What Brought Me Here, and Why I’m Staying

Thanks for clicking this, especially at this time of year when everyone feels stretched thin. I’ll admit up front that this writing exercise may be a bit self serving and probably more therapeutic for me than anything else. But my hope is that there’s something in here that resonates with you too.

Let’s start with a quick exercise.

I want you to think back and try to remember the moment or moments that first pulled you into crypto.

What year was it? What was going on in your life at the time? What was the underlying why that brought you here?

Maybe it was just this year. Maybe you’ve been around since the Bitcoin whitepaper. Either way, what was the draw?

Was it purely about money? Was it driven by a set of ideals that felt important or even urgent at the time? Or was it some mix of both?

I’ve found myself thinking about this a lot over the past few weeks as things slowed down and a bit more space for introspection opened up.

For me, it was largely driven by curiosity. I remember nights after work, my wife asleep, the room dark except for the glow of my laptop, falling deeper into this rabbit hole in whatever spare time I could find.

What started as a passing interest quickly became a journey I’m still on today. Because once you stumble into Bitcoin, you almost inevitably run into a much bigger question: what is money?

And once you start pulling on that thread, everything else begins to unravel. You start questioning assumptions you didn’t even realize you were making. You revisit ideas you once took as fixed truths and discover they are anything but.

That path can take you in some unexpected directions. You might find yourself learning about the Isle of Yap and Rai stones. You might start reading about monetary history, trust, coordination, power, and human behavior. One question quietly turns into ten more, and before you know it, your worldview has shifted just enough that you can’t quite go back to how you saw things before.

And that, at least for me, is where the journey really began.

Or maybe, instead, you start examining the emergence of the Federal Reserve more closely and eventually pick up The Creature from Jekyll Island.

Or maybe Milton Friedman suddenly sounds far more interesting than he ever did in school.

Or maybe it’s something else entirely.

At a certain point, the list becomes almost too long to name, so here’s a very incomplete snapshot of some of my own personal rabbit hole journeys along the way:

• The gold standard and why it failed repeatedly

• Bretton Woods and USD hegemony

• The Cantillon Effect

• Ludwig von Mises

• Friedrich Hayek

• Understanding low vs high time horizons

• Hard money vs elastic money

• Why savings became “bad” in modern macro

• Energy as the root of economic truth

• Proof-of-work

• Why “wasted energy” is often stranded or excess energy

• Censorship resistance vs permissioned systems

• Separation of money and state

• Self Sovereignty

• The history of the internet

• Early Cypherpunk ideals

I’m not an expert in any of the above. Not even close. But these are the kinds of side quests that seem to emerge naturally once you start learning about Bitcoin in any serious way.

And that’s really the point.

If you’ve gone deep enough down the Bitcoin rabbit hole, there’s a good chance your worldview shifted in some meaningful way. Maybe politically. Maybe economically. Maybe technologically. Maybe all three.

For me, the promise of crypto was always bigger than just money. The money mattered, and still does, but it was only part of a much larger picture.

Which brings me to something that’s been bothering me for a while.

We’ve lost our way.

We’ve drifted far from the original ethos of crypto. This isn’t a new or controversial take. Plenty of people have said some version of this before. But for me, it feels important to revisit it, especially now.

Because when I step back and reflect on why I ended up here in the first place, it’s hard not to notice how far the conversation has shifted.

Erik Voorhees’ talk Why Are We Here at Permissionless captured this tension in a way that really stuck with me:

Full talk here:

Another thing I find myself doing from time to time is rereading the opening pages of the Bitcoin and Ethereum whitepapers. It probably looks a bit like a religious zealot revisiting the holy scriptures, and honestly, it kind of is.

But every time I do, I walk away with something new. Sometimes it’s a small detail I glossed over before. Other times I’m just struck, again, by the level of foresight and clarity they had at the time. It’s hard not to admire how much was anticipated before most of the world even realized these ideas mattered.

I’m also always surprised by how many people in this space have never actually read them. Not the full papers, not even the abstracts or introductions. Given how often they’re referenced, that’s always felt a bit strange to me.

So here they are, in case you want to revisit them yourself or read them for the first time. I’ve included links to the full versions below.

Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System

Thankfully, a 19 year old kid in Canada, inspired by Bitcoin and shaped by an early lesson in digital ownership from World of Warcraft, felt compelled to take the next step.

In 2013, Vitalik Buterin published the Ethereum whitepaper, proposing that blockchains could be more than money. They could be programmable, trust minimizing platforms anyone could build on.

Ethereum didn’t replace Bitcoin. It extended its promise.

A Next-Generation Smart Contract and Decentralized Application Platform

So if that’s what brought me here, the more interesting question is why am I staying?

Before I get there, I want to pause and reflect on 2025.

Over the last few months, as the year has been winding down, I’ve seen a noticeable amount of doomerism on the timeline. And honestly, I don’t blame anyone for feeling that way.

This year tested people.

