As expressions of our collective psychology, markets are by nature cyclical. Prices go up and down as we swing between fear and greed, from bullish to bearish. Nowhere are these swings more extreme than in crypto, where everything is supercharged by the hive-mind dynamics of the Internet and the financial rocket fuel that is leverage. Compounding this volatility is the fact that crypto is inherently (and sometimes existentially) uncertain, as a speculative and emerging asset class. When things turn bearish, not only do market participants question the relative or absolute value of a given asset, they begin to question whether it ought to be worth anything at all. When things are really on, there’s nothing like a crypto bull market. Conversely, when the vibe shifts and the music stops, there’s nothing more terrifying.

Life is inherently uncertain. So too are markets. On any given day, prices may go up, or they may go down -- and it’s impossibly hard to know which in advance. Trading is thus ultimately an art of dealing with uncertainty; of making decisions amidst the face of uncertainty, of reckoning with the unknown. To anyone who’s ever paid it any mind, this should be self-evident. The question, then, is what to do about it? Given that noone can ever truly Know, with anything like certainty, what the market will do -- especially over the short-term -- how is one to find the conviction necessary to make a bet, one way or the other? Well, the first step is simply appreciating this intrinsic uncertainty of markets and the finite, fallible nature of the human mind. No matter how smart you consider yourself, it’s essential to appreciate that you’re always liable to error and that anything can (and often does) happen. As such, you never want to think in binary certitudes. Instead, adopt a probabilistic mindset, assigning some level of (albeit mostly arbitrary) probability to anyone of your trades / investments / bets, and size them accordingly. For example, if there’s even a 10% chance you could lose it all on a given trade, don’t bet the farm. Further, always prepare for the 10% outcome so that, should it transpire, you will live to fight another day. While it’s a subtle shift in thought, this probabilistic approach to making bets is a way of keeping yourself honest (and hopefully, away from financial ruin).

“More than two decades later, the information supplied by the HGP consortium, and by the subsequent sequencing of tens of thousands of individual human genomes, is proving to be a vital resource for biomedical research. That was always the hope, and a significant part of the mission. But not only has this information brought us little closer to understanding life itself; it has in some ways shown us that we are further away from such understanding than we thought. For if there is anything like a language of life, it will not be found in the genome—which does not resemble any instruction booklet ever made by humans.” -- Philip Ball\*, How Life Works\*

There is a recent term that crypto has become enamoured with, a term that supposedly accounts for the phenomenon that is memecoins: “financial nihilism”. The concept is fairly self-explanatory. By most objective measures, the economy is cooked. Consider interest rates, the housing market, the cost of education and healthcare, inflation and the rest of it. Not to mention the world is burning up all the while! How is anyone -- let alone “the kids” -- supposed to get ahead in such a dire circumstance? The apparent answer: gamble. Hence, memecoins. Indeed, against this economic backdrop, people are so disillusioned with things, so disenfranchised, so frustrated, that they have resorted to the most extreme and circular kind of speculation -- that is, speculating on speculation itself. Or so the rhetoric goes. However intellectually satisfying this hypothesis may be, it’s interesting to note that very few who actually partake in memecoins would offer this as an explanation for their behaviour. While those who stand outside the speculative fervour offer financial nihilism as a diagnosis -- as if the underlying behaviour were fundamentally pathological -- those who actually participate in it tend to have a very different perspective.

There are many ways to conceptualise, or otherwise attempt to understand, blockchain networks. You can think of them narrowly as digital asset ledgers. Alternatively, you could choose to understand them as new kinds of collective computers. If you broaden the aperture even further, you could also view them as a novel, emerging class of social network (e.g. network state). That blockchains are different things to different people, or different things at different levels of abstraction, is precisely what makes them so hard to define. But blockchains aren’t unique in this regard. As with anything of intellectual interest, they contain multitudes and thus transcend any singular classification. However, while there are many -- equally valid -- ways to conceive of blockchains, and their web of human relations, my more recent and now preferred way of framing them is as a new kind of -- intrinsically financial -- media network.

