Golden Path (p1)

I've wrestled with this article in my head for a while now, shifting my opinion back and forth between cypherpunk being viable or not, libertarianism being viable or not, and, generally, crypto being viable (or not). What follows is the most recent download from how I think about where crypto is at now philosophically. I don't think these thoughts necessarily correlate well with prices, nor I beleive in my thought pieces having any ability to move them, so if you are reading this to get "alpha", you can safely close this article down. Instead this is more akin to a manifesto of sorts, the "why are we here" piece (something that has been in short supply lately) and the "p1" in the title means that there is (maybe) more to come, likely about how I manage to hold these views cimultaneously with running a very much centralized meatspace based company.

Golden Path

For most of my life, Dune has been the top3 books of all time. This might have changed in recent years (Culture series now rank higher for example), but it still holds a very dear place in my heart as something that shaped me in my late teens and early twenties.

People tend to focus on first three books in the series, but for me it is the fourth book, "God Emperor of Dune", that stayed with me properly and actually influenced a lot of my thoughts on progress, benefits of diversity (in the not woke sense of it) and that general "how things should be" stuff. I'll definitely spoil things a bit here, so apologies in advance, but the central idea of the series until that moment (and series really goes downhill after that book for sure) is that the only viable way for humanity to survive is to spread out and deiversify. The Golden Path is a millenia long plan to impose stability on humanity, such that once it disappears, humans will hate it (stability) so much that they will hate any centralization almost on cellular level. In other words it is to

"teach humanity a lesson that they will remember in their bones": that sheltered safety was tantamount to utter death, however long it would be delayed"

It is in our nature to seek stability and to organize things, fight chaos and entropy. It is in our nature to build Empires, whether nation based or Corporate. And we know that all Empires fail and all Corporations die, but we keep trying anyway, building something grander and more powerful with each iteration. And the bigger we build something, the more disastrous the collapse. Even worse than that, the ultimate empire building can doom the humanity to extinction, whether by being to centralized to succumb to external event, or to give up on existence as a society as part of internal "evolution". And so we continue moving the states from chaos to self-organization to empires to collapse, over and over throughout history. And the key learning from the concept of Golden path for me is we should be embracing the diversity during the consolidation phase and reject the empires, however enticing the stability (and promised prosperity) is.

There is a lot of "sheltered safety" in existing nations. And there is a lot of "sheltered safety" in existing corporate/financial machine. To me both are slowly moving us all towards the inevitable collapse. To make it clear right away - this is not a statement against capitalism and/or progress. Far from it, there is less and less capitalism and more and more horrid and gloryless statism in this system. All in all the future Leviathans in question are the following:

1. Anarcho Capitalism. Corporations win, governments lose. Whether it's the world of Tessier-Ashpool, CosaNostra Pizza, Inc or Weyland-Yutani, it's pretty bleak for anyone who is not a senior cog in a machine.

2. Nationalism. Nation states control everything and devide the world. Whether we arrive at the world of 1984 or something more palatable remains to be seen

3. Fascism. The unholy alliance between Corporations and Government. This is the Galactic Empire period of star wars - Rebellion is pretty much a given. Leaving it to the reader to guess which country is potentially heading this way

What is on the other side of this? What does not offer shaltered safety and instead urges us to adopt Individual Sovereignty and Independence as the main goal. What strives to exist outside of national borders with a complete disregard for gated financial systems? What embraces the "unsafety" as a feature not a bug. Why, I'm happy you asked, the word you are looking for is Crypto.

The Paths Ahead

I've been in our "industry" for almost 9 years now and I don't ever recall the vibe being so lost with very little to look forward to. On the surface, it sounds like we got most of the things we always wanted: "institutional adoption" and technology being actually used. But something is missing and it's not just in prices, it's in the "soul" of it, in the "what are we actually doing here" all while the world around us is moving on and there is a cooler kid on the block now ("AI"). We are utterly lost.

But of course not all of us. Some are embracing stablecoins emergence as the win. Some are celebrating (in my opinion very much prematurely) (somewhat) decentralized perpetual exchanges winning over tradfi and cefi "dinosaurs". And some are looking into building their own empires on the intersection of defi and tradfi. We are seeing the new emergence of "corpochains", enteprise blockchain made great again. So yeah, some people are excited, but I'm not one of them, despite Wintermute standing to benefit nicely from that merge.

I am not excited because I see different paths ahead and only one of them is both viable and worthy:

1. Tradfi absorbes crypto. Broad stablecoin adoption. KYCd corpochains. KYCd "dexes". The financial machine runs more efficiently with less intermediaries. Bitcoin is digital gold with most of it belonging to Sovereign governments, corporate treasuries and ETFs. Or maybe it is the CBDCs that are being adopted globally instead enabling full control of our (financial) privacy. The tech is gloriously working, but isn't it obvious, however, that we lost? Probability: Most likely

2. Governments surrender to blockchains and everything runs on permissionless ledgers with complete disregard to KYC/AML regime. Crypto taxed only on exit to fiat system. Token valuations are in trillions. It's a free, glorious world. It's also a very much imaginary one. We won (but it's a dream). Probability: Least likely

3. Uneasy Coexistence. We build something that exists parallel to the existing system, completely independent of it. You personally can exist in both and governments can't touch it because it's walled off by design. We win and we win properly. Probability: Entirely up to us

I hope I give out the vibe that I don't find scenario 1 enticing. It's just making the existing machine (whichever of the three Leviathans wins in the end) more efficient.

