@goodalexander: why crypto is down and reasons to be excited going forward

reasons why crypto is down: 1. On chain stocks and bonds have not resulted in material fee capture for any major L1 protocol. Arbitrum pumped on Robinhood announcement only for Robinhood to build its own inhouse solution. Temporary Nasdaq on-chain trading pump then it turns out they're using private blockchains. SOL doing $1m a day of fees down from $24m Trump coin frenzy and $15m+ of inflation. 2. high inflation and primary equity story is international equities, gold, and AI. crypto is not getting enough attention 3. Trump promised mass deportation, less international engagement, low inflation. seems we are 0/3. With no Trump USD stablecoins and regulatory progress could reverse. Crypto is seen as Trump proxy. when Trump won EURUSD collapsed and BTC went bid. now EURUSD is surging while BTC is down 4. Gold / silver have captured 'sovereign diversification'. Russia appears to have successfully use gold to thwart US sanctions after invading Ukraine. Despite the fact it could have used crypto (it did not). Now China is looking at Gold as a good reserve asset if it chooses to invade Taiwan 5. "Digital Gold" story does not work if Gold is up only and AI is up only while coins are down only. Thus - people no longer believe. At the same time there are high valuations and relatively high network inflation 6. There has yet to have been material evidence of AI <> crypto inter-relation. Bittensor if anything by becoming more credibly non political is allowing subnets to do anything (not just AI related). Coin is dead. Narrative of AI agents doing things with crypto so far has not come to pass. 7. DATs, and MSTR buying at high prices are a double edged sword. As DATs drop below MNAV activists are incentivized to take stakes in DATs and sell the underlying tokens to drive shareholder value. In current market conditions this would be catastrophic 8. Maybe quantum fears - but I think we are memeing ourselves about that far more than ppl are actually trading on this I think it's important to understand these things. The market put on a huge bet that the system and crypto would mesh. That bet has imploded. It is not pretty. I got some things right and many things wrong. I am not planning on leaving the industry or pivoting to gold mining. Reasons to be excited about Crypto on a go-forward 1. People are not thinking through what a fully multi polar world looks like given current debt levels combined with CBDCs. base case is mass financial repression and wealth taxes targeted at individuals. Individuals cannot easily 2. There are only 100-200k researchers and engineers in the global AI industry. Unlike previous industrial revolutions - the growth in AI will not cause mass employment. It will instead cause mass unemployment. This will only accelerate confiscatory impulses and also put pressure on global central banks to ease (bullish fixed supply assets). AI itself will be effectively leveraged to track physical locations ala China making it difficult for individuals to effectively custody gold 3. Nation states may not get along but all of them will want to tax citizens 4. The original BTC run was Chinese high net worth individuals. We have a mental model of what this looks like. More repression. More capital controls. That's how BTC went from $100 -> $80k to begin with. 5. Unlike the original BTC run privacy technology has advanced considerably. ZK transactions are 20x cheaper than they were in 2021. Halo2 / Z cash have made substantive technical progress. Railgun is responsive to TornadoCash rulings and there are increasingly legal frameworks for privacy. 6. AI is fundamentally compression technology. Models are getting smaller. Open Source (like Kimi K2.5) is pretty solid and will remain subsidized by China indefinitely which is treating open Source AI development a bit like free marketing for CCP ideals. There will reach a threshold when there are models that are smarter than ppl that run on local hardware. This makes society portable in a way that was previously unimaginable. 7. The technical selling has 2 sources: a. DAT overhangs, which are reflexive and can expand to buying pressure if the market turns around b. Bloated teams, which should structurally be able to be cut due to AI coding 8. Re: quantum I think AI coding will also accelerate the speed at which some protocols become quantum resistant, and I imagine this will be faster than traditional websites. There are some undeniably scary 'quantum internet' bear cases out there but I think we're way too early for that Put another way: sovereign individuals were never really believable before "vibe coding". Because you'd need an army of employees. Who need national services. The economic viability of small scale technological economies is skyrocketing. And therefore even if traditional equities or bonds don't end up on public blockchains imminently there is still believably going to be substantial post-national on-chain volume. But it is coming at a lag vs market expectations, resulting in massive financial destruction Binance, Hyperliquid and Tron remain successful decade long experiments in - what are essentially equity like assets that exist completely outside of traditional jurisdiction or reporting requirements. It is fundamentally viable to run on-chain businesses, and will become more appealing over time bc of how messed up our world is I don't want to pretend that the current market condition is good or that "I Called it". or something. I am trying to make sense of it. If I had to sum it up "anti or post nation state assets bet the ranch on nation states and got screwed". Anarcho capitalists shocked their government partnership didn't work out. Makes sense in hindsight doesn't it.