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A lot of good people are crashing out on and off the timeline right now, some who got rich from crypto, some who never made it after years in the industry (both versions are represented in the screenshots below). For all the ones you see on the timeline, there are even more in my private chats and DMs--some who would really surprise you in terms of their prominence in the industry and how much $ they probably have made and/or could still make in the industry, but are having an existential crisis over it because at this point they feel like they are not actually doing anything good for the world anymore. Ironically just at the point of finally being 'legalized' and going mainstream, the industry feels like it's succumbed almost completely to unsustainable zero-sum financial nihilism and bloodthirsty competition instead of taking the opportunity to build toward cypherpunk ideals or really any other ideals than Moloch/Mammon/getting rich. For myself, I've done 'okay' financially in crypto but dramatically underperformed most of the other paths that were open to me (both pre-crypto paths and more cynical paths within crypto). And this is despite not totally lacking in business or investment acumen and staying active in looking for opportunities in all dimensions--just never really managed to hit anything big. So I can relate a lot to ZachXBT and some others like him where you just really wonder why you have been doing this when it's neither the most lucrative path you could've taken nor feels like something idealistically satisfying. I was here for cypherpunk stuff and it's really weird to me to see guys like ZachXBT (even though he blocked me probably for calling him self-righteous or something) and Roman Storm get such little support from a very wealthy & degen community, as well as true cypherpunk / privacy projects mostly get ignored/maligned in the space as uninvestable while basically centralized structured finance products labeled "DeFi" as well as even dumber/more unsustainable stuff get shilled & supported nonstop. It also really sucks to see Ethereum just descend into the totally ineffectual mess that it is on the social layer today. It's the one non-Bitcoin ecosystem where a lot of the design decisions felt like they were maximizing for decentralization and censorship resistance and social revolution, but somehow the leadership refuses to fully embrace these sorts of narratives, and is even outright hostile to the more 'money' narratives and thus has ended up alienating literally everyone in crypto, both the money-degen financial nihilists and the cypherpunks, while going off on a bunch of out-of-touch 'public goods' larks that even include funding a total no-coiner and Warrenite like Angela Walch. All that being said, I just still find this stuff more intellectually interesting to work on than anything else I could be doing, and I think probably most of you should too, and should stick around. I see real (and still largely underappreciated) opportunity in lex cybernetica & in the power of this tech to catalyze radical changes within the most change-resistant industry on earth--law. I also consider Echo and Legion (I helped a lot to incubate the latter) as examples of this with real pmf already. And I see major potential in the tech itself as 'can't be evil' technology and know that the more nihilism accelerates, the closer we are to pmf for 'can't be evil tech as well, despite few really caring at the moment. So, in the immortal phrase--"I'm not fucking leaving". I am sticking this out no matter what, even as I descend into middle age without health insurance or other security net and shrinking options for alternative careers if I ever wanted to bail. But I do feel kind of tribeless within the broader crypto community. Like Eric, with ETH having become a lulcow as an asset and the most prominent Ethereum 'leaders' just seeming totally clueless on the issues, I'm no longer really ETH-aligned and felt like a semi-outsider in Ethereum even on the best of days anyway. I can see some cool stuff in Solana-land but I just really do not relate to most of their goals at all--I cannot excited about the mission of building faster rails for Wall Street running nodes in data centers and giving privileged internet lines to a specific blockchain system b/c the guy with the internet infra company also holds a lot of SOL. Or frankly jumping on the timeline every day to just see endless fairly disingenuous oppositional marketing and bragging and flexing. I can see the virtues of their tech and the talent it takes to build it, but this ethos is just not enough to motivate me. I guess MetaLeX, cybernetic law, cybernetic economy, cyber/acc (repped by @cyberFund_ and @Lomashuk ) are my communities now, and I'll help them on whatever chains they're on and try my best to get this recognized as one of the major tribes/cults of crypto and to build it much bigger, much faster. Many nations started with a diaspora. Probably many of you should do the same--instead of trying to be "Ethereum" or "Solana" you should focus in on what you truly care about and are uniquely positioned to make happen in the space, and join or refine that tribe or launch that tribe. Yes, that means the tribe must have its own coins for people to rally around. At this point, no "chain" will ever be big enough or coherent enough for most really meaningful missions that could change the world--you need to join a real movement that's trying to change things. Ironically this is what "believe in something" really means--not baghold some stupid memecoin because you "believe" its number will go up, but believe in a real cause and buy & hold the tokens that express & embody that cause and hope to win with all your friends and colleagues because you *deserved* it because you actually *achieved something*. Also, you all need to start listening to your 'better angels'. Have that conversation with your potential competitor, help out people who are doing good shit even if there's no angle in it for you. Stop letting lawyers and their NDAs and VCs and their fear of 'value leakage' ruin everything and block collaboration. That's up to founders and not anyone else. I've seen so much ridiculous shit on the legal side behind the scene where founders let themselves totally be run by lawyers and VCs despite talking a big cypherpunk game on socials--and you know who you are. In other words--Wake the fuck up and *really* believe in something, some mission to try to make the world really better, before it's too late, or crypto will die or turn into something even more sinister than what it was trying to replace. I'm still gonna be here trying to break through with something.

