Big Themes for the New Year 🎉
Three Things #150: December 22, 2024
One year ago, I celebrated publishing the 100th issue of Three Things, and I mentioned that the first 100 of anything can safely be ignored. Hopefully that means that Three Things this year is finally starting to find its groove and make some sense! 150 is no less arbitrary a milestone, but there is something special about doing something continuously for three years. That’s a heck of a long time. Aside from family and work, how many things have you stuck with for that long?
We’re still a few days away from the end of the year, but I’ve already begun the process of reflecting on the year that’s ending and contemplating what comes next. As I review 2024 and prepare for 2025, here are the three biggest things that are on my mind.
Thing #1: Change 🌱
Some years we make steady progress. Some years we get stuck, or even regress. Some years are literal disasters, and we spend all year responding as best we can. It feels like there’s been a lot of those years lately.
But 2024 wasn’t one of those years. It was a year of massive change, personally as well as on the societal level. Most of that change, I think, was progress.
On the personal level it’s been a year of increasing discipline. I’ve run experiments and taken on new challenges every year, something I’ve written about here many times. My challenge last year was to run every day for a year.
This year is a bit different. Having turned 40 recently was a little bit of a wake up call, and an opportunity to become more mature and make some difficult decisions. As a result, I changed a lot more than one thing this year. I was a little more relaxed about working out this year—not quite as many 3am wakeups and early morning jogs before an early flight, for instance—but I’m going for substance, and for holistic wellbeing, not for ticking off days on a calendar. I began strength training seriously this year, and combining this with running has been a really wonderful new experience.
I’ve also made some major changes to my diet. I cut back a lot on red meat, and I’ve almost completely cut out unhealthy things like processed food, fried food, and cheese, not to mention alcohol. I massively reduced carbs and increased protein. On the occasion when I do indulge in these things, I enjoy them all the more. I want to be healthy and relatively young for my son, and indulging in unhealthy comfort foods is much less important than being a healthy dad. Changing eating habits is difficult, but take my word for it: it’s very doable if you’re serious about it.
I’ve also put a lot of work into improving my sleep schedule. This means eating dinner earlier, controlling exposure to light, and generally adopting good sleep hygiene. Sleeping well, eating well, and staying active has made a massive difference in my overall feeling of wellbeing, my energy level, and my mood. It’s also allowed me to work much more productively and with more focus.
All of this is imperfect, especially while traveling, and there’s a lot of room for improvement, but I’ve seen how impactful it can be and I’ll continue to work on these things in the new year. I’m also proud that I made progress on improving diet and sleep not just while at home but also while on the road this year, which is something I’ve always especially struggled with.
It’s also been a year of big change on the societal level, and that change felt especially rapid and pervasive this year. It feels like the pace of technological change continues to accelerate, and that technological change is beginning to have a big impact on society and on politics.
The most obvious technological trend is AI. Each ChatGPT upgrade includes new features that were literally unthinkable only a year ago. AI agents are doing crazy things like creating meme coins, running X and OnlyFans accounts, and amassing followers and dollars. They’re out-PhDing PhDs and out-doctoring doctors, and video models are now producing photorealistic videos that have leapt over the uncanny valley. These tools have already begun to transform industries, and it’s only a matter of time before they transform society at large, that much is clear. Exaggerated claims that AI tools will be doing things like running companies, armies, or even countries before long don’t feel so far-fetched anymore. And this is just the beginning.
It’s not only AI that’s accelerating. I feel the same acceleration happening in the crypto industry. Yes, we’ve been through several market cycles and there are always ups and downs, but this time it feels different. It feels like society at large is beginning to come around to what we’re doing and why it matters. Obstacles are being removed, one after another, and more and more people are cottoning on. For the first time it truly feels inevitable that crypto is going to eat the world, it’s just a matter of time.
It’s worth mentioning that these two trends aren’t playing out in isolation. AI and crypto are a marriage made in heaven. Cryptocurrency is the natural means by which AI agents hold and exchange value, and transact with one another. And AI tools are already beginning to facilitate the creation of novel crypto assets and networks. The success of one feeds the success of the other.
