Justin Bons

I like @Justin_Bons , he was a Cardano hater and now we have his begrudging respect but outside of all of that, he has a vision and I think he’s right. Crypto will transform finance. Full stop. We will look at the era before crypto like being stuck in a Kafka novel.

My net worth peaked at $1.2 million. None of it was real. I don't mean that philosophically. I mean it was located on servers that have since been turned off. I own eleven properties in the metaverse. Three in Decentraland. Four in The Sandbox. Two in Voxels. One in Otherside. And a beachfront villa in Horizon Worlds that I bought for $214,000 because Mark Zuckerberg called it "the next frontier." The frontier closed last week. It's a mobile app now. Last year I mass DM'd 340 people the phrase "you don't understand how early we are." I have since stopped doing that. Not because I was wrong. Because most of them blocked me. I got into metaverse real estate in November 2021. Everyone was buying. Someone paid $450,000 to be Snoop Dogg's neighbor. In a video game. With no legs. The avatars didn't have legs. I thought that was bullish. "The legs are coming," I told my Discord. "Legs are a roadmap item." Three hundred people reacted with rocket emojis. I called myself a "digital land baron." I put it in my Twitter bio. I put it in my LinkedIn headline. I said it on a podcast that had eleven listeners. Three of them were bots. The rest were my alts. My virtual property has more square footage than my actual apartment. My actual apartment has furniture. Location, location, location. My most valuable asset was a plot next to a virtual Gucci store. Gucci left in 2023. The store is still there. Nobody's in it. It's like a mall in Ohio but with worse graphics and no food court. I held. Diamond hands. That's what we said. "Diamond hands." It means refusing to sell while your investment loses 94% of its value. We turned financial paralysis into a personality trait. A guy in my Discord paid $2.4 million for a 618-parcel estate in Decentraland. Prime district. High foot traffic. I asked him what "foot traffic" meant when the platform had 38 daily active users. He said I didn't understand the technology. I didn't. I still bought more. We had a DAO. A decentralized autonomous organization. That means we voted on decisions. There were nine of us. Three never showed up. Two voted on everything without reading it. The other four were me and my alts. We voted to "acquire strategic parcels." The vote passed unanimously. I voted four times. My portfolio peaked at $1.2 million. I told everyone. I made a spreadsheet. I projected 40x returns by 2025. I made a pitch deck. The pitch deck had a slide that said "WE ARE BUILDING THE DIGITAL ECONOMY." The slide had a rocket emoji. That was my entire financial model. In 2023 I bought a Bored Ape for $189,000. It's worth $14,000 now. I don't talk about the Ape. I still use it as my profile picture. People ask me about it. I say "I'm long-term bullish." Long-term bullish means I can't sell it without crying in a Panera. My mom asked me what a Bored Ape was. I said "digital art on the blockchain." She asked why it cost more than her car. I said "you don't understand Web3." She said "I understand you live in a studio apartment." She's not in my Discord. Justin Bieber bought one for $1.3 million. It's worth about $90,000 now. I felt better about mine after I heard that. That's community. WAGMI. We're All Gonna Make It. We said that every day. In the group chat. While the floor dropped. While the volume dried up. While 95% of all NFT collections went to zero. We're all gonna make it. None of us made it. But we said it with conviction and a laser-eye profile picture. That counts for something. It doesn't. But we said it did. That's decentralized consensus. Meta spent $84 billion on the metaverse. I need to say that again. $84 billion. More than the GDP of Luxembourg. More than the GDP of Iceland, Luxembourg, and Malta combined. They spent it on a platform where the avatars had no legs, the graphics looked like a 2006 Wii game, and the peak user count was lower than the lunch rush at a Chipotle in Des Moines. They just pulled Horizon Worlds from VR headsets. It lives on as a mobile app. My beachfront villa is now a mobile app. Location, location, location. Zuckerberg renamed the entire company for this. Facebook became Meta. A $900 billion company changed its legal name because the CEO watched Ready Player One and said "I want that." Reality Labs lost $10 billion in 2021. $14 billion in 2022. $16 billion in 2023. $18 billion in 2024. $19 billion in 2025. That's not a strategy. That's a speedrun. They laid off 1,500 Reality Labs employees this year. Shut down three VR studios. Killed Supernatural. Put the entire VR social vision in a casket and said "we're pivoting to AI and wearables." The pivot took four years and $84 billion. I pivoted too. I'm an AI real estate investor now. I bought a virtual plot in an AI-generated world that doesn't exist yet. The founder said it was "the intersection of spatial computing and large language models." I don't know what that means. I gave him $40,000. He has a whitepaper. It's 47 pages. I read the title and the tokenomics section. The tokenomics section is a pie chart. I love pie charts. They make everything look like a plan. The project has a roadmap. Q1: "Build community." Q2: "Launch beta." Q3: "Scale ecosystem." Q4 is blank. Q4 is always blank. That's where the exit scam goes. My accountant asked me to value my metaverse portfolio for tax purposes. I said $1.2 million. He said "current market value." I said $6,400. He stared at me for eleven seconds. I know because I counted. He asked if I had any other investments. I showed him my NFTs. He stared for longer. I told him they were "cultural artifacts with long-term provenance." He asked if I'd considered a 401k. I told him a 401k was "legacy finance." He told me to leave his office. The metaverse is dead. I don't accept that. I am a digital land baron. I own eleven properties across four platforms. I have a beachfront villa in a mobile app, a plot next to an empty Gucci store, and a cartoon monkey that cost me more than my actual car. Location, location, location. The location is nowhere. But I'm early. I'm always early. That's the same as being wrong except you get to say it with confidence.

