I've been taking it quite slow the past couple weeks and wanted to vent about a couple things. The first part is on crypto. The second one is on global polarity, followed lastly by what I believe the next big conflict will fixate itself on, now that the war on drugs and terrorism have largely ended.
It's corny to say out loud, but it's hard to argue that crypto has produced much that's durable, relative to the time and capital it has consumed. The default product has been speculation packaged as financial liberation, exported at mass scale to people who don't understand the game they're stepping into.
There are exceptions. The privacy coin meta is one of them. Tokens like XMR have paved the way towards securing some fragment of financial freedom that stablecoins and the traditional banking world could never afford to give us. I think that's good, and it's empowering to have an alternative. It's not the final form of financial freedom, but it's a stepping stone towards it.
Outside of that, optimism feels thin. The "gold rush" energy that defined earlier cycles is gone, and that's normal. Every market eventually matures, edges compress, and the marginal opportunity becomes harder to justify as a full-time identity. In simpler words, it doesn't seem like crypto will provide any semblance of the opportunities it provided in the past, going into the future.
My base case for this year is boring price action and fewer asymmetric opportunities. I'm thinking just a range between 60-100k. Not catastrophic, just not a market to exert all your energy into. Maybe a few good trades a year.
But if there's anything I've learned this past year especially, it's that there will always be more opportunities. At the end of the day, if we strip out all the fancy words and theories, it just comes down to basic "bare bones" investing, and understanding where the zeitgeist is shifting to. If you can do that, you can succeed in a lot of domains, not just in crypto. But for most of us, I think it's an ample time to find a different arena.
This past half-year I mostly stayed sidelined. Not because I'm disciplined, but because there wasn't much to do that felt worth doing. I moved to a new place, worked on my diving credentials in prep for my antartica trip next year, and cleaned up some life admin. Some of it was real, but a lot of it was just maintenance disguised as progress. Still, downtime is useful. You don't always need to be scouting for a new trade or market. You can sharpen the blade without needing to make it look like you're on the prowl.
Unlike entropy and the natural state of the universe, power in it's most raw form, rarely fragments itself. It almost always opts for concentration. And if you look at history, this has always been the case. Humans, generally speaking, went from nomadic fragmented tribes, to villages, then to kingdoms, cities, states, nation-states, and finally countries and superpowers. It's common to hear online amongst others about how we're shifting to a multi-polar world. I disagree. Power is in equilibrium in either a unipolar or bipolar geopolitical world. And I suspect this will continue to be the case. And if you force me to sketch the board, I still only see a handful of spheres rather than a true multipolar balance.
I'm not going to do prophecy-by-tweet here. The details are unknowable, and people like to conflate their preferred outcome with their primary forecast. What I do think is true is the directionality: alliances will harden and become more rigid (stances on the most pertaining contemporary geopolitical issues crystallize), supply chains get weaponized as a means for geopolitical leverage (think gunboat diplomacy in the early 1900s but this time with semiconductor chips and rare earth minerals), followed lastly by middle regional powers being pressured into choosing private alignment even if they publicly pretend to maintain neutrality.
Regarding the EU, Europe will continue to discover that "unity" is a just an instagram slogan until further priority is granted towards remilitarizing. Russia will continue to remain a strategic problem for Europe, and regarding the current conflict between them and Ukraine, I think we'll likely see Ukraine concede a token amount of its territory. I don't think Russia will accept any type of war resolution that does not result in a territorial gain. Yes, it's illegal in the Ukrainian constitution, but constitutions can be rewritten. As for whether Ukraine joins the EU/NATO, I'm not really sure. I just believe that Ukraine won't be able to exit this conflict without giving up some amount of territory to Russia, assuming of course that Putin does not die in the immediate coming year(s).
Moving to the east, China is a patient actor. I don't think Taiwan needs to "fall" in some dramatic epic war to be functionally absorbed. It can happen through dependency, mainland incentives, internal division, and a slow redefinition of what sovereignty and being "Taiwanese" means in practice. It doesn't even have to happen officially. Taiwan can continue to remain "sovereign" but if it's people have an affinity to the CCP and the "motherland", it doesn't matter whether Taiwan is still considered a country or not. Again, power concentrates. It does not distribute itself naturally. And the Chinese are especially patient. They really don't have to do much to eventually absorb Taiwan.
Now that the war on terrorism and drugs are largely over, I believe that the next big war will fixate itself on information and the subsequent control of it. What I'm saying is nothing new, and people far smarter than me have signaled this way before. But I do I believe it's necessary to reiterate this, because it feels like we are at an inflection point, a point in time that marks when the conflict is going to accelerate at speeds not previously witnessed before. You already see it happening now. The UK wants to ban twitter. The Australian government is implementing age restrictions on social media to curtail youth exposure. There is already a silent war being waged against free access to the internet. And I believe that AI and LLMs will only exponentiate this struggle, making it harder and harder to discern what's real and what's not.
That's why you're seeing growing interest in products that can price truth. Prediction markets aren't magic, but they're a clue: people are looking for alternatives to institutions whose incentives have drifted. When you see a flood of price inelastic capital piling into imperfect products, it's usually not because the tools are good, but because the demand is so insatiable that it's willing to overlook many problems associated with the products (incompetent teams, toxic insider flow, etc).
Generally speaking for the future, the practical advice is boring: stay light. Don't anchor too hard to a single industry or a single narrative. Watch where talent migrates, where constraints loosen, and where new rails get built. The next "golden age," if it arrives, won't announce itself with a press release. However it may usher itself in, I know that you'll be ready and well equipped to handle it when it comes. The world is changing right in front of our eyes, and it finally feels time to pick a side.
You're either with the change makers or the changed. The enactors or the reactors.
At the end of the day, It's always been your choice.