@BlackstarXXI The question is legit🤷♂️. I guess it’s always the same with art. No Need for Innovation or who was first or second. Either people like it and buy one or people say nah, too expensive. And then there are collectors who dig deeper into a project and decide to give it a try.
You can now enable Claude to use your computer to complete tasks.
It opens your apps, navigates your browser, fills in spreadsheets—anything you'd do sitting at your desk.
Research preview in Claude Cowork and Claude Code, macOS only.
1/ On Losing Faith
Is it over?
Was it all a fever dream?
Have we run out of steam?
Is it time to pivot to AI for real this time?
2/ Everything is dead?
BTC: DAT premiums down, nobody cares
ETH: Stablecoin
Alts: Crushed
NFTs: Right click saved
Meme coins: As expected tbh
Zcash: Pumping! which ofc means "cycle is over"
3/ This is the worst cryptotwitter timeline I have ever seen relative to the environment.
Nobody is attacking us, USA is being reasonable and rational, no CEX has run away with our money, and yet, dead, dead, dead.
No narrative, no spark, nothing.
4/ Why?
I read the timeline and it tells me:
a/"nobody owns BTC" (odd, I mean someone has to own BTC, there is a ton of BTC)
and
b/ "the gamblers have liquidated themselves (again)" - true, but it was always like this
5/ This TL feels different. This does not feel like
"fuck I got liquidated", it feels like malaise, tiredness.
Like boredom, to be honest.
I know you think it is the price action but the price action is obviously downstream from psychology.
6/ I have a different view of what is going on.
I think almost everyone forgot what matters, chased after things that did not matter and, we are in the process of discovering they don't matter.
7/ What matters? Only decentralization, only permissionlessness. Nothing else matters at all.
Everything else about crypto is WORSE than a centralized database and always will be because that is how computers work.
8/ In my view, basically everyone "major" except vitalik has strayed from the light on this.
Let's start with Team BTC which USED to be very interested in how to build a network that become nation-state resistant.
This was the BTC of Antonopoulos, of Lopp
9/ We are 5 years into the BTC of Saylor and that BTC is 100% about driving price action.
It is about driving flows to BTC, about getting fully integrated with the USA financial system.
10/ It sounds nice, it sounds better than the system beating us with a big stick, but the net effect is that more and more BTC ends up in Coinbase Custody in New York State
Nothing wrong with that, but none of that BTC is nation-state resistant.
It is 100% non-resistant to the US government specifically.
11/ The problem with this is that with permissionlessness off the table, the only thing left to drive purchases of BTC is FOMO.
"there are only 21M, they are going to run out, you need to buy some before others do and it goes exponential"
12/ I mean, maybe that is true.
I am not making price predictions, I still own BTC and always will I think.
But it is cringe, and it is wrong.
13/ You can think about this by taking it to the extreme case and trying to understand which of the two scenarios adds value to the world.
14/
Scenario A: Blackrock owns all 21M BTC, everyone on planet earth owns shares in the Blackrock ETF and Brian Armstrong is in charge of making sure we don't lose Our Precious
Scenario B: Everyone on earth has their own BTC wallet and BTC is distributed in several billion places around the world and it is literally impossible for any government to stop BTC
15/ In Scenario A, BTC is a complete and utter failure. It is just a pet rock. Yes it is "rare" but it is also "100% seize-able by the USA government"
At which point, it might as well be an IOU from the USA government that it pinky-swears is rare
16/ "but it is not like this because other nation-states are accumulating and game theory blah blah blah"
No my brothers and sisters.
The exact scenario where your BTC get seized is a) centralized and b) hyperbitcoinization
Maybe the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve is happening and it is your ETF and $STRATEGY (TM) capital stack all along (thank you for your contribution to our national security)
17/ To be clear, nobody is seizing your BTC (let alone your ETH) now because it is not important enough yet.
But, if it was, I dunno, I would not trust those centralized vehicles.
CEO, Board, shareholders, SEC, US government, state government, custody firm, their regulators all have an angle of attack on a DAT.
