Recent crypto learnings 4: “Memecoins are prediction market perpetuals”

Past updates 1, 2, and 3

By the way, the FDIC is essentially guaranteeing over $20 trillion in deposits on just over a hundred billion. So they’ve got a half-penny on the dollar.

L2s eventually move to interoperate with one another based on tech evolution and customer demand
9) ETHEREUM IS SUDDENLY THE DE FACTO GLOBAL SETTLEMENT LAYER and ETH IS THE NATIVE PROGRAMMABLE MONEY OF THAT SETTLEMENT LAYER

when volume > marketcap, parabolas are often in final stages

CometBFT is software for securely and consistently replicating an application on many machines. By securely, we mean that CometBFT works as long as less than 1/3 of machines fail in arbitrary ways.

Grant Engelbart, Carson Group Vice President: “We’re seeing advisors allocate 3.5% of Bitcoin ETFs on average to client household portfolios

There are 8 key innovations that make the Solana network possible:
* Proof of History (POH) — a clock before consensus;
* Tower BFT — a PoH-optimized version of PBFT;
* Turbine — a block propagation protocol;
* Gulf Stream — Mempool-less transaction forwarding protocol;
* Sealevel — Parallel smart contracts run-time;
* Pipelining — a Transaction Processing Unit for validation optimization
* Cloudbreak — Horizontally-Scaled Accounts Database; and
* Replicators — Distributed ledger store

Validators are special full-nodes that participate in the consensus process (implemented in the underlying consensus engine) in order to add new blocks to the chain. Any account can declare its intention to become a validator operator, but only those with sufficient delegation get to enter the active set (for example, only the top 125 validator candidates with the most delegation get to be validators in the Cosmos Hub)

As (i) parabolically growing global debt necessitates accelerating debasement of even the most stable fiat currencies, (ii) price inflation across both essentials and durable assets marches higher, and (iii) more governments and banks around the world move to seize deposits and censor payments, the value of the properties above will become abundantly clear to billions (in most cases this will be an instinctive realization rather than an academic one).

But while the benefits of the internet’s early incarnations were more abstract, bitcoin comes with a powerful adoption incentive baked in: the opportunity for rapid and unmatched accrual of purchasing power over time (or more colloquially, “Number Go Up”). Early adopters will reap outsized and compounding rewards from this trend (i.e. a greater share of finite available bitcoin) at the expense of laggards, incentivizing a self-perpetuating rush to move first

Avalanche consensus stands out for its permissionless nature, meaning it doesn’t impose a strict limit on the number of validators, unlike other layer-1 solutions like Cosmos or BSC, which limit their active validators to 125 and 21, respectively

Pixels grew from 5K to 730 K DAU when migrating from Polygone to Ronin. MAU currently sits at a whipping 1.3 M. Is Pixels the largest onchain application in all of crypto right now? Game developers need users and Pixels proves that Ronin is the only chain that can offer this.

The general purpose public blockchains out there might best be understood as platforms for rule-breaking apps. (For if there are no rules being broken it becomes tempting to ask why a decentralized architecture is the best tool for the job.) If I were an investor I’d be asking any apps (or dApps) on top of these platforms the question “what rules are you breaking?”.

Under BIT001, each Subnet has its own token that can be converted into the main Bittensor token TAO. Also, each subnet has its own issuance (1 token per block, half to the TAO/Subnet token pool and half to miners/validators) schedule and Uniswap style LP pool for conversions between TAO and subnet token

Out of 1997 validators 1818 received delegations from the foundation & Alameda.
In total they have delegated 106M SOL, 73M from the foundation and 33M from Alameda.

Safety: blockchains are designed to be reliable and secure with minimal trust assumptions, in adversarial environments, where a lot of value is at stake. Agents interacting via smart contract applications inherit these strong properties

The world’s 1st on-chain AI project, “The Rockefeller Bot”
The world’s 1st on-chain AI game, “Leela vs the World”
And the world’s 1st on-chain AI artist, “zkMon”

I do not view @bittensor_ as a cryptocurrency project
I see $TAO as AI and Machine Learning infrastructure, utilising #crypto for incentivization

For instance, Ripple, which recently pledged $100 million to “ramp up” global carbon markets, was one of the blockchain networks used in the World Bank’s research on the Interledger protocol, research which the World Bank referred to as “very promising.” Ripple’s remittance product was previously endorsed by the World Bank and Ripple co-founder, Chris Larsen, was previously an advisor to the IMF on blockchain technologies.

