Thinking About ETH
Lately I’ve been sharpening my focus on ETH—why do I hold it, and do I want to continue doing so? Why do I think it’s valuable?
There are basically three major theses I’ve seen floating around from my friends and colleagues on ETH:
“Bitcoin+” — a store of value hedge against monetary entropy, but “better” because:
it can be deflationary when it can be, inflationary when it must; and
- it has native programmability, so you don’t need a custodial or semi-custodial overlay just to use the money.
- “System equity” — the asset is a claim on the cashflow dynamics of a decentralized compute platform: more usage → more demand for blockspace → more fee flow + burn → scarcity pressure.
- “Digital oil” — a commodity frame that tries to split the difference between (1) and (2).
These aren’t cleanly separable; they’re different camera angles on the same machine.
My view is related, but slightly different: ETH is cyberpunk money. Yes, cyBerpunk, with a ‘b’. And cyberpunk is now.
Cyberpunk vs. cypherpunk: why the frame matters now
In Neuromancer, Cyberpunk 2077, and other cyberpunk sci-fi, money is less a moral concept than a routing primitive: credsticks, corporate accounts, informal street liquidity, and favors—value moves through whatever rails the system can’t fully police, and the people with leverage are the ones who can still execute under pressure.
The “eddies” are everywhere, but the real game is who can transact when the corpo stack is hostile: identity, access, enforcement, and exit all collapse into the same question—can you still get your action included, settled, and recognized as real?
That’s the right lens for Ethereum.
ETH isn’t “cypherpunk money” in the narrow sense of a privacy-activist artifact (like ZCash). It’s cyberpunk money: a bearer credential for a world where corporate power and th3 str33ts both use tech creatively—constantly in tension but ultimately interdependent.
Crypto discourse keeps trying to force a false dichotomy: either you’re building liberatory tech that resists institutions, or you’re building corporate infrastructure and you’ve “lost.” Reality is uglier and more interesting:
- Corporations will build & use crypto rails. They already are.
- The street layer will route around brittleness, extraction, and censorship.
Cypherpunk is cryptography-driven activism: privacy, anonymity, secure communication, mathematical tools to resist centralized control. For the most part, it excludes the ‘corpo side’ entirely as corporations are unwilling to transact in a fully lawless zone.
Cyberpunk is broader and more accommodating: systems-hacking at the boundary of institutions—tech + law + finance + identity + social engineering, where style is strategy and the rules are written in a mix of code and contracts. Corporations can operate there, because compliance, enforcement and accountability are possible, but so can outlaws—and this makes cyberpunk a universe in which all kinds of parties can interact freely, often engaging in mutual couplings and subversions.
Ethereum’s thesis lives exactly there: build protocols that let adversarial institutions interoperate, while still preserving real exit and real property for whoever can sign and pay. And using ETH as the currency within that Night City. That’s cyberpunk.
ETH as Cyberpunk Money
ETH’s value prop as ‘money’ often gets oversimplified into sovereign-money-vibes, essentially overlapping heavily with marketing to bitcoiners and goldbugs. But they are already fully bought-into BTC or gold, and will never convert to ETH.
BTC and gold convey nothing—they are memecoins forming a bet in favor of a particular paranoid social philosophy about fiat inflation and central banking. A bet that, personally, I think will become increasingly irrelevant in the new normal of deflationary AI and robotics.
ETH as cyberpunk money is more ambitious and has broader and more intuitive appeal, because ETH always conveys exercisable ‘system rights’ inside the Ethereum blockchain network system. ETH’s tight coupling to a smart contract environment enabling trustless commerce gives it continued relevance even in a deflationary environment, because (1) it has real economic fundamentals to ground its value; and (2) both corporations and individuals need an ‘economic autonomous zone’ in an increasingly hyperscaling, posthuman technocracy.
ETH’s Fundamentals
In proof-of-stake, ETH doesn’t just “represent” value; it is the resource that buys you the ability to get your transactions executed and included in the blockchain and participate in consensus:
- With Ethereum adding FOCIL in Hegota, paying the current market rate in ETH to validators guarantees you execution and inclusion of your transaction in a block.
- 32 ETH plus consumer-grade hardware enables you to activate a validator and participate in proposing/attesting to blocks and (loosely speaking) ‘voting’ whether to adopt particular protocol upgrades.
The in-protocol network powers of ETH are fundamentals. They are, in practice, more concrete than “full faith and credit” rhetoric, because they are enforced by an explicit state transition function plus penalties.
