Europeans have lost freedom of speech, which is the first freedom to fall before the rest follow.

The continent is, frankly, quite depressing now. Apart from being an incredible vacation and retirement place, there isn’t much going on. It’s hard to find a place where you can feel true optimism about the future.

It’s no wonder that no one is optimistic anymore. Few new things are built, crime rates are going parabolic and the local population is being replaced at a record rate.

My unpublished long post on Europe can be summarized by Thiel’s remark on the matter. Europe has three futures: Sharia Law, CCP-style surveillance state, or Greta Thunberg with a bike (see Ayn Rand’s The Return of the Primitive).

I’m not big on any of those outcomes. At CitizenX, we have also been warning for years that Europe will get increasingly confiscatory.

I have been thinking for years about where to move. There are many factors to balance, and there’s no perfect place for everyone.

But I had a few very telling moments.

A couple years ago I tried to launch a remote-first, European-focused fellowship for teenage entrepreneurs. My first finding? Europe’s schools have crushed teenagers’ souls so much that there aren’t many of these anymore. My second finding? Every one of those extraordinary teens wants to move to the US.

Another realization is how much the US has given me. As a teenager, I tried for months and months to raise for my startup. I chased Spanish VCs, who would always be busy yachting. In the US, we raised in a week from none other than Tim Draper, who invested in companies like Tesla and SpaceX. The US is the only country in the world in which a billionaire takes the time to meet a boy from a small Spanish town and hear from his crazy startup. It truly is the land of opportunity.

I’m not a teenager anymore, and I don’t need to raise money. But I want to live in a place where talented teenagers can build, for they are the future of our civilization.

And the US happens to be the last bastion of Western Civilization. With Europe increasingly turning East, the US is the only one with the power to change the course of our weakening civilization.

Within the US, Miami seems like such a vibrant optimistic place. People are outdoors getting fit, being healthy, walking their kids and dogs. Or indoors building, investing, etc. Even Patrick Collison is Miamiposting.

Even though I am reminded (by both some Americans and most Europeans) about how polarized things are in the US right now, I cannot help but feel incredibly optimistic about its future. Maybe it is in my contrarian nature to feel the opposite to the mainstream narrative, but I really believe the country is on the right track.

Just forget politics for a second and focus on the three things that will define the world for the next century: space, AI and crypto. Those three are overwhelmingly happening in the US, and the current administration is taking all three very seriously.

“Easy decisions, hard life. Hard decisions, easy life” is a great saying. The US is now going through very hard decisions, which I believe will yield great results in the decades to come. Strong men are finally at the helm of Earth’s greatest country.

Even though I deeply despised the US for its crypto crackdown, I realized such crackdown was incredibly anti-American. Upon reading more about the US and understanding its past, I realize more and more how much I sympathize with American values.

I don’t know what will happen in the next years. Maybe there’s a Civil War. Maybe there’s an overnight exodus of all talented people to a bunch of other hubs. Maybe this was a “bull trap” after all.

I sincerely hope not. The current AI race and space race require for America to give its all. If America doesn’t win both, Western Civilization is done for.

I don’t want to see a world where America fractures and China wins both races. That would be an extremely unfree world.

You should always have a plan B, but you should live your plan A, for otherwise you will have never lived life.

I’m beginning a new chapter of my life in Miami, focusing my work on space technologies so the West can win the upcoming space race. If you are into space and live nearby, hit me up and let’s grab coffee!

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I cofounded Aragon in 2016 to move companies onchain. We ended up focusing on DAOs (for regulatory reasons), and today more than $30bn in assets are governed by Aragon’s smart contracts.

When we launched Aragon in 2017, the total stablecoin supply was $10m. DeFi was still just a dream in whitepapers. And yet here we are today. Bitcoin has become a reserve asset, stablecoins are a national priority and DeFi is redefining finance.

The regulatory environment has gone from awful to incredibly supportive. Crypto has never had more tailwinds.

At the same time, it has matured so much. A lot of the value will soon be captured by large incumbents with existing distribution who will leverage crypto to better their products.

I got into crypto as a teenager. I was idealistic and naive. That cypherpunk vision is what attracted me. But success is a double-edged sword: crypto has succeeded, but those founding principles have been watered down. This is a normal process in every technological revolution.