18/ If USA seizes BTC, other countries won't save you:
EU: "Thank god our dreams have come true, we can ban it also"
UAE: "grumble grumble, but fine we will go along"
China: "ban. unban. ban. unban. anyway so long as currency is not free-floating, BTC won't be free here"
Russia: "someone falls out of a window"
19/ Of course, BTC in ETFs is by no means the worst of it. The "crypto's main use is a casino" crowd is the worst.
This is not a zero-sum game, it is a negative sum game because it is rigged.
20/ "what about the JPGs huh?" -> I still love them.
The best ones are the best tokens in the world by far, rare, suffused with meaning, with no external dependencies and great to hold on-chain.
And beyond the art JPGs, I think that NFTs can do many more things, but this is on me to "show, not tell"
21/ I want to circle back to BTC because it is the easiest to reason about.
When people explained to me time and time again that it was a ponzi, I had a simple explanation of why it is not.
21/ BTC lets you do some things better than the existing system. "be sovereign over your money" or "send money to anyone on the planet within minutes" or "maintain an insurance policy against the existing financial system"
22/ I could not tell you how much value this had, but I knew it was not zero.
In fact, the value went up the more people used it, the bigger the network was, the more people you could transact with, the more resilient it was to government censorship.
These are the economics of a network system, not of a ponzi.
23/ If you take this away, if you stop building a network but instead just, at the extreme, just sell everyone shares of the ETF, well there is no network, there is no incremental network value being generated by the next buyer.
24/ In this model, BTC becomes more ponzi-like.
If a new participant does not make the network stronger by joining, they are not adding value, therefore there is a fixed pie and it is just value transfer to an existing holder.
25/ Again, take it to the extreme other direction -> assume we managed to move the whole economy to decentralized rails.
I think that world would be better, it would make better decisions, it would take advantage of the wisdom of crowds, there would be more transparency, less rent-seeking and the aggregate value of the world goes up because it is more productive.
Some % of the improved value of the world will get captured by the early participants to the network (which is normal and fair) but some % will be captured by everyone (as a late participant or consumer).
26/ But if we don't make the world better, if the world is exactly what it is, but also we play with a pet rock, this will not happen and, well, eventually playing with pet rocks gets very boring
27/ So what to do?
The same things you always should do:
a/ push yourself, and by extension, the world an inch, a foot, a mile down the pathway of decentralization.
many ways to do this, it is a journey, start today.
b/ remember, you, yes, you in the mirror have no business trading perps or day-trading stupid coins.
you are bad at it and your future self will be mad at your current self.
28/ If you must do it, carve out a budget and test how great you are across the cycle with your budget (1%, 5%, 10%, 20% of your portfolio, not all of it)
I am of course a dinosaur, but my total portfolio % of "putting money into stupid coins I have been FOMOed into it" is less than 1%. It has gone about as well as you might expect.
29/ Other than that, own some BTC, some ETH, some NFTs (good ones, that you like) in a self-custodial wallet, a small number of your favorite alts if you must.
And keep your job. Earn money, don't try to be a pro crypto trader, this is an imaginary job that only cobie and like 5 other people are qualified for.
I have always worked, every single day of my adult life. You should too.
30/ Crypto is a bad way to get rich quick, but a decent way to get rich slowly. In any case, you should have some stake in the decentralized world, in the digital world.
31/ I think in the end, "it" will be OK but "it" it not everything, it is not most things. As it always was, most coins will go to zero, most NFTs will go to zero. These are the rules of the game.
32/ Most of you are young. You have time, you have time into the ASI world, you have the greatest gift and wealth of all. You will be ok.
33/ Don't mope. It does not help anything. If you are bummed out, sad about your outcomes, there is only one sure thing that helps.
Get back to working.
34/ Even if you are young, life is short, your life is the important thing, money is just a game, just a tool, just an information system.
Don't anchor to your wealth, don't anchor to your ATH, it is not real, my ATH wealth has gone down 90% multiple times. Note it and just keep going.
