Best of wrongalot.substack.com on Kiwi News
Most upvoted by Kiwi News readers
7 stories from wrongalot.substack.com have been shared on Kiwi News since 12 September 2024, with 30 upvotes and 8 comments in total. The latest was shared on 30 September 2025. They are listed below, most upvoted first.
Text under a title is an AI summary of the linked article.
- Welcome To Disillusionment
The essay argues that crypto is entering a disillusionment phase comparable to the Dotcom bubble, with the 2020-2025 period forming one extended cycle propped up by excess capital and ETF and Microstrategy inflows rather than real cash flows or innovation. It says VC-style private-to-public arbitrage has shrunk as everyone has adopted the same playbook, and that crypto has relied on "degen" speculative liquidity and tradfi adoption, neither of which it describes as durable user growth. It lists DeFi's resilience under volatility, stablecoin activity that has decoupled from crypto cycles, and Stripe's acquisition of Bridge as positives to build on.
- Crypto Face/Off
The author argues that crypto is a new environment rather than a financial vessel, and that the industry's push toward pragmatism, centralization and yield is eroding its core value of trust minimization. The essay ties this to the film Face/Off, comparing crypto's identity crisis to the swapped identities of Sean Archer and Castor Troy. It draws on Marshall McLuhan, including his 1960s observation that official culture tries to make new media do the work of old media, and his "Emperor's New Clothes" image of antisocial people who see environments clearly. The piece claims that a minority of users is quietly opting into crypto through participation rather than optimization.
- What do we believe?
The author argues that crypto Twitter ("CT") resembles CNBC-style commentary, mostly entertainment that can occasionally stumble onto useful investment advice, and that the industry's reliance on the four-year cycle and short-term incentives is damaging to real innovation. Crypto has become mainstream entertainment, and participation alone no longer guarantees returns. The author says there has been no real innovation trigger in the past two years, and that copycat projects masking a lack of product are being funded. The author suspects that without new market highs, crypto will enter an unforeseen and possibly painful period that could be good for innovation.
- The War For Mindshare
Memecoins are presented as attention markets, a mix of prediction markets and attention networks in which the main thing captured is financialized mindshare, the level of attention a token receives. The article says memecoins bundle distribution and product into one, so pumping a token to capture attention is a financial bet, and that value flows where attention goes. It also argues that attention networks have grown asocial, since "capital is what matters as attention follows capital," and that memecoins are the first onchain asocial product-market fit. The article states that few memes have staying power and that rugs are a feature, not a bug.
- The Crypto Arc
The author, an crypto investor who describes himself as a Thielogian, argues that crypto has moved through a cycle from cypherpunk idealism through startup optimism and memecoin speculation to a current push for regulatory clarity, and that the biggest remaining opportunities lie at the frontier of this now-established space. He says crypto is in the Trough of Disillusionment and that definite optimists are nearly impossible to find in the industry today. He also states that centralized exchanges have shifted from optimists championing adoption to pessimists defending market share, and that the most competitive landscapes produced the biggest wins for investors.
- Up Or Down?
The author argues that crypto's current cycle lacks a pure technological innovation trigger and rests instead on a regulatory and top-down trigger, so it may be an extension of the last bull market rather than a new one. The essay contrasts the DeFi-driven prior cycle with memecoins, which it describes as the first instance of crypto-native commerce, and notes that retail interest sparked briefly when Moonshot onboarded 400k users in 24 hours after the $TRUMP launch. It suggests the outcome, whether a disillusionment or a Dotcom-like bubble, depends on whether the recent rally is an insider hype preceding broader retail mania.
- This Is Not The Bottom
This essay applies René Girard's scapegoating theory to crypto market cycles, arguing that each bull market unfolds in two acts separated by a "mimetic crisis" intermezzo and ends with a sacrificial scapegoat. It says the current cycle, whose foundational principle is institutional adoption, is in an intermezzo as of March 2025, with the scapegoat not yet revealed. Candidates it raises include MicroStrategy and its $40 billion Bitcoin bet, with Michael Saylor, and Donald Trump, whose memecoin the essay says "rugged" the market.