Even though I co-founded CitizenX in 2023, I kept an ear on the crypto ecosystem until 2025, when I decided to turn the page. I still think Bitcoin, Ethereum and DeFi have produced something of extraordinary value, but I believe it’s time to invest my capital and my time in something else.

I love the zero-to-one. I love religiously holding beliefs that sound outrageous to almost everyone in their sane mind.

Crypto is now in its one-to-ten stage. What’s still in the zero-to-one stage? Space.

As a kid, I couldn’t help but look up to the sky on a starry night and ask myself "why do we exist?" I'm not sure there's an answer, but if there's one, it's waiting for us out there. As I became a teenager, I realized that being raised in a tiny town in Northern Spain, I could never have access to what I needed to explore the mysteries of space.

So I got into the world of bits. First open source, then startups and crypto.

But I feel it’s now the time to revisit my childhood passion, and come back to the world of rockets and atoms.

I’ll finish with the three words that both crypto and space share: To the moon!

But I learned that the times have changed. When I applied (and won) HackNow — a similar program awarding 5k EUR to Europe's best underage hacker — the tailwinds were there. There were some similar programs in the US, but not nearly as enough as today. And Europe was a much more vibrant place. I thought that multiplying the prize by 10x would for sure get me a lot of talented applicants. I was wrong. I learned a few things:

Teenage hackers dream of the US

The overwhelming majority of young hackers that I connected with are already in the US (thus have easier access to capital), or are soon thinking of relocating to the US.

The US has many programs like this, so HopeHack wasn't mission critical for them.

I was surprised to see that the US still wins on both narrative — the land of the free and the brave — and capital — with dozens of programs to attract young founders.

Europe is not what it used to be

I thought that HopeHack could be a lifesaver for those talented young hackers in the sinking ship that Europe is now, but it seems like it's too late already.

I feel that the education system has dulled kids too much. Ten years ago, when I was a teenager, I started a group of teenage hackers in Madrid. Most of us met on Twitter. That would be way more difficult today, even though there are probably 10x more teenagers on social media than a decade ago.

But dumber social media (Instagram, TikTok) has drastically changed the internet that I grew up with.

Even in Spain, where I have a big following, I didn't get a single application.

The few founders that I know in Spain tell me how incredibly hard it is to find talent, let alone young talent.

On the other hand I was very positively surprised about Asia, in particular India.

US and Asia seem to have a bright future, while Europe seems to live off its past.

HopeHack didn’t have tailwinds

My fight against industrial schooling and (as I call them) Prison Schools will continue, and it's a hill I am willing to die on.

But the particular iteration that HopeHack represented didn't receive the tailwinds I expected, which means that the market doesn't need it that bad.

I believe there are better approaches that leverage tailwinds, for example Nautilus in SF, taking advantage of the fact that most teenage hackers still dream of living in SF.

I donated $30k to Nautilus and I'll keep donating to similar causes that propel teenage geniuses.

To all the applicants, thank you! I will be reaching out to you personally, direct you towards other programs, and hep you in your journey in whichever way I can.

I started creating software at age 12. I was raised in a depressing place and bullied in school. Many of my classmates went into drugs and crime. I was lucky to discover coding, and directed all my energy and passion towards it.

Then I went on to start companies. I failed many times, but eventually created successful companies that are shaping entire industries — like Aragon with DAOs, or CitizenX with citizenship.

I know how hard it is. I want to give bright talented teenagers a chance to meet each other, make friends, and build things together. Some of the world’s best companies have been founded by teenagers and drop outs.

We'll give the opportunity for teenagers all around the world to apply online and show us what they have built. Then we will select the fellows, welcome them to our online community of young builders and bring them together in an in-person event.

In that event, we will announce the winner of a $50,000 grant from the fellowship. Imagine how many more Elon Musks we would have, if only our first two decades on this planet weren’t spent sitting in classrooms that resemble prisons. That’s why I started HopeHack.

For those young hackers that just don’t fit in today’s society.

For those who cannot wait to build.

For those whose future is now 🔮

hopehack.com

—

If you are a talented teenage hacker, HopeHack will help you. We connect bright teenagers together and grant one of them $50k to stop studying and start building. Apply now →

I have come to realize that I live in exile.

Nations tend to routinely purge their talented and free thinking citizens.

As an Spaniard, I'm familiar with many who exiled during Franco's dictatorship.