Memecoins are crypto native social fi — Imran Khan

Another aspect is that liquidity can hide the ball. Shitcoins (and nfts) use low liquidity to meme that your bag is more valuable than it is. If for example a tiny bit of some shitcoin trades at some high price, that doesn’t mean the sum of everyone’s bag is worth that much, yet most are inclined to believe it. This is a kind of arbitrage on perception vs reality that these assets exploit

In short, it will FEEL like a regular bear cycle, but in reality the game has changed for BTC and ETH – forever.
This means the window in time for the average non rich person to get generational exposure to BTC and ETH is closing, very rapidly

Essentially, most people will be priced out of owning 10 ETH or 1 BTC.
I also believe that going forward alts will be less appealing each cycle as people just prefer the concensus trade of BTC and ETH that are guaranteed to go up due to ETF flows + because of new market participants size, you could still get 20-50% per year, with way less downside risk.
As such I think people will be less interested in altcoins.
This mimics how the S&P500 works, with basically 4-6 massive tech firms, like Google, apple, amazon, meta etc. Propping up the entire thing

While the experiment is still underway, Akash provided 24,000 NVIDIA A100 (80GB) hours to Thumper to code and train the model, and we’ll be publishing the model and code to Hugging Face soon. The result will be an image-generation AI model that can be used without the risk of copyright infringement, and will round out Akash’s capabilities to support the three most popular AI tasks: training, fine-tuning, and inferencing.

* The total time for generating the proving key was 327,916 seconds — over 91 hours when run on a single machine with 128 core CPUs and 1TB RAM
* These 144 proving keys occupied a disk space over 10TB
* The total proving time of the 144 sub-blocks was 322,774 seconds — just shy of 90 hours (when run on the same single machine)
And we did it! 200+ hours later, on a 128-core CPU and 1TB RAM machine, we completed the world’s 1st full ZK proving of the inference pass of a billion+ parameter LLM!

we will see much more homogeneity at L2, with the ultimate end game being that many L2s either become tightly coupled to each other (eg the superchain) and/or to L1 (via based sequencing and native zk prover support in the L1).

Chopping Block on decentralized AI:
Scale AI less about data lake / RLHF, more about fine tuning and running infra now
Two main categories: Decentralized inference and GPU marketplaces
Most don’t believe latter is competitive v centralized
Haseeb: Crypto excels where there’s a lot of censorship
Tarun: Even OpenAI fine tuning has lots of rules and restrictions
Seems they’re more skeptical about infra and more interested in app side finding real use cases and metrics, need more decentralized AI apps
“Ratio of infrastructure to application is absurd”

Has the ETH ETF launched and Larry Fink and his cabal of satanists piled into the deflationary asset? no Have we seen NFT mania yet? no
If you’re thinking of taking profits already you just might in fact be one of the weakest pathetic people I have ever known to ever exist

Memecoins are prediction market perpetuals eg $TRUMP, $DOGE

Bitcoin is the most successful financial meme since gold and even at today’s all-time high, all the bitcoin in the world is still only worth about 1/14 of all the gold in the world.
Unlike the gold meme, which has infected about as many minds as it ever will, the bitcoin meme is growing — and it’s growing in a time when 1) people have more money than ever to invest and 2) people are more than ever looking for lottery-ticket type investments

The driving force behind ongoing experimentation at the intersection of crypto and AI is the same that drives much of crypto’s most promising use cases – access to a permissionless and trustless coordination layer that better facilitates the transfer of value

Akash has long provided a marketplace for CPUs, for example, offering similar services as centralized alternatives at 70-80% discount. Lower prices, however, have not resulted in significant uptake. Active leases on the network have flattened out, averaging only 33% compute,16% of memory, and 13% of storage for the second of 2023. While these are impressive metrics for on-chain adoption (for reference, leading storage provider Filecoin had 12.6% storage utilization in Q3 2023), it demonstrates that supply continues to outpace demand for these products

Bitcoin, to me, essentially looks like the open-source code equivalent to a self-fulfilling prophecy. The way it functions, as I said yesterday, essentially makes it a freedom-money virus

Assuming fees from all Uniswap pairs are distributed to stakers and assuming that Uniswap does its highest-ever monthly volume (last achieved in 2021) and it maintains that level of volume for an entire year, stakers could then expect a payout of 5.3%.