Crypto is the undeniable future.

@TheDesertLynx We are two of the rare old school bitcoiners who left when we saw the perversion, corruption & capture So we see that big vision, while also not being fooled by all the BTC BS I am afraid we are a tiny minority, though; most newcomers do not have the insight history gives us

@Justin_Bons I'm definitely not thinking too small.

Crypto is far bigger than most people can imagine Even today, most are thinking too small Crypto will swallow up the entire financial world, while also changing the nature of money & power itself Bitcoiners tend to understand this, even if BTC itself cannot achieve this vision

@jtneff23 Totally, that is why BTC is a dead end "L2 scaling" has always been a bankrupt idea; looking at ETH proves it! As all of the major L2s can censor & steal all user funds without delay due to admin keys Bitcoin died in 2017 when we lost the civil war & BTC took a different path!

@Justin_Bons Is anybody worried about corporations and government controlling/being restrictive on layer twos? We need the layer two for transaction speed/volume. Isn’t that the weak point potentially making BTC be a Trojan horse? That’s my biggest concern.

@v1s1t_ Why is that even useful? Hosting a node in a browser seems to me like it would unnecessarily bottleneck the network I do not even consider non-block-producing nodes to be valuable either; they do nothing & light clients function fine for normal users anyway Call me skeptical!

@Justin_Bons Then look at nimiq.com Nimiq is the first blockchain written in Rust/WASM that runs a full node natively in the browser. It eliminates the "middleman" app or heavy local install, turning every web-connected device into a first-class citizen of the network.

@Meximattrides Exactly, BTC is literally technologically incapable of supporting DeFi That is why it cannot play that role in the world It cannot even be money either, as without capacity, it cannot be used for exchange Unsustainable security means scarcity & security goes out the window too

@Justin_Bons Facts. And the non-tetards understand BTC will not achieve this as the beta test.

@zk_colton The runner-up is ETH, which is more decentralized on the network level due to a slightly higher validator count However, ETH is centrally governed & non-native delegation has caused it to have a much lower Nakamoto Coefficient Stakeholder governance pushes ADA over that edge!

@Justin_Bons > Cardano is now the most decentralized blockchain! I’m curious as to how you reached this conclusion.

Cardano is now the most decentralized blockchain! A "ghost town" is not a good model for success, as it can never change the world Without scalability, we cannot make any real positive impact Balancing our values with utility is how we truly support the cypherpunk cause! 🔥

Crypto is not just about money, you were gaslit to think that. Crypto is a cryptographically secured internet with no central controller, no single point of failure. Crypto is a few major blockchains that have passed the Lindy Test. They are being adopted, once fully adopted, All messaging, transacting, and interacting will be secure and consented by you the user alone. Almost all scam and spam will be removed from the internet. The entire system will be replaced. This is what it feels like. 👍 Crypto is a technology layer that replaces the current internet messaging infrastructure, and the global store of value ledgers with hygiene. 99% of the current internet is fake messaging. 99% of value is stored in manipulated opaque derivatives. Not hard value, in seizable securities. With crypto all your rights and interests are cryptographically stored so that only you can access them. With crypto you consent. You are in control. Crypto is a new internet. Start to learn. This disrupts everything. Trust computers. Trust math. Trust open source code. You can see it all. Stop trusting humans. We don’t need to any more. Information and messaging hygiene. They will fight like dogs to change the narrative, manipulate you, gaslight you, fool you. I’m a technologist with 30 years of experience in tech and UI. The critical network is upgrading. You can invest now but will not be able to for long.

@CybernautADA Increasing speed & capacity would make ADA a winner Specifically, sub-second confirmation with 10k+ TPS is the competitive standard for now ADA is great in almost every other way. However, in its current state, it cannot compete Bonus: Add stake weighted based on time locked!

@Justin_Bons Alright, you tell us the 3-5 metrics on which ADA needs to improve and how much? I really want to know if you think ADA can do it or not.

@ItsDave_ADA Seems to me as if you are sticking your head in the sand by claiming all the other crypto usage is "fake" The usage is real, as it cannot be faked. Truth is that low fees & speed attract usage The majority of the stock market is bots, too. There is nothing wrong with that!

