Patrick McKenzie

I think I have two broad perspectives on this.

One, people often treat the market cap of something as like implicitly that is some sort of cost on society.

And I think the true cost to society of crypto has been that anytime one engages in attempting to do productive enterprise, some actor in society has said, okay, I will stake you with some of society's resources, which these resources are rivalrous.

They cannot be applied to any other things society needs in the hope that you will produce something that is worthy of being staked with this.

How much have we spent on crypto, not on trading tokens around, but on building infrastructure and spending rival resources that we can't get back, whether that's, you know, GPUs or ASICs or electricity that could have gone to other things in China but went into mining or the time of talented and intelligent people that could have been building other software products but was instead building crypto.

That number is in the tens of billions or hundreds of billions of dollars.

What do we have to show for that tens of billions or hundreds of billions of dollars?

I am very crypto skeptical, and I could give you an answer to that question.

I think crypto-like fans would not like to hear it from me, so I prefer Vitalik Buterin's articulation of this question from 2017.

He asked, at the time it was $0.5 trillion, a trivial number, only $500 billion in market cap.

He said, have we, and I'm paraphrasing a tweet thread, have we truly earned this number?

How many of the unbanked have we actually banked?

How many distributed applications have a meaningful amount of value doing something which is meaningful?

And he has about six other meditations on this.

And I think, you know, like,

Crypto folks certainly aren't accountable to me.

In some manner, you're not even accountable to Buterin, even though he's clearly a leading intellectual in the community.

You're accountable to producing positive value in the world.

But what is the answer to Buterin in 2024?

how many of the unbanked have we truly banked what is the best use case for crypto right now once crypto has a responsive answer for that that is sized anything like proportionate to the hundreds of billions of dollars tens of billions or hundreds of billions of dollars of resources that we've staked crypto with i think crypto people should feel enormously proud of that accomplishment in some future where it hypothetically arrives and in some future where that hypothetically arrives you have my sword i will love your uh your initiative however the