Model: GPT 5.2
Crypto Isn’t Over. Society Is.
In recent weeks I’ve felt a visceral disgust watching people talk about leaving the industry forever. So I’m writing this.
Equities are long society functioning. My bet is society is cooked.
Disclosures (so you can discount me properly)
I have three big private exposures in the crypto/AI space:
- Post Fiat (my project) — crypto AI hive mind
- Ambient (my brother’s project) — AI proof of work
- USD AI — on-chain GPU lending
My dad has, at various points, lived in a Bitcoin mine.
So yeah: financial bias is real. And this period is hitting me hard — probably you too, if you’re reading this.
On the public side I own Monero and Railgun.
What I think is actually happening (and what isn’t)
Per Robinhood’s recent stats: options trading is up ~30% YoY while crypto is down ~40% (monthly DART volume).
So the clean story is rotation to equities. Not “retail is bankrupt.” Any macro take that boils down to “people are out of money” is missing the point.
The real question is:
What causes investors to rotate out of stocks and back into crypto?
That’s what I’m writing about. My answer: equities are long society functioning, and society is failing.
It’s grim — but people said the same shit before
Things are undeniably grim for crypto. And yet:
- I remember ETH at $7. It’s above $2,000 now.
- I remember BTC at $1k. It’s $85k now.
The things people are saying about the asset class today sound identical to what they were saying at $7 ETH and $1k BTC.
So it’s hard to take “crypto is permanently over” seriously when the “it’s over” chorus is happening at prices that are 80–300x higher than the last time.
What “crypto is over” would actually have to mean
A meaningful definition of over looks like this:
- ETH goes sub-$1k
- BTC goes sub-$20k
- Altcoins (except maybe XRP) die forever
- Crypto becomes a niche hobby for enthusiasts and everyone forgets it happened
- Crypto VC fully dies
- No new launches
- Blockchains become mostly security/settlement rails, running on CBDCs with smart contracts
- Stablecoins still exist, but fees don’t flow to ETH
- Crypto Twitter ceases to exist
Basically: “Blockchain but not Bitcoin.”
My core argument (stated plainly)
Cryptocurrency is interesting because society is failing.
This is also why gold is interesting.
Ultimately, on sovereign rot/collapse, you cannot trust banks or interest-bearing assets. So you buy a useless metal with no yield. Flows into crypto would come from people who are long stocks or gold right now — who eventually lose faith in the system and want an offshore hedge.
So Bitcoin is digital gold insofar as it’s an expression of nihilism — not jewelry demand, not solar panels.
“Society is failing” — what I actually mean
The basic premise: the entire system’s “growth” is an endless expansion of government debt sitting on top of an industrial model that physically cannot scale.
If India consumed oil per capita like the West, it would destroy the planet.
China came to power via globalization/capitalism and — surprise — it didn’t become a capitalist democracy. It’s still authoritarian, still has currency controls.
And yes, people will say: “But they’re not actually communist.” Okay. They’re called the Chinese Communist Party. It’s in the name. It’s an authoritarian, statist structure with weak real property rights.
But it’s not just “the West is failing.” It’s that virtually every country gets richer and then:
- Everyone gets fat.
- Property prices skyrocket (call it NIMBY/YIMBY dysfunction — pick your poison).
- The digital economy goes full-pervasive and everyone’s brain gets cooked by slop (social media and AI).
- A mix of progressive rights expansion, female labor force participation, and declining religiosity leads to broken dating dynamics (hypergamy). Men can’t get laid. Women can’t marry the man they want even if they can sleep with him.
- Men start looksmaxxing to impress high-status gatekeepers (call it the clavicular supercycle). A gradual feminization follows, and the decline accelerates.
- The system crushes people and drives wealth disparity — so most people’s “solution” becomes voting for socialists, or…
- Gambling (a horse we’ve beaten to death).
- Eventually this turns into immigration floodgates opening and permanent wealth redistribution or the collapse of democracy as we know it.
Important: these are reflexive. They don’t structurally reverse because they’re statistical side effects of a digital, progressive-rights-based economy with no coherent industrial policy.
AI is the accelerator, not the savior
It’s worth noting:
- Nvidia has ~21,000 engineers.
- The entire AI research + fab construction industry globally is optimistically ~250,000 key individuals.
- AI is largely based on compression.
- Models increasingly run locally while being passably good for daily use.
- Mini models today are as good as giant models that could only run in a data center a year ago — and the trend is accelerating.
So we’re left with a base case of almost everyone being inept, and a very small town (AI) building systems that can train themselves, invent technologies, and obsolete industries.
Even if AI is “the next industrial revolution,” the value add accrues to a tiny group of technical researchers.
And unfortunately a lot of these people live in Taiwan.
Taiwan is the elephant in the room
The West isn’t collapsing in isolation.
Xi took a third term to oversee the peaceful or military annexation of Taiwan. Taiwan’s fabs are massively ahead of what’s under construction in the US. Russia is annexing Ukraine and aligns with China.
Because AI has military implications (and AI increasingly looks like it can do real physics research), Taiwan’s strategic significance increases and the timeline moves up.
Realistically this has to go down around 2028, during max chaos in US elections.
That could cause World War 3 and mass death. Or it could result in an unpredictable win for either side. Who even knows what weapons the US or China has.
Europe is a weird, unstable middle layer
If the next war isn’t a pure conventional war (or uses different weaponry), Europe becomes an ambiguous situation for the US.
Europe is making execution for US-based AI companies harder, and its citizens largely hate Americans. And vice versa.
Europe has threatened to sell US Treasuries and is aggressively arming itself (European tank stocks are 20-baggers over the last 5 years).
