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Every few years, crypto dies. Someone steals a bunch of money. An exchange goes poof. Something devastating happens and we start over. Again.

As I was clearing my inbox over the holidays, I stopped to open an email from someone I didn’t know. Rare, but it happens. It was from the MtGox bankruptcy trustee.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t a creditor at the time MtGox went down. If I was, I’d probably be writing this somewhere off the sandy shores of Ko Samui. I made a promise to myself in 2013 that if I ever made $10k on crypto, I’d pay off my student loans, go live on a boat in Thailand and just write.

Yet here I am, eight years and two market cycles after one of the first Bitcoin exchanges got hacked, sitting in a house I bought in LA, catching up on bankruptcy proceedings.

Non hyperbolic claims

There’s nothing for me to claim, sadly. Whatever BTC I had at the time was spent doing the only thing anyone could imagine doing with crypto back then: buying drugs on the dark web. I must have spent millions on Silk Road at today’s prices. Stupid, I know, but there really wasn’t anything better to do.

I know what you’re thinking right now. You’re right. I’m flexing. I’m flexing because you’re struggling. We’re all struggling. Struggling to think about crypto and if you made the right decision. To buy. To sell. To work here full-time. If it’s gone for good. If it’ll ever come back. What It All Really Means in The Grand Scheme of Things.

I’ve had a lot of time to sit and think over the last ten years. My brain has spent more time lifting COVID-20 level batshit insane ideas in one decade of crypto than most will in a lifetime. You may have seen ATH’s, but I saw ETH at $0. When no one cared and you still thought I was crazy. Maybe you think I’m crazy again, but listen, babe, I just don’t care anymore. We’re not even close to the bottom; $1,200 is a dream. That’s why we bought houses last year when everyone was buying monkey pictures. That’s why we laugh and send screenshots when someone tweets something we came up with last cycle. That’s why after all this time, I’m still writing long-form and you’re still reading. Because writing is a luxury and CT can barely afford to read.

Sorry to be a dick, but this is a bear market. Scroll up. Read the sign. That goes for you too, lady. In case you haven’t heard, we’re in the middle of a global recession. No room for bullshit when everything is hyper-inflated. This is what a bear market sounds like. Meow. Get used to it. If you don’t like it, leave. Unsubscribe. See if anyone cares! ᵔᴥᵔ

But if you’re hungry, stick around. This is where the good shit gets made.

Non hype zone

You see a lot of nonsense in a decade of crypto. Bulls, bears. Promises, betrayals. Triumphs, downfalls. Unicornshit trades in pairs. We hear a lot of the same old, same old with every new cycle. The formula goes like this:

“X” is broken. ”Y” extracts too much value. Decentralize “Z”.

Substitute something that actually works for “X”. Choose someone you don’t like for “Y”. Pick any industry for “Z”. Add a token. Subtract any commonly understood definition for value or utility. Boom. You have yourself a white paper. Er, a pitch deck. Wait. What cycle are we in again? Right. That one again.

Non light

Time brings clarity. What becomes clearer with time is that crypto is about what you don’t see. Crypto has been and always will be crypto. Short for cryptography. Mathematical smoke and mirrors. A finite game of shadows.

Not web3. Not the ownership economy. Say it with me: crypto. Do I need to spell it out for you? C-R-Y. Finish the rest yourself.

The stuff you don’t see is as important as the stuff you do. And what you don’t see on CT, at conferences, and in news headlines is what happens in the dark. You don’t see Satoshi’s dirty laundry going into the washing machine. All you see is “ICO boom.” You don’t see the artist quietly lining up crypteau-riche patrons on Telegram before the NFT drop. All you see is “sold out.” You don’t see the CFO quietly making an edit to the Swiss balance sheet that turns millions of dollars in Company A into billions in Company B. All you see is “round closed.”

If you wanna know, ask about it. If not, keep it moving.

Non vision

What’s even harder to see in crypto at the moment is a world I want to live in. Good luck meeting someone with an imagination, let alone a vision for the future. Gone are the days where self-proclaimed crypto prophets professed radical world views fully departed from our precious base reality.

Assassination markets? Dead. Killer AI DAOs? Gone. Futarchy? Forget about it.

I’ve watched people either get soft or go mad over the years. Egos balloon. Cortexes atrophy. The pendulum swing from left to right. We deserve this. All of it. Yet somehow we still deserve more.