And this is also why PoS is a better grounding for cyberpunk money than PoW:
- ETH gives you protocol-native operational participation: stake is the gate, and stake is slashable.
- BTC is belief-weighted scarcity plus durability; mining is gated by specialized ASIC capital that is not intrinsically coupled to BTC ownership, and transaction inclusion is basically a bribe market with no protocol-level inclusion right.
There’s also a deep difference in negative covenants. Because stake is slashable and ASICs are not, PoS chains can protocolize prohibitions in a way PoW simply can’t:
- thou shalt not equivocate on fork-choice, or thou shalt get slashed
- thou shalt not be offline too long, or thou shalt get slashed
- thou shalt not censor, or thou shalt get slashed
Real social contracts have both affirmative and negative covenants. PoS can encode both with teeth; PoW mostly encodes affirmatives and hopes the economics behave. If you doubt that, just catch up on the BIP-101 debates in Bitcoin, as people struggle to figure out how to punish miners for including “spam” within Bitcoin’s enshrined libertarian validator dynamics.
ETH can serve as a good money because bootstraps its monetary properties less through hard-cap ponzinomics and lindy social consensus and more through alegal property-like powers that emerge from the system’s intrinsic properties: the ‘system right’ to buy execution/inclusion, the ‘system right’ to participate, the ‘system right’ to be treated as first-class in the base protocol—all embodied in ETH as an asset.
The Ethereum value loop: utility → security → neutrality → more utility
Ethereum has a structural reflexivity that is both economic and constitutional. The loop is roughly:
Exercisable rights → broad participation
- Low-ish hardware requirements and permissionless staking pull security toward a wide actor set.
Participation → usage and demand
- Credible settlement attracts devs, users, and high-value use cases. Demand for execution shows up as demand for ETH (fees, collateral, settlement).
Usage → fees
- The system prices scarce block resources in ETH.
Fees → validator rewards + burn
- Fees flow to validators; basefee burn tightens supply in high-usage regimes.
Rewards + burn → ETH demand
- ETH becomes a yield-implicated, security-linked asset, with scarcity pressure that intensifies with usage.
ETH demand/price → network security
- PoS security scales with value at stake and the cost to corrupt it.
Security → credible neutrality
- The harder consensus is to corrupt, the more believable the claim that rules apply uniformly.
Credible neutrality → migration of value + complex logic
- Serious assets and serious contracts go where settlement is hardest to subvert—feeding back into usage.
If any link breaks—e.g., fees don’t strengthen security, or “security” doesn’t produce neutrality, or neutrality is politically/operationally compromised—the whole thesis degrades. Ethereum’s design is compelling because it tries to keep those links tight within a true circular economy.
Credible neutrality in a corp-heavy world
Here’s the cyberpunk turn: you should expect powerful institutions to show up—exchanges, brokerages, payment giants, rollup operators, custodians, even governments and quasi-governments. They will build rails. They will optimize for their incentives. Sometimes they will coordinate. Sometimes they will be coerced. Sometimes they will do coercing.
The question is not “will corporations use Ethereum?” They already do. The question is:
Can any one corporation—or cartel—tilt the system such that everyone else is structurally subordinate?
That’s what “credible neutrality” is actually doing in the cyberpunk frame. It’s not moral purity; it’s an engineering constraint:
- A credibly neutral base layer is the interoperability substrate for adversarial actors.
- If the substrate isn’t credibly neutral, then the strongest actor eventually wins by policy, censorship, capture, or subtle market-structure choke points.
Ultimately, this feeds into one of the emergent properties of blockchains identified by Nick Szabo as a superpower—blockchains dramatically increase social scalability.
Ethereum becomes the only economic zone where you can realistically insist on “no special lanes,” which means adversaries can scale up commerce with each other despite low trust and lack of practical legal recourse. And ETH is the access card you can swipe at the gate to do high-fidelity business in that low-trust Interzone.
Inclusion and censorship resistance: the bedrock of digital property rights
Property requires credible enforcement of exercise. If you “own” an asset but can’t move it, exit it, collateralize it, or unwind it under stress, you don’t own it in the only sense that matters.
On a blockchain, that enforcement reduces to inclusion:
Can you get a valid transaction included in the canonical history within a bounded time, assuming you pay the clearing price?
