“夏草や　兵どもが　夢の跡

Natsu kusa ya/ Tsuwamono domo ga/ Yume no ato

The summer grasses.

All that remains

Of warriors’ dreams.”

Basho speaks here in 1689 of the ruin of Hiraizumi, after the defeat of the Fujiwara in 1189, elaborating:

“In the space of a dream, three glorious generations of Fujiwara vanished; two miles in the distance are the remains of the Great Gate. Hidehira’s headquarters have turned into rice paddies and wild fields. Only Kinkeizan, the Golden Fowl Hill, remains as it once was.”

While Basho has the luxury of 500 years of post-fact comprehension -- of the distance afforded by time to draw a lesson and arrive at a conclusion -- the technological gap between these two events is vastly smaller than the technological acceleration that has occurred in the last decade-plus of cryptocurrency. We do not need 500 years to contemplate the passage of time -- we can see a our great ruins with as much clarity as the Great Gate of Yoshitsune.

Our warrior’s dreams, so to speak, are exemplified in modern times, as 99.9% bags, vaporware, unrealistic solutions to problems that no longer exist -- or are as pressing. Over 90 tokens have a current market cap of $1bn, with 20 exceeding double digits. These are a wide range of token types in this range — memes, utility tokens, stables, you name it. Reaching this $1bn+ status only happens to 0.7% of the tokens listed on CoinMarketCap (let alone the vast amount of unlisted tokens). The mathematics of success are worse than survival rates at Hidehira’s headquarters.

Basho continues, by quoting Du Fan:

“The state is destroyed, / rivers and hills remain. / The city walls return to spring, / grasses and trees are green. “

We are to understand that the endurance of the state -- of establishment -- is insignificant compared to the slow trudge of nature and time itself. As our time -- meaning here the liminal space of technology -- advances exponentially, we see this process at rapid speed. If I were a smarter person, I’d have a salient point to make here about the recent roll-ups conversation and Vitalik’s Endgame essay -- however, all I can really do is make the trite point that our issues and solutions are valid only in a certain timeframe, one that is rapidly assessed and discarded. Viral, adaptive evolution is one of the hallmarks of an “always on” market and ecosystem. The stock market is open for a paltry 32.5 hours per week -- it follows that our advancement and change should occur at >5x rate. It also follows that we should produce “corpses” or “battlefields” at a similarly increased rate.

If we contextualize the “state” as not simply the traditional market/financial structure, but understand it as a literal state -- that is, the current situation, reality, the NOW -- we can frame this cycle as the shifting of priorities/prospects from one project to another. Here, also, where the core foundation -- the rivers and hills -- may continue to serve as the base of another “state” (be these ideas, concepts, solutions, pieces of technology, or even failures that might persist in usefulness [often times the right question is the most useful goal than the right answer]). Consider the progression of zer0-knowledge proof conceptualization in the 1980’s, to the release of Zcash in 2016, to our recently renewed interest happening actively.