If you are healthy, in a decent country, in a half-decent economic situation, you are better off than almost anyone who has ever lived
35/ If you have an opinion (even a dumb one) about Monad or Grifters, you are in the 0.001% most forward thinking people in the world.
Did you make a "mistake"?
Who cares, everyone makes mistakes - keep going, keep trying, keep making mistakes, eventually you will find your way, you will get a win.
This is how it goes.
36/ use a hardware wallet and even better a SAFE
37/ and to close again with the most important thing. decentralization is the only thing that matters.
if you go in that direction, if we go in that direction, in the end, it will be ok.
i have no doubt about this, i have never had any doubts about this, it matters so much more than you think it does.
/the end
On Punk Strategy (PS): Some stream-of-consciousness initial thoughts:
1/ PS is a simplistic (not full AMM), inventory-bound market maker (buys and sells), not a Saylor-esque laser eyes buy-and-HODL DAT
2/ PS generates short-term profits in up markets and not in down markets. If you believe in long-term up-only for punks, it will create long-term profits too, but fewer profits than just HODLing punks would have
3/ you can indirectly participate in the profits generated from #2, to the degree that profits are generated, by buying the token under the theory that token buybacks will make number go up (this is sometimes true and sometimes not in tokens)
4/ the tax on token transactions creates working capital for the market-making in #1. In classic terms, the token contains both the GP and LP and has a large front-end and back-end load (10% as of right now) on both the GP and LP. There is no real exact analogy in tradfi but it is something like that
5/ PS has a small tribute from the other Strategies, though this does not change the fundamental analysis
6/ I somehow "disagree" with both Team PS and @PunksOTC, in that I think it is net more positive long-term for the CP price than for the PS token because it creates buying pressure whether token is going up or down. Though ofc @punksOTC spends a lot more time market making punks so I might be wrong
7/ The fact that PS relists higher as opposed to not listing does not seem to me to be a net negative - those punks were already listed, but lower. If a human collector wants to buy them and HODL them, they can anyway so this is net incrementally more buying pressure at all times
8/ In other words, imagine you have an NFT collection and two people started trading an unrelated token back and forth between themselves and, for some reason, took 10% of their trades and said "we will blindly buy the floor NFT and list it for a higher price, and never list it for a lower price"
You may wonder if this is a good strategy for those two people, but it is probably good for your NFT collection's floor price and liquidity so long as they are happy to do it
9/ I think the PS people saying "don't look at NAV or NAV multiple" (they are 50x ore whatever right now) are right because the goal here is NOT a long-term hold for price appreciation
What you should be looking at instead is: a) as the expected profit stream from the trading strategy and b) applying a multiple to that
10/ Of course, "should" is carrying a huge amount of water here since this is crypto, and obviously we trade on vibes not on "financial ratios", so I do not put much credence (good or bad) in traditional financial analysis for crypto
11/ It is just that IF you are going to use a tradfi metric, the right one here is price/earnings, not mNAV, I think
12/ Is "buy floor and list x% more" the world's most advanced trading strategy? Obviously not, I think if someone offered you an investment bot that "bought the floor and sold it 20% higher" you would not have been ultra-impressed
13/ These are the challenges with smart contracts - it is hard to get advanced strategies into the EVM and it is an area that needs work for us to progress to building more complex self-driving systems
14/ As always in crypto, the speed of capital formation is astonishing
15/ Is this a better relationship between a fungible and an NFT than: "no relationship at all" and "the NFTs 'yield' fungible coins" - I think so because of #6 above - I think the benefits in the end will accrue to the NFT collection
16/ Is any of this a price prediction or investment advice? Are you kidding me? - I have no idea what BTC is going to do, so obviously I have no idea what the right price is for something that was $5M two weeks ago and $300M today
17/ Is this the type of thing that can happen with network art and cannot happen with digital art in a museum?
Yes!