And recently many Americans have exiled during the 2017-25 crackdown on crypto.

The difference is that labeling the former as exile is easy. In hindsight, we all agree that exiling from European fascism made sense. But did the masses agree at the time? Not at all.

The masses looked at those in exile with hatred. *Traitors! Criminals who ran away!*

The few that dared to understand looked at them with envy — after all, not everyone had the means or courage to leave.

I myself didn't realize that I live in exile until recently. In fact almost my entire friend group lives in exile.

We would gladly live in Spain, if it weren’t turning into a Marxist dystopia.

Modern Spanish discourse revolves about "solidarity", blaming businessmen as the problem and claiming capitalism has failed — even though the country is a pinnacle of socialism.

Most democracies today are bureaucratic oligarchies in disguise.

That's why it's hard to pinpoint who is the cause of the exiles. There's no Franco, there's no Mussolini.

It's an entire class of politicians, public workers and "private" companies funded by the government. Nearly half of the voter base in Spain consists of pensioners or public workers.

That class is driving an entire other class of people to exile. The freethinkers, the productive and the families.

The freethinkers are in exile because they cannot tolerate the local propaganda rotting their brains. Even the ones with higher tolerance end up leaving, as the brain rot intensifies with no one remaining to vent to. Eventually there are not enough freethinkers to defend freedom of speech. Then free speech gets banned, prompting the last freethinkers to exile.

The productive are pragmatic. They look at the numbers. The brain rot and increasing taxes are numbers to them. They know they are bigger than them. They work and work and work. They get taxed and taxed and taxed, every year a percentage point higher. One day they wake up, and with the same resolve they apply to their work, they decide to leave.

The families care about both freethinking and productivity. Parents don't want the brain rot to get to their kids. They want their hard work to translate to better quality of life for their kids. They want to leave something meaningful behind.

In an ideal world, no one would need to exile the country that saw them grow.

But since circumstances are as they are, I propose a reframe:

We aren't expats shopping around. We are in exile.

The former is part of the brain rot. The bureaucratic oligarchy wants to turn everyone against you for leaving. They want to make it a thoughtcrime. And they are working hard to make it an actual crime (think exit taxes). They want to portray exiles as losers and deserters.

The exile is reality. It's guilt-free. It's even heroic. By standing up for noble ideals like freedom and private property, you are starving regimes that strangle the core pillars of progress: freethinking, productivity, and families.

Not all expats are in exile. Some wouldn't want to live in their country of origin. That's fine.

But to the class of citizens routinely vilified, robbed by the unproductive majority, and stripped of their freedom of movement (via exit taxes):

Yes, you are in the exile. You are doing nothing wrong. You are doing yourself and those around you a favor. The indoctrinated will never thank you. They will hate you, they will envy you.

You have now joined the great ranks of those who exiled, such as Dante, Voltaire or Snowden.

Enjoy the exile. Let them expropriate everything that remains and fight for its scraps.

Become strong. If you have kids, raise them to be strong.

For one day weak men will perish, and from their ruins we shall rebuild our dreams.

Happy exile.

If you are exiling soon or in exile already, you should think about investing in a second citizenship — it will further increase your mobility. We built CitizenX for you.

Thanks to capitalism, which rewards those who create value based on supply and demand, society has thrived.

The highest earners are now the most mobile they have ever been. They create the businesses that employ people, they spend the most, and they transfer their know-how to other professionals — enabling them to climb up the social ladder. They have the highest leverage in society. They are Sovereign Individuals.

In the US, the top 10% pays ~70% of all income taxes. The bottom 50% pays only ~3%.

Many countries are falling prey to taxing the rich their fair share. Even countries with a strong track record concerning wealth preservation, like the UK, are turning populist.

Unfortunately this is a trend that will make everyone poorer and decrease everyone’s quality of life.

This is a fight between two personas. Let’s name them Adam and Emma.

Adam is a high earner. He works in tech building software.

Emma is an average earner. She works in an administrative 9-to-5 job.

Adam has kids and considers himself as a pragmatic centrist voter. Emma doesn't have kids and considers herself a leftist voter aligned with social justice.

They both live in a Western democracy.