Then there’s politics, which in many ways is downstream of the other trends I’m describing. I wrote at length about why I’m hopeful that the dismal political situation of the past few years has turned a corner and why I believe things are about to get better. Sometimes things have to get really bad before we’re able to collectively turn the corner, and I feel that’s what’s happened these past few years, between the pandemic (and the dismal pandemic response), ongoing war and global conflict, economic malaise, and the generally piss poor quality of our politics and institutions in general. People in general aren’t dumb and they aren’t blind. They see these things, too, and they’re as fed up as I am.
Things are so bad that I’ll take any change that moves us away from the status quo and has least a halfway decent chance of improvement. That change is right around the corner, and I think it’ll be for the better.
Which brings us to our next thing…
Thing #2: Hope 🍀
Some say history ended after the fall of the Berlin wall. I think it’s just beginning. We may not quite be on the verge of world peace, or of a new solarpunk supercycle hyper optimistic glorious utopian future, but I genuinely feel that such a thing is achievable, eventually. Crypto and AI aren’t a panacea, and they could still go horribly wrong, but I now believe they’re more likely than not to move us in that direction.
The social and political pendulum swung too far in one direction and it’s now finally starting to swing back in the other direction. The old direction was characterized by out of touch elites feeling entitled to make decisions on behalf of hundreds of millions of people with very different values. It was a woke direction, one of nonsensical, out of touch, radical policies that have proven extremely unpopular. It was one of rapidly eroding public faith in our institutions. It was one of ever-rising debt and an ever-growing, increasingly intrusive government. I don’t think all of that is going to magically get better overnight, but I think this most recent election, and the incoming administration, is a golden, once-in-a-generation opportunity to reset a lot of these things and to move us in a better direction.
Crypto is a small piece of this puzzle, but it’ll play an outsized role going forward. There’s a lot to be excited about in the industry, but there’s also a lot to be frustrated about. This market cycle has been driven by meme coins, and one interpretation of meme coins is that they reflect a growing sense of hopelessness, desperation, and even nihilism on the part of young people. It can be easy to share this feeling of desperation when surveying the industry: even after more than ten years, usable applications that aren’t just for trading and speculating are scarcer than honest politicians at the county fair.
On the other hand, blockchain infrastructure is in a much better place than it’s ever been before. There’s orders of magnitude more block space available than in previous cycles, and that block space is of a higher quality than anything that came before: it’s more secure, the throughput is higher and latency is lower. Higher throughput means fees are lower. Chain uptime is higher than ever before. Developer tooling is getting better and better.
There’s reason for hope at the macro level, too. More and more consumers are buying and trading cryptocurrency, more and more companies are putting crypto assets on their balance sheets, and even nation states are considering building a strategic reserve. Bitcoin is the gateway drug to much more than sound economics. DAOs and even a few real-world governments are experimenting with cryptocurrency applications, and cryptocurrency-inspired applications, like futarchy, quadratic voting and liquid democracy, led by projects such as Metagov and RadicalxChange. Experiments with AI governance are just beginning.
It feels like at long last a final hurdle has been cleared and, now that bitcoin has been normalized, it’s only a matter of time before mainstream organizations, investors, and, yes, central banks and governments begin embracing blockchain and cryptocurrency for all of the reasons we’ve been excited about them for years. As I wrote above, blockchain and cryptocurrency are clearly beginning to eat the world, and that trend cannot be stopped or reversed. What does that mean for the world and why does it make me hopeful?
It means we’re going to have organizations of all sorts and at every level that are fairer, more participatory, more transparent, and less corruptible. It means that everyday people around the world are going to be free to transact and save in the currency they prefer, and to permissionlessly build novel, creative financial products and services. It means that governments and central banks are going to have to compete with the likes of bitcoin when establishing monetary policy. Not everyone, everywhere is going to switch to using bitcoin, but bitcoin is going to force central banks to be a lot more honest, responsible, and accountable. It hopefully means more responsible government spending, less money printing, and less forever wars funded through inflation. Eventually, AI is going to lead to organizations that are also better run and more efficient.
I could go on and on about why this is such a good thing and why it matters so much—I did so in two recent issues. In summary, though, let me just say that, while there’s a lot of scams and a lot of noise out there, in the end quality wins. I have absolute faith that in the long term, to quote Benjamin Graham, the market is a weighing machine, and the projects with the most gravity are going to be the winners. These projects, the ones that have already achieved a degree of Lindy including Bitcoin and Ethereum, and the applications built on them, are already well on their way to changing the world, and others will surely follow.
