Patrick McKenzie

For the last many years, we have been saying, you can still get in early.

You can still get in early.

You can still get in early because the value has not arrived yet.

And so that is my capsule summary on crypto 14 years in.

We've staked a group of talented people who are very good at giving a sales pitch with tens of billions or hundreds of billions of dollars.

And look at what we have built.

this would be a failure in any other tech company.

So capital F failure.

So either like radically pivot and unfail it, or maybe we should stop continuing to stake you with money.

That is evidence.

And you know, like some tech savvy people have a good payment rail and well, they have a payment rail that they did not have access to 15 years ago.

but at the cost of tens or hundreds of billions of dollars.

Counterfactually, if one had thought, okay, we really want to work on debt payment rails specifically, another way one could hypothetically have deployed $10 billion is on the best-funded lobbying campaign in history in the United States to work on AML and KYC regulation to allow more easy transfers of money worldwide.

Don't judge it by, like, hypothetical worlds.

Just, like, keep in mind that hypothetical worlds might exist.

Judge it by, like, the actual realized utility at the moment relative to the amount of resources consumed.

A trillion dollars?

Like, at what date in the future do we judge, like, someone has been right or someone has been not with respect to, we have created, like, you know, people in crypto have very confidently stated in various places that this is the next iteration of the internet.

This is, you know, will revolutionize the world, not just how payments are conducted, but it will be, like, a fundamentally new computing architecture.

Okay, like...