Crypto
Diagrams | Matrices | Thinkers
Why does crypto matter? Identity, Payments, DeFAI, DePIN
Crypto is really a cultural movement and culture is any organisation's most valuable asset. Games shape our cultural identity while play teaches coordination. Crypto is the ultimate buidl your own adventure game.
Life imitates art far more than art imitates life - Oscar Wilde
Potential
Crypto represents a transformative generative technology that fundamentally reshapes how value is created and distributed by enabling new forms of user interaction, through new marketplaces, and participatory capital formation, it allows communities to collectively fund and build ventures that were previously impossible.
Crypto and AI Gaming Environments will create powerful spaces where virtual, physical, and mental realms converge - a phygital playground where we can form better habits through deliberate experimentation. Like a living laboratory, this environment allows us to:
- Test ideas in low-risk simulations before implementing them in reality
- Build healthy habits through gamified challenges and rewards
- Learn from collective intelligence and shared experiences
- Transform virtual lessons into physical world progress
The key insight is that meaningful personal growth requires a harmonious blend of:
- Digital tools for tracking, analysis and accountability
- Physical spaces for real-world practice and community
- Mental frameworks for lasting habit formation
By creating these integrated practice environments, we establish Phygital Schelling Points - natural gathering places where people can come together to learn, experiment and grow. This isn't just about technology - it's about crafting spaces (virtual and physical) where human potential can flourish through intentional practice and community support.
The future of human development lies in this synthesis - where AI augments our learning, crypto aligns our incentives, and thoughtfully designed physical + digital environments help us turn aspirations into habits and habits into lasting positive change.
Fundamentals
Crypto as Generative Technology
- Crypto is a generative technology that creates new users, marketplaces and things, meeting participatory capital formation.
- Generative tech by definition creates abundance and cannibalizes the market for scarcity, as seen with the printing press.
- The Renaissance succeeded because it had generative tech (print, double-entry bookkeeping) combined with new capital formation that was participatory.
Participatory Capital
- Crypto enables new ways to build businesses and solve cold start problems that weren't possible before.
- Tokens are a new economic formation to solve cold starts, e.g. Helium incentivizing a network infrastructure build out for a fraction of the cost of incumbents.
- Crypto fulfils the internet's promise by allowing users to earn from participation, not just equity holders. Value accrues to network users.
Decentralization and Choice
- Decentralized tech breaks apart centralized control and opens up choice, which is messy but net positive.
- Successful movements open up a spectrum of options rather than just replacing one monopoly with another.
- Crypto will enable a plurality of options for identity, privacy, and utility in different contexts.
Bridging Digital and Physical Worlds
- NFTs can serve as a bidirectional bridge between the digital/synthetic world and the physical/IRL world.
- Owning digital items (NFTs) tied to physical goods enables much more rapid and liquid trading without having to ship the physical item each time.
- Helium is an example of using crypto to improve a local community IRL, e.g. renovating a historic building using proceeds from a node.
Trends
- DeFi Renaissance: Focus on Real-World Assets (RWAs), reshoring DeFi talent, U.S.-based capital formation, and decentralized finance applications.
- Consumer Apps: Exploration of on-chain applications, mobile apps, prediction markets, NFTs, on-chain gaming, loyalty engines, and the creator economy.
- Protocol R&D: Topics include blockchain design, EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine), SVM (Solana Virtual Machine), modular vs. monolithic architectures, rollups, scaling, parallelization, privacy & security, and ZK proofs.
- Token Design: Discussions on tokenomics, token generation events, cash flows and fee switches, utility, governance, and equity.
- Crypto x AI: Integration of open-source models, on-chain verifiability, decentralized physical infrastructure networks (DePIN), agents, decentralized GPUs, and incentivized training.
- Bitcoin: Addressing Bitcoin dominance, network development, scaling solutions, and institutional/nation-state adoption.
Technology
Blockchains are new open source platforms that anyone can fork, but you cannot fork culture.
Show me the incentive and I will show you the outcome - Charlie Munger