Spending my days, as has become habit, thinking about such esoteric notions as tokens and token designs, blockchains and blockchain communities, digital ownership and digital wealth, and the nature of the web -- its uses and misuses -- as a whole, I find myself asking, How’d this happen? How is it, I mean, that I’ve become so fixated, indeed positively obsessed, with such arcane concepts as these? Though I’ve always had an interest in the history of computing, I’m far from a computer scientist. I’ve never really considered myself a technologist. Neither have I ever particularly cared about the nature of finance, minus a few fleeting thoughts about capital formation and its mechanics. And yet here I am. Thinking about computers. Thinking about people. Thinking about money. And about how it all intersects. So how did this happen? How is it that I find myself here? -- “into crypto”, as it were.

There was once a time when ‘crypto’ was synonymous with ‘cryptocurrency’. Today, the term is far more expansive, spanning NFTs, zk-stuff, identity systems, stable coins, and more. Given the recent expansion of crypto, as a term and now veritable industry, it’s interesting to consider what crypto’s ‘killer app’ might be. Many take the view that the cryptocurrency piece is just the beginning, that eventually we will see ‘non-speculative’ use cases sporting ‘real utility’. Farcaster is a current example of such a phenomenon; a product that leverages the immutability of a blockchain to house their name space, in the form of a smart contract, and PKI (i.e. wallets) as an identity augmentation, in service of a new brand of ‘sufficiently decentralized’ social media. Conspicuously absent from Farcaster is any native use of cryptocurrency, lending credence to the idea that crypto might just transcend the realm of the explicitly financial. In the background, however, it is largely the allure of financial incentives -- in the form of memecoins -- that is driving a lot of Farcaster’s recent adoption. And so it is that even in the context of what is considered the shining exemplar of a ‘non-speculative’ crypto app, speculation and cryptocurrency remain the dominant themes. This would seem to support the more ‘conservative’ perspective that the fundamental use case of crypto is, and always will be, money, financials services, and speculation. So, which is it? Is cryptocurrency simply a chapter of the emerging crypto story, or shall it remain the primary motif?

It’s easy to dismiss the ‘Network State’ notion as some technocratic, libertarian fantasy, divorced from the practical realities of human life. However, the impulse to do so reveals more about how constrained our political imaginations have become than the underlying merits of the idea itself. Details aside for a moment, the fundamental thrust of the Network State idea is simple: where the nation state, and its underlying social apparatus -- rule of law, sovereign money, state monopoly on violence etc. -- have served as the guiding socioeconomic principle by which modern homo sapiens coordinate at scale, perhaps the Internet -- and its associated technologies -- might equip us with a fundamentally new mode of social organisation, one uniquely suited to the dynamics of the Digital Age. While Balaji -- the leading proponent of the Network State movement -- proposes a rather specific manifestation of this idea, if we simply suspend disbelief for a moment, there are many conceivable ways this idea might take form. In fact, in some meaningful sense, we already have what we might think of as ‘proto Network States’ in the form of blockchain networks.

The most popular mental model for blockchains today is that of a shared computing platform. As computing platforms, they are touted for their ‘credible neutrality’, 'permissionlessness’ and marketed according to their various security and performance characteristics. Most commonly, they’re presented as an open, decentralized alternative to the prevailing paradigm, whether that be finance or tech. Within this framing, it’s generally assumed -- and explicitly asserted -- that there will be one or two platforms that end up winning a disproportionate share of this evidently existent market for decentralized trust and compute. If security and decentralization is what matters most, then we should expect Ethereum to capture the majority of demand. If speed and cost -- and UX generally -- is the primary determinant of success, then Solana -- or some other high-throughput chain -- would seem destined for the top spot. While this frame of things is entirely reasonable, it is, I suggest, an incomplete view of what blockchains ultimately are, and how they will be employed in the future.