CW

With all due respect to Chris, I completely disagree with this take. Chris argues that "web3," particularly crypto-powered gaming and media, failed due to scams and regulation, and that better regulation will unlock these non-financial cases. OK, think about this for a second. Does this pass the smell test? Do you think web3 gaming failed because of Gary Gensler? Do you think web3 media plays failed because the scammers crowded out the honest media innovators? Really? If this is true, why didn't they kill financial crypto, which had WAY more of both? Financial use cases were right in the crosshairs of the regulatory harassment, and they also attracted way more scams. Why shouldn't we instead accept the more obvious answer: non-financial use cases for crypto have failed because no one wants them. Let's just admit it. They were bad products. They failed the market test. It was not Gensler or SBF or Terra that caused these things to fail, it was that no one wanted any of it. Pretending otherwise is cope. Enormous sums of capital and talent explored these ideas, and we should acknowledge what we learned. That lesson is not "if we just had better laws, then finally people would finally be using decentralized Spotify" or whatever. Call a spade a spade. Every single use case in crypto that has worked at scale has been financial in nature. 2008: Bitcoin - non-sovereign store of value 2014: Tether - stablecoins 2015: Ethereum - programmable money 2017: ICOs - capital formation 2018: Prediction markets (Augur, later Polymarket) 2020: DeFi - literally finance is in the name 2021: NFTs - non-fungible financial assets (to the extent they worked) 2024: RWAs (the year BUIDL took off) All this stuff was adopted bottoms-up. We as investors discovered that people wanted to do these things with crypto. The web3 consumer stuff, on the other hand, was primarily conjured up by investors and pitch decks, ZIRP accelerationism, and "wouldn't it be crazy if" blog posts. This was the opposite of the "what smart people are doing on their weekends" thesis. In fact, if you go back to the Ethereum white paper from 2014, almost every single Ethereum use case Vitalik describes is financial in nature: token issuance, stablecoins, derivatives, on-chain treasuries/DAOs, on-chain savings, insurance, price feeds, escrow, gambling, prediction markets. It's all in there. This is nothing to be ashamed of. Finance is almost 10% of GDP. It's an enormous part of the world economy, and banks are some of the lowest NPS score companies in the world. People hate their banks and the outdated financial architectures their money runs on. It's literally why Bitcoin was created. There is so much to innovate in the realm of finance, and I truly believe we are only at the beginning of that displacement. You don't need to assume anything more to project the next 10x in crypto. The old saying goes "crypto will do to finance what the Internet did to every other industry." I respect Chris's optimism. But 18 years in, we should not be propagating this meme about consumer web3 use cases as though they're inevitable. If you are hanging around the rim hoping that crypto is going to disrupt media and gaming, you should know the history and look at it with clear eyes. Now if you as a founder believe that despite that, you know the secret to cracking this market--I respect that, and I certainly don't begrudge anyone to follow their convictions. But I think it's important that investors be honest that all the evidence points the other way.

Blockchains have always been and always will be tech for finance. Their core purpose is financialization. That’s why architecting a chain to protect unification of liquidity is more important than practically anything else. I am happy the misadventures around things like gaming in particular are fully dead and over. More broadly, I felt the “read write own” / web3 articulation was too skeuomorphic and, frankly, intellectually lazy to transpire because new tech is never as simple as putting something on a blockchain and voila. You have to create new markets. This narrative functioned more as a fig leaf for a reason to put VC dollars into more unnecessary infrastructure to rationalize a desire to create a private asset that could become magical internet money. The more folks that launched projects to attract price based on selling a narrative to the wild Wild West of internet liquidity, the harder the legitimizing narrative machine worked to ascribe value to all this as the third coming of apps - “all the stuff you do today, but now it pays you” In reality, the opportunity is immense, and bigger than our most creative minds can imagine, but not as it’s been articulated over the last few years. This blockchain adventure has always been about finance: open financial rails for anyone and everyone on the internet. This makes it newly possible for capital formation and internet formation to happen anywhere in the world, and for the ensuing innovation and progress to take hold. Open finance enables greater economic freedom and with it individual sovereignty and agency.

I used to have a lot of debates about 'regulation of DeFi front ends' and Treasury even proposed an insanely burdensome set of rules to regulate web site operators as intermediaries At the limit (extreme government oppression scenario), this is no longer an issue for actual DeFi as AI can assemble a UI to interact with any smart contract on the fly. . .conversely, that would make trying to regulate these things increasingly silly. . .

If Sam Altman thinks OpeanAI could eventually be run by AI, maybe it’s time to revisit DAOs in earnest. 2021’s enthusiasm had a lot mantras, but a major one was “we’re still early.” I still believe that was correct, but visions of the future were so grand that even the most monumental forward progress could feel like being “early” meant the arrival of something real could take another 50 years—and neither markets nor humanity had time to wait that long. But in just 5 years we’re now in an era where time and space constraints are diminishing faster than our imaginations can create new visions of the future and, more importantly, people can feel it. At some point it won’t be a question of “being early” and then waiting for the rest of the world to catch up—it will just be “this can happen now,” and then it just does. But if you live in a world where everything can happen anywhere all at once, and don’t have any bedrock to ground it in, you have incoherence. Complexity doesn’t disappear just because things happen faster, it moves to a new substrate and our phenomenological toolkit adjusts accordingly. Crypto and blockchain tech are critical to anchoring coherence in this environment, and I think we are now right on time.

I am increasingly convinced that crypto is not a speculative asset class, but an inevitable outcome of a broken global system of finance and IP. The institutional framework we have relied on for decades is weakening. Legal systems, treaties, and global institutions are struggling to coordinate behavior across borders. At the same time, software is becoming the primary mechanism for trust, enforcement, and organization. As this transition accelerates, market cycles matter less than structural direction. What comes next are digitally native organizations, ownership models, and coordination systems that are not anchored to any single state. The political and economic scaffolding we inherited was designed for an analog era. It does not scale to an internet native world. Nation states will not disappear, but their exclusive claim to legitimacy eventually will. Networks will increasingly take on roles once reserved for governments. If we care about open markets, individual autonomy, and private communication online, then crypto is no longer a speculative asset but a core infrastructure that powers the world. What a time to be alive.

codex 5.3 is terrifying.

for the past 2 years ive been deeply paranoid about my kids’ future in the post-agi era. things im increasingly convinced of -> ai will be smarter than the average human before my kids enter adulthood, possibly well before. -> therefore agency and taste r the only things that matter (old adage but obv true). -> the current school system which emphasizes compliance and repetition is already obsolete. -> so what do i need to do as a parent? 1. have them use ai as much as possible. 2. give them as much freedom as possible (agency). 3. expose them to as many things as possible so they know early on in life what they r naturally good at and interested in (taste). 4. give them a lot of time and love. that's it, 2-4 probably applied before ai, but certainly more-so in the next 10-20 yrs.

stop people pleasing