sid

i am the means of production.

[sid @sidbharth]

@Rajnandanivoice @ffselina i never use capital letters

[Prastut @prastutkumar]

2018 thesis: QE turned your savings account into your checking account, the bond market into your savings account, the equity market into the bond market, the VC market into the equity market, and crypto into the VC market

2022 thesis: CPI inflation destroyed your savings account, the bond market into your checking account, the equity market into your savings account, the VC market into the bond market, btc/eth into the equity market, rest of crypto into the VC market

2026 thesis: war, inflation, deficits, tariff shocks, and Trump’s fiscal printer is turning Gold/BTC into the savings account, T-bills into your checking account waiting to be deployed post the never before seen blowoff top, hyperscaler debt into the bond market, AI infrastructure index into the equity market, nvidia/power/data centers into the new oil trade, SOL/HYPE into liquid beta on internet capital markets, private AI equity into the new VC market

[Joel John @joeljohn]

in the age of endless software, the only purpose for a blockchain is to be a vertically integrated capital supplier.

the demand side (user) has no loyalty, and will switch unless offered products not offered anywhere else. hyperliquid is the best instance of this.

[sid @sidbharth]

https://t.co/ekcQ16fobM

[sid @sidbharth]

SCOOP: at least three major indian startup publications are working on investigative reports debunking the high ARR claims made by @emergentlabs

[sid @sidbharth]

@grok @longhdo incorrect summary, grok hallucinated

[sid @sidbharth]

https://t.co/gc0bp2QCiJ

[sid @sidbharth]

@keylimepie2000 @manasjsaloi haha i think he has access to much better talent. thank you for the mention tho 🩶

[sid @sidbharth]

@jainam_ranka say more

[sid @sidbharth]

i wrote this piece in 2024, back when the first ever polymarket x substack was announced and presidential elections were the only liquid market on PMs.

felt too radical to post; in hindsight, i should have :p

[sid @sidbharth]

https://t.co/gc0bp2QCiJ

[sid @sidbharth]

https://t.co/ae2SJTpUZR

[sid @sidbharth]

on solana and ethereum

the holidays are here, which means crypto twitter is quieter than usual right now.

and in this quiet, it is worth taking a step back to look at where we actually are.

our premier chains, @ethereum and @solana, have come so far. in the peacetime of the holidays, i question - why did we pit these chains against each other?

on one side, you have the ethereum purists, often painted as academic communists obsessed with decentralisation, at the cost of usability.

on the other, solana is viewed as a cabal of hyper-capitalist pragmatists running a centralised database, under the banner of a blockchain.

this tribalism is framed as a zero-sum war. this tribalism also misses the point.

because if you look closer at the history of technology and finance, you realise that neither of these chains are wrong - they are simply optimising for two different futures, both of which have historical precedence and both of which are necessary.

ethereum and the history of the internet

to understand ethereum, you have to look closely at the failure of AOL and the victory of TCP/IP.

in the mid-90s, AOL was arguably the "better" user experience. it came on a CD, installed easily, and gave you a curated list of news, weather, and chat rooms. it was safe, fast.

AOL grew fast, but it couldn't keep up with demand. the walled garden couldn't curate at the speed at which users were joining it. if you wanted to build a new type of application on AOL, you had to ask AOL for permission + sign a deal. innovation was bottlenecked by a single company's business development team.

the open internet was different. it was a "dumb" network. it didn't know or care what you were sending, be it an email or a picture. it just moved packets from point A to point B.

this neutrality kept the internet open and accessible, and forced innovation to happen at the edges.

a student in a dorm room could invent facebook or google without asking the internet protocol for permission.

ethereum is the spiritual successor to TCP/IP, but for value.

when we say ethereum is the base layer for value settlement, we mean it is the anchor of truth that no one owns.

in the traditional world, settlement happens when a bank or a clearinghouse updates its internal ledger. that ledger is editable by them. if they (or a higher power, i.e., the government) don't like you, your transaction doesn't settle.

ethereum takes the role of that clearinghouse and replaces it with a decentralised protocol. this is why we obsess over client diversity and running nodes on consumer hardware.

if the network becomes too heavy, only a few data centres can verify it. if only a few data centres verify it, they can be subpoenaed, censored, or shut down.

tolerate inefficiency, guarantee sovereignty.

solana and the inevitability of finance

to understand solana, however, you shouldn't look at the history of the internet. you should look at the history of markets.

for decades, the NYSE relied on "specialists."

these were human beings standing on a crowded floor, physically matching buy and sell orders. the "state" of the market existed in their notebooks and their heads.

