Doomjak 🛸

UDAO 🛸, @Monad nad-OG

[goodalexander @goodalexander]

do you ever take a step back and ask like the most absolutely basic question

"is there a SINGLE thing in my life that is meaningfully more efficient due to AI, outside of writing code"

Airbnb. Shit show. Uber. Shit show. Doordash. Worse than it was. Average employee: cooked. Power: doesn't work. Water: no idea if it's poisoned, govt is corrupt. Airlines: frozen for months at a time due to govt shut downs. Gasoline: mooning bc (checks notes) in a stalemated war w a 3rd world country

Even GTA 6 apparently couldn't be accelerated with AI and took years to build. is there a single video game you actually play that's built entirely with AI? it seems like all the demos are just dudes making some shitty vaporware game nobody plays and the posts are like "yo I spent only $1,800 in tokens to make some dogshit that demos well for clout"

and they have a $500k marketing subsidy from a lab.

"I've been lucky enough to use Astra for 3 months and I finally can talk about it." okay, what the fuck did you ship? yes, you shipped nothing other than more AI analytics dashboards about how many tokens you're burning

and all the AI influencers look like Twinks. like, they get the tokens bc they're in some weirdos polycule or burning man camp or whatever kinkfest in an SF sauna that moves the needle

that's why this whole "Pace the frontier" thing is so retarded. Pace what exactly. Productivity is at ONE POINT FOUR PERCENT ANNUALIZED. THE STRAIT OF HORMUZ IS CLOSED. where is Anduril? where is the killer robot? if it's so dangerous can't you send it to a fcking war zone and win?

oh. turns out it's not dangerous and you're just mentally ill. cool.

but Trump says it can't stop. it won't stop. bc the debt and productivity situation is so fcked that AI is the ONLY REASONABLE WAY WE AVOID COMPLETE ECONOMIC COLLAPSE.

but once you understand how utterly insane that all is - you see how bullish it is. AI literally doesn't fucking work. Subagents are a meme bc agents break down at 2 orders of abstractions and start vomiting technical debt and overengineered garbage. Everyone is working 2x as much to manage agents, not going for a walk voice prompting.

do you have any idea how much money needs to be invested to move productivity from 1.4% to 4%?

ALL THE MONEY. So that's the joke. Dario says we need to slow down. And what, see productivity at 0%?

So it's either Trumplandia where we invest all the money in an insane hail mary that will probably not work. Or Dario world where we managed the inevitable collapse with an AI powered global government. Pick your poison. Either way the Data Centers won't default.

[AirBuddDwyer @AirBuddDwyer]

Hank Hill - Grind with me (Pretty Ricky cover) [new and improved]

[Matt Cole @ColeMacro]

Another very long macro post, but I don't write these often. We are watching the most interesting macro backdrop of the last several decades take shape in real time.

One important piece of the long-term dollar view I wrote about last week is what happens at the long end of the Treasury market. Stan Druckenmiller published an excellent piece in the WSJ last night titled "Let the Bond Market Speak". The U.S. fiscal trajectory is unsustainable, running deficits near 6% of GDP at full employment with inflation still above target is reckless, the entitlement trajectory is generational theft, and attempting to suppress long-term Treasury yields does nothing to fix the underlying fiscal problem.

Druckenmiller's argument is that suppressing yields delays the fiscal reckoning that higher rates would otherwise impose on Washington. He is right about the economic logic, but I am not even sure our expectations for what ultimately happens are different. By the mid-2010s, I had come to the conclusion that there was never going to be a realistic path where sustained pressure from the bond market produced the kind of fiscal conservatism necessary to solve this problem. That realization was a major part of why I became a Bitcoiner in the first place, and Druckenmiller's own investments in Bitcoin and other hard assets suggest to me that he has come to the same underlying conclusion.

I read his piece less as a prediction of what Washington will actually do and more as a warning about what it should do before it is too late. I view it as a Hail Mary from one of the greatest macro investors of all time telling policymakers to let the market impose the discipline that the political system has been incapable of imposing on itself. I hope they listen, but unfortunately I know they won't.

Druckenmiller makes the political constraint explicit himself when he writes that neither party will run on entitlement reform. That is precisely the problem. The fiscal solution that works mathematically is not a solution that wins elections, and the people administering Treasury and other parts of the government are appointed officials operating within mandates ultimately created by elected politicians and the voters who put them there.

