Robert On Crypto

Such a good piece. Must reading. In both cases, the banking lobby is arguing that novel instruments that benefit consumers – whether fully reserved depositories or interest-bearing stablecoins – pose a risk to the banking system and bank deposits. A more accurate description would be that skinny master accounts and interest-bearing stablecoins pose a risk to banks’ monopoly over payments.

Re: the quantum threat to Bitcoin & blockchains, there are two broad takes: (1) Quantum won't be relevant for a long time, therefore there is no need for urgency. (2) Quantum is already relevant, and we need to act with urgency. FWIW the actual quantum physicists and security experts are increasingly in world (2). People that believe we're in world (1) are either armed with bad facts, bad assumptions, or just don’t want to think critically about the impact. 🧵

Crypto will viciously test your conviction. We go through entire market cycles, severe drawdowns and extreme euphoria, every few years. What investors feel in a lifetime, we experience every few years. It’s brutally hard to manage positions. You want to be a long-term holder but the market reminds you how right and wrong you are daily. Venture doesn’t have a ticker constantly grading your thesis in real time. We do. Every single day. Right now, some of the most vocal believers are quitting. Throwing in the towel. Dismissing the space. Remember this moment. Years from now someone will scoff and say “oh yeah, you were just lucky for being early.” Being early is goddamn hard. Years ago you could’ve been too early. And being too early is indistinguishable from being wrong. We’re not too early anymore. Read the room. Read the headlines. The infrastructure is battle tested. The adoption is happening. And the cruel irony is that crypto natives are quitting just as non-crypto natives and new adopters are about to capture way more value than they ever will. A lot of the groundwork was built by the very people throwing in the towel today. That’s a shame. But markets don’t care about fairness. They reward conviction. For anyone who told you that you were just lucky. None of this is fucking easy. The drawdowns, the noise, the conviction required to hold when the world tells you you’re wrong. Learn to love the pain. Learn to love the work. Or you’ll always be a prisoner of the market and of other people’s opinions. Find love for the game or go play another one. If you’re still here. Still building, still creating, still grinding. I salute you. This is a generational shift and we’re lucky enough to shape it. Long crypto

JUST IN: THE PETITION TO PARDON THE SAMOURAI #BITCOIN DEVELOPERS JUST PASSED 15,000 SIGNATURES LIKE IF YOU WANT THEM TO BE FREED IMMEDIATELY 👏

Great clip on the Federal Reserve. Show this to everyone you know.

They argued that writing code is a crime. They compared privacy tools to money laundering. But we know the truth: Privacy is a human right. Math is not a crime. The fight for my freedom - and for the future of open-source software - is at a critical moment. I need your voice to show the world that this community stands together. Please, take 5 minutes to write a letter of support. Your words are the most powerful tool we have left. freeromanstorm.com/write-letter The fight is not over yet.

“Ethereum was not created to make finance efficient or apps convenient. It was created to set people free” This was an important - and controversial - line from the Trustless Manifesto ( trustlessness.eth.limo ), and it is worth revisiting it and better understanding what it means. “efficient” and “convenient” have the connotation of improving the average case, in situations where it’s already pretty good. Efficiency is about telling the world's best engineers to put their souls into reducing latency from 473 ms to 368ms, or increasing yields from 4.5% APY to 5.3% APY. Convenience is about people making one click instead of three, and reducing signup times from 1 min to 20 sec. These things can be good to do. But we must do them under the understanding that we will never be as good at this game as the Silicon Valley corporate players. And so the primary underlying game that Ethereum plays must be a different game. What is the game? Resilience. Resilience is the game where it’s not about 4.5% APY vs 5.3% APY - rather, it’s about minimizing the chance that you get -100% APY. Resilience is the game where if you become politically unpopular and get deplatformed, or if a the developers of your application go bankrupt or disappear, or if Cloudflare goes down, or if an internet cyberwar breaks out, your 2000ms latency continues to be 2000ms. Resilience is the game where anyone, anywhere in the world will be able to access the network and be a first-class participant. Resilience is sovereignty. Not sovereignty in the sense of lobbying to become a UN member state and shaking hands at Davos in two weeks, but sovereignty in the sense that people talk about "digital sovereignty" or "food sovereignty" - aggressively reducing your vulnerabilities to external dependencies that can be taken away from you on a whim. This is the sense in which the world computer can be sovereign, and in doing so make its users also sovereign. This baseline is what enables interdependence as equals, and not as vassals of corporate overlords thousands of kilometers away. This is the game that Ethereum is suited to win, and it delivers a type of value that, in our increasingly unstable world, a lot of people are going to need. The fundamental DNA of web2 consumer tech is not suited to resilience. The fundamental DNA of _finance_ often spends considerable effort on resilience, but it is a very partial form of resilience, good at solving for some types of risks but not others. Blockspace is abundant. Decentralized, permissionless and resilient blockspace is not. Ethereum must first and foremost be decentralized, permissionless and resilient block space - and then make that abundant.

