Bitcoin is at 100k; we have a crypto-friendly president, and everyone is angry.
The Overton window has firmly shifted. This time, it actually is different.
But not like we expected.
The Trump presidency presents this weird conundrum—a thousand thoughts have entered my mind about what this could mean for my internet coins. On one hand, we have the most powerful man in the world bull-posting our coins. But on the other hand, he's using his power and influence to launch dilutive meme coins, enrich his family, and generally maximally extract capital from this space.
The truth is stranger than fiction.
When Bitcoiners first mapped out their game theory plans for how it would take over the world, many predicted that governments would first fight us, and then we would win. And at first glance, it feels like that might actually have been correct.
Bitcoin has won. It's gone from being evil people's money used to fund bad people's things to freedom money, embraced and promoted by the most powerful institutions, individuals, and even nations on Earth.
Larry Fink, Donald Trump, Stanley Druckenmiller, Ray Dalio, Elon Musk—all at some point have spoken happy-sounding words about Bitcoin. This is a far cry from where we were a decade ago when the only use case was buying a pizza or having environmental protesters glue themselves to your driveway because you personally were murdering the planet.
But for those of us who spend 16 hours a day staring at the computer, talking to our weirdo internet friends, and wildly gambling on make-believe money:
Well, I think things are about to get weirder, and probably a lot harder.
For all of crypto history, we've been able to wildly speculate on what the "future" of these things might bring. "The world will come on-chain," "everyone will transact in stablecoins," "NFTs will replace physical art," "DeFi will replace the banking system."
But historically, none of this stuff has ever really been possible. The tech wasn't there yet, and the governments hated us. It would be easier for them if we didn't really exist, so they bullied us in every way they knew how.
As a result, teams spent all of their mental energy trying to design products that kept them out of jail while still maximally pumping the price.
Actual good user experience was at the bottom of the priority list for the longest time.
In some ways, this worked out very well for us internet nerds. One of the main tactics teams used to pump the price and stay out of jail was literally handing a bunch of us tens of thousands of dollars in the form of airdrops.
CoinGecko tells me the top 50 biggest airdrops amount to $26 billion in 'free money.'
And because of this weird dynamic where it was basically impossible to create anything actually good, we instead imagined that all these things had already achieved their goals and priced them accordingly.
We've seen Layer 1s without users being valued higher than most tech companies, ponzi stablecoins valued higher than nation-states' GDPs, and monkey pictures trading for more than houses.
I guess what I'm trying to get at in my badly worded way is that this entire industry has been designed based on a broken incentive structure.
It has been just as easy to get rich by talking about building something as it is to actually build something. And while a lot of us criticise this, we also have directly benefited from it.
And I think this might all be about to change.
Pro-crypto governments and regulations mean that finally we can start to build serious things for serious people.
And while this is WILDLY bullish for the overall industry, I have absolutely no idea what it means for us idiots.
In a world where legal clarity enables real innovation, do the innovators continue to give us free money?
Where there is legal clarity, do the professionals come on-chain and dampen the degen spirit that exists today?
If crypto projects have innovated and have "actual users," what happens to all the apps that still have no users?
If governments now embrace us rather than hate us, do we walk blindfolded into using chains that are far more centralised?
When there is zero barrier to entry to creating a token, do all tokens get diluted?
With better quality apps, do we see humongous inflows from actual users rushing to spend their money in the on-chain economy? Does this money stay here or get extracted back out?
Do we end up with a Web 2.0-like scenario where seven companies make ALL of the money, and everything else is pretty worthless in comparison?
Do your lineage's futures depend on you buying those seven coins, and if you miss them, you spend all of eternity impoverished because you held onto Ethereum for too long?
Does Michael Saylor FSH all his Bitcoins because he is a madman, and that would be quite funny, and we all become poor anyway?
Does the Ethereum Foundation self-combust, and we watch as Vitalik goes on a rampage and creates a new blockchain with his new Milady spirit?
What if Trump decides that actually he wants a USA chain, and airdrops tokens to every citizen and heavily taxes all other chains and tokens?
Does all this mean number go up or number go down?
The honest answer is I literally have no clue. It's probably the least clear my mind has been in the past five years.
All I know is that everything is going to change, and crypto will not look remotely similar in four years' time.
So what am I doing about it?
Because I am very dumb and have gotten extremely lucky over the past few years, I'm taking some chips off the table.
No longer can I tolerate having 95% of my net worth in make-believe money that goes down 95% every few years.
I'm far too afraid of my girlfriend to tell her that I bet our entire future on an orange man keeping his campaign promises after I'd already bet everything and won on him winning the election.
I think I'll actually perform better in the future if my brain knows that if I mess up, I won't have to sleep under a bridge because some of my assets are in 'real things' now.
I'm also fairly terrified of how sophisticated scams and phishing attempts will get later this year. Now we have AI that can write better than basically any human. I don't think it'll be long until these bots are specifically designed to trick you into giving them your keys.
I want to hedge against this outcome too. Having multiple devices, multiple wallets, multiple chains—a Horcrux approach and hardware wallets are more important than ever before.
I'm holding all of my Bitcoin. It's still the only asset in this space I really, truly believe in and think has many multiples left in it over the rest of this decade.
And my plan is to just take it as it comes. The future is going to be wild. Innovation is going to happen. Crypto as a space is going to grow tremendously, and there will be tons and tons and tons of opportunity.
I want to be nimble. I want to have stablecoins available for all of the new exciting stuff that gets built. All the experiments, all the dumb stuff, all the memes.
I don't want to take any of this too seriously. I want to have fun, make money, and enjoy myself.
So that is the plan. Take some profits. Secure my life. HODL my Bitcoin and try to make it all back again on whatever happens next.
The future is going to be weird. At least make sure you enjoy it.
DO NOT LISTEN TO THIS POST IT IS NOT FINANCIAL ADVICE I AM INCREDIBLY STUPID. IF YOU SELL YOUR COINS THEY WILL GO TO A TRILLION AND IF YOU HOLD THEM THEY WILL GO TO ZERO. CLOSE THIS PAGE. STOP READING. DO NOT FOLLOW ME. I AM DUMB.