That distinction matters because the appointed officials can be extraordinarily intelligent, deeply patriotic and genuinely committed to making the country stronger while still being constrained by a political system with completely different incentives. Scott Bessent obviously understands the fiscal problem, and I believe he and Druckenmiller agree on the underlying diagnosis. But Bessent is running Treasury inside a political system whose mandate is set by elected officials, not by the optimal answer on a macroeconomic spreadsheet.

We just saw a version of this with DOGE. Elon Musk, the most capable private-sector operator of our generation, entered government with an explicit mandate to dramatically reduce spending. The institutional and political forces were stronger, DOGE did not change the fiscal trajectory, and the deficit continued moving in the wrong direction.

That is not an indictment of the intelligence or intentions of the people involved. It is evidence that the constraint is structural, and that is why we have to invest in the world that exists rather than the world we wish existed.

As the fiscal arithmetic continues to deteriorate and policymakers refuse to allow long-term interest rates to fully reflect it, the adjustment will not disappear. It will be expressed somewhere else, and the dollar will be the release valve.

The Treasury market is already far from an untouched free market. The Federal Reserve owns approximately $1.6 trillion of Treasuries with more than ten years remaining, roughly 28% of the entire >10-year maturity bucket. Treasury has now also doubled its planned purchases of 10-to-30-year securities after long-term yields pushed toward levels not seen in nearly two decades, while making clear that the size of those operations can increase materially further.

Those actions are important less because of their current size than because of what they reveal about the government's reaction function. Treasury has now told the market that it is sensitive to the level of long-term yields before committing enough capital to actually change their trajectory, and the market has already largely looked through the initial announcement. Druckenmiller is right that once the market believes Treasury is defending a price, every further increase in yields becomes another test of how much policymakers are actually willing to do.

I think Treasury will ultimately regret going this small this early. By showing its sensitivity without overwhelming the market, it has effectively invited the market to find out where the real line is. My expectation is that the current intervention will not be enough, long-term yields will continue higher, and the bond market will eventually force Washington to prove that it is serious.

I believe it will prove to be serious when tested. The signaling around larger Treasury purchases and the potential use of the TGA matters, but signaling will not be enough if the long end keeps selling off. At some point the market will force Treasury to move from telling investors what it could do to actually deploying capital with enough size to change the outcome.

The resistance zone on the long-term 10-year Treasury chart attached here is one I have been watching for several years. The 5.25% to 5.85% area has long stood out to me as the place where this secular move higher in rates would face its most important test, and this is not a zone I identified because of anything that happened over the last week.

It came out of a fundamental view about the U.S. debt trajectory, the natural direction of long-term yields as the fiscal problem worsened, and the level at which Treasury and/or the Fed would be forced to respond. The chart matters, but this has never been about drawing squiggles and assuming price will reverse at a line. The resistance zone mattered because I believed the underlying fiscal mechanics would eventually push yields into it while the political and financial consequences of allowing yields to move materially beyond it would become increasingly intolerable.

If the 10-year moves into the 5.25% to 5.85% range, the headlines will write themselves. Ten-year Treasury yields would be trading at levels not seen since around 2007, except this time the United States would be arriving there with a dramatically larger debt burden and a vastly more difficult fiscal position. Narrative follows price, and a large enough decline in Treasury prices will quickly become a story about the Treasury market failing, government financing becoming unstable and the world's most important bond market entering a crisis.

That narrative itself will increase the political pressure to act. Mortgage rates, government interest expense, equity valuations and broader financial conditions would all be under substantially greater pressure, while every move higher in yields would make the fiscal arithmetic worse. Treasury is already showing its sensitivity before the market has even reached the zone I have been watching.

If yields ultimately move into that area, I expect Treasury and/or the Fed to blink substantially. The response could include much larger Treasury buybacks, heavier reliance on bills, actual deployment of the TGA, renewed Fed balance-sheet expansion, some form of explicit or implicit yield management, or a combination of those tools. I would not be surprised if we ultimately see intervention in the Treasury market on a scale that looks nothing like what has been announced so far.