Emma is fed up with inflation. She's losing purchasing power every month. On top of that, public services are getting worse. Getting an ordinary health check is now a months-long endeavor. She goes to London and sees all these rich people, unconcerned with those issues. She hears about all the tricks they use to pay less taxes. She thinks they should pay their fair share, and votes accordingly.

Adam is hard-working, after years of dedication to become a highly skilled worker, he doesn’t like the government taking away 2/3rds of his income — half in income taxes plus another ~20% in multiple indirect taxes. Crime and social unrest are on the rise. He reads about all these countries with lower taxation, higher security and even special programs to attract high earners.

Adam doesn’t want to pull the trigger just yet. He likes his life here. He might leave family and friends behind — they would have to make new friends, maybe even learn a new language!

Emma doesn’t even think about leaving. She doesn’t have that mobility. She would struggle to find a job, and on top of that she benefits from multiple social welfare programs. She would lose all that.

Emma never met Adam. But in her mind, Adam is enslaving her. He’s making her poorer and making her do work that he doesn’t enjoy to barely make a living.

Adam never met Emma. But in his mind, Emma is enslaving him. A horde of Emmas are voting for bureaucrats that force him to pay most of what he produces to them, yet they produce little themselves.

I will not go into who’s right or wrong. Capitalism has reduced poverty by 90% and grown GDP per capita by 3,000%. I hope the numbers speak for themselves.

The fight above isn’t a fair fight. Adam has an order of magnitude more mobility than Emma.

At some point, triggered by yet another tax hike, not feeling welcome anymore or rising crime, Adam decides to move his family.

Adam and his family relocate to Dubai. He hates leaving his extended family and friends behind, and he isn’t even sure whether he’ll call Dubai home for the decades to come. But he cannot subdue the future of his family to populism.

Adam, who was an incredibly productive taxpayer, has left. Emma, who is a mediocre taxpayer — and a net receiver of taxes via welfare programs — has stayed.

Repeat this thousands of times. Less taxes are raised. Talented people start feeling the exodus and start shopping around.

Then tens of thousands. Infrastructure is getting visibly worse. Talented people now have many friends who have left, and see that it’s not that scary. The word spreads.

Then hundreds of thousands. It’s getting hard to find people to get work done. Stuff stops working everywhere. All the brightest minds have left. Stagnation is in the air.

Then millions. The airport cannot even get a plane on the air. Everyone is obese. The country collapses.

Emma is even more unhappy than she was before. She got poorer to a level she didn’t think it was possible in a first world country. Emma has no kids, but her fellow citizens' children now bear a burden that will take generations to fix.

Adam is doing well, but lives with a bittersweet feeling. The country that saw him grow up, get married, make so many friends, is now a train wreck. At least he lives in a place where he doesn’t get robbed — either via excessive taxes or stabbing in the streets. His family and friends that stayed have built tremendous resentment towards him, and think people like him ruined the country. He’s made new friends, but he’s losing them as his family moved a couple times already — trying to find a place they really connect with. He feels like living in an impasse.

Everyone ended up less happy than they were. It’s a lose-lose situation.

By trying to tax more, governments all across the West will actually lose tax revenue. Adam didn’t go to another Western country to pay his taxes. He either left the West, or found another country with some kind of incentives program.

Populist policies are shrinking the taxable base of the Western civilization. Every week now, I talk to extremely talented individuals that are feeling the decadence of Western civilization. Some of them are just moving from a socialist Western country to a less socialist Western country. But some are leaving the West altogether.

While this happens, common goods are getting visibly worse. Most Western governments fund themselves via money printing, but need taxes to offset GDP-to-debt ratios. Otherwise they might face defaulting. Of course that will never happen, as they would just print even more currency. But that means more inflation. Which means more poverty and social unrest.

The countries that understand these dynamics will amass incredible talent at a pace never seen before — by attracting these disenfranchised Sovereign Individuals. Think Dubai or Singapore. The ones that don't, and keep trying to tax their way out of structural issues, will accelerate their way to Idiocracy.

Be careful, these socialist delights have violent ends.

If you are one of these disenfranchised Sovereign Individuals, you should think about investing in a second citizenship — it will further increase your mobility. We built CitizenX for you.

However, something that struck me as odd is how many things I had to erase, re-learn or learn from scratch well into my 20s.

It’s been that way to the point that I have developed the following heuristic: whatever the boomers taught me, the opposite will be true.