We watched the sitting President of the United States launch the TRUMP memecoin, quickly followed by the MELANIA memecoin. That moment alone sucked an enormous amount of attention, liquidity, and energy out of the market. It was hard not to feel like something had gone a bit off the rails.

Then there was October 10th. The 10/10 crypto crash, where Binance appeared to break in real time. Even now, it’s unclear whether we’ve seen all the fallout from that event, or if more bodies are still waiting to surface.

Another uncomfortable reality that became harder to ignore this year is the question of who we actually built all this open source software for. Venture capital has poured billions into backing genuinely impressive teams and pushing the space forward. But how defensible is that work when the code can be casually adopted by companies like Robinhood?

And isn’t that, in some sense, exactly what we said we wanted?

Open source means permissionless. It means anyone can use the tools, improve them, and deploy them at scale. When Robinhood adopts these ideas, it’s a signal that the technology worked. That the ideas escaped the lab.

But it also forces a harder question. If the value accrues everywhere except to the people who took the earliest risk, built the infrastructure, and held the tokens, then something in the incentive design is still broken.

A similar dynamic played out elsewhere. Larger players like Circle were able to acquire entire teams and intellectual property, leaving tokenholders behind and allowing the original network to fend for itself. It’s brutal, but also revealing. If tokenholder rights aren’t better defended, rational actors will continue to pick through the bones, take the meat, and leave the carcass behind.

Even DeFi’s brightest success story hasn’t been immune. Aave spent much of the year wrestling with an age old question the space still hasn’t resolved. Where should value accrue, and to whom?

There’s more I could list, but these are the ones that feel most vivid in my mind.

Stepping back, it felt like many new entrants to crypto this cycle got absolutely rinsed. Caught in a memetic rip current of greed, grift, and financial nihilism. They were pulled straight into the worst parts of the industry before they ever had a chance to see the best of it.

When I first got into crypto, the landscape was much simpler. There were essentially two gravity wells: Bitcoin and Ethereum. That simplicity mattered more than I realized at the time.

It afforded me the space to slow down and actually study what I was looking at. To go deep rather than wide. To sit with ideas long enough for them to change how I thought. The kind of learning I’ve described earlier in this piece didn’t happen because I was smarter or more disciplined. It happened because there were fewer things competing for attention.

Today, the experience for new entrants is very different. Instead of two foundational systems inviting deeper understanding, they’re greeted by an endless feed of tokens, memes, and narratives, all demanding immediate conviction and faster decisions.

It’s hard to build first principles in an environment optimized for shock, speed, and spectacle.

The TikTok version of crypto. Fast, loud, and convinced that money should be easy. That segment grew far larger than I expected.

In some strange way, I’m relieved that bubble seems to have burst. We’re slowly finding our way back to something more fundamentals driven.

If you strip out stablecoins and wrapped assets, and look only at tokens that are attempting to capture future value, there are still roughly 67 unicorns with billion dollar plus fully diluted valuations. Personally, I still think that number needs to come down further. But it has come down. And that matters.

The industry has been healing, even if it hasn’t always felt like it in the moment.

Another reason I’m staying is that it’s genuinely hard to walk away from those early moments of discovery.

I still remember the first time Bitcoin really clicked. Or the first time I used something on Ethereum that felt undeniably new. Trading on Uniswap without an intermediary. Using Alchemix. Borrowing against my own collateral on Aave without asking a bank for permission. Those weren’t incremental improvements. They were fundamentally different experiences.

They reshaped what felt possible.

So sometimes I ask myself if I’m just chasing those early highs. Trying to recreate a feeling that only exists the first time you see something truly novel.

But I don’t think that’s what’s happening.

I’m staying because I’m an optimist by nature, and I still believe deeply in human ingenuity. We’ve already built many of the core primitives. Now we’re watching them move from experiments into infrastructure. From niche tools into rails that institutions, companies, and eventually everyday users begin to rely on.

The landscape is shifting under our feet because new entrants are finally adopting crypto not as a curiosity, but as plumbing. And messy as it can look in real time, that’s what adoption actually feels like.

For me personally, staying means continuing to push toward the frontier. To stay close to the innovation as it happens. To filter signal from noise. To focus on what’s being built that actually moves things forward.

That’s what excites me. And that’s where I think the most value still lies for anyone who continues to listen to The Edge Podcast or read The Edge Newsletter.

And before I close this out, I want to say thank you.

To everyone who’s read the newsletter, listened to the podcast, sent a message, or shared a thought along the way. Knowing there are thoughtful people on the other side of this makes the work feel worthwhile.

Maybe that’s where I’ll leave this.

Not with certainty. And not with predictions. Just a reminder.

Whatever brought you here in the first place probably wasn’t an accident. It was curiosity. Or frustration. Or a question that didn’t have a satisfying answer anywhere else.

Those questions still matter.

The noise will come and go. Cycles will repeat. Incentives will distort, then correct. But the underlying ideas, the ones that made you stop and really pay attention the first time, are still here.

That’s why I’m staying.

And if you’re still here too, even quietly or a bit skeptically, you probably already know your own reasons.

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