That change may take one or both of two forms. It may be values-aligned and do a lot of good, in the ways I’ve outlined above. It may also be catastrophic and lead to terrifying, dystopian, Black Mirror-esque outcomes. It’s not hard to see how we could end up on either path from where we stand today. I hope and believe that we can walk the former path, but it’s on us to make sure that happens.
Which brings us to our third thing this week…
Thing #3: Responsibility 🎖️
I’ve always felt a strong sense of responsibility, duty, and moral obligation to be generous and helpful to those less fortunate than I am. In the past I’ve tried to fulfill this obligation through charity work, financial contributions to charity and other nonprofits, generally engaging in service, and by doing work that has a meaningful social impact.
This feeling has only grown over time, and the rise of blockchain and cryptocurrency are one big reason. None of this really mattered much a few years ago. For one thing, there simply wasn’t much at stake. It was easy to write it all off as a weird experiment and as a hobby shared by a handful of nerds and hackers working in their parents’ basement. For another thing, crypto hadn’t yet begun to have any mainstream impact whatsoever. You could go about your daily normie life totally unaware of Bitcoin and Ethereum and it made basically no difference.
All of that is now changing. The most obvious change is financial: you cannot be a professional investor, or investment manager, today without understanding cryptocurrency, digital assets, and the impact these have already had upon global markets. But blockchain and cryptocurrency are beginning to have a broader social impact as well, as discussed above. Just as the Internet, the Web, and mobile phones transformed pretty much every industry on earth, over the next generation AI and crypto are going to have the same effect.
It’s tempting to react to this success in a selfish, narrow way. This is how many crypto OGs have chosen to handle success, and it manifests in unfortunate memes like #HaveFunStayingPoor. Needless to say, this response is immature and unhelpful for multiple reasons. It isn’t ethically correct, it’s adversarial, and it only serves to alienate people who might otherwise be allies.
We need to frame success and the rise of these ideas and these tools differently, in a more positive, more inclusive, more socially constructive light. Blockchain and cryptocurrency are, and always have been, fundamentally democratizing tools. They take power away from elites, especially governments, and put it squarely in the hands of everyday people: developers, artists, community organizers, meme coiners, and creative people more generally—and, yes, nerds and hackers working in their parents’ basement.
That’s why it’s so essential that, now more than ever, we make the effort not only to ensure that these assets and tools are accessible to as many people as possible, but also—and maybe even more importantly—that they’re legible and understandable to as many people as possible. Our inability to do this is one of crypto’s biggest failings, and it’s entirely on us. While some organizations, most notably Coinbase, have made some effort, in general we haven’t done a very good job of explaining what we’re up to, or why, or why normies should care.
Actually, in spite of this failing, we’re doing okay. It’s clear that hundreds of millions of people around the world believe in the technology in spite of awful messaging and cringe marketing. That speaks to the fundamental attraction of the idea and the usefulness of the technology. Yes, speculation is definitely part of it, but over time it will matter less relative to the other things crypto stands for. Blockchain and cryptocurrency, and the ideas that inspired them, appeal to people on a more fundamental level.
That gives me hope, but we can do so much better. Now is the time to make it happen. Those of us who understand these ideas and these technologies need to take the time to sit down with our friends and family and explain what this is about and why it matters so much—multiple times, if necessary. It needs to be an ongoing conversation. It needs to happen in public, too. And it can’t be condescending (less “have fun staying poor”, more “stay humble, stack sats”).
We have to meet people where they’re at. We have to give them simple metaphors that make sense to them. We have to give them case studies that explain just why banks, fiat currency, and centralized applications are so dangerous and why we need alternatives to all of these. We need to emphasize that we’re not trying to replace existing institutions so much as offer alternatives that are fairer, more transparent, and more participatory.
Ironically, like NFTs before them, meme coins are helping! It’s a big reason for their success. They’re simple and require very little homework to understand. There are no complex technical ideas to grok and no overly complex economic models to study. Their allocation tends to be fairer to retail investors. They’re exactly what they claim to be, no more and no less.
We should support any initiative, including meme coins, that broadens the appeal of what we’re building. We need to take this responsibility seriously. We have a golden opportunity today to bend these ideas and these technologies for good, but it’s not a foregone conclusion that that’s going to happen, and in any case we can’t do it without a much broader base of support.
It’s on us to build that support. We have our work cut out for us. Let’s get to it, and make 2025 the biggest, most epic year yet, with rapid progress toward our lofty goals.