The education system taught me to stand in line, to seek comfort, to fit in at all costs and to believe and uphold the system without questioning much.

As I grew up I realized that the only path to success and happiness is in being who you are, seeking discomfort, questioning everything and most definitely not relying in the system.

We have raised an entire generation on wrong values. But it doesn’t stop there.

I’m almost 30. I finished high school and moved out at 17. Even today, the majority of my conscious years have been spent going to school.

Yet I had to learn the basics of health much later in life. And I had to unlearn almost everything that they taught me about such subject.

Unfortunately some damage is irreversible. For example, the body decides where to store fat in the early teenage years, based on your habits. School makes you sit still for hours. It really doesn’t help.

School (to date) teaches the Food Pyramid where bread, rice and cereals are the most foundational echelon. I could be stronger, faster and live longer if they hadn’t done that to me. As I learned about all these atrocities, I started rigorously working out in my mid-twenties and I have reversed much of that damage.

A few months ago a friend from Spain went to an international medical fair abroad. To spice things up at dinner, people from each country would team up and cook something from their country. They ordered Spanish food from a restaurant. Turns out that in their group (two males and one female), no one knew how to cook.

I can relate. I didn’t know how to fry an egg until I lived on my own and I had to. I’m almost 30 and I just learned yesterday about water filtering systems, and the fact that I have been drinking less than ideal water for years.

These are basic facts about life. Health. Nutrition. Fitness. Cooking.

The boomers like to say that these mundane things don’t belong in a classroom. That kids should study bigger topics like “math” and “language” and “physics” to contribute more to society. Well, the education system sucks at that too.

I was 14 when my family almost got kicked out of our apartment. My parents were really overdue in their mortgage payments. I had been working since 12, so I had savings and could save the day. But what followed defined my career for the next decade. I started questioning the whole trust the system rhetoric that everyone seemed to follow. I went down the rabbit hole and read about fiat money, and then Bitcoin.

Piece by piece, my reality was being torn apart. To this day, a month doesn’t go by in which I discover yet another lie.

Science and society advances, and it’s normal that we discover new truths on the way. But discovering new truths is one thing; realizing your whole perception of reality was wrong is a very different one.

There are always exceptions, but in the West, parents have failed their children.

Boomers have forced kids to lose their most precious learning years in schools that resemble prisons, compromising their health, getting brainwashed and killing any creativity.

It’s no wonder that there’s an entire book providing evidence on why boomers are a generation of sociopaths.

It’s not only about the time lost in school, but also about the decades that follow, unlearning and getting frustrated as reality constantly doesn’t match the expectations that were set forth as a kid.

I don’t usually talk about money, but a friend asked me what it was like to get rich, and he wanted to know specifics, so I told him my story.

I had a day job in midtown Manhattan paying $20K per year — about minimum wage… I did this for two years, and saved up $12,000. I was 22 years old.

Once I had $12,000 I could quit my job and become a full-time musician. I knew I could get a few gigs per month to pay my cost of living. So I was free. I quit my job a month later, and never had a job again.

When I finished telling my friend this story, he asked for more. I said no, that was it. He said, “No, what about when you sold your company?”

— Derek Sivers on How I got rich on the other hand

I had such a similar experience. I started saving since I was a kid. My parents gave me 2€ per week. At age 12, that was enough for me to purchase a domain name and hosting for my first open source project.

Doing that project allowed me to get deeper into software and start landing my first freelance gigs at age 14.

At age 17 I had saved enough to move from my hometown in Spain to Madrid, where I got my own place and lived on 1,000€ per month.

I was such a weird edge case in a country with >30% youth unemployment and mean emancipation age >35, so I was on newspapers/TV a lot. That allowed me to land speaking gigs, on which I made ~1,700€ per month.

Boom, I was free. I could keep doing startups and following my passions 24/7.

Ultimately, that freedom allowed me to take risks, and if you work hard and take risks long enough, luck happens.

Of course you can do this in your teenage years and early 20s, but it becomes harder as you age, start a family, etc.

The time to prioritize freedom and risk-taking over all is as soon as you can.

First, because starting earlier means more time for compounding to do its magic (both on finances and knowledge). Starting to compound money and knowledge (and health, via exercise) in your 20s can make a massive difference as early as your 30s and 40s.