“Memecoin” = “sell everything without having a product”

even when eschewing the eye-watering gains that early BTC investors earned between 2011 and 2015, note that February 2024’s percentage gain is “only” the fifth largest percentage gain since 2017 and the second largest percentage gain this halving cycle, with December 2020 having experienced a 47% gain

If you go look at social risk you will see it went parabolic *AFTER* BTC hit new highs
So perhaps the answer to retail coming back is dependent on *IF* #BTC hits new highs.

If we’ve learned anything from the past 8 years in digital assets, giving your users a chance to invest in the early stages of a project’s growth (via tokens) builds sticky customers, power users, and evangelists for life. We often say that tokens are the greatest capital formation tool in history by aligning customers and shareholders in a way never seen before

Collection of recent crypto learnings 3: “…one can argue that currencies themselves are intrinsically platforms, and that coexisting multiple currencies should be analyzed as platform competition.”

Past updates 1 and 2

The ENS approach is even more vulnerable, where a group of multisig key holders, no matter how reputable, will control the governance and upgrade of the backbone infrastructure of the decentralized web.

I believe, in reality, a significant portion of the cryptocurrency space operates on meme culture,” Zhu said during the AMA. “We all tend to invest in bitcoin because it represents something everyone believes in, transforming it from a meme into a tangible reality

out of the three core layers of internet stack – naming (DNS), transportation (TCP/IP) and application (HTTP), naming is at the very start of the stack

Good breakdown / categorization of AI+crypto projects


(But missing generative media like images, videos)

the core definition of a blockchain is all the data used is generated within that blockchain and therefore verifiable by any participant in the blockchain. Towards that same end, smart contracts can only talk to smart contracts

Furthering the idea that the US has much to gain from the adoption and co-option of Bitcoin is the tangible stash of coins distributed within its borders; MicroStrategy’s 189,150 bitcoin, the 215,000 bitcoin seized by the Department of Justice, Block.one’s 164,000, Grayscale’s 487,000 in GBTC, and now the new US spot ETF offerings hold a combined 170,174 bitcoin as of 1/31

in a 2011 interview with Bloomberg, Fink went so far as to say “Markets don’t like uncertainty. Markets like, actually, totalitarian governments… Democracies are very messy.”

Bitcoin is punk rock. You don’t get it? Fuck you we don’t care. We’re having a party — Peter McCormack

CDixon (paraphrased): “Computer” is a collection of both nouns and verbs. A ledger is just a noun. So it undersells the power of verbs like earn, transfer, spend, save, stake, lend, etc

From an app’s perspective, blockchains offer three key features: consensus, composability, and availability 🧵
1. consensus – solve contentious race conditions
2. composability – access other liquidity and apps
3. availability – data is readily accessible
// what about governance (consensus?), tokenomics (new biz model)

The Ethereum blockchain core developers did briefly consider including an ALARM opcode to enable smart contracts to schedule operations in future blocks, but it was ultimately discarded as unworkable [https://vitalik.ca/general/2022/03/29/road.html]. The Cosmos SDK used for development of application specific blockchains [https://v1.cosmos.network/sdk] has some support to execute code – with significant limitations – at the beginning and end of each block.

Blockchains invert the hardware-software power relationship, like the internet before them. With blockchains, the software governs a network of hardware devices. The software—in all its expressive glory—is in charge.

one can argue that currencies themselves are intrinsically platforms, and that coexisting multiple currencies should be analyzed as platform competition.

That said, when a token goes straight down, you can’t call this a screaming success. There is a good reason why IPOs generally go up. And there is a good reason for why BNB, ETH, and BTC are 3 of the most successful protocols today. When you price an asset low, and let early investors participate in the financial upside of your success, it tends to have long-lasting positive effects. Your users become power users and evangelists. But when something prices high and goes straight down, you alienate those who were true believers. And it’s hard to come back from that

AI+blockchains point to a dystopia of impersonal and faceless interchangeable-parts humanity that’s more industrial than the industrial age.

