boogers.eth

I’ve seen a lot of people misunderstand what we’re saying. Our claim is that in a world of full automation, inequality will skyrocket (in favor of capital holders). People aren't thinking about the galaxies. The relative wealth differences in a thousand years—or a million—will be downstream of who owns the first dyson swarms and space ships. And space colonization isn't bottlenecked by people’s preference for human nannies and waiters. So even if you can make 10 million dollars a year as a nanny in the post-abundance future, or get a 10 million dollar charity handout, Larry Page’s million cyborg heirs can own a galaxy each. You might think this is fine! Why is inequality intrinsically bad, especially if absolute prosperity for everyone goes up? Fair enough, but to me quadrillion fold differences in wealth between humans seem hard to justify in a world where AIs are doing all the work anyways - these disparities in wealth are not incentivizing hard work or entrepreneurship or creativity, which is what we use to justify inequality today. Just to recap, full automation kills the corrective mechanism on runaway capital accumulation - which is that you need labor to actually make productive use of your capital, thus driving up wages. Some people asked: why assume AGI leads to full automation? Maybe people will still prefer human nannies and waiters. Even if true, we think labor's share of GDP—which has been roughly 2/3 for centuries—would still likely collapse toward zero, massively increasing inequality. Here's why. It sometimes happens that when machines are only slightly better than humans, people sometimes pay a premium for the human version. But once machines become much better, that preference disappears. When carriages were not much faster than being carried on a litter, the rich sometimes preferred the litter. Now they prefer the car. They might still have a chauffeur—but once self-driving vehicles are allowed to move far faster, human-driven cars may be relegated to a slow lane. If the economy grows 100x, wages must also grow 100x for labor's share to stay at 2/3. But prices are relative—so this means human labor becomes 100x more expensive compared to AI-produced goods. A human-cooked meal costs 100x what the robot version does. For labor share to hold steady as that ratio grows to 1,000x, then 10,000x, the preference for human-made goods would have to become increasingly fanatical. And there's a second problem: the higher wages rise, the greater the incentive to develop machine substitutes for whatever services humans still provide. The premium on human labor is precisely what incentivizes its own replacement. Just to clarify a few other things: - “Piketty’s long run series are disputed.” We spend a long chunk of the essay explaining why Piketty is wrong about the past! But we’re arguing that the assumption he makes (specifically that labor and capital are substitutes) would be true of a world with advanced enough automation. We spend so much time rebutting his claims about the past because the wronger you think he was about the past, the more you think will change once his assumption comes true. - “A capital tax would lower growth.” Yes, as we point out, capital taxes incentivize consumption now instead of saving and investing for the future, at the margin. But if capital is the only factor of production, then it’s hard to come up with an inequality-capping tax that doesn’t lower growth. - “Capital can escape, both across time and space. This makes a wealth tax impractical.” We agree! As we say in the essay and in the tweet summary below, it would be really hard to implement Pikkety’s flagship solution (a high and progressive global wealth tax). You could go Georgist and try to tax land, but the natural resource share of income is only 5% and is likely to stay low until we hit “technological maturity” for reasons we explain in the essay. We don’t see any easy ways to avoid (literally) skyrocketing inequality - in fact, that’s what inspired us to write the essay and explain this problem in the first place. Also, to address a subtext: I think the currently proposed California wealth tax is a very bad idea for many reasons. This essay is about inequality under full automation, not about how California can make its healthcare expenditures more sustainable.

2025 wasn't the year the crypto industry wanted but probably what it needed to continue moving forward As an industry we are now fully done with memecoins, NFTs, low float/high FDV, and generally anything consumer My guess for 2026 is that we see far fewer token launches, a focus on the majors (ETH, BTC), and a persistent institutional bid for DeFi blue chips with sensible value accrual Maybe a bid so strong it will surprise people, when coupled with persistent buybacks and maximum financial discipline by protocols The future of this space is very clearly be stablecoins, RWAs, lending capital markets, and asset management We will fix many of the problems of crypto simply by doing less, doing it better, and walking the regulated path It is a bullish setup, but the rallies/markups/exits will be hyper-concentrated

Welcome to 2026! Milady is back. Ethereum did a lot in 2025: gas limits increased, blob count increased, node software quality improved, zkEVMs blasted through their performance milestones, and with zkEVMs and PeerDAS ethereum made its largest step toward being a fundamentally new and more powerful kind of blockchain (more on this later) But we have a challenge: Ethereum needs to do more to meet its own stated goals. Not the quest of "winning the next meta" regardless of whether it's tokenized dollars or political memecoins, not arbitrarily convincing people to help us fill up blockspace to make ETH ultrasound again, but the mission: To build the world computer that serves as a central infrastructure piece of a more free and open internet. We're building decentralized applications. Applications that run without fraud, censorship or third-party interference. Applications that pass the walkaway test: they keep running even if the original developers disappear. Applications where if you're a user, you don't even notice if Cloudflare goes down - or even if all of Cloudflare gets hacked by North Korea. Applications whose stability transcends the rise and fall of companies, ideologies and political parties. And applications that protect your privacy. All this - for finance, and also for identity, governance and whatever other civilizational infrastructure people want to build. These properties sound radical, but we must remember that a generation ago any wallet, kitchen appliance, book or car would fulfill every single one of them. Today, all of the above are by default becoming subscription services, consigning you to permanent dependence on some centralized overlord. Ethereum is the rebellion against this. To achieve this, it needs to be (i) usable, and usable at scale, and (ii) actually decentralized. This needs to happen at both (a) the blockchain layer, including the software we use to run and talk to the blockchain, and (b) the application layer. All of these pieces must be improved - they are already being improved, but they must be improved more. Fortunately, we have powerful tools on our side - but we need to apply them, and we will. Wishing everyone an exciting 2026. Milady.