Second, because there’s so much literature linking happiness to one’s control of time (freedom). After you can buy your own time, wealth can provide nicer meals, faster cars… but it’s not a life changer as buying your own time is.

I’m radically against the more and more infantilized view of youth that society has. The fact that we consider teenagers or people in their 20s as clueless kids is outrageous. Our education systems have succeeded in making the youth bland and stripping them of any creativity or passion.

Biologically speaking, a human being in their early 20s is a fully functional human being. Physical qualities are in all time high, number of neurons too. For women, fertility peaks at ~25.

It’s no secret that the brain becomes less plastic as we age. That means the younger, the more creative. Somewhere in late teens or early twenties, high brain plasticity meets enough rational knowledge of the world to create the perfect time to be all-absorbed by one’s passion and take risks. But again, it’s outrageous what modern society is doing to its youth.

To forge your own luck, earn your freedom as soon as you can.

This trend has now reverted, and the time to leave is approaching.

You might think “nah, it’s fine, the fall will take a long time anyway”. I will argue here why this trend has been covertly going on since the 70s, and why we are years/a decade away from massive civil unrest and tyranny in the US and the EU.

Many Ukrainians and Russians also thought that things weren’t that bad. They thought starting afresh somewhere new, leaving some family and friends behind, maybe having to sell properties and switch school for their kids was too much hassle for the risk. But the risk is existential. They are now being mobilized to essentially fight their brothers and sisters, possibly dying in the process. Calculated risks are okay — catastrophic risks are not.

A fair and free society rests on the pillar of constitutional civil liberties. I will explore the most important ones, and argue why they are on their knees already, providing concrete examples. Some examples are in the US, some in the EU, and some in Spain — the country I’m originally from, and thus very familiar with.

Freedom of speech

Censorship (oh, sorry, moderation!) is becoming widespread quickly.

It’s just as impossible for men to become a lesbian as it is for men to become pregnant. Men are men regardless of their sexual fetishes. — Tonje Gjevjon, Norwegian actress

Tonje faces a 3-year prison sentence for posting that on her Facebook page.

Right wing activist Dries Van Langenhove has been sentenced to 1 year in prison for being in a group with racist/anti-semitism memes. He argues he was just part of the group and didn’t post them himself. Whether he did or not, the point stands: he’s going to jail for the memes.

I can agree or disagree with them both, and that’s the whole point of freedom of speech — that every human being can say things I disagree with, and as long as there’s no violence involved, they are within their right.

It’s even better in the internet, because if I disagree so much that it’s repulsive or it offends me, I just close the tab and move on.

The advent of DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) has created a wave of far-left activists that go to great lengths to make sure other people are jailed for having different viewpoints.

The fact that people are going to jail in the “first world” for having a viewpoint about sexual orientation and posting memes is alarming, and reminiscent of the Dark Ages.

As the separation of powers has been slowly subverted in “first world” countries, we end up with situations like this:

A Spanish judge decided to ban Telegram in Spain while investigating (so without even a final court decision) the service because people can upload clips of content that is copyrighted by Spanish TV stations.

That rationale can justify essentially taking down any website or service out there.

He then backtracked, citing that he needed time to understand how the service works — yes, we are in the hands of boomers that don’t even understand messaging.

It’s not the first time this happens. The Spanish government banned gateway.ipfs.io because Catalan activists were using it to help Catalans vote whether they want to stay in Spain or not.

Again, I can agree or not with Catalan independence, but that’s not the point. The point is that freedom of speech should exist, and censorship is literally the opposite of it.

Freedom of education

DEI has entered the classroom in many schools already. I’m not even talking about the wave of Harvard/Stanford resignations/firings because professors are stating and seeking truth (which is the point of university), although those are alarming too.

I’m talking about schools, both elementary schools and high schools. In many countries the government controls the syllabus. What happens when freedom of speech ceases to exist? Questioning the “new truth” becomes illegal, so it becomes the status quo, and ultimately lies become the syllabus.

What can you do as a parent in such a circumstance? Again, you cannot even raise questions because you’ll be framed for “hate speech” or God knows what.

Many countries now allow kids to start the one-way street to change gender.

█████████████████████████████

(redacted since freedom of speech doesn’t exist anymore and I was genuinely worried about pointing out a biological truth).

In many countries, this has become the only thing that kids can do against the will of their parents. And when kids become teenagers, we all know about their willingness to be as contrarian as possible.

