Vlad, srry for renting your wall, not many humans left on this app. The deflated morale is the natural course of hardcore revolutions. Cryptoanarchism is exciting and all, but it takes socially embedded "protestant" dudes to translate it into something meaningful to civilization.
I tried butting heads with you about this on your podcast, that putting trustlessness on a pedestal is wrong. "Civilization is the scale of trust", and we shouldn't conflate the strong conviction that the TCP/IP rails of society must be trustless and singlepointoffailure-free with a trust-hostile culture. Below greg maxwell on bitcoin mailing list bringing nuance into the trustless shibboleth (surprising i know), really influenced me.
Bitcoin toxic culture more than anything screams "trustless trustless on every layer", treating common normie sense and judgment as muggle midwit. You end up getting married to the worst chronic normie institutions a la MSTR.
This lack of cultural depth highly limits bitcoin's ability to be meaningful to non-abstract civilization. And the pessimistic sentiment shades over vibrant cypherpunk-principled projects like zcash and kaspa (your top two fav:)). You should ascribe zcash's recent success to it being pushed by a naval+solana "cabal" of people with backbone-cypherpunk convictions but otherwise far from anarchist-flat absolutists.
Crypto's next manifesto must be legible to normies. As someone smart wrote recently (me): We've "earned" turning normies from a derogatory term into a sanity check on our revolution. And to really land it needs to open also political/social avenues for permissionless rails.
Bitcoin has at least 20 more years before it's dead (the turtle that is, not the currency), but that's not a long time on civilizational scales, and we need to make sure crypto outgrows its v1 sooner rather than later.
Rename your podcast to Crypto Takeover and I'll join as second host.
ALT greg maxwell