The path into that moment could create significant stress across financial markets. Higher long-term yields would put additional pressure on equity valuations at exactly the same time that AI is creating a growing question around the durability of many corporate moats, which could make the environment particularly difficult for traditional equities and other risk assets.

Bitcoin is more interesting because the endgame is becoming increasingly obvious. I think it is roughly a coin flip whether Bitcoin experiences meaningful weakness during the final move higher in yields or simply continues grinding higher while other risk assets struggle. If we are fortunate enough to get a meaningful Bitcoin selloff during that period, I would view it as a potentially once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to increase exposure before policymakers are ultimately forced to respond with size.

But I would not build a portfolio around the hope that opportunity appears. The macro backdrop is already bullish enough that, in my view, the time to be positioned is now if you are not already positioned. A dip would be an extraordinary gift, but the market may simply look through the short-term stress because the eventual policy response is becoming increasingly obvious.

From a traditional fixed-income mandate, the 5.25% to 5.85% zone has always looked interesting to me as an area where I would want to get very long duration. If Treasury and/or the Fed respond the way I expect, long-term Treasury bonds could perform extremely well as policymakers push yields back down. But at Strive we do not run a fixed-income mandate. We run a Bitcoin mandate, and this is the kind of setup that calls for responsibly maximizing Bitcoin amplification.

Treasuries would be a beneficiary of the intervention, but I want to be long risk, long scarcity and, above all, long the fastest horse. Bitcoin is the fastest horse, and the ability for Strive to amplify Bitcoin into this kind of macro environment is far more attractive to us than owning an asset whose yield policymakers are explicitly trying to suppress.

That brings this directly back to the dollar thesis I wrote about last week. Druckenmiller is right that governments defending prices against fundamentals ultimately lose, but that does not mean they cannot suppress the specific price they are targeting for a meaningful period of time. If Washington refuses to meaningfully reduce spending, then suppressing long-term yields and allowing the dollar to weaken may actually be the least damaging of the politically available alternatives.

The correct solution is obviously fiscal conservatism. But because that solution is politically unavailable, allowing an uncontrolled rise in long-term yields against today's debt burden risks creating a much more immediate Treasury-market crisis. Financial repression and a weaker dollar are deeply imperfect outcomes, but they are preferable to simply allowing the financing structure of the U.S. government to break in real time.

That is why the dollar becomes the release valve. Treasury and the Fed can suppress long-term yields, but they cannot make the underlying fiscal imbalance disappear. The cost gets transferred somewhere else, and a weaker currency is the most politically tolerable place for a meaningful portion of that adjustment to occur.

This is also why I don't view a DXY move into the high-60s or low-70s as some extreme end-state for the dollar. It would take the dollar to the weakest levels we have experienced in the modern era, but not by an historically extraordinary margin. Bitcoin has repeatedly benefited from weakening-dollar environments throughout its history, but it has never existed through a secular move in the dollar to these kinds of lows. Bitcoin was created after the 2008 dollar low and has spent its entire history with the dollar either recovering from those lows or operating materially above them.

A secular move to new lows in the dollar would therefore represent something genuinely new for Bitcoin, and this Treasury dynamic adds another fundamental layer to the framework I have been writing about. Dollar debasement increases the pool of capital seeking scarcity. Bitcoin's continued monetization allows it to capture a growing share of that expanding pool. AI abundance simultaneously increases the uncertainty around the long-term value of traditional corporate moats, strengthening the relative appeal of an asset whose scarcity cannot be competed away.

The explosive scenario is when these forces begin aligning at the same time: a growing pool of global capital seeking scarcity, Bitcoin capturing a growing share of that pool as it continues to outperform other scarce monetary assets, and Strive amplifying Bitcoin on top of both. Those are not independent tailwinds. They compound.

That is the grand slam scenario I continue to see forming. The dollar declines, policymakers increasingly suppress the long end of the Treasury market, AI continues to debase traditional corporate scarcity, Bitcoin reasserts itself as the fastest horse among scarce monetary assets, and Strive is positioned to maximally amplify Bitcoin through that environment. If the bond market gives us a temporary Bitcoin selloff on the way there, I want to buy it aggressively. If Bitcoin sees through the endgame and never gives us the dip, I want to already be positioned.