Now I know there are some people who believe that scenario 2 is possible, but it's a pipe dream. Governments are not giving up on their sovereignty any more than corporations willingly give up their monopoly status. Casinos are not going to run on Solana unobstructed. CFTC won't just give up on Hyperliquid being non-KYC and unregulated (and if the current regulator does, next one or the one after next won't). And should I remind you that any centralized stablecoin issuer can freeze your tokens with a court order? The only scenario where this is happening is broad socio-economic collapse and this is not something I'm looking forward to as a father of three (and an employer to hundred+ people).

Which leaves scenario 3. You can call it Metaverse, Network State, DAO or Cultural Tribe. What they share in common is they exist independently and often in conflict with "meatspace" political and financial systems.

Into the matrix

Our problem for the most part is a lot of us never learned this lesson "in our bones". Especially those of us in the West, we gradually got used to progress, things getting more and more convenient, all while not really experiencing the dark side of not being sovereign. Ironically we experienced that dark side the most in 2022-2024 when we got both the regulatory onslaught from SEC and CFTC and at the same time came super close to centralized entity effectively buying most of crypto (FTX/Alameda + VC complex). Yet we learned exactly wrong lessons. Instead of doubling down on being free we thought we would win by getting the right people in the right places.

Parallel to that, we spent years complaining about crypto UX, Bitcoin not being convenient medium of exchange (which is true, it's not), endless hacks etc etc. What if we got it all wrong? What if the inconvenience is the culture we need to actively embrace as the fair price for being sovereign. I'm not saying we should accept metamask as the pinnacle of innovation. I am not saying we should all be engraving seed phrases on metal cylinders. I am saying we should work towards making the UX not for the 50% of the world who dont really need it, but for the 50% of sovereign individuals who do - both in developing countries who face continious erasure of democracy and total government control and in developed countries that are more and more resembling China and Russia with their aboslutely idiotic anti-privacy laws (looking at you Europe and UK).

Our goal shoul not be the fight against the "regulation" or "governments". Our fight should be to create something that simply cannot be controlled. It's about not relying on the chokepoints: fiat on/off ramps, app stores, DNS hosting, centralized sequencers, social media platforms, and yes, of course, centralzied stablecoins (that can be frozen). Whatever we build should not be easily shut down with a court order or by a corporate bebureaucrat flipping a switch. The tax man should not want our stupid MICA incompliant tokens (until we cash out that is). The endgame is simple - we should create a system where an ordinary person can exist without asking persmission from anyone.

What this means more specifically:

• Embracing permissionless, sovereign protocols, rejecting black box off-chain solutions

• DAOs were the right way and I am actually talking about the ones that DIDNT work, where there was no centralized entity actually controlling it fully with a pretend governance theatre. We never got to build proper communities instead focusing on how to incentivise comment slop. We need to keep trying

• Learning to either not rely on centralized stack, or being able to dynamically switch stacks if something is turned off on the outside. This holds for infra (clowd, LLMs), social coordination and of course stablecoins (more in next point)

• Make algo stablecoins great again. our mistake was getting too much into ponzis. DAI and UST were not the wrong approaches per se, adding USDC to DAI and adding completely unsastainable yield on UST was. And it makes perfect sense that DAI would not scale to the level of tether with just ETH backing - we need to build a parallel economy first which we never really did/tried. Even better - actually transact in crypto among ourselves, though I think this will come at a later stage

• Enabling privacy is a must. Tooling for it pretty much doesnt matter as long as it is achieved

Scattering

God Emperor of Dune finishes with the "scattering" - humanity esape into the void following the God Emperor demise. We should have had our scattering post 2022, when we learned the lesson, but it's not too late.

We don't (always) choose the part of the world we operate in today. Some of us are stuck in a country with little means of exit, some of us are bound by self-imposed obligations. My rather gloom prediction is we'll have more and more reasons to escape in the coming years. The Leviathan will grow, subjugate and oppress. It's (currently) impossible to completely scatter into the "better" parallel crypto world even if it existed. But we can at least (re)start building something for others to escape into, while simulteneously making meatspace and crypto co-exist.

The means to escape will be the only things worth building. Something that will work in spite of the outside world when crypto stops being popular (as it inevitably will). But more importantly it will be something that gives what we do and build meaning. Most of us will choose to coexist with the Leviathan. Obligations, Comfort, Money or simply another meaning will drive them and that is fine. The ones left will build the exits, and (maybe) get back what we lost.