Milo runs it, but we all own it. Americans have shares, the British have shares, and even Germans have shares. As a result, or so Milo claims, the subconscious drive of everyone is to increase the value of the syndicate.

In one part of the book, Milo is confronted by the main character Yossarian. The syndicate killed his friend and Yossarian is angry and wants to know why. Milo, clearly frustrated, explains there was nothing he could do about it. He told Yossarian that the syndicate was contracted by the Americans to bomb a German bridge. The syndicate was also hired by the Germans to protect the bridge. Since he knew how to get around German anti-aircraft (he placed them) and he also knew when the attack would take place (since he planned it), the real decision was just how to keep everyone happy. Since the syndicate got an extra thousand dollars for each American plane shot down, he ran the numbers, and this was the best option.

Everyone won because the syndicate won.

He pleaded, “don’t you understand that I have to respect the sanctity of my contract with Germany?” He wanted to save Americans’ lives but was bound by his moral duty to increase the value of the syndicate. The lives of soldiers came secondary to the integrity of the contract. He explained that no one would argue for the lawlessness implied if the contract failed.

It seemed he had no option.

………………………..

I’ve been relatively quiet about the direction of Ethereum lately. In fact, the last time I took a vocal stance was pushing back against Lido centralizing the validator set a few years ago. But now we’re back to discussions on staking and centralization. It’s not that it’s necessarily urgent at the moment, but the dialogue is completely different this time around. Rather than discuss the merits of the proposal, there’s this almost religious belief that we shouldn’t change things.

We all want solo stakers, limited unnecessary payouts to centralized actors, and ETH (not an LST) as money, but we’re stuck picking which eternal path we need to take to get us there.

The real issue is that we’re so set on limited changes and neutrality that we’re trying to solve a values problem (we want a decentralized set of stakers) with a market parameter. It’s like Milo trying to figure out how not to kill his friend while running the numbers. “Which parameter can we tweak so we never kill our friends again?”

its not just staking

Like many of you, I’ve been here a while. I’ve also kind of changed my mind on a few things.

Hopefully you have too.

We should be growing up as a space. I know it’s hard for some to hear, but there’s a reason people tend to lose the ideological purism that defines one’s youth. For those in crypto early on, these ideas were of pure markets and privacy. We were cypherpunks building unstoppable tools, all with goal of eventually existing outside of society in some John Perry Barlow-esque digital utopia.

And so, create we did.

One of my biggest gripes now is when people say, “we should build a decentralized [enter category]”. The truth is that we built most of what we say we want. Pretty early on, we had all of these things, and they were truly decentralized. Prediction markets, off-chain payments (SpankChain), oracles, stablecoins, perps, even messaging protocols and internet browsers…all of it fit the bill of what we said we wanted.

And yet none of them won.

They had their moment in the spotlight, and we all worked through the UX bugs to get them to work for a minute, but the centralized versions beat them out.

Every single time.

Someone came along, stripped out every piece of decentralization, and mopped the floor in terms of adoption. And it’s hard to blame the user. Most of the time, these projects pretended to be some technological miracle that solved the trilemma and the few who said something were shunned as if they just didn’t understand.

The leadership and thought leaders in the space said nothing. You’d be lucky to get an Eric Wall article or have Vitalik politely hint at their needed progress in an article. Decentralization was a spectrum and projects were fine as long as they had something in their roadmap.

And this is how the space progressed. Over time those older systems were forgotten, and the newer ones were replaced by even more outright tradfi systems. The gas became too high to do anything non-financial on-chain, and the financial stuff was so intertwined with centralized stables that the point of decentralizing a higher point in the stack became pointless.

What happened?

To me, this is how we get back to Milo. Somewhere along the way, we went from having a side to just running the numbers in an emotionless system. We legitimized our relationship not based on ideas or goals, but through the common holding of a specific token. We all became part of the syndicate.

As a result, we too would sacrifice the goal for the price. In fact, the two became indistinguishable for most of the newer faces.

We’ll watch as repeat scammers pump a new coin or literal terrorists steal from a system. We’ll sit by idly as a thinly veiled Ponzi scheme captures billions of dollars.

We’d love to do something, but we have to respect the sanctity of the contract. They’re paying gas; they’re members of the syndicate too.

We then happily tout their usage in our aggregate statistics. “Look at our growing usage [of centralized applications]!”