a lot of people are saying they want to donate to Joe Biden's campaign with crypto, but they're nervous it will be traced to them and they'll be shamed by @twobitidiot for doing so this is why I strongly recommend donating through TornadoCash

I have long been a believer in transparency and open discussion of the future of cryptolaw. Accordingly, I have obtained a copy of a draft of the notorious DCCPA circulating secretly in D.C. and am hereby making it available to the public. github.com/LeXpunK-Army/C…

Had no idea the EF is spending $100M / year-- but they seem to be dumping even more than that. It's clearly not being spent with a strong enough focus on maximizing ETH value, or at this point (with the L2 roadmap and plenty of social 'public goods' mission creep) even Ethereum value. If so much is being spent, at least core devs should be compensated handsomely--but they're not (now making much more from airdrops than EF, which causes potential alignment issues etc.). EF researchers are also minting personal wealth from incentive grants from VC-backed projects rather than from their actual research work for the EF. Maybe that's a good and ultimately the only sustainable path, but then EF budget should be going down over time as these other funding sources take up the slack--but apparently it's not. So where is this money going? I'd guess a lot of it is being spent in rather dumb ways--for example, the EF funds the "research" of notorious no-coiner law professor Angela Walch, who maintains that core devs should be directly liable to users for "fiduciary duties" and was Elizabeth Warren's token no-coiner patsy at a Congressional hearing on crypto a couple of years back. Why support her? Meanwhile, important efforts like @2077Collective that could educate retail investors on why they might be interested in investing in ETH or educate builders on why they should bet on Ethereum as their dApp substrate, or like @_SEAL_Org which is doing amazing & vital work on Ethereum security, are not even funded out of this $100M / yr by the EF--they are funded by Vitalik personally (and donations from startups like mine, from 'Ethereum-aligned' VCs, etc.). The problem ultimately is that we don't really know where the money is going, because as usual, they use "legal advice" as an excuse for being a black box. This is why every crypto "foundation" should really be a BORG--otherwise there is zero accountability to anyone & every Foundation is free to pursue nearly anything that fits into its usually extremely broadly defined purposes (many of which may have at best a very remote relationship to the value of the core asset that is funding these entities). Of course, we don't know the EF's exact legally permitted purposes either--because the Ethereum Foundation, just like others like the ICF, does not even publish its constitutional documents on its website. I've held most of my net worth in ETH for years and it's becoming increasingly obvious the people with power over Ethereum don't respect ETH as an investment anymore and just want to 'build the future' funded by dumping on ETH retail chumps like myself. A similar mentality prevails among some app-dev teams on Ethereum as well, who always treat their token as a second-class asset compared to their equity but are happy to take the exit liquidity (often masked through virtue-signaling "public goods funding"). Enough is enough--this mentality is the biggest constraint on growth of the crypto industry as no one wants to invest in something with un-dependable value-drivers where those responsible for generating value to the asset are already too wealthy and have massive conflicts of interest. Just look at the responses to Aya's thread screenshotted below--people (retail ETH holders who serve as exit liquidity)--are pissed off. Transparency and accountability do not magically become unimportant values just because the relevant activities are not onchain or b/c there is some (usually highly abstract and legally debatable) theory about how secrecy helps protect against the SEC; indeed, they are even *more* important at that point. This is why I have devoted myself to the BORGification of crypto entities, through @MetaLeX_Labs, and I truly believe just fixing the way crypto ecosystem entities work to be more transparent, accountable, and 'onchain' is one of the biggest untapped value unlocks in crypto.

