, it’s harder still to imagine that there’s not a way to thread the needle here. In the end, the fundamental guiding principle here is that users should be owners and politically engaged members of the networks they participate in and contribute value to (i.e. first-class citizens). While this undoubtedly presents a host of new design challenges, it’s somewhat condescending to think that users aren’t capable of both participating in a network, ala Facebook, and owning it, without somehow losing their minds as a result. In any case, just because something is hard doesn’t mean it should be avoided. For the hardest things are, as in this case, often the most necessary.