We’ve been doing this for so long that we’ve made a religion out of not doing anything. We’ve been following this neutrality at the top level and then are left in disbelief when everything under it fails to fall into line.

In my book, I place the blame on neutrality and markets.

We set up these systems, and we think that they’ll just take care of themselves forever. We think there is such a thing as a perfect bonding curve. We feel like we can somehow encode our values into the parameters and walk away as the code and incentives perfectly work for all future generations.

We act as if the problem of the syndicate was in how the syndicate was structured. “If only we could make the numbers work out differently.”

It never will.

Markets will get captured and monopolized. Scams and extractors will use your system for everything it’s worth and you will be left with the scraps. Financialization and the need to put it all into numbers will drain every ounce of human connection, values, and goodness out of your system.

So stop the arguing on the perfect system or the perfect curve. It will never be perfect. Just move in the right direction and be nice to the people still hanging around.

If you’re lucky and successful, you’ll have to maintain this and argue about governance and monetary policy tweaks and social forks until you pass it on to your kids to do the same.

Just quit saying you’re neutral toward the use case. You do care who uses the system. You don’t want bad actors, and you don’t want scammers or systems that enrich tradfi. You want solo stakers and you don’t want LST’s. If Ethereum ends up as a platform used primarily by the CIA and Goldman to funnel money to terrorists, by the definition of CROPS, it could still be considered a success.

Reject this.

We can choose to keep moving toward a goal, and it isn’t the asset, the network, or especially the principles we use to build it. The goal is what it's used for. It’s for people posting private messages and using private coins. It’s for people using a decentralized internet. It’s for people organizing and being part of a digital community.

You do care if your friend dies and you’re ridiculous for pretending you don’t.

When you walk out my back door, it’s only about 100 feet until you hit the tree line. Previously blocked off with overgrowth, a few years ago I decided to cut a path to the trail that runs a few miles through the woods.

It was the best decision ever.

Even besides the runs I take through the barely lit woods in the morning, I get the chance to take my daughters on hikes all the time now that we don’t have to walk another half mile to the trail entrance. I just love being in the woods.

It’s not that the trail goes anywhere exciting or has breathtaking views, it’s just that it’s always changing. We always find a new bug, a snake, a deer, or even just the ever-present squirrels. It’s somehow always a great time and the best part is that you don’t even need to think about where you’re going.

You just follow the trail and it does the rest.

the path here

I’m not new to this writing thing. In my adult life, I’ve kind of never stopped writing. I started back in 2010 after college with a blog austrianinvesting.com. I was a huge Ron Paul fan and had to stand up against the evils of big government. Even found a picture on the wayback machine:

After I did that for the next 5 years, I took a couple years off and then started a Medium that I wrote for while I built DDA/Tellor (the crypto company I ran for almost a decade). Of course, Medium got horrendous at some point, so I tried Twitter (also went downhill) and some decentralized alternatives, but ultimately stopped the articles altogether for the past few years while I wrote my book.

And now that too is in the past.

I’ve never been one to enjoy the selling process, so marketing the thing is of course taking a side seat to working on new ideas, and of course, writing about them.

So with nowhere to post long form content, I found myself once again looking for a proper platform and Substack seems to be where the cool kids are at.

the content

I write longer form content on economics and crypto.

I’ll often venture into the hot topics of the day (e.g. AI, housing, politics) where I feel I can offer something different with my framework of thinking. I know I have some articles coming on the coming interest rate collapse, stablecoins wrecking monetary policy, AI labor effects, and the perils of immutability.

My thoughts on economics have come completely full circle since the austrianinvesting days and I don’t expect them to stay the same. In fact, I hope I find better arguments for every one of my positions.

So take the articles with a grain of salt. I tend to be so early to some trends that it’s a disadvantage and far too late on others to be cutting edge (e.g. starting a Substack in ‘26), so please don’t take any investment advice from me.

winding

So this is where my trail is going and I’m staying on it. I feel unfathomably blessed to be in a place where I have the time to write and the freedom to not have to hold back. The trail’s working out for me even if I don’t know exactly where I’m going.

If you do disagree with the arguments, I hope the writing is pleasant enough to keep you around and maybe give you a chuckle or two. I promise to make every piece something I’m proud to give.

-Nick