These therapies, at that age, are driving suicide rates through the roof. Fortunately some countries are reacting and stopping this madness.

To recap, a state-approved syllabus is quite dystopian, but if there’s free speech, it’s somewhat balanced. Without free speech, education becomes dogmatic indoctrination.

Financial freedom

As I predicted last year, the EU is making its first moves to ban self-custodied crypto.

Financial freedom is important because money correlates very positively with freedom.

It’s impossible to have financial freedom if the money supply is controlled by the state.

We all have heard of how the Spaniards stole Latin American gold. But that’s a very brute tactic.

Historically, other colonizers have been smarter. Go to a place and force them to use your currency. No one gets harmed, it’s way less confrontational. Then you print the hell out of it — impoverishing the colonized country.

This has been going on since 1971, when Nixon ended the gold standard.

But there’s more. Let’s talk about pensions.

There are two kinds of Western societies: the ones that need to bear with the mismanagement and selfishness of the boomers, and the rest. If you don’t know Spanish: sanidad is healthcare, defensa is military. Education and infrastructure don’t even have a label because they are too small in the chart.

When someone — for example a working Gen X mom — gets her paycheck and her taxes are retained, almost half is going to pay pensions and debt interest payments. Around 5% of all taxes goes to sustain and build infrastructure, public healthcare, education and military. So, 5% goes to actually sustain the goddamn country.

Most public pension systems are pyramid schemes, which by definition only works if the pyramid keeps growing. What happens now that the pyramid has shrunk? Remember, younger generations always pay the bill, even if that means financial and labor slavery.

Skilled immigration might help alleviate the problem, but countries with draconian taxes, falling civil liberties and left-wing governments usually attract the wrong kind of immigration. For example, left-wing governments are incentivized to attract illegal immigration because despite increasing crime, they usually support the left. Show me the incentive, I’ll show you the outcome.

On top of that younger generations are having to spend most of their income in rent or mortgages — in other words, paying the boomers, who own most of the real estate. Why?

Boomers could pretty much build anywhere back in the day. Then, once they owned property, they pushed for regulation to make it harder and more expensive to build. Even though there are areas massively underpopulated everywhere in the West, housing is artificially scarce and thus expensive. The NIMBY movement got started.

From building new housing to building nuclear stations, they kept opposing progress.

There’s a common denominator: Profits are privatized, but losses are socialized. Since boomers are the largest voting demographic, the bill is always passed on to younger generations. The house always wins.

Some boomers say millennials and Gen Z are lazy, but it’s hard to achieve financial success, let alone freedom if:

• Most of your paycheck goes to pay for a roof over your head.

• A big chunk goes to pay for inflated energy prices.

• A small chunk of the taxes you pay actually goes towards enhancing infrastructure, education, defense and healthcare, so that you can remain safe, productive and enjoy a better quality of life.

Exit freedom

The Spanish exit tax doesn’t run short on draconianism, since it can be up to 23% (cap gains tax) of all your assets.

The freedom of exit is a very basic one. Without it, we are slaves of a country, a government, or in the best case, a majority or an intransigent minority. We are cattle and we are milked.

The fact that these countries are restricting the freedom of exit is an obvious sign of incoming tyranny. It screams “we know we are doing undesirable things to our citizens/residents, so we don’t want them to leave”.

If citizenship-based taxation or a 23% tax on all your worldwide assets is palatable, where do we draw the line? A 100% tax is only a ~4x increase of the latter.

Again, the time to leave a regime like that is when the tax is 23% — there’s nothing preventing it to become full on expropriation.

The way forward

Any solution would have to rely on:

• Intergenerational solidarity: I have heard this concept used a thousand times to justify increased taxes, to pay for pensions and do COVID lockdowns — since COVID’s death rate was extremely low for the young population, but quite high for the boomers. In theory, boomers could apologize, eat up their mistakes, and ease up on housing restrictions and let their pyramid scheme (pension systems) collapse — to allow the youth to have a chance at life. But I have never ever heard intergenerational solidarity benefitting the youth. So intergenerational solidarity is a one-way street. Did you know boomers used to be called the Me Generation? In some countries, even though they had decades to compound their wealth, they enjoy tax breaks and price discounts. Can you believe it?

