Crypto is still the opportunity of a lifetime if you can understand the currents! As only decentralized, scalable, & private chains make this dream a reality Crypto will replace all of finance & even money itself! All we have to do is pick the winners for the grand prize: 🧵 That is what makes the future so aligned with the cypherpunk dream: The incentives lead to freedom. That is always what made crypto such a great & worthy endeavor for us to spend our time on Crypto has made it; it is not going away. Despite the industry being barely recognizable anymore from the old days, when it was just a bunch of fringe revolutionaries trying to change the world Do I miss those days? Sure, I do. However, we always knew that if crypto were to truly succeed, it would not be able to remain a niche; it had to go mainstream Today, crypto is corporate & highly institutional, whether we like it or not, that is what crypto's success looks like As long as we can enshrine the core primitives that made this entire movement worthwhile in the first place, then we have still won: Decentralization This can be a contentious issue, as people often treat decentralization as a binary, when in reality it is a complex spectrum with multiple factors that nobody even weights the same That makes arguments around decentralization often devolve into religiosity, when in reality it can be approached scientifically & objectively: By measuring various factors, such as stake distribution, Nakamoto Coefficient, validator count, governance design, client distribution, politics, consensus architecture & more Scalability Crypto is pointless without decentralization & useless without scalability. We need both attributes to make a real difference Programmability is also essential, as what is good decentralized money without good decentralized finance to support it? We see that in BTC, the only way yield can be earned on BTC is to leave the security of BTC's network, most often forcing users into a centralized custodian or much less secure setups That is how programmability in the form of a Turing-complete Virtual Machine becomes a critical component for any blockchain's success When we have decentralized scalability & programmability, privacy is also unlocked: Privacy Privacy does not need to be built on the L1 directly. Smart contracts deployed on top can do the same thing, think of protocols like Tornado Cash, Railgun, Privacy Cash & Arcium as prominent examples of that today Making privacy optional is ideal. Not only because we want transparency from larger institutions, but also because the scalability requirements for default privacy are too high to support global finance That is why having spot & perp markets remain transparent is also preferable to going entirely dark. As individual users can still anonymize & break links in & out of such markets. While most of commerce involving normal people can remain fully private Helping to strike a healthy middle ground in terms of the engineering trade-offs, while the fee market takes care of prioritization organically & fairly Crossing The Rubicon There is now no doubt that crypto will continue to play a more prominent role in the world. Even banks & governments are on board, the very types of institutions crypto was meant to fight That is still the case; however, these organizations correctly recognize that the best way to remain relevant is to go along rather than continue fighting this latest wave of technological innovation. While also legitimately seeing the benefits for everyone involved! Compromise There lies crypto's next greatest challenge: Not to let the watering down of crypto be taken too far There is a healthy middle ground between compromising too much & too little Strategically, remaining a staunch niche with a few thousand cypherpunks running nodes on Raspberry Pi's for an unscalable chain out of their basements is not a formula for success However, neither is accepting chains like Ripple, Tempo & Canton, which are straight-up permissioned! Conclusion Navigating these currents successfully is a real challenge, as it depends on having the correct thesis about the future of crypto & the world Something we have consistently done over at @cybercapital since I founded the company in 2016. Having started my own crypto journey in 2013 The market might seem depressed now, but the fundamentals have never been stronger As a value investor & a cypherpunk. High revenue & high usage on scalable, decentralized & permissionless blockchain is what gets me the most excited today That is what success looks like, not self-congratulatory speeches or ad nauseam virtue-signaling about why XYZ community is morally superior to another... Crypto has come this far by doing, changing the world through the utility it offers people. That is still where crypto's edge lies. That is why SOL & HYPE are paradoxically more cypherpunk than BTC & ETH today! When advancing the cypherpunk dream depends on adoption, offering a better product becomes the only way to make that dream a reality! 🔥