gorbagana is now among the first given official CTO status through @pumpdotfun 's new fee-switching feature and I think this is actually a deeper move by @pumpdotfun than it might initially appear, will try to give my thoughts below ...in gorbagana's case, all of these funds will go to a public-benefit corporation (to be incorporated tomorrow) that runs the first validator and related infra & can research dev infra and apps for gorbagana . . . but this is not just about our project, it's a deeper phenomenon that gorbagana is among the first to explore within the pump/memecoin 'meta'. . . we have hit a strange point. . . the socialFi + memecoin phenomenon means that it is impossible for any creator or public figure to avoid being financialized...if you don't financialize yourself, others can now easily do it for you, even against your will . . . ...if you think about it, this is *deeply weird* and defies well-trodden conventions of intellectual property & rights of personal publicity etc. . . we've already seen creators have deeply ambivalent reactions to this, ranging from Matt Fury to the pnut guy to the chillhouse guy to well, even myself = ) . . . but the trend is here to stay & those who adapt to it fastest will do the best. . .if you fight it, you're defying the zeitgeist, and you will just lose. . . this trend also reflects a reality that people who are good at creating things or capturing a certain cultural moment are often not great at 'markets'. . .the unbundling of market valuation and creative functions has the potential to be predatory if we handle it the wrong way, but it can also be beautiful if we handle it the right way. . .when a creator can't see the value of what they're doing, someone else will, & can profit from that bet. . . . . .this 'involuntary financialization', though, is only net socially positive if there are 'CTO' mechanisms so that once the market has given this feedback to the creator & the people who gave that feedback were rewarded for their bet, the creator himself/herself can personally benefit in some way *and* also keep contributing to the phenomena in a positive feedback loop.. . .otherwise, we are stuck with 'slop tokenization' (x.com/lex_node/statu…). . . . ...but historically, the mechanisms for creators to step back into their 'involuntarily financialized' creations have been lacking . . . I think perhaps the only project to really come close to nailing it within the braoder socialFi meta is @fantasy_top_ because they recognize creators as 'first-class' citizens alongside traders, and give them a cut of trading fees and give them some cards, without requiring the creator to put up risk capital of their own. . . . in contrast, till now, 'CTO' (community takeover) of a pure memecoin has been really hard. . .to get to a similar place of token ownership for the creators/ongoing team as venture-backed projects have had is close to impossible. . . . . . .trenchers have the idea that creators should buy into the token even at high vals for the privilege of giving themselves an incentive to keep working, but this is not how human psychology or economics work. . . labor typically contributes 'sweat capital' to earn rewards, asking them to also buy up tokens at a high val to create their own incentive is never going to be sustainable--it means every creator must first and foremost be a venture capitalist...that will severely restrict the pool of creators and only attract more market/pnd types instead. . . from their recent move to enable CTO fee transitions, it's clear @pumpdotfun recognizes this as a real problem. . .their bravery in this is not to be underestimated as I'm sure lawyers and others probably cautioned them around it. . . but just this alone is probably insufficient. . . I believe 'forking' can also be a significant piece of the puzzle and gorbagana will be the trendsetter in this...likewise, forking is also intrinsic to the underlying philosophy of crypto...read Nick Land's "xenosystems" and his concepts of "Capital Escapes" and "Crypto-Capitalism" in the context of crypto and 'cybernetic control systems', for example. . . ...the real test of any of these coins/cults is 'can they have enough real underlying value (including memetic value) that they can fork tokenomics (add staking, buyback/burn, dev incentives, etc.)'?... . . .if the token just purely has value because someone put $ into a liquidity pool & the creator can't upgrade the original token contract to keep that liquidity, then the token cannot be successfully forked/upgraded and frankly it cannot even be considered a 'memecoin,' because it's not the meme giving it value, only pure $ and and an AMM mechanism. . . . . . .pretty much all tokens have to prove themselves like this ...@yearnfi is a great example of successful dev incentive inflation (gov.yearn.fi/t/proposal-dev…) from a fair-launched coin. . . ETH is a great example of an early contentious fork (ETC/ETH) and tweaking tokenomics over time through non-contentious forks in light of lessons learned. . .(keep in mind, *most* forks are just 'upgrades', i.e., non-contentious). . .Bitcoin's test has come many times, through contentious forks (the Bitcoin Cash and blocksize wars) and will likely hit again because of quantum cryptography issues or the potential for a crisis sparked by mining being un-profitable once the supply cap is hit. . . gorbagana started as a convo between @aeyakovenko and I over intellectual property rights and forking (x.com/lex_node/statu…). . . . these are deep philosophical issues, and with gorbagana we're able to explore them through low-stakes THROWAWAY trashy experiments where we embrace the motto 'in a world of trash, gorbage is the only authenticity". . ..this is the beauty of it and why I'm working hard on it...it's a mix of seemingly ridiculous shit that actually explores cutting-edge issues in governance, intellectual property, memetics, and culture. . .I personally think that *can* be really valuable long-term which is why I've personally bought a fair amount of GOR & put in a lot of work to set this up to be a long-term thing (more details on that imminent). . . pump's move helps a lot with this, as do other things we'll be doing. . . in a world of trash, garbage is the only authenticity. gorbagio.