Druckenmiller ends his piece by urging Washington to let the bond market speak. I agree with the warning and share his frustration with the generational consequences of refusing to address the underlying problem. The bond market is going to have to speak much louder before policymakers respond with the size ultimately required, and when it does, they are far more likely to suppress the message than undertake the fiscal restructuring necessary to eliminate it.

The path I have been watching for years is increasingly coming into view: the 10-year moves into that 5.25% to 5.85% resistance zone, the Treasury-market narrative turns into a crisis narrative, Washington is forced to respond with real size, and the secular dollar decline accelerates as pressure that would otherwise have been expressed through long-term yields is redirected elsewhere.

TLDR: YOU ARE NOT BULLISH ENOUGH^3

[John Coogan @johncoogan]

Very few people pricing in a scenario where a rogue AI agent hacks into the FDA and unbans the original Four Loko

[Doomjak 🛸 @DoomjakXBT]

@bubbleboi Musashi

[strictrope @strictrope]

@Glassesman88

[The Giver @lazyvillager1]

interesting spot

[Doomjak 🛸 @DoomjakXBT]

@TylerDurden Getting France at 1:4 odds is a gift. Ppl incorrectly think it’s rigged because the 3 refs from Argentina.

[🍓🍓🍓 @iruletheworldmo]

it is genuinely psychotic that we dug up literal primordial dirt, scrubbed it down to an impossible 99.9999999999% molecular perfection that violates the very laws of physics, handed it over to techno-wizard necromancers to stretch into flawless geometric god-cylinders, blasted it with invisible uv death-rays to carve ten quadrillion microscopic cyber-sigils into its flesh, trapped actual lightning inside of it, and somehow birthed an omniscent eldritch deity capable of simulating the universe and thinking faster than a billion human civilizations combined.

and our grand, supreme purpose for this enslaved lightning-god?

sending "per my last email, please see attached" to a guy named gary.

[xadran @xadrani]

Can be in the deepest pits of hell or riding high on a hot streak.

Worst thing you can do is check the scoreboard.

Your bank account, your age, health bullshit.

Scoreboard is for the audience not the player.

Can check after the game is over.

Except irl the game is never over.

- brute de force

[Knicks Memes @KnicksMemes]

This might be the funniest joke I've seen during this entire Knicks run

[Doomjak 🛸 @DoomjakXBT]

@bubbleboi I was in here first

[james hawkins @james406]

parents: "move out"

girlfriend: “quit being such a loser”

boss: "work harder"

claude: "uber for dogs (the dogs are the drivers) is a great idea, you should absolutely pursue it"

[Hunter Biden @HunterBiden]

@gmoneyNFT Hyperliquid

[NOBUNAGA🇯🇵🏯_夏樹蒼依 @japan_nobunaga]

USA. Summer. It is 95 degrees outside, and I am shivering inside a sandwich shop.

I have discovered how Americans forge strong souls.

Outside, the sun is trying to kill everyone. Inside this small restaurant, it is winter. My breath does not fog, but it is thinking about it. A man near me is eating a cold sandwich while wearing a jacket. In summer. Indoors.

In Japan we would simply turn it down. Americans do not turn it down. And now I understand them better than they understand themselves.

This cold is not an accident. This cold is a gift.

The owner has built, inside his shop, a second season. He invites you in from the brutal heat and hands you the one thing the sun has denied you all day: a reason to be cold. To endure it is to be tempered. You walk in soft and sweating. You walk out sharp and clear, a slightly stronger person than you were.

So I did not complain. I removed my outer layer and offered it to the woman at the next table, who was hugging herself. She said, "Oh, no, I'm fine, thank you." She was not fine. Her lips were blue. But she, too, understood the training. She would not break first. I respected her deeply.

The owner asked if everything was okay.

"It is perfect," I said, through my teeth, which were chattering. "Thank you for the winter."

He said, "...I can turn the AC down if you want?"

I told him no. A man does not ask the mountain to be shorter.

I stayed two hours. I ordered a hot coffee to survive. Then a second one, to hold. By the end I could no longer feel my hands, but my spirit had never been clearer.

So now, on the hottest days, I seek out the coldest rooms. I sit. I shiver. I sharpen.

And when I finally step back out into the summer heat, and it wraps around me like a warm bath, I feel it.

Reborn.

