Venkatesh Rao ☀️ pfp
Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
The next year on paper looks very bullish for crypto, but I think is actually bearish. Trump admin’s “support” for crypto is cynically political and a case of”with friends like these…” Also given pre-inauguration conflicts with SV, the support is fragile anyway, and will only last as long as the relationship. Like it or not, crypto’s relationship to DC is mediated by SV. It’s not direct. More globally, I’m cautiously bullish on Miele being genuinely aligned. While I’m not particularly aligned with his politics either, he seems like more of a serious person you can at least productively disagree with. The rest of the world is somewhere between dismissive of crypto as a has-been trend and something that’s been domesticated and drained of all subversive potential due to stuff like CBDCs, stablecoin boom, Solana, mature KYC regimes, growing control over CEXes,… for a brief period ~2018-19 I think the political world was slightly scared of crypto, which is not entirely a bad thing.
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Venkatesh Rao ☀️ pfp
Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
The current perception of crypto is that it’s an irrelevant marginal tech scene with a hard bound on mainstream influence. It’s seen as a minor law enforcement problem around a traditional purely financial asset class with no real political significance. Like the art market, which also has pretensions to political significance non-artists entirely ignore or at best look upon indulgently/tolerantly as the games of favored children. Political potential defanged, economic potential minor, financial value capped and captured. Or like gaming. The value prop as a computing technology is regarded as strained, overwrought, and low credibility. The contrast with AI is particularly strong. It’s like how Harry Potter and Neville Longbottom both satisfied the Chosen One prophecy, but the latter was a joke. I don’t think the perception is true, or necessarily needs counterprogramming. Crypto’s path to material significance need not evolve through public recognition of significance. But it still needs a path.
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Venkatesh Rao ☀️ pfp
Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
The true picture I think is: 1. It does have significance comparable to AI, but is a much harder tech to develop, which explains why it is much less mature despite an earlier start 2. By its very nature, it will be invisible back-end significance, second foundation style, and we’re all overindexed on the anomalous high visibility NFT era 3. Mainstream adoption in explicit form will never happen, but the tech will get buried under UX. Normies will be about as aware of it as they are of SQL. 4. In the backend, it will evolve as a hardened commons with strong overlap with open source 5. The “TAM” for crypto will divide 80-20 between “unbundled” crypto a la Bluesky and 20% blockchain-based (or similar integrated stacks). But the 20% blockchain++ stuff will slowly become nation-state-level load-bearing. 6. Public blockchain-based assets will settle at 10-20% of world economy long term, maybe 4-5x that of gold 7. Societally, it will become a “fourth sector” after public, private, and non-profit
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Patrick Atwater pfp
Patrick Atwater
@patwater
huh "7. Societally, it will become a “fourth sector” after public, private, and non-profit"
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