Why not put $500 into a memecoin that could 50x, knowing that you could likely lose most or all of it? It’s not like the $500 is enough to make any difference anyways. Neither is $1k or $5k. That mindset, which is becoming pervasive in America, is financial nihilism. This is the zeitgeist for young Americans, you’re naïve to think otherwise. And it’s a huge driver of shitcoining

For Web 3 to succeed it needs to do two things:
Enable cool functionality unable through traditional Web 2,
and make the user largely unaware that they’re even on the blockchain

Programmable, composable data structures (ie, tokens) are the “new computing primitive” that will usher in the next phase of the internet

We need an alternative. Crypto is the perfect marriage for AI since the transparent global human coordination that underpins the movement is something that can harness AI for good at global scale. Crowdfunding (with cash or with your GPU) the creation and fine tuning of open source models which anyone can audit in real time for biases or issues is the safest path forward in the accelerating world of AI.

The idea of Bitcoin, like the idea of Index funds is a clean “world view” that markets itself. It’s not the only crypto that does so. Once you do accept Bitcoin into your brain, part of your brain opens up to other cryptos: Eth, Solana, NFTs, Ordinals … maybe some combination of Crypto and AI like Tao.

My sense is that this new idea: Bitcoin, and this new demographic: Millenials are in for an epic bull run.
The BTC ETF will be the gateway drug for this. It will get the Boomers and GenXs so that they CAN participate in the transition. Most won’t. But enough will.
It’s an idea that will take over the next 20 years.

USDT on the Ethereum network shows an average transfer size of $35,000, indicating its involvement in substantial financial activities within the DeFi ecosystem, likely influenced by Ethereum’s higher transaction fees. Conversely, USDT on the Tron network presents a distinct scenario. With Tron’s minimal transaction fees, the average transfer size for USDT is around $7,000, facilitating more frequent, lower-value transactions

He defines crypto as a meeting of “generative tech” (the creation of new things, users and markets) and “participatory capital formation” (individuals pooling money in new ways to create new types of businesses).

Collection of recent crypto learnings 2: “Ethereum hit $10 billion in revenue faster than any other major software company besides Google”

Below are some thoughtful and entertaining crypto-related content since the last update

Ethereum hit $10 billion in revenue faster than any other major software company besides Google

Ethereum Revenue

Programmable, composable data structures (ie, tokens) are the “new computing primitive” that will usher in the next phase of the internet

We need an alternative. Crypto is the perfect marriage for AI since the transparent global human coordination that underpins the movement is something that can harness AI for good at global scale. Crowdfunding (with cash or with your GPU) the creation and fine tuning of open source models which anyone can audit in real time for biases or issues is the safest path forward in the accelerating world of AI.

Chris takes the same journey but he calls these phases Read, Write, and Own. The initial phase of the web, when the web browser arrived, was mostly a reading experience. Then in the early 2000s, the web became two-way and we could Read and Write. What Blockchain Networks have unlocked is the ability to own things on the web

The “big, long macro trend” is what’s important, not the “technology” of “passive investing” or “indexing”. American Boomers of the last 30 years think they are “smart” to Index, but their real smartness was to jump on board a trend fueled by US money printing combined with quantitative easing and globalism

The idea of Bitcoin, like the idea of Index funds is a clean “world view” that markets itself. It’s not the only crypto that does so. Once you do accept Bitcoin into your brain, part of your brain opens up to other cryptos: Eth, Solana, NFTs, Ordinals … maybe some combination of Crypto and AI like Tao.

My sense is that this new idea: Bitcoin, and this new demographic: Millenials are in for an epic bull run.
The BTC ETF will be the gateway drug for this. It will get the Boomers and GenXs so that they CAN participate in the transition. Most won’t. But enough will.
It’s an idea that will take over the next 20 years.

Friend.tech does ~$7M in annualized revenue from only ~500 DAUs. But you need to have an extremely high CLV for the economics to work.

He defines crypto as a meeting of “generative tech” (the creation of new things, users and markets) and “participatory capital formation” (individuals pooling money in new ways to create new types of businesses).

Cdixon on investing (he leads a16z’s Crypto Fund):

I used to think venture investing is 80% an intellectual test, 20% emotional test. Now I’d say it’s the reverse.
I’d say the same about my experiences as a startup founder. Probably true of many other long-term activities.

