38 – Bond Villain Vibes

Bond Villain Vibes A-Brewing

Last week’s largely advertorial edition, complete with some empty hot fluff, got the team and I thinking about how reactive we’ve been to the space lately. Whether actively engaging it or passively consuming it secondhand, we’ve primarily been responding to a larger conversation as it unfolds on the TradingView charts of livestream shit-shillers.

But we’re not just trying to respond to the conversation. We’re trying to shape it.

To that end, we want to get back to discussing utility in the space. Solana ETFs are poised to go mainstream, as is the broader blockchain. Users looking to transfer money on digital payment platforms are now seeing stablecoins as the top option. Why? Because they’re cheaper, not to mention more trustworthy, than the old rails. And I am certainly a free market, stablecoin maxi. Does that mean I’m looking to bring back the wildcat banks of old? No way. But I do prefer more issuers of stablecoins to less, and I don’t believe mechanisms like the FDIC incentivize the right behaviors from the banks they protect consumers from.

Why bring this up?

DOGE — and no, not the memecoin, which, on an unrelated note, I’d hodl given the ongoing and future relevancy of the task force — is currently digging through transactions across departments tied to the direction of the executive branch. There’s been no shortage of pushback to their scorched earth approach. But that has left little room for discussion of the potential opportunities it opens up.

Like, say, the promise of putting the federal budgetary dispersion on chain.

Benford’s law is an algorithm that’s easy to run, and the Department of Defense hasn’t passed an audit in decades. I would fully support monitoring the financial transaction of our tax dollars, as well as the accounts of public officials, via a secure and transparent blockchain ledger.

However, that’s with the important caveat that said monitoring does not extend to individual citizens. This rightful fear extends to the existing administration, which is happy to run a full-on blitz supporting the space, but with an ignorance so ironic that it risks ushering in the very surveillance state feared under a CBDC system.

In the hands of the current ruling class, it’s reasonable to believe any widespread blockchain adoption could quickly devolve into the worst centralized use case imaginable: digital identity systems. Trump, and the Republican party as a whole, have been very vocal about their disdain for inconsistent voter identification requirements, and with their crackdown on the immigration front, and past conversations around other ID systems, it’s hard to not picture any development on this front.

Real ID, the web2 version of you tokenizing your digital identity, becomes law for air travel this spring. Want to fly on a plane? Your birth certificate or passport need to be used in the issuance of your driver license, or state ID card. Not that scary in the grand scheme of things, but when paired with the forced face and biometric scanning that’s occurring at many boarding gates, the surveillance state seems to be expanding.

Meanwhile, “Scam” Altman and Trump just partnered on Project Stargate, where $500B of funding has been secured for a marginally more intelligent AI. Scam’s brute force approach to tackling this problem is pretty caveman to me. But when you consider he’s got the might of the US government, ChatGPT, and his crypto-based, digital ID system project WorldCoin brewing, it all starts to seem a little less neanderthal and a bit more Bond Villain.

TL;DR: Don’t call your Senators, just launch a stablecoin. The best resistance to chaos is to create your own order.

—El Prof