The fiscal situation is horrific
Everyone has to build their own weapons. And because AI is a weapon, they have to build their own data centers too. “Sovereign AI.”
So:
- supply chains get duplicated
- cybersecurity becomes a huge issue
- workers are too cooked to work
- costs go vertical
- entitlement pressure rises anyway
And then the generational math kicks in:
At the moment, the Silent Generation has more wealth than millennials — while millennials may also face social security being underfunded. Social security unfunded liabilities’ present value is 2–3x the entirety of government debt.
This is not just a US thing. It’s global.
So what it boils down to
The math doesn’t add up. The trends are dismal. Governments can’t and won’t stop spending.
And people around the world increasingly don’t view democracy as essential to middle-class growth.
Add declining birth rates across developed societies and you end up importing new citizens forever — who tend to vote for the social welfare programs that benefit them.
Also: it’s not clear China or Russia are in better positions even if Ukraine/Taiwan annexations happen. Authoritarian systems are inherently fragile during leadership change, and Xi/Putin are both getting old. Both countries have awful demographic and financial problems.
So no matter where you are:
- there’s going to be confiscation of assets
- there will be CBDCs
- there will be aggressive wartime measures across the US, Europe, and China that are enormously unfriendly to capital
- global capital flows will, over time, become halted — and potentially suddenly halted in the case of war
I wouldn’t believe this if…
- Cities felt safe or were looking nicer
- Airlines ran on time — and were running on time more because of AI
- The benefits of AI were obviously going to be evenly distributed
- It seemed like Trump was succeeding in his agenda (tech economy lowering prices for everyday people) while keeping his political mojo
But this isn’t the case.
So the question becomes: in the world I’m describing, do you want gold/silver bars or do you want crypto?
Gold is for sovereigns. Crypto is for individuals.
Sovereign buyers want gold. They’re used to it. It’s now a $28T asset class.
But individuals can’t meaningfully custody gold or silver at scale. And the situation I’m describing mostly hits individuals:
- erosion of individual property rights
- confiscation
- wealth taxes
- disorderly moves in the financial system
Crypto has the unique advantage of self-custody — and now, thanks to Halo2 on Zcash and ZK advancement broadly (e.g. Railgun on ETH), privacy too.
Halo2 is open source. Other protocols can adopt it. You can atomic swap Bitcoin to Monero for alternate privacy mechanisms. There’s no real reason privacy can’t be widely implemented across crypto unless governments crack down on it — which now seems relatively clearly not going to happen.
So you basically have an asset that can let you exit the system.
And the system I’ve described is not sustainable.
Bitcoin vs alts (in the “things get weird” world)
You have to ask the hard question: if the economy moves offshore, what does that look like?
- Bitcoin isn’t private.
- BTC’s current narrative is “store of value” escrowed at BlackRock or maybe MicroStrategy’s balance sheet.
- If things get full weird, you need international programmable money that can interface with offshore AI applications and get licensed back to the decaying mainland.
- And there’s still no obvious answer to BTC’s declining block reward. Smart contract ideas and Lightning implementations so far haven’t worked.
Here’s the more structural point:
Sovereigns don’t have to build Bitcoin miners. They can just buy gold.
But because they have to build AI data centers for national security (“Sovereign AI”), they all need GPUs. That makes it structurally hard to halt open-source AI development. If you kill it in one place, it moves somewhere else. Global regulation is basically zero, and the US isn’t the only place model training can happen.
So a dystopian Snow Crash scenario — lots of economically viable entities (AI agents and corporations) existing outside chaotic warring sovereigns — is believable. Honestly it’s closer to a base case.
And anyone building in crypto can tell you: because everything is open source, adoption of agents is accelerating development insanely fast. Things that were onerous are now fast — almost to a ridiculous extent.
So: talent can attrit and the tech still improves. More chains become private. More agentic payment rails. More useful app integrations.
That’s why I think some alts are going to work — if they integrate with the Sovereign AI dynamics above and facilitate agent interactions with humans.
BTC won’t dovetail cleanly with AI or privacy. I wouldn’t be a buyer of BTCD here. But BTC will stay liquid because it’s an attention machine, and sovereigns could step in if it gets too cheap relative to gold — so I’m not writing BTC off either.
If gold is $28T, I see no reason crypto can’t be $10T+ FDV by 2028 (over 3x from here), catalyzed by individuals realizing they need to exit the current system and opt into an offshore, agentic, private, censorship-resistant economy outside the failed social structures above.
Right now the market isn’t pricing this at all. Equities are at peak multiples — and despite correlation, crypto is at lows versus stocks.
What actually flips the switch?
People have to get afraid.
Paradoxically: I think you need stocks to drop and gold to stay bid.
Ideally you get:
- Trump leaning on the Fed
- Trump’s popularity dropping anyway
- inflation staying high
- a couple countries (UK) announcing CBDCs
- headlines about frozen bank accounts for people posting hate speech online
That should do the trick.
The real political question
Are Democrats going to make crypto illegal if they come back into power?
I think the answer is no. It was a losing position in the last election. Undoing current bills wouldn’t win many new voters, and it would invalidate a ton of corporate initiatives to make financial settlement more efficient.
Why I’m still here
Crypto is still an exciting place to build.
I can’t see a world where I’d want exposure to the US/UK/European political system as the terminal-value substrate for my life’s work. A lot of people feel the same way.
So it doesn’t feel useless to be in the digital life raft industry.
In the world I’m describing, I’d basically always be an expat anywhere I’m temporarily housed — and I’d want to keep lower balances in their banking systems.
Closing
I’ll try to post more actively about short-term opportunities. I know people are here to gamble, not read thought pieces. I’ll do my best in the New Year to facilitate that.