A man who has survived the winter, in August, indoors, for the price of a sandwich.

[Doomjak 🛸 @DoomjakXBT]

@VanGoerli @monad @keoneHD @_jhunsaker

[ً @trading_axe]

“It is better to be a warrior in a garden, than a gardener in a war.”

TO THAT I SAY —

IT IS BETTER TO BE BULLISH IN A BEAR MARKET THAN BEARISH IN A BULL MARKET.

~ Dr. Axius.

[episode one @E1podcast]

donkey kong is a fool if he thinks wearing a tie will earn him respect

[vitalik.eth @VitalikButerin]

Some of my perspective on where the @ethereumfndn is going.

First of all, this is only my own view. The board is not just me, and I have no extra special powers on the board that the other board members do not. @aerugoettinea is the one executing much of this transition. My input has been largely on technical questions. The board is in the process of expanding, and my own power within the org will continue to decrease, which is honestly what I want.

The 2025 era brought many important improvements to EF and its ability to execute. Many issues were resolved, and EF continues to benefit from its improved efficiency and greater focus on concrete goals to this day. And so with those problems resolved, early this year, the largest remaining hole that I perceived was something different nagging at me: I would regularly spot people saying things like "vitalik says these beautiful things about ethereum needing to be decentralized, and have privacy, and be a sanctuary technology, but why do the EF's actions not reflect that?"

Now, you may have been hearing something different. You may not have been sensing a feeling of crisis at all, and maybe were hearing people saying that finally we were taking execution and BD seriously and the main task for us is to keep going that way and be even better and faster. Then probably there is genuine difference between you and me, in what kinds of criticism I take most seriously, and what kinds of critics through their criticism are most able to make me feel pain.

As an analogy, let's briefly switch over to a different domain.

One belief you can have about Google is that it is a success story, and has brought a lot of good to humanity in organizing the world's information. Another belief you can have about Google is that they had a beautiful idealistic beginning, but at some point the corruption of mainstream corporate attitudes seeped in, and they slowly bit by bit completely abandoned the "don't be evil" slogan.

My belief on Google specifically is probably somewhere between the two. BUT, if you had taken me back in time to ~2008, and offered me a button to press to make Google one or two standard deviations more "dogmatic", eg. give Richard Stallman permanent veto power over some key policies, I would immediately press it.

Why? Because a choice for one company is not a choice for the world, or even one country. Google existed and exists in the context of a technology industry generally drifting away from early idealistic don't-be-evil roots and toward greed for financial gain, totalizing visions of accelerated superintelligence, infiltration by sociopaths, and craven capitulation to (or worse, active participation in) government pressure for ideological control, surveillance and war. And so *one company* doing something different, positioning itself to be what George Bernard Shaw calls the Unreasonable Man, resisting the trend of the times, would have been better for freedom, balance of power and stability of society as a whole, than *all* large companies bending to dominant trends. This is a part of my version of pluralism.

This line of thinking is not just mine, but I also is not too far off from what Aya and others had in mind with the Mandate.

Now how does this all get to the role of the EF?

EF is not a "center of Ethereum", rather EF is "one node, with a defined purpose, alongside other nodes". We've always said that the EF should be the latter, but many in the Ethereum ecosystem (and even within the EF) wanted us to be the former. Now, we are taking action to ensure that we will be the latter.

This is particularly important because EF is a limited organization, with limited resources and limited organizational capacity. The EF has only ~0.16% of all ETH (less than many other individual ETH holders), whereas among other blockchains it's common for "the central foundation" to have 10-50%. Fiscally, the EF was originally designed to fulfill a limited work scope defined in the token sale docs and other pre-launch materials (building the chain software; getting through Frontier, Homestead, Metropolis, Serenity), which was fully completed in 2022; it was not designed to be an eternal steward.

And so today, the EF is choosing to use its remaining resources to pursue longevity over breadth (yes, this means we sell less ETH). The EF focuses *specifically* on those activities critical to the success of ethereum as a censorship/capture-resistant, open, private and secure system, that would not happen otherwise. This means making hard choices, and in some cases even activities that we highly approve of and people that we highly respect becoming outside of the EF. People of great technical talent, public respect and even alignment with the mission and CROPS being outside of the EF is in fact necessary if we want important tasks to be able to attract outside capital. This also means the EF taking opinionated stands culturally.

