my thoughts on the crypto markets, stream of consciousness: bitcoin seems like it's poised to become the asset many has wanted for a long time. in a world that is getting increasingly complex on all fronts, bitcoin is even starting to stick out as simple. simpler than fiat, simpler than crypto, it's starting to get that quality that gold has where "it's just a unit of something that stays that way" and i think it will be relevant. yes bitcoin has flaws, anonymity is shit, LN is shit, security budget is a question mark, ETFs risk capture at the consensus layer, all that is true, but bitcoin is a household name and people understand wtf it is, and it will likely stay relevant moving forward regardless if you want it or not, and if you're into crypto, it has always been my belief that this is good for you. sorry, nope, no serious allocator is going to want to treat these assets like startups and keep having to wonder "but am i investing in napster instead of spotify?", "but what if ethereum gets replaced by solana", i still swear by that bitcoin staying #1 simplifies the pitch of our *entire* industry and allows it to grow out of a pink sheet penny stock pvp casino, which is what we would have if bitcoin got dethroned in favor of shiny. the dominance of bitcoin will allow other assets to proliferate on the side because there is something to race against, a status quo to challenge. you can make something better, more anonymous, more free, than the trillion dollar asset. the death of bitcoin is a wasteland and your consensus puzzles and zkps are reduced to libertarian tech trinkets ethereum kinda failed this cycle. the core reason for it is the structure of the regulatory environment makes it so that retail is made to buy the pico-tops of well-engineered projects and ride their charts down since they'll never understand low-float FDVs over unit prices. VCs have not been ashamed to max extract from this dynamic either. disillusioned crypto participants thus made the rational decision to buy dogshit useless garbage the entire cycle because atleast you can buy a meme at $1m FDV, but this dynamic will likely become perverted by KOLs looking to extract in the same way VCs have done, and i'm pretty certain that people who are into this nonsense would claim that this exact thing has happened already. you may say then, but eric, ethereum isn't the erc20s assets we speculate in, it's the decentralized infra we build and the ultrasound money, but the decentralized infra we're building hasn't been that impressive either, we've still got centralized rollups, fragmentation, shit for privacy, OFAC censoring builders, the real magic of ethereum has been "smart kids doing smart computer finance shit" and that made the space heavily investable because these kids looked like they were inventing the future, but for anyone who is interested in smart kids building the future there are smart kids that do generative ai these days and that just sounds smarter, is easier to understand and get tangible value from vs. the decentralized casino yield farm that even vitalik calls an ouroboros. so yea ethereum kinda lost to solana this cycle that more just bought into the nihilism of it all and decided to excel at atleast that, as a technology, as a community. that being said, it's convenient to confuse the narrative fumble of ethereum this cycle with the conclusion that ethereum is throw-away garbage at this point. ethereum has come an extremely long way. stablecoins are my preferred way to use fiat. i routinely use it for the majority of my fiat and i feel comfortable having large portions of it in protocols like compound. to think that you'd be able to do this without a bank 10 years ago and that it would work and that it would be safe is pretty crazy. i am enjoying this even as a privileged westerner. going back to banks seems insane to me. prediction markets are really cool too, powered by stables. so yea, i guess this is just where we're at? looking forward, i expect ai to just continue to become a bigger "problem" for crypto, in the sense that it competes for the same mindshare both from builders and investors, it will drag even more coins to rebrand as ai coins, and we'll get forcefed the narrative of "decentralized ai" for many years to come. these projects will be dogshit but they will continue to exist because there will always be a real, valid vision to sell, "what if chatgpt wasn't such a cuck"—the market will fail to deliver this, decentralized ai will try but it will be shit because you need centralization to do ai well and the frontier models will always be better and the best we'll be able to do in terms of uncensored ai is finetuning open source models and telling them to be less woke, but that will be a usecase just as easily served by erik voorhees via venice than it will for decentralized ai projects, and one of the main reasons for this is that you can't mathematically validate "proper work" in decentralized ai networks so they all become grifts of redundancy, nonsensical overfitting and corrupt human oracles, until they start using TEEs which will evolve into a question if the "decentralized ai is even decentralized", but this will still be a big hit because the main thing crypto can do for AI is provide AI startups with fast enough exit liquidity before the agipocalypse happens—if you think about it you can't even be bullish on an AI startup if you think that your path to liquidity will take longer than it will for the entire world to become unrecognizeable so AI will have to marry crypto for this reason, but you'll still be buying dogshit