we live in a world where a handful of corporations control how we communicate, banks decide who gets to participate in the economy, and governments can make entire populations financially invisible overnight. we've somehow accepted that our digital existence depends on a collection of very large computers owned by people we've never met, and we're just hoping they remain nice. and then we figured out how to build some of this differently. permissionless systems, verifiable ownership, infrastructure that doesn't necessarily belong to a single institution or state. obviously far from perfect, but the implications seem pretty extraordinary to me. especially now, when power is becoming increasingly concentrated and the ability to exclude people is becoming increasingly automated. yet most of our attention seems to go towards increasingly sophisticated ways of moving money around. billions in transactions, thousands of tokens, entire ecosystems built around making numbers go up. i'm not even against any of it. i love the absurdity, the art, the experiments, the completely unnecessary things people build just because they can. i'm participating in the nonsense too. but sometimes it feels like we've invented something with the potential to fundamentally change how people interact with power and decided the most interesting application is figuring out which cartoon animal will appreciate in value next week. i keep thinking about how much bigger the ambition could be. systems that don't really care where you're born, which passport you hold, or whether some institution approves of your existence; infrastructure that makes it harder to censor, exclude, erase, or confiscate. not because decentralization magically solves all these problems, but because having alternatives seems increasingly important. especially for people who don't have the luxury to treat these things as abstract philosophical discussions. i genuinely don't know how we get there, i don't know what the applications should look like, how we get people to use them, or how much of this is even realistic to achieve. maybe we're still incredibly early, maybe the financial speculation is a necessary part of figuring things out, maybe i'm underestimating how difficult it is to turn these ideas into something actually useful. probably all of the above. but i can't get rid of the feeling that we're aiming for something much smaller than what might actually be possible. there's an entire network of incredibly intelligent people working on cryptographic systems that would have seemed unimaginable not that long ago, and somehow a big part of the conversation is still about which number will go up next. i don't think the answer is to stop making weird things or pretend everything needs to serve some grand social purpose. please keep making the weird things. i just wish we were a bit more ambitious about what all this could eventually mean outside our own little corner of the internet. maybe i have no idea what i'm talking about. i just find it hard to believe that the finish line for permissionless, stateless infrastructure is a slightly more entertaining stock exchange.