We are more than the shackles that bind us. - xh3b4sd

We are once again entering a cyclical phase in which people outside of this crypto industry reach out to more accustomed insiders, only to ask what coins to buy, or whether they should sell their "Bitcoin" now. Why now? Because prices are up and with it, attention is high. Every other quarter, every other year, rising crypto prices make it into the news cycle of ordinary people, sparking curiosity, again, meaning greed, over and over and over. People never come to ask mid season, how they can ensure fair elections onchain. People never come to ask on a random Tuesday, how they may protect their privacy using cryptography. Somehow, people never come to ask during lunch, how to protect themselves against inflation, read currency debasement. Nobody ever comes to ask how they can do away with all of the administrative paperwork that we all have to obey as in our adult lives. No. Friends only talk to you about crypto if they think there is easy money to be made. Family only talks to you about crypto when the greatest fraud in modern history takes place. Somehow people only come to talk about crypto when the public opinion puts some random token price in the spotlight, because it is this time of the year again. We are so early to this secular blockchain revolution that attention is seemingly everything. Nobody has any interest in technology nor its impact, unless people get rich from it without putting in too much effort. One of the running gags in crypto is "the tech has dramatically improved" if prices were rising sharply over night. And the most absurd thing about this joke is that it actually reflects accurately how most people think about a blockchain project today. The technology is only very good when the price is very high. When people outside of this industry reach out to me in order to talk about crypto, then they do it out of financial motivation. And I always go back to first principles. I cannot sell anything to you. And your ideological prepositions may prevent you from seeing anything beyond your own horizon anyway. Financial decisions have to be made by yourself, for yourself. The only advice I have to give is this. Try to get the big things right. The question that you should be asking yourself is what actually motivates you, and what you actually try to achieve. Your motivation and your goals dictate your financial time horizon and with it your set of strategies that you should be executing upon. The exercise of financial planning and strategic execution thereof is actually very complex, which is why we have armies of certified financial advisors, most of which are not worth their money to begin with. What does your starting point look like? And how does your target destination look like? Those two questions need to be considered fundamentally when making financial decisions. And those questions can naturally only be answered by reflecting on your own position in this very universe.

Following from the above, I am always trying to find better ways to explain financial technology, because I think financial literacy is one of the most important educational topics, period. The more tragic it is that none of our education systems does a good job helping individuals understand how anything in finance really works. When I was growing up, we had no financial education in any of our curriculums whatsoever. Zero. Which makes a lot of sense from the point of view of literally every single nation state that we have seen over the past 200 years. All that any given nation state really cares about are obedient factory workers that produce some good or service, without asking too many questions about the larger forces in life. But life is changing, and we are more than the shackles that bind us. And with that, more people should have an understanding of what money actually is. More people should see through inflation and realize how uninformed policy makers impoverish the weakest of society, those that they themselves claim to represent. We should all have a common understandig about "hardness" and how this monetary property affects generational wealth transfers. We should all be a little bit better at understanding systems, and how to articulate their mechanics. Because only then can we reason about the forces that be. And only then can we come together and try to be better tomorrow.

I had recently an idea for a practical game, or thought experiment, that leans into the concept of emotional granularity. The basic idea here is that you simply look at some thing, any thing that comes to mind, and describe that thing in your own words as you imagine it. This form of cognitive training works under the assumption that what you can articulate, you truly understand. And the more you are able to articulate a thing, the more you are able to comprehend, teach, and use it. Let's play this game, and feel free to adjust the context and scope to whatever is interesting to you personally. Just to make a point, and to show how dead simple this game really is, let us imagine an ordinary tree. Imagine a tree and try to visualize how it looks like. Now, on a meta level, the tree that you see, and the tree that I visualize, are likely to be very different, but only to the degree to which trees may differ. And to the extend that you are able to articulate your understanding of a tree, to the same extend you can apply basically any concept or technology. That means, we can play this game in any domain and use it for any problem statement, because all systems can be described in abstract terms. This very ability to transfer principles from one domain to another is what mechanism design is all about. And my hope here is that our thought experiment may help to make you better at understanding systems. And now back again to our tree. The tree that I see has a very wide trunk. It is very big and looks very majestic, as if it is carrying the weight of the world on its shoulders. The trunk is not simply straight, but growing slightly bent by the wind. Its roots are anchored deep down in the earth. And its root network is so large that it reaches far away from here underground. Many branches grow higher up the tree in what looks like networks of ever more fine grained ant super-highways. The tree that I see is so big and so old that thick and soggy moss is covering vast areas of wood wherever gravity permits. Leaves are growing at the endings of every branch and sometimes almost randomly out of any place in the thick crusty bark. All of those leaves have a quite similar shape. Some leaves show different colours and shades, but all of them show an intricate network of veins providing structural support for the biomass around, enabling the vital flow of some almost magical form of energy. And on, and on, and on. You may notice that the concept of emotional granularity comes from our ability to realize how much is "there". And the more you zoom out and the more you zoom in, you will notice that different structures, different mechanics, and entirely different ecosystems flourish, guided by their very own equilibria. The more you can realize, the higher is your emotional granularity. And the greater your emotional granularity is, the better you are equipped to understand systems, which, in a complicated world, is a very big plus. I am sure that some social scientist has a fancy name for this kind of game. It is highly likely that psychology students learn about similar exercises in the first five lectures in class. The dynamics between visualization, articulation and understanding occurred to me at some point, and I found this little thought experiment to be wildly useful, which is why I wanted to share it here with you in the Powerlaw memo. My question to you would now be, how far can you go now?

My number for this week, amongst others, is 7, because the 7 day burn on Ethereum L1 caused the ETH supply to go net negative again. Comparing the issuance between BTC and ETH on the UltraSound Money website is really nice to look at, because it shows us which network is really inflating. Another happy note, the ETH ETFs became net positive since inception for the first time now. Over 600 million USD were flowing into the ETH ETFs this past week. Let that sink in for a moment. Far more than half a billion US Dollars were buying ETH in a single week, all the while most institutional funds do not yet allocate to the asset class. The crazy thing to think about here is this. It took only a single week to turn the entire ETH ETF complex around in order to make it an economic force for good. And just when Kyle Samani explained to us how every single payment provider that you have ever heard of is building on Solana, just then Arbitrum took over Solana in stablecoin TVL, standing at 4.9 billion USD over 3.7 billion USD. Well, well, well.