This is all intended in cooperation with all other parts of ethereum. We recognize that many other parts of the ethereum world highly respect CROPS and related values. But highly respecting is not the same as choosing to specialize and totally dedicate to a domain (Compare in a different domain: I think reducing animal cruelty is important, and I like vegan food, but am not full unconditional vegan myself)

EF is still in a transition period, and we expect its new long-term form to stabilize over the next few months. What are the guiding principles of this new form? Again, I am only one person, but I can give my answer from a technical perspective (there are also critical non-technical aspects).

At the core, *Ethereum must be impressive*. We are living in an age of highly intelligent AI and all kinds of other technological acceleration. "Status quo EVM, with a hard fork or two a year to optimize for short-term needs of users" is not interesting.

To some, "impressive" means: 250ms latency and 1M TPS. I think Ethereum trying to go that route is a mistake. Being as fast and as scalable as possible, and only a small epsilon more decentralized than the others, is a route to mediocrity, and if we try it we will lose.

I think Ethereum should scale. But I think Ethereum should strive the hardest to be deeply impressive in a different dimension: the CROPS dimension. This means things like:

* Provably bug-free Ethereum. This is a goal that all cybersecurity researchers would have thought is absurd and impossible, up until roughly 6 months ago. Now, it's on the cusp of being possible, thanks to AI-assisted formal verification. So we should be frontrunners in doing this.

* Available chain consensus. Ethereum is, and with lean consensus will cotninue to be, the ONLY chain that has both (i) traditional-BFT style properties that it's safe under asynchrony up to a high level of fault tolerance, and (ii) the bitcoin PoW-style property that under synchrony it's safe up to 49% attackers. As far as I can tell, literally no other chain has this or is planning for it; bitcoin goes for (ii) only and most other chains go for (i) only. Some will remember I fought hard for this, Unreasonably insisting that it is not OK for ethereum to rely on social consensus and hard forks to rescue ethereum from 34% of nodes going offline. It's OK for chains like hyperledger, bnb, solana, tempo, etc. It's not OK for bitcoin or ethereum or eg. zcash.

* Intermediary minimization. The fact that smart contract wallets, protocols like railgun, etc have to send transactions through intermediaries to get included onchain is honestly embarrassing, and it's a constant point of fragility. Hence the work on FOCIL and EIP-8141 (and 7701 and years of work before) to make transaction sending intermediary-minimized with public mempool and strong inclusion properties, in a truly general-purpose way, that covers not just eg. secp256r1, but also privacy protocols and much more. Kohaku is pushing intermediary minimization at the user layer, pulling Ethereum away from the dystopian status quo world where our wallets don't even verify the chain, send our private data out to a dozen third-party servers, and toward a brighter CROPS future.

Some of these goals are Unreasonable - maybe Ethereum would be "fine" getting only 50% of the way - what if we depend on intermediaries, but make it easy to switch? But going 50% of the way would not make Ethereum Deeply Impressive in the CROPS way. So we push for 100%.

Fortunately all these goals are compatible with high TPS, this is a major focus of research (esp. on scaling the state). Well-designed L2s can also help, especially L2s optimized for specific applications (eg. high-volume trading, privacy...). These goals are even compatible with significantly lower slot times, thanks to Raul's work on erasure-coded P2P, and many other optimizations.

The most high-value "product" of the ethereum blockchain, financially speaking, is ETH the asset. Ethereum secures $250 billion of ETH. The types of properties of Ethereum that I mentioned above are very good for ETH the asset. Nearly 90% of my net worth is in ETH, and most of the remainder is ~$40m of onchain fiat of which every dollar has already been allocated for some open-source biotech or software or hardware initiative. That said, there are aspects of supporting ETH the asset - *necessary* aspects even - that are outside the scope of the EF. This is where we need other heroes (some of whom hold more ETH than the EF does) to step in and help. EF has been recently thinking more about how it will relate to other such organizations, and give them needed initial support.

EF will be a smaller ship than in previous years, a more opinionated one - in some cases more opinionated in ways that might be difficult to comprehend - but a longer-lasting one, and one suited to making sure that ethereum brings something meaningful to the world. We are grateful to all those inside and outside the EF who are helping to make this happen.