Giving up too early, being overly influenced by external sentiment, acting hastily, losing sight of fundamentals, getting too optimistic, getting too pessimistic, being overeager to do something when sometimes you just have to wait, other times waiting too long…. Etc etc :)

Every bull market in crypto has been kicked off by a new method of token distribution. Examples include:
* PoW chain proliferation—2013/2014
* ICOs—2017
* IEOs—2019
* Liquidity mining—2020
* NFT minting—2021
*

Some view this regression phenomenon as the foundational policy of the crypto space: “whatever is permitted by the protocol’s code and market structure is legitimate.” This viewpoint, while rarely expressed in such direct terms, is remarkably common among crypto users

Regression to the code erodes social norms, and this consequence accounts in large part for what repulses people from crypto. Even as protocols fulfill important social functions like affordable remittances and escape from inflationary regimes, “the space” appears to outsiders as greedy and riddled with scams. It is for this reason that crypto seems to stand apart from all prior human institutions

Token buyers will be to investors what bloggers/tweeters are to journalists:
Tokens will break down the barrier between professional investors and token buyers in the same way that the internet brought down the barrier between professional journalists and tweeters and bloggers.

Multi-chain developers have 10x-ed since 2015 and accelerated after 2018.
30% of devs have been working on 2+ chains for 3 years.
Most chains share deployers with Ethereum. Ethereum, @0xPolygonLabs, & @BNBChain cross-polinate the most frequently.
Large ecosystems have emerged for @0xPolygonLabs, @Optimism, @Solana, @NEARprotocol, @Cosmos, @Arbitrum, @BNBChain, and @avax

Treasuries are just staked US dollars (!)

In these cycles, bitcoin consistently outperformed altcoins in phase 1 of the upswing. In phase 2, altcoins substantially outperformed bitcoin. What’s interesting is that the magnitude of outperformance is so large that altcoins have outperformed bitcoin across the full length of both cycles

If attention is the core pricing factor, then what crypto enables is an infinite canvas to issue and trade assets that track attention. The broader pattern of “financializing attention” requires two of crypto’s most important properties to reach its natural end state: permissionlessness and composability.

The reason is that the transition from a gold-backed to fiat-backed system was comparable to a soft communist revolution, as the *visible* seizure of gold laid the groundwork for the *invisible* seizure of wealth via money printing.
And the classically trained judges at that time fully understood this. Justice McReynolds’ then-famous dissent denounced the ruling in the harshest terms, noting that the “Constitution is gone” and the “dollar…may be 30c tomorrow, 10c the next day, and 1c the day following”.

The most important takehome is that tokens are not equity, but are more similar to paid API keys. Nevertheless, they may represent a >1000X improvement in the time-to-liquidity and a >100X improvement in the size of the buyer base relative to traditional means for US technology financing — like a Kickstarter on steroids

Crypto is the modern version of the long emerging markets trade. As an industry, it will see the most relative capital inflows, budding innovation and has an innately global footprint. It provides a fiat currency debasement hedge (Bitcoin), new application networks akin to the internet (smart contract blockchains like Ethereum and Solana) and the fastest growing population. You can compare it to any individual sovereign, country or financial market and nothing beats it.

Our thesis at Variant is that the next generation of internet networks will turn users into owners—specifically asset owners. The internet enabled everyone to become a publisher, and similarly, crypto enables everyone to become an asset owner, and therefore, an investor. You don’t need capital to invest, you can invest your time or work by producing art, running machines, or doing physical work.

Ethereum is just a super useful thing – Ippolito

Collection of recent crypto learnings: “Crypto is the machine’s body. And AI is the brain that enters into it.”

Below are some thoughtful and entertaining crypto-related content

Redphonecrypto’s 69 Theses for 2023

Great presentation on crypto’s “big picture”, a bit quasi-religious and grandiose but it’s good crypto hopium if you’re into that sorta thing. Source: https://redphone.substack.com/p/69-dreams-and-delusions

Crypto, you see, is a stepping stone on the journey to AGI. It is a prerequisite, a necessary appendage that allows artificial consciousness to “escape the box” and manipulate its environs.

Crypto is the machine’s body.
And AI is the brain that enters into it.

Bull markets are not mere monetary phenomena. They are collective, psychological, soul-bound events powered by our dreams.

Fundamental analysis always skips the most important metric in crypto: attention.
Nothing matters more (see memecoins or NFTs for evidence).