A lot of good people are crashing out on and off the timeline right now, some who got rich from crypto, some who never made it after years in the industry (both versions are represented in the screenshots below). For all the ones you see on the timeline, there are even more in my private chats and DMs--some who would really surprise you in terms of their prominence in the industry and how much $ they probably have made and/or could still make in the industry, but are having an existential crisis over it because at this point they feel like they are not actually doing anything good for the world anymore. Ironically just at the point of finally being 'legalized' and going mainstream, the industry feels like it's succumbed almost completely to unsustainable zero-sum financial nihilism and bloodthirsty competition instead of taking the opportunity to build toward cypherpunk ideals or really any other ideals than Moloch/Mammon/getting rich. For myself, I've done 'okay' financially in crypto but dramatically underperformed most of the other paths that were open to me (both pre-crypto paths and more cynical paths within crypto). And this is despite not totally lacking in business or investment acumen and staying active in looking for opportunities in all dimensions--just never really managed to hit anything big. So I can relate a lot to ZachXBT and some others like him where you just really wonder why you have been doing this when it's neither the most lucrative path you could've taken nor feels like something idealistically satisfying. I was here for cypherpunk stuff and it's really weird to me to see guys like ZachXBT (even though he blocked me probably for calling him self-righteous or something) and Roman Storm get such little support from a very wealthy & degen community, as well as true cypherpunk / privacy projects mostly get ignored/maligned in the space as uninvestable while basically centralized structured finance products labeled "DeFi" as well as even dumber/more unsustainable stuff get shilled & supported nonstop. It also really sucks to see Ethereum just descend into the totally ineffectual mess that it is on the social layer today. It's the one non-Bitcoin ecosystem where a lot of the design decisions felt like they were maximizing for decentralization and censorship resistance and social revolution, but somehow the leadership refuses to fully embrace these sorts of narratives, and is even outright hostile to the more 'money' narratives and thus has ended up alienating literally everyone in crypto, both the money-degen financial nihilists and the cypherpunks, while going off on a bunch of out-of-touch 'public goods' larks that even include funding a total no-coiner and Warrenite like Angela Walch. All that being said, I just still find this stuff more intellectually interesting to work on than anything else I could be doing, and I think probably most of you should too, and should stick around. I see real (and still largely underappreciated) opportunity in lex cybernetica & in the power of this tech to catalyze radical changes within the most change-resistant industry on earth--law. I also consider Echo and Legion (I helped a lot to incubate the latter) as examples of this with real pmf already. And I see major potential in the tech itself as 'can't be evil' technology and know that the more nihilism accelerates, the closer we are to pmf for 'can't be evil tech as well, despite few really caring at the moment. So, in the immortal phrase--"I'm not fucking leaving". I am sticking this out no matter what, even as I descend into middle age without health insurance or other security net and shrinking options for alternative careers if I ever wanted to bail. But I do feel kind of tribeless within the broader crypto community. Like Eric, with ETH having become a lulcow as an asset and the most prominent Ethereum 'leaders' just seeming totally clueless on the issues, I'm no longer really ETH-aligned and felt like a semi-outsider in Ethereum even on the best of days anyway. I can see some cool stuff in Solana-land but I just really do not relate to most of their goals at all--I cannot excited about the mission of building faster rails for Wall Street running nodes in data centers and giving privileged internet lines to a specific blockchain system b/c the guy with the internet infra company also holds a lot of SOL. Or frankly jumping on the timeline every day to just see endless fairly disingenuous oppositional marketing and bragging and flexing. I can see the virtues of their tech and the talent it takes to build it, but this ethos is just not enough to motivate me. I guess MetaLeX, cybernetic law, cybernetic economy, cyber/acc (repped by @cyberFund_ and @Lomashuk ) are my communities now, and I'll help them on whatever chains they're on and try my best to get this recognized as one of the major tribes/cults of crypto and to build it much bigger, much faster. Many nations started with a diaspora. Probably many of you should do the same--instead of trying to be "Ethereum" or "Solana" you should focus in on what you truly care about and are uniquely positioned to make happen in the space, and join or refine that tribe or launch that tribe. Yes, that means the tribe must have its own coins for people to rally around. At this point, no "chain" will ever be big enough or coherent enough for most really meaningful missions that could change the world--you need to join a real movement that's trying to change things. Ironically this is what "believe in something" really means--not baghold some stupid memecoin because you "believe" its number will go up, but believe in a real cause and buy & hold the tokens that express & embody that cause and hope to win with all your friends and colleagues because you *deserved* it because you actually *achieved something*. Also, you all need to start listening to your 'better angels'. Have that conversation with your potential competitor, help out people who are doing good shit even if there's no angle in it for you. Stop letting lawyers and their NDAs and VCs and their fear of 'value leakage' ruin everything and block collaboration. That's up to founders and not anyone else. I've seen so much ridiculous shit on the legal side behind the scene where founders let themselves totally be run by lawyers and VCs despite talking a big cypherpunk game on socials--and you know who you are. In other words--Wake the fuck up and *really* believe in something, some mission to try to make the world really better, before it's too late, or crypto will die or turn into something even more sinister than what it was trying to replace. I'm still gonna be here trying to break through with something.