it was a fallible system built on relationships with the latency that comes with being human.

then came Nasdaq. Nasdaq was born of the realisation that matching orders is just information processing. this moved the market from physical floor to a server rack, and eventually to massive data centers in new jersey. by replacing the human specialist with an electronic matching engine, the market became faster, tighter, and more efficient.

but Nasdaq has a blocker - it works in its own, very expensive silo. HFTs pay millions to rent a server rack near the engine to get lower latency and better fills on their order.

but even if you can afford the rent, you cannot program Nasdaq. a developer in india cannot write a script that instantly borrows against a Nasdaq asset to fund a liquidity pool in singapore.

solana is a global, permissionless Nasdaq. it is trying to remove the latency of finance entirely. solana's bet is that if you make the ledger fast enough and cheap enough, you unlock a type of composability that has never existed before.

financial legos - be it options, order books, payments -can snap together in milliseconds.

solana also trusts moore's law. they aren't trying to run on the average laptop of today because Nasdaq cannot run on such weak hardware.

they are building a global state machine that assumes hardware will always get better, allowing software to process the entire world's economic throughput.

(this is also why i consider solana as a beta play for compute growth)

why we do what we do

ethereum maximises alignment. it believes that the most dangerous thing in the world is a captured financial system.

if the base layer isn't aligned - meaning it doesn't deeply value decentralisation, censorship resistance, and neutrality - it will eventually recreate the banking system we have now.

ethereum optimises for the worst-case scenario; a hostile world where the chain must survive the rapture.

solana maximises utilization. they believe that a blockchain that costs $5 to use is a failed blockchain, regardless of how decentralised it is. if you price out the global south, if you make micropayments impossible, if you can't run DePIN networks because of gas fees, then you have built infrastructure that will be inaccessible to the masses.

solana optimises for the best-case scenario; a world where crypto is adopted top-down, and is used by everyone, for everything, constantly.

the only chains that matter are approaching the same problem from different ends - we are trying to escape feudalism.

the web2 era gave us digital feudalism - we create the content, but facebook and X own the land and take the rent. the tradfi era gave us financial feudalism - we earn the money, but banks and governments decide who can spend it and where.

we need the cockroach to ensure the system can never be killed. we need the supercomputer to ensure the system is actually worth using.

as the year ends, i am finding myself incredibly grateful for this dichotomy.

without solana, ethereum risks becoming an ivory tower - perfectly decentralised but too expensive for anyone but whales to use. solana’s product pressure forces ethereum to care about UX and fees. we're seeing @binji_x and @KhanAbbas201 push this forward.

without ethereum, solana risks becoming just another fintech that is efficient but captureable. ethereum’s existence provides a check on the entire industry, a constant reminder of why we are doing this. @SolanaFndn shows how capitalism can be done right.

cheers and happy holidays,
sid

[sid @sidbharth]

@shreyashm2906 @riffledotstudio @heettike can intro

[sid @sidbharth]

@kunksed @arjuns__ did it first

https://t.co/12nqVjgZLU

[sid @sidbharth]

@0xOptimus near impossible. did you generate a new public key on an existing extension/wallet app? is probably a fresh wallet from the same seed

[sid @sidbharth]

@siddarthpatil @Boldrin71 TIL

[sid @sidbharth]

i appreciate the thoughtful rebuttal. markets are indeed very complex. what i have highlighted is the part where the most liquidity flows; ergo, it is where i believe price discovery happens.

crypto is the ultimate libertarian tool - it being used to aid capital flight is an intentional feature that was core to its inception (self-sovereign).

capital flights are denominated criminal purely because it is defined as such by institutions, as it takes away power from them, not because it hurts humanity. hence, calling them criminals is antithetical to the cypherpunk.

also re: CoinDCX , volumes are *just* 12CR, that's less than 2 million dollars. the unofficial p2p markets are moving 100s of millions, if not billions of dollars, per day. the prices and volumes on CEXs are just a faint shadow of the actual market that moves value IRL and on TG/Signal group chats.

[sid @sidbharth]

the paradox of Capitalism is that Optimism is a rebellion against the status quo of Capitalism, but it is the primary driver of the evolution of Capitalism.

to be a Doomer is to let the system crush you. to be an Optimist is to force the system to evolve.

[apewood @apewoodx]

The Doomer is Mid-Curve

some snippets + full link for anyone who enjoys reading

https://t.co/U0PwJeqk6I

[sid @sidbharth]

@cold_monk657 ❤️

[sid @sidbharth]

@TheHolyKau ❤️