One of my favorite characters in literature is Milo Minderbinder from Catch-22. He’s the fast-talking businessman who’s basically the WWII embodiment of modern hustle culture. Even besides the hilarity of his character, I like him because he plays a special role in the story. He represents what’s called “the syndicate.” It’s the global company that’s entangled with everything. From food to war to the production of all goods; it’s so large that the company is inseparable from the economy itself.
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.
