awper

In crypto and defi (ie in honest markets), when a component fails, those closest to the component—whether wildly negligent or innocent victim—suffer the loss, and are burdened with that responsibility. Unequal, but proper. In tradfi and banking (ie in coercively manipulated markets), when a component fails, the entire society is forced under the burden of its resolution. Costs are socialized. Equal, but improper. The former, with time, becomes self-correcting, self-improving, and crucially, retains vitality. The latter, regardless of time, becomes stagnant and soulless, and here everyone can wallow in an equivalent grey. Any man of agency should prefer the former, taking care over that to which he is proximate. It is from this that the virtue of markets emerges.

truly insane how much 10/10 fucked us

To restate the argument in more obvious terms. The eventual end state of labor under automation has been understood by smart men (ie not shallow libshits) for ≈160 years since Darwin Among the Machines. The timeline to full automation was unclear. Technocrats and some Marxists expected it in the 20th century. The last 14 years in AI (since connectionism won the hardware lottery as evidenced by AlexNet) match models that predict post-labor economy by 2035-2045. Vinge, Legg, Kurzweil, Moravec and others were unclear on details but it's obvious that if you showed them the present snapshot in say 1999, they'd have said «wow, yep, this is the endgame, almost all HARD puzzle pieces are placed». The current technological stack is almost certainly not the final one. That doesn't matter. It will clearly suffice to build everything needed for a rapid transition to the next one – data, software, hardware, and it looks extremely dubious that the final human-made stack will be paradigmatically much more complex than what we've done in these 14 years. Post-labor economy = post-consumer market = permanent underclass for virtually everyone and state-oligarchic power centralization by default. As an aside: «AI takeover» as an alternative scenario is cope for nihilists and red herring for autistic quokkas. Optimizing for compliance will be easier and ultimately more incentivized than optimizing for novel cognitive work. There will be a decidedly simian ruling class, though it may choose to *become* something else. But that's not our business anon. We won't have much business at all. The serious business will be about the technocapital deepening and gradually expanding beyond Earth. Frantic attempts to «escape the permanent underclass» in this community are not so much about getting rich as about converting wealth into some equity, a permanent stake in the ballooning posthuman economy, large enough that you'd at least be treading water on dividends, in the best case – large enough that it can sustain a thin, disciplined bloodline in perpetuity. Current datacenter buildup effects and PC hardware prices are suggestive of where it's going. Consumers are getting priced out of everything valuable for industrial production, starting from the top (microchips) and the bottom (raw inputs like copper and electricity). The two shockwaves will be traveling closer to the middle. This is not so much a "supercycle" as a secular trend. American resource frenzy and disregard for diplomacy can be interpreted as a state-level reaction to this understanding. There certainly are other factors, hedges for longer timelines, institutional inertia and disagreement between actors that prevents truly desperate focus on the new paradigm. But the smart people near the levers of power in the US do think in these terms. Speaking purely of the political instinct, I think the quality of US elite is very high, and they're ahead of the curve, thus there are even different American cliques who have coherent positions on the issue. Other global elites, including the Chinese one, are slower on the uptake. But this state of affairs isn't as permanent as the underclass will be. For people who are not BOTH extremely smart and agentic – myself included – I don't have a solution that doesn't sound hopelessly romantic and naive.

REVERSE ENGINEERING WINTERMUTE'S $100M MARKET MAKING WALLET ON HYPERLIQUID One thing nobody talks much about is that, since everything is on-chain, you can just LOOK with your own HUMAN EYES at what the tier 1 market makers like Wintermute are doing on Hyperliquid (or fetch it with a Claude script like me). Positions, Balances, Orders, everything. Wintermute's Wallet: 0xecb63caa47c7c4e77f60f1ce858cf28dc2b82b00 I pulled Wintermute's full account state on Hyperliquid - positions, balances, and open orders. Here's the complete breakdown. --------------------------- 1/ THE SETUP Wintermute runs a ~$95M operation on Hyperliquid: - $57.8M perp account - $37.4M in spot holdings - 1,732 resting orders - 76 markets quoted - $199M total quoted notional Wallet: 0xecb63caa47c7c4e77f60f1ce858cf28dc2b82b00 --------------------------- 2/ QUOTING OVERVIEW Total bid notional: $101.7M (51%) Total ask notional: $97.2M (49%) --------------------------- 3/ TOP MARKETS BY QUOTED NOTIONAL BTC: $78.1M (105 orders, 0.96 bps min spread) ETH: $32.0M (103 orders, 2.19 bps min spread) SOL: $14.1M (54 orders, 1.39 bps min spread) HYPE: $9.7M (27 orders, 23.8 bps min spread) XRP: $9.6M (58 orders, 8.07 bps min spread) DOGE: $9.1M (38 orders, 4.18 bps min spread) --------------------------- 4/ THE TIERED SIZE STRUCTURE Wintermute uses up to 11 size tiers per market with a consistent 2.5-2.8x multiplier (geometric) between tiers. Smaller sizes near mid with tight spreads. Larger sizes further out with wider spreads. --------------------------- 5/ BTC QUOTING LADDER Distance Size Notional 0.001% 0.05 BTC $4.7K 0.003% 0.11 BTC $10.3K 0.010% 0.37 BTC $34.6K 0.030% 2.67 BTC $250K 0.080% 13.4 BTC $1.25M 0.200% 27.5 BTC $2.57M --------------------------- 6/ SPREAD ANALYSIS Large cap (BTC, ETH): 1.6 bps avg spread Mid cap (SOL, XRP, etc): 8.2 bps avg spread Small cap: 45 bps avg spread Tighter spreads = more volume expected Wider spreads = adverse selection protection --------------------------- 7/ INVENTORY POSITION Total perp positions: 83 markets Net exposure: $177M SHORT This is accumulated inventory from market making, not a directional bet. They're quoting across venues and inventory accumulates where the flow is. Offset on other CEXs/DEXs. --------------------------- 8/ TOP POSITIONS (accumulated inventory) ETH: $88.3M SHORT SOL: $22.2M SHORT HYPE: $21.2M SHORT XRP: $8.8M SHORT DOGE: $5.7M SHORT BTC: $2.0M LONG --------------------------- 9/ SPOT HOLDINGS UBTC: $9.5M USDC: $9.1M UETH: $6.4M HYPE: $4.2M USDH: $2.2M USOL: $2.2M USDT: $1.7M Total spot: ~$37M --------------------------- Lots more you could glean from the available data but I'll leave it there for now. Also it's not really "reverse engineering" since it's just saying what their balances and orders are. But I'm going for clicks here. Data source: Hyperliquid public API Analysis: January 2026 Live View: app.trade.xyz/trade?market=X… Full Raw Data & Graphics: github.com/0xLoris/winter…