Variant Fund’s A Tale of Two Cryptos: Speculation vs Decentralization

Our thesis at Variant is that the next generation of internet networks will turn users into owners—specifically asset owners. The internet enabled everyone to become a publisher, and similarly, crypto enables everyone to become an asset owner, and therefore, an investor. You don’t need capital to invest, you can invest your time or work by producing art, running machines, or doing physical work.

The prospect of participating in economic growth is what has drawn in so many entrepreneurs and users—and it’s important because some portion of those users learn from those experiences, to think, and act, like investors. It often starts with things that look like toys (or dogs) but drives towards a serious shift in psychology, where money, effort, or skill are honed to contribute more seriously to the space

Quinn Thompson – Lekker’s 5 key themes for 2024

Beginning in Q2 and into Q3 ahead of the November election, the Fed and incumbent administration will declare victory in the war against inflation. Ironically, these proclamations reach a fever pitch just as inflation is bottoming around September 2024, approximately 27 months after the June 2022 peak. As a result, stocks and risk assets post record breaking numbers in Q2 and Q3. The narrative will be something along the lines of “no matter who wins the election, red or blue, both candidates will spend egregiously”. The reality is this continued heavy spending combined with lower interest rates will be the spark that reignites another bout of inflation and will ultimately be bad for long duration and risk assets.

Crypto is in a secular bull market, while also making its first steps into a new cyclical bull market. These two together create big outcomes.

Balaji’s Thoughts on Tokens

The most important takehome is that tokens are not equity, but are more similar to paid API keys. Nevertheless, they may represent a >1000X improvement in the time-to-liquidity and a >100X improvement in the size of the buyer base relative to traditional means for US technology financing — like a Kickstarter on steroids

For example, when you buy an API key from Amazon Web Services for dollars, you can redeem that API key for time on Amazon’s cloud. The purchase of a token like ether is similar, in that you can redeem ETH for compute time on the decentralized Ethereum compute network.

After the early kinks are worked out, the token launch model will provide a technically feasible way for tech companies (and open source projects in general) to spread the wealth and align their userbase behind their success. This is a better-than-free business model, where users make money for being early adopters

Some recent Ethereum learnings (and I’m still very bullish)

I’ve written before about my interest in Ethereum, and though it’s largely underperforming in the early stage of this current bull market, I believe the Ethereum token, network, and ecosystem will have its day / year / time in the attention sun. For me, part of the spirit and purpose of investing is to channel what capital and energy you have towards the world you WISH to see, and not just purely to maximize return. And Ethereum’s focus on decentralization, openness, pluralism, and a sort of positive idealism (reflected in Vitalik, largely) is something I aspire to. But investing is hard, crypto is always humbling, this is not investing advice, blah blah.

Below are just a few recent tweets / writings / learnings about Ethereum that I wanted to share:

Ethereum has a yield in excess of its inflation rate. This is the definition of “real yield”, and is unique to Ethereum in the crypto world.
Institutions love yield. Especially real yield. It’s not hard to imagine a world where a bit of crypto risk-appetite in general comes back, and some institutional money managers realize that Ethereum can be viewed as both a tech-growth risk-on play, AND a real-yield play

But Ethereum has durable and unreplicable advantages right now. It is simultaneously
-The most Lindy smart contract chain
The only smart contract chain that crossed the regulatory chasm
-The only chain with which Coinbase is aligned
-The only chain that has a “yield”

One enormous medium term advantage Ethereum has in the institutional world is that the CME lists an ETH futures contract. BTC is the only other cryptoasset that’s listed on CME. Now with almost 3 years of history, this contract has given regulators, notably the SEC, some level of comfort with trading around ETH that just doesn’t exist for SOL.

Source: https://medium.com/alliancedao/ethereum-is-the-only-institution-friendly-smart-contract-chain-b6a0ac199b6f

One thing I ♥️ about Ethereum is the ability to easily verify the contract and look at the source code, whereas on Solana, one would need to compile the source code and generate a bytecode file before comparing against what is deployed on the blockchain

And of course Vitalik’s recent essay on cypherpunk values including:

  • Open global participation
  • Decentralization
  • Censorship resistance
  • Auditability
  • Credible neutrality
  • Building tools, not empires
  • Cooperative mindset

Source: https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2023/12/28/cypherpunk.html