The thing about crypto being immutable is that it's a digital problem, not a real one in the sense of Philip K. Dick's idea of reality. Reality is what doesn't go away when you stop thinking about it.
Cold mediums like records, paintings, and sculptures don't need that upkeep. They persist whether or not someone maintains them. A vinyl record warps, a painting fades, a sculpture crumbles, but they don't disappear the moment a network goes down or a consensus protocol fails. Crypto, by contrast, is built on digital fallibility—what's called "immutability" depends on an infrastructure that demands constant energy, maintenance, and belief.
It's a forever subscription model. The moment you stop paying into the system—whether in attention, in computing resources, or in raw belief—it starts slipping away, like a lapsed domain name or an abandoned MMO. 1 reply
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The thing about forever subscription models is that they only thrive when money feels free—when interest rates hug the floor and capital sloshes around looking for somewhere, anywhere, to land. In that environment, the future doesn’t feel expensive. The cost of keeping a system alive indefinitely? Practically an afterthought. The time value of money gets blurred, stretched, deformed, until nobody’s really thinking about the long haul.
That’s why crypto and subscription model proliferated in the zero-interest era—because the psychological cost of commitment was low. People signed on, not because they crunched the numbers, but because the numbers didn’t seem to matter. The bill was always in the future, and the future was cheap. But when the tide turns—when rates rise and capital hardens—suddenly the upkeep starts to feel like a weight, not an afterthought. That’s when the cracks show. 1 reply
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