I am mostly disinterested in the exact mechanics of PS, but do think it is the latest example of why network art is different
Success or failure, PS will be there forever now, as long as Ethereum and punks themselves. This is wild, fascinating and I think we will see endless more experiments like this over the next 1, 10 and 100 years
18/ One of the reasons I am infinitely bullish on early/important/top 10,000, 100,000 or 1M or whatever NFTs is that I think they will be the 'target' of endless smart contract based experiments over the years and we have no idea what will happen over time
Just like BTC is more important the Strategy or any ETF, DAT, etc, I think CP are more important than any vehicle, person, contract buying or selling them
19/ I would love to see a Punk Strategy but with "the sales button taken away" - I don't have time to do it, but if someone did it well and professionally and non-scammy, I would buy a few tokens
20/ As you know, I have trouble finding the "sell" button in general, so I like the idea of collectively buying punks but I dislike the idea of collectively selling them for 20% more
21/ So if we take this idea to its logical conclusion, why sell them at all? Why not have a token that just funds buys only? In time, 10 years? 50? 100? could it become the largest owner? Who knows? If people stay interested, "yes"; if not "no" but we could probably, almost certainly buy at least 1 and that would be fun
22/ I have been beefing with @batsoupyum all weekend because he is a Boomer (tm) and he is telling me all types of Boomer things like "this would be like a closed end fund and you need to be able to redeem otherwise the token will trade at a discount to NAV, blah blah"
As if PS, and CryptoDickButts and so on trade on financial ratios
23/ In any case, every properly fractionalized NFT / NFT collection with a redemption mechanism (Fractional, Whale, etc) has always traded at a discount to NAV because it is boring - just hanging around owning a 1% of a punk in the hope that later you will sell it for more, is very boring IMHO. I bought some fractionalized $APE back in 2021 and almost died on the spot from boredom.
24/ One the other hand, "we will collectively own a lot of punks forever", I dunno, that seems more fun and interesting and you can "do things" with them
25/ To continue the thought experiment: if it makes you feel better, say you could sell them in 99 years. Does that change anything? I don't think so, but it gives an "exit" for those who feel they need it. And it makes no difference IMHO if it is "never", 99 years, 69 years, 42 years etc
26/ If you "buy and HODL" in an immutable self-driving contract, would this move the sense of ownership transitively to the token? I am not sure, but it is an interesting question I think.
27/ "But you would lose the burn of PS" -> I mean, OK, sure but this does not reflect my "investment thesis" as such on punks.
If this was important to me, I would have sold my punks a long time ago and not just captured profits from the burn indirectly moving the token price (maybe), but directly from the sale.
But beyond the fact that I generally like NFTs and do not want to sell them, I do think 10 years from now punks will be worth more than today (NFA, etc, etc) so even from an "investment" perspective, swing trading them seems not ideal
28/ thank you to @Rhynotic for giving me the opportunity to think about something different and put my brain cells to work
29/ for those in profit, don't forget to take the chance to buy some NFTs
30/ As always, do not read into this my views on the financial side of PS - I have no idea what my views are on the token, in the immediate, short, medium or long-term, so for sure you don't either.
Today with @MorganLBrennan, I discussed the differences between Bitcoin, Gold, and other crypto networks — and the rise of Digital Treasury Companies, Digital Credit, and Digital Finance.
Someone let ChatGPT run a stock portfolio.
over 2 month ChatGPT’s portfolio is up +29.22% vs. the S&P 500’s +4.11% over the same window.
(Prompts, Code, Github listed)
The process works as follows.
ChatGPT is given real market data each trading day, including prices, volumes and benchmarks, stored on GitHub.
On weekends it uses that data to research deeply, reevaluate the portfolio, and look for new stock ideas.
The portfolio is simulated daily based on any changes, and then the person manually executes those trades in a real brokerage account.
ChatGPT has full authority to make buy or sell decisions, but only within U.S. micro-cap stocks under $300M market cap.
🧵BITCOIN KILLED REAL ESTATE
NOBODY takes real estate SERIOUSLY anymore.
You get a 30‑year relationship with a bank, a city that taxes you forever, and a roof that ages like milk.
Bitcoin only gave you roughly 70–80% annualized over the past decade while doing nothing in your garage.
Let's break it down 👇