That’s why censorship resistance is the substrate of property rights. And it’s why Ethereum research keeps gravitating toward mechanisms that harden inclusion guarantees under adverse conditions—e.g., FOCIL (fork-choice enforced inclusion lists) as an explicit attempt to reduce the degrees of freedom available to would-be censors.
Speed alone doesn’t solve censorship. The load-bearing variables are:
- distribution of block production power,
- protocol incentives/penalties,
- and explicit inclusion mechanisms when the threat model demands them.
If the corp stack can blacklist you at the settlement layer, the “money” is fake. ETH’s valuation thesis depends on Ethereum making that kind of blacklist structurally difficult.
Ethereum as a programmable legal substrate: the compute commons with teeth
A useful mental model is to treat Ethereum as a programmable legal substrate—a compute commons that remains reliable even when participants are adversarial.
This buys you a new institutional primitive:
- deploy code that represents or enforces agreements, markets, registries, and rights
- commit to execution that follows protocol rules—not a platform operator’s preferences
In other words: the ability to make commitments that are harder to breach than ordinary institutional promises, even when the breaching party is rich, sophisticated, and willing to litigate into the sun.
You pay for that execution in the one asset the system natively recognizes: ETH.
ETH is cyberpunk money because it’s a hybrid of:
- compute credit
- performance collateral
- membership credential in a neutral execution jurisdiction
Cyberpunk framing matters because the world we’re building is not “an infinite garden” It’s a boundary layer between legacy institutions and new ones, where law and code interlock like mismatched gears. Ethereum’s edge is that it can become the shared substrate precisely because it’s hard to bend.
L2 scaling: don’t let the plot drift
Rollups are necessary. The rollup-centric roadmap is rational: keep L1 slow enough to preserve decentralization and verification, and scale execution via L2s that inherit L1 security.
But the cyberpunk risk is also obvious: L2s can become corporate enclaves.
- centralized sequencers can censor or reorder at the user-facing layer.
- token economics can divert value capture away from ETH.
- alternative data-availability choices can reduce the economic coupling to L1.
So the pro-ETH version of the rollup future is:
- L2 activity must pay L1 for settlement/data in a way that scales with usage (so ETH burn/revenue remains coupled to adoption)
- L2 neutrality must converge toward L1 neutrality over time (decentralized sequencing, credible exits, minimized governance attack surface)
- ETH remains the gravitational asset—fees, collateral, staking/bonding, unavoidable conversion paths
Reflexive L2 bullishness is as sloppy as reflexive L2 bearishness. L2s are bullish for ETH if they preserve economic coupling and neutrality inheritance. Otherwise they become fragmentation engines: lots of activity, siphoned value, weakened guarantees.
In cyberpunk terms: corporate arcologies can exist—but they can’t be allowed to quietly overwrite the settlement constitution.
Tokenized assets: crypto-native property vs. blockchain theater
Tokenization only strengthens the ETH thesis if it becomes cryptonative property, not a token-shaped IOU with an admin key and a terms-of-service kill switch.
The dividing line is simple:
- Does the chain’s state transition function itself constitute the authoritative transfer mechanism (or the trigger that legacy institutions are bound to honor)?
- Or is the token merely a UI pointer to an offchain registry that can ignore you when inconvenient?
If Ethereum is going to be the settlement layer for assets that matter, you need structures where:
- onchain events are treated as dispositive (or at least presumptively authoritative),
- enforcement is minimized to objective cryptographic criteria,
- and human/legal intervention is narrow, explicit, and exception-handling—not routine discretionary control.
This is where Ethereum’s inclusion guarantees matter again. A tokenized claim is only as good as your ability to exercise it under stress. We need cyberpunk tokenization protocols on Ethereum, like MetaLeX, not ones designed for legacy Wall St. intermediaries.
Conclusion: ETH as cyberpunk money
Cypherpunk gave crypto its moral center: privacy, autonomy, resistance. But the live arena Ethereum is building for is cyberpunk: corporations and th3 streets coexisting on the same rails, adversarial yet interdependent, each side using tech creatively, each side trying to tilt the system.
In that world, money is not just a store of value. It’s:
- an execution credential,
- a settlement resource,
- a security instrument,
- and a property enforcement primitive.
So “ETH as cyberpunk money” is ultimately a thesis about constitutional settlement: if Ethereum remains credibly neutral, credibly inclusive, and economically coupled to its scaling layers, then ETH isn’t valuable merely because people believe.
It’s valuable because it is the scarce credential for the only layer in the stack that everyone—corpos and street alike—can’t afford to let anyone else control.
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