quoting note1z37…z535so I’m gathering my thoughts for Only The Strong Survive v2 - which may or may not ever actually happen, fyi - and I have a theory about crypto I wanna run past the good people of nostr.
in my mind the following explains a few things handily: i) why so many smart and seemingly well-intentioned people work in crypto; ii) the nature of the legitimate innovation to have come out of that ecosystem that the people in i) are attracted to; iii) why cryptobros are either mad or confused that bitcoiners don’t take i) and ii) more seriously, and; iv) why despite all the above, bitcoiners are basically *still right* to not take it seriously.
I really like this theory but tbh what worries me is that it’s basically *too elegant*. I’m sure the reality is much messier so I’d appreciate picking holes in it. here goes:
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there are 3 use cases for crypto: scams, stablecoins, and R&D.
- scams are scams, I’ve written literally hundreds of pages on this so I don’t feel like elaborating much here.
- everybody knows what stablecoins are but here’s where it gets interesting: I think they have no technical merit but they have massive commercial merit (I’ll elaborate on both shortly)
- by R&D I mostly mean the (truly!) cutting edge cryptography and distributed systems research going into zero-knowledge systems for “scaling.” These have massive technical merit but no commercial merit.
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now here’s what I mean by all that:
by “no technical merit” I mean that stablecoins have central issuers. you *can* issue them as blockchain tokens but you really don’t need to. the issuer could quite literally run a database with some straightforward public key signature schemes for transfers and it would make minimal operational difference. the fact Tron is the most heavily used for this is testament to this point: it is barely even pretending not to be a database. for whatever stupid reason, this works as regulatory arbitrage because regulators are retards and this is iNnOvAtIon that is spared their violence, but, again, it has no technical merit.
by “commercial merit” I mean that this is *extremely widely used and valued* as a means of providing dollarized shadow banking to countries with absolute joke fiat currencies. while cryptobros love pointing to this and many bitcoiners tie themselves in knots explaining it away, I see it as essentially unrelated to bitcoin. clearly there is a superficial connection, but you could create any superficial connection you like by shoving a blockchain into somewhere it doesn’t belong, and regulatory-arbitrage-induced massive commercial success doesn’t change that more fundamental analysis one bit (fyi, highly recommend matt (npub185h…wrdp)’s take on this on recent(ish) TFTC - he goes into more detail than I have space to here)
“technical merit” is self-explanatory, but the circumstances are worth appreciating: currently it’s only really in Ethereum that you can permissionlessly experiment with pretty much unboundedly computationally complex cryptographic schemes that operate on real value, which is attractive to (basically) academics if you want to try things out in the wild rather than just in papers on ArXiv.
buuuuuuut … by “no commercial merit” I, of course, mean that the “value” being played with is nonsense. there is tens/hundreds of billions of dollars (cycle-stage-dependent) of value at stake to play around with, but there shouldn’t be because the *underlying systems* make no technical or economic sense and the value is only sustained until there are no greater fools and/or the pump and dump funds at the root of it all reach the end of their lives.
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finally, here’s how the contrasting attitudes break down:
cryptobros are mad bitcoiners don’t like stablecoins because they have clear commercial merit, so why would you ignore that? and they are mad bitcoiners don’t like the crypto R&D because it has clear technical merit so why would you ignore that? if you are happy with technical merit but no commercial merit, or vice versa, it’s easy to convince yourselves bitcoiners are recalcitrant, closed-minded, tribal, dogmatic, or whatever else, and just kidding themselves about what has been achieved in ex-bitcoin crypto (and of course, they conveniently ignore the scams as something like “collateral damage” or “using this tool for evil rather than good” or whatever, rather than actually pretty core to the whole thing)
buuuuuuuut … bitcoiners are either ambivalent on or outright reject both because they lack the half that makes it worthwhile. bitcoin has technical *and* commercial merit, therefore is worth working on.
so the bitcoiner’s attitude (also mine, hence the above is obviously going to be biased in this direction) is, roughly: you can work on stablecoin and stablecoin-adjacent tech and finance if you like, but, even if it’s massively commercially successful, it’s kinda LARPy because it doesn’t even really have anything to do with “blockchains” and, once the state catches on to the larpiness of the iNnOvAtIoN, it lacks the technical merit to resist that obvious attack. likewise you can work on crypto R&D if you want, but if you are building it all on a self-referential house of sand (/cards? not sure which metaphor I prefer) you are likely wasting your time in the long-run. you are building ways of manipulating value that we can say with near certainty will no longer exist on a long-enough time horizon. maybe you’re okay with that but probably you just haven’t thought it through carefully enough.
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there are interesting follow-ups here as to whether either stablecoins or R&D (i.e the stuff with partial but incomplete merit) could or should be brought to bitcoin, but this note is long enough and, besides, I’m aiming at an accurate analysis rather than a normatively motivated prescription, so maybe some other time.
I’ll note before ceding the floor to questions or comments that I arrived at this by pattern recognition from a shockingly large number of the founders I speak to in my day job. I’d guesstimate 1/3 of them came from crypto, and 90% of *them* gave some variation of one of the two explanations above as to what was lacking and why they moved, all of which they independently realized after working on [whatever] for long enough. I’m open to there being some massive sampling bias in that source of info, but I thought it was worth throwing in by way of justifying that I didn’t just make all this up. I mostly just observed and codified …
this note is gonna form the basis of my Dubai talk so would appreciate feedback if you have any - the more detailed the better and can DM if you prefer.