But you are overlooking one thing. Real usage, you incorrectly assume that a high TPS means real usage. You forget to mention that low fees, allow bots to inflate TPS and artificially appear as real usage. What if 0.3 TPS was real usage and 500 TPS was just bots moving assets backwards and forwards cheaply whilst shouting "look at all this usage and TPS". The ghost town isn't really a ghost town. I rest my case.

@Girakian Leios has been promised for the past 5 years, so I will believe it when I see it Leios is a huge improvement; however, it is still not a competitive solution compared to rest of the market Partnerships are not the same as adoption & usage, plenty of "ghost towns" use that trick

@Justin_Bons So we have this year on Cardano; Ouroboros Leios third quarter with 500/1000 TPs , we have layer zero connecting more then 160 coins , we have midnight on the Mainnet end of the month, we have Pyth, Dune, hydra, CME futures , integration stables etc….so

@ItsDave_ADA The average usage for ADA right now is 0.3 TPS... If you cannot admit that is a "ghost town", then you have bigger problems First step is to admit you have a problem, & only then can you fix it There are several chains doing hundreds & two are in the thousands of TPS right now

There is no ghost town on Cardano, it's a lively blockchain with ~120 million transactions, USDCx integration launched in the last month $14.4 million already minted, Layer Zero integration, ZK proofs demonstrable on Cardano L1 in the last week for privacy. Leios pushing towards a 1k TPS showcase. Lots of projects are continuing to chose Cardano. We do need more utility, but to call it a ghost chain is purely a non educated attack.

@zacodil It needs to be able to keep up with demand & signal to the market that it is ready for more demand ADA fails there catastrophically 1k TPS is a huge improvement over 18... But it does not cut it for today's competitive environment Also, at what speed? That is also critical!

@Justin_Bons Curious where Leios fits in your framework now - the prototype is already minting endorser blocks on a devnet. Does hitting even 1K TPS change the equation for you, or does Cardano need the full 10K to be competitive?

@_HamK83 The closer we get to mass adoption, the harder crypto also becomes to control It will not all be smooth sailing. The obvious angle of attack is governance Getting an L1 to stop scaling stops the threat That is why stakeholder governance is key in resisting perversion & capture

@Justin_Bons You really think banks and governments are just going to sit back and allow a parallel system they can’t control? The closer we get to mass adoption, the more influence and centralization creeps in.

@TheDesertLynx Haha, yes, that guy is definitly a big blocker "Bcasher" Definitly the kind of person the community would totally demonize & ostracize! Appreciate you putting this message out there It is a very unpopular opinion, but it is the unadulterated truth: That needs to be understood!

@Justin_Bons Whaaaaaat?! Crazy talk! Who is this "Satoshi Nakamoto" fellow (if that's even his real name). Sounds like some kind of third-rate shitcoin scammer!

Some of the biggest scams in crypto were hoisted on people under one simple pretext: "But you can self-host your own node!" This simple red herring has enabled all kinds of compromises to our sovereignty when using crypto. Now first, let me be clear: self-hosting is great. Running your own node is great. Compared with having to trust companies to not screw you over, it's absolutely massive. However, the "you can self-host" distraction actually harms the practical decentralization and sovereignty of the space in two key ways: 1) Not Everyone Needs to Run a Node! The entire novel innovation of crypto is a decentralized, unified, guaranteed network that remains censorship resistant. The whole point of this is that you don't need to self-host to have censorship-resistance guarantees. You can just use the self-funded, self-running decentralized network. By deliberately engineering protocols like Bitcoin (and to a lesser extent, Ethereum) in order to make node-running accessible for hobbyists, everyday transactions and actual use by said hobbyists became out of reach. In other words, people were made to be able to run nodes to validate transactions they themselves can't afford. 2) Ignore Centralization If You CAN Self-Host The even darker part: by giving a self-hosting option, users are distracted from the blatant centralization and censorship vectors facing 99% of users. A great example of this is Lightning, where anyone can theoretically run their own node and manage their own payment channels in a fully peer-to-peer way. But practically, it's immensely clunky, technical, involved, and expensive. As a result, almost all users use fully-custodial systems, or at best extremely-centralized semi-custodial services, and this goes ignored because theoretically anyone can self-host. The Real Holy Grail: No Need to Self-Host The real innovation we should be striving for: no need to self-host! The most innovative freedom projects take the core foundational principle of crypto that started with Bitcoin: that the system makes it so that honest miners will run a censorship-resistant network without all participants having to run miners themselves. They take this foundation, and apply the principle to every level of the stack. Essentially, anywhere in the entire experience of an average user where there's a company or centralized service in there that they need to trust, find a way to decentralize it, without requiring the user to self-host. We've already made amazing progress on this already, and we can keep doing better. But we have to learn to avoid the self-host red herring.