Purtle

Decentralized, transparent, permissionless, programmable, trustless, censorship-resistant, unbanked, self-sovereign degen

[Ignas | DeFi @DefiIgnas]

1. Crypto crashing despite rising dollar anxiety
2. Can no longer say 'we're so early'
3. Crypto Twitter is dead
4. Institutional adoption already happened, tailwind spent
5. Regulatory environment is already as good as it gets
6. AI crowding out electricity for miners
7. Crypto is Epstein-adjacent (Epstein Files)
8. Quantum computing threat to BTC's security model
9. DATs like Strategy are now sellers
10. AI taking all the smart-tech mental share
11. Other markets pumping hard (SK Hynix +250%, Micron +260% YTD)
12. Everything rally is back, Goldman non-profitable tech basket mooning like 2021

Yep, I feel it all.

[Wilfred Frost @WilfredFrost]

This is a critical factor to consider. Great piece by @jburnmurdoch @ft

What if remote working, not AI, is to blame for weak junior hiring?
https://t.co/xxLrHF8Nyu

[a16z @a16z]

College CS enrollment is declining

Charts of the Week: https://t.co/O1SZEaWPFX

[Purtle @knwlim]

@minjang_kim 와우 30명 ㄷㄷ 실리콘벨리의 M7이라고 칭송받는 기업도 이런 난리가 난다니 뭔가 빨간약 먹은 기분이네요... 직장인은 직장인일 뿐이다...

[TFTC @TFTC21]

Ken Griffin went home on a Friday "fairly depressed" after watching AI agents at Citadel do work that used to take teams of PhDs in finance months to complete. Done in days.

His words: "These are not mid-tier white collar jobs. These are extraordinarily high skilled jobs being automated by agentic AI."

This is the head of one of the most successful hedge funds in history saying the people he pays seven figures to analyze markets and structure deals are being replaced by software that works in hours instead of months. Not theoretically. In his own office. Right now.

The Coatue deck we covered earlier this week called agents "the biggest unlock" in AI. Griffin just confirmed it from the buy side. The shift from copilots to agents is not a future event. It is already happening at the highest levels of finance.

[Cred @CryptoCred]

Crypto's current state is a bit shit

1. Market cap is not an indicator of quality - the top 50 is made up of ghost coins or bloated governance slop that has underperformed and is uninvestable

2. The long tail speculative stuff went from high risk high reward to 'some dude in Miami is going to zero this if you hold it for more than 5.9 seconds'

3. Everything is extremely correlated and you can't meaningfully make bets based on sectors as it all converges into a tightly correlated mush, especially to the downside

4. Broad brush alt season is an artefact of the past that's very hard to replicate given (2) and given that there are simply too many coins and the excess of speculation doesn't really happen on centralised exchanges anymore - it's been siphoned off to bundled shit in max PvP settings

5. Crypto reputationally is no longer the sexy frontier of speculation. Institutional bid is in AI, retail speculative bid is in 0DTE equities, single name stocks etc.

6. Convexity has flattened. Even a lot of the historically safe blue chip stuff (BTC, ETH etc.) has underperformed and the historical anchor of 'buy deep drawdowns because all-time highs are guaranteed and explosive' has disappointed. All the shit we used to put up with because of the accessibly massive trend and momentum effects is now harder to justify because those same effects are getting neutered or siphoned off into other arenas.

The obvious rebuttal is 'cycles' but even this past cycle is a useful counterpoint: it was extremely concentrated versus broad brush wealth effect, plus something very obviously broke after 10/10.

So what does this all mean?

1. In previous cycles, nailing timing was enough and selection was the cherry on top (rising tide lifted all boats). I don't think that holds - both timing and selection matter now and in the future.

2. Participation alone can be an edge if the asset class is early enough and/or mispriced enough. I don't think that holds either, and we might actually have to learn how to trade (fuck).

3. Hopefully I'm an idiot doomposting the bottom

GM

[Simon Kuestenmacher @simongerman600]

I’ve never seen a map that makes more sense.

[Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸 @pmarca]

AI increases workload. Many such cases.

[banteg @banteg]

i expanded this eval to 25 languages and evaluated gpt-5.4 medium /fast in codex

you can see the full results below
https://t.co/FVdu6Zmm0u

[OpenAI @OpenAI]

Introducing EVMbench—a new benchmark that measures how well AI agents can detect, exploit, and patch high-severity smart contract vulnerabilities. https://t.co/op5zufgAGH

[Purtle @knwlim]

AI benchmarks are losing their relevance

Solving abstract puzzles or passing theoretical exams doesn't prove real understanding

At some point we're going to hit a wall with these artificial tests and realize that assessing human intelligence is harder than we thought

[moon @MoonOverlord]

Cryptocurrency was an experimental financial operation conducted by the central intelligence agency please return to your normal job, thank you for your cooperation.

[Purtle @knwlim]

@parsec_finance 🙏

[Purtle @knwlim]

@cremieuxrecueil Isn’t there a survey by the EU agency for fundamental rights showing high prevalence rates of sexual violence in sweden compared to other european countries?