The best meme we have for a God Protocol today is still a baby-eating Carthaginian goat. The best LARP we have for a decentralized autonomous organization is National Treasure DAO 2. The best blueprint we have for pioneering a new world is The Sovereign Individual, but make it web3 💅. From the guy who had his name tossed around in a Bushwick back room as a potential candidate for Trump’s Head of Whatever by Steve Bannon’s child actor BFF and a newly minted crypto billionaire.

Give me a break.

I came for liberatory techno-social systems and all I got was network states. I came for tokenized hypertribes and all I got was Ape Fest. I came to drink from the quantum fountains of enlightened giga-societies and got served midwit seltzer in the mateverse.

Look, I get it. We have to start somewhere. Make the territory visible by mapping it. Good. Make your enemy visible by putting a face on it. Great. Make your community sustainable by finding a revenue model that doesn’t require dumping tokens on them. Perfect.

But also.

You can’t think outside of the box when you are the box. Wear a mask long enough, you start to become it. Have a third of your token supply held by someone who has the emotional regulation capacity of a teenager, then fine, I guess food and beverage seems like a really great option.

You’re doing good work. Hard work. But don’t forget where you sit on the chart.

Non-stitutions, non states

Technology is supposed save time, not waste it. Every worthwhile human invention made it easier for us to do more work in less time with less people, not the other way around. That’s why everyone on CT is sitting around talking to ChatGPT and going “Oh god, oh fuck.”

So tell me why the best idea for DAOs at the moment is getting the “smartest” people around the world - all that time, energy, attention, capital - into one place to do the simplest, most boring, most mundane thing I can possibly think of: buy a copy of the U.S. constitution.

It’s so banal that it’s almost perfect. A bright shining emblem of the brainrot endemic in the American crypto imaginary. We are so fucking lost in Western consumerism that the most radical way we can think of using an actual time machine is to buy a copy of this country’s founding document. To do what? Start a network state? Yeah, you and what virtual army.

Newsflash: You can’t form autonomous zones within a nation state without armed conflict. Good luck selling NFTs to your virtual country club when states have a monopoly on violence. If you had actually finished the Sovereign Individual, you’d know this was the one worthwhile idea in that book. So stop telling kids to drop out of school unless you and your internet swarm of libertarian WASPs is willing to provide firearm training and teach Krav Maga. At the very least quit decrying “cancel culture” as if your VC firm didn’t create it and your magnum opus didn’t depend on it.

Or just be honest. You need this. Because you think it’s a marketable meme. You want a bunch of people to get inspired to use your clunky secret voting tech and validate all the hours and capital we poured into building tech with next to zero external adoption.

Sorry if it stings, but this is desperation territory.

We 👏 need 👏 a 👏 new 👏approach.

And non-Nipponese metaverses either

There’s nothing new under the sun. That’s because the sun isn’t new.

Every metaverse I’ve stepped into has a single point of failure. Do you know what it is? Hint: it’s not AWS. It’s not Zuckerberg.

They all have a single point of light in the sky. Why? Did you even read the Three Body Problem, or did you just grift the Dark Forest?

Gravity. Euclidean geometry. Rectangular skyscrapers. Bipedal humanoids. 24 hour time cycles. Capitalism. Why are all the starting assumptions for “the new world” the same?

Sci-fi writers from the early 20th century had more wisdom teeth than today’s roving bands of green-pilled paddle shifters and biz-techno hentai peddlers. Now we live in a world where the only races people can think of are colors. The only classes people can imagine are what you can afford to spend on an NFT. The only world people can dream of is one with more chains.

The dream is dying. Time to return to the real metaverse and get back to work.

Non dumb questions, just ideas

And before you open your mouth and say something silly like “it’s easy to sit there and critique while the rest of us BUIDL,” kindly go back to your metaverse and fly a kite. I’m not falling for your grift again. The other thing you learn when you’re around long enough is that grifters like to sit around and wait until people disappear so they can steal ideas and claim them as their own.

If you came here seeking α, get in line. Until then, you’re gonna have to sit and suffer the chaos until it’s your turn to play. Like everyone else. And we’re going to make you pay this time.

Mama said if you’re good at something, never do it for free. And Mama was always right.

Qiao,
0x

P.S. - Hey, Mirror. I can’t move pictures around. And could you please let my readers do something interesting like unlock the kawaii version of this post with an NFT switch. Like dark mode, but make it web3. Qapiche?

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