Community alert: Ledger had another data breach via payment processor Global-e leaking the personal data of customers (name & other contact information). Earlier today customers received the email below.

Today we celebrate Satoshi Nakamoto. But let's not forget the cryptographers and the cypherpunks who took decades to build the bricks for Bitcoin. Bookmark this and enjoy a fast, floating trip about the quest for perfect money. #BitcoinHistory #cypherpunk

In America, if you support the 1st or 4th Amendments too earnestly, you go to jail.

🚨 @aave is having a full blown civil war And it might be the biggest governance fight defi has ever seen. Heres a clean breakdown 👇 Aave has two sides: – Aave labs → a centralised entity founded by stani – Aave dao → token holders who govern the protocol Now heres what happening, Dec 4, 2025: Aave labs announces a partnership with @CoWSwap to improve swap pricing + mev protection on the aave interface. Dec 11, 2025: A popular delegate, @DeFi_EzR3aL drops onchain analysis stating that swap fees from the new cow swap contract are being routed to a private wallet controlled by aave labs. Not the dao. Translation: DAO revenue just got quietly cut off. Dec 12, 2025: Marc zeller (largest delegate, aave chan initiative) calls it stealth privatization. Claims ~$10m per year that should go to the dao is gone. Dec 16, 2025: Things go nuclear ☢️ A. Proposal called “poison pill” by Tulip King. The demands: – Seize all aave ip, code, and brand – Force aave labs to become a dao owned subsidiary – Claw back all past revenue earned using the aave brand B. Then comes proposal #2 — “brand seizure” by former cto of aave labs @eboadom, – Move trademarks, domains, socials to the dao immediately. Logic: If dao pays for dev + marketing then dao should own the brand, domains, socials. Aave Labs / Stani’s defense: – This (cowswap thing) was never a fee switch. – Frontend revenue was a surplus labs donated voluntarily. – Aave labs is a private company. – DAO owns the contracts, not the website. – Labs pays for hosting, security, and frontend engineers. Now the plot twist, amid all this chaos, Aave labs opens a snapshot vote on dec 23👇 Proposal: Give aave token (aave dao) holders explicit control over brand assets, domains, socials, naming rights, github, npm, everything. (baed on @eboadom's proposal) Except… The author of the proposal @eboadom says he never approved it. He claims it was rushed to vote with his name on it while discussion was still active. Calls it “disgraceful.” Urges people to abstain. @Marczeller says the proposal was rushed during holidays, with fresh delegations gaining voting power. Zoom out. This isn’t about cow swap. This isn’t about one wallet. This is the unresolved question of defi: Who actually owns a protocol? The code? The frontend? Or the brand? Aave is about to set a precedent. And everyone is watching.

I’ve never seen someone make such a profound argument for Bitcoin, without even realizing it. This is just breathtaking.

BREAKING: The U.S. Comptroller of the Currency has found conclusive proof that 9 large financial institutions actively engaged in debanking. The financial institutions named are: - @JPMorgan - @BankofAmerica - @Citi - @WellsFargo - @USBank - @CapitalOne - @PNCBank - @TDBank_US - @BMO bloomberg.com/news/articles/…

The most based father in recorded history.

real

JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon: “If I was the government, I’d close it down.” JPMorgan now: “We accept BTC as collateral.” How things change 😂

Here's an embedded version of the Broken Money video. -An analysis of the past, present, and future of money, and how technology impacts it over time. -How the current disequilibrium (transactions way faster than settlements) creates centralized and corrupted money clusters:

"People in the tech and AI world don't understand what privacy means. They live and grow in a world where all data is, of course, collected by the company and siphoned off. That seemed dystopian to me and I wanted to build an alternative." Catch Venice founder Erik Voorhees in this in-depth interview on CoinDesk

The Tether folks are in the early innings of running a massive interest rate trade. How I read this audit is they think the Fed will cut rates which crushes their interest income. In response, they are buying gold and $BTC that should in theory moon as the price of money falls. A roughly 30% decline in the gold + $BTC position would wipe out their equity, and then USDT would be in theory insolvent. I'm sure some large holders and exchanges will demand a real-time view of their B/S so they can assess the solvency risk of Tether. Get out your popcorn, I expect the MSM to run wild with this, especially all the editors with TDS who want to shit on Lutnick and Cantor for backing this stablecoin.