[zoomer @zoomerfied]

[ ZOOMER ]

ETHEREUM FOUNDER VITALIK BUTERIN SAYS THE ORIGINAL VISION FOR L2'S "NO LONGER MAKES SENSE", UNLESS THEY CAN "EXTREMELY SCALE" OR DO SOMETHING NOVEL: X

[Ignas | DeFi @DefiIgnas]

Twitter was better than X.

- Thread > Articles. You could quote tweet specific arguments. The new algo now kills threads.

- Short 280-character tweets forced concise thinking. The art of brevity is super needed in this AI slop world.

- 'For you' reduced the need to follow new accounts, making it tough for new creators to grow. To grow now, you need loud, polarizing, clickbait posts.

- Creator payments distort incentives: Twitter was about organic idea-sharing for the sake of it. Not commercialized attention that incentivizes spam, bots, and rage-bait.

View count is great though.

Elon & Nikita are now fixing problems they themselves created.

[Steve Hou @stevehou]

Mark Carney’s speech at Davos was eloquent and sobering, and rightly praised. Yet Friedrich Merz’s address is likely to prove far more consequential in practice. I strongly recommend listening to it in full.

“Germany has gotten the message.”

That was the core signal. Merz deliberately spoke in his imperfect English to underscore it. Though more technical and dry than rhetorical, he projected a seriousness and resolve I haven’t heard from a European leader in years.

Germany now appears determined to push and, if necessary, force through the European Parliament the key EU reforms laid out in the Draghi report. The goal: position Europe to survive and compete in the era of great-power politics.

Read the speech sentence by sentence. Watch for concrete policy commitments, industrial targets, and fiscal priorities. The European revival agenda got off to a slow start and many wrote it off, but I think it may be accelerating now.

[vitalik.eth @VitalikButerin]

“Ethereum was not created to make finance efficient or apps convenient. It was created to set people free”

This was an important - and controversial - line from the Trustless Manifesto ( https://t.co/QAvZfiNxpe ), and it is worth revisiting it and better understanding what it means.

“efficient” and “convenient” have the connotation of improving the average case, in situations where it’s already pretty good. Efficiency is about telling the world's best engineers to put their souls into reducing latency from 473 ms to 368ms, or increasing yields from 4.5% APY to 5.3% APY. Convenience is about people making one click instead of three, and reducing signup times from 1 min to 20 sec.

These things can be good to do. But we must do them under the understanding that we will never be as good at this game as the Silicon Valley corporate players. And so the primary underlying game that Ethereum plays must be a different game. What is the game? Resilience.

Resilience is the game where it’s not about 4.5% APY vs 5.3% APY - rather, it’s about minimizing the chance that you get -100% APY.

Resilience is the game where if you become politically unpopular and get deplatformed, or if a the developers of your application go bankrupt or disappear, or if Cloudflare goes down, or if an internet cyberwar breaks out, your 2000ms latency continues to be 2000ms.

Resilience is the game where anyone, anywhere in the world will be able to access the network and be a first-class participant.

Resilience is sovereignty. Not sovereignty in the sense of lobbying to become a UN member state and shaking hands at Davos in two weeks, but sovereignty in the sense that people talk about "digital sovereignty" or "food sovereignty" - aggressively reducing your vulnerabilities to external dependencies that can be taken away from you on a whim. This is the sense in which the world computer can be sovereign, and in doing so make its users also sovereign.

This baseline is what enables interdependence as equals, and not as vassals of corporate overlords thousands of kilometers away.

This is the game that Ethereum is suited to win, and it delivers a type of value that, in our increasingly unstable world, a lot of people are going to need.

The fundamental DNA of web2 consumer tech is not suited to resilience. The fundamental DNA of _finance_ often spends considerable effort on resilience, but it is a very partial form of resilience, good at solving for some types of risks but not others.

Blockspace is abundant. Decentralized, permissionless and resilient blockspace is not. Ethereum must first and foremost be decentralized, permissionless and resilient block space - and then make that abundant.

[Purtle @knwlim]

@VitalikButerin milady

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

I've never felt this much behind as a programmer. The profession is being dramatically refactored as the bits contributed by the programmer are increasingly sparse and between. I have a sense that I could be 10X more powerful if I just properly string together what has become available over the last ~year and a failure to claim the boost feels decidedly like skill issue. There's a new programmable layer of abstraction to master (in addition to the usual layers below) involving agents, subagents, their prompts, contexts, memory, modes, permissions, tools, plugins, skills, hooks, MCP, LSP, slash commands, workflows, IDE integrations, and a need to build an all-encompassing mental model for strengths and pitfalls of fundamentally stochastic, fallible, unintelligible and changing entities suddenly intermingled with what used to be good old fashioned engineering. Clearly some powerful alien tool was handed around except it comes with no manual and everyone has to figure out how to hold it and operate it, while the resulting magnitude 9 earthquake is rocking the profession. Roll up your sleeves to not fall behind.