• Total constitutional overhaul: Would have to change the voting system in such a way that voting power is a curve — the more years left to live in the country, the more voting power, maybe starting from the 20s. Otherwise any other proposal — such as abolishing the public pension system or reducing housing regulations — will be voted against by the boomers.

• War: This one is initially hard to see, since it would be children fighting their parents. However, since parents have basically left their children a burnt Earth with an indebted society — therefore they have been fighting a Cold War against their children for decades — I start seeing this is as a real possibility.

In any way, talented people will see this dead end and flee the country, further lowering productivity, which reduces tax collection, thus requiring more draconian policies, thus forcing more youth to leave. Rinse and repeat, and war and poverty are the only prospects.

However, if we can learn something from history, is that when people get poor fast, they resort to tyranny.

Hitler didn’t “come into power” — he was voted in.

Thus I believe the US and the EU will resort to tyranny, and possibly dictatorship. It can be camouflaged in multiple ways — don’t forget that many Russians still don’t think they live in a dictatorship — but it will be obvious from the outside.

Most talented individuals have flown Russia, first during the USSR, then during Putin’s regime. The ones that stay are by definition the ones prone to being servants to a dictatorship. If most talented individuals start fleeing the US and the EU after the erosion of civil liberties, it’s a matter of time until a dictator is voted in.

Conclusion

If I had to summarize it in two quotes:

Ate their fill of housing, resources, a clean planet, government spending, and then closed the door but didn't forget to pass the check on us. — zxc123zxc123, fellow Redditoor

Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times — Michael Hopf

I’m not being a catastrophist — life will go on. Freedom might not go on in the West, but it will certainly go on somewhere else. I’m a rational optimist, but it’s hard to be rationally optimistic about the West.

In any way, I don’t feel safe writing about topics I care about anymore — which should be an alarming sign of how we are entering tyranny.

Cofounding Aragon, and taking it from zero to popularizing a new class of organizational structures (DAOs), has been an incredible journey. We took something deemed impossible, and we transformed it into software helping govern >$16bn in protocols core to Ethereum, like Lido or Curve. We also contributed back to Ethereum, seeding projects like DAppNode or Frame, which I use daily. I’m thankful to everyone who made this happen, and especially to my former cofounder, Jorge.

However, like almost every high-growth journey, it has left its scars.

It’s been a few years that I haven’t been involved in Aragon’s day to day. Despite that, I continued being involved in some of Aragon’s governance.

Aragon Association announced that most of the treasury has been deployed towards allowing token holders to redeem ANT for ETH. Aragon raised $25m, but through our savvy treasury management and responsible spending, we multiplied that amount. Unfortunately, more is not always better. Such treasury distracted everyone from making a product, created endless bureaucracy and attracting opportunists to the project.

Now that most of the treasury has been deployed towards allowing token holders to redeem, my tenure at Aragon is fully done. Something so simple as letting go of excess funds has been such a complex and lengthy endeavor internally. I am exhausted.

Aragon has given me my best professional achievements and my worst nightmares. It’s taken a toll on me like nothing else in my life did.

I still have dear friends working at Aragon, and I hope the best for Aragon, the DAO space, and the fight for freedom. I hope taking the best of Aragon, but with a clean slate, renewed focus and way fewer funds, will help them take DAOs to their next stage.

It still is as noble of a mission as it was when we founded Aragon. And I gave it all I could.

Let’s analyze the pattern of events that have unfolded recently:

• Nuclear power phase-out: In the US, Germany, etc. without a clear replacement, and sometimes relying on Russian oil or coal.

• COVID pandemic: There’s plausible evidence suggesting it was engineered, and there’s total evidence that it spun out of a Chinese lab.

• Russian invasion: Which happened right after Western economies were hit by the pandemic, and had heavily reduced reliance on nuclear.

The US economy was in a weird position before it all happened, with record-low interest rates that resulted in fake economic growth and a period of excesses.

Then COVID hit, basically pausing the economy. Inflation got out of hand “temporarily” as they said. Then inflation didn’t get back to normal, so they raised interest rates. But by raising interest rates so quickly, banks started going poof. SVB, Credit Suisse, etc.

To “stabilize” the situation, central banks announced measures to bail the “faulty” banks out and provide added liquidity to their fiat currencies. But where does that money come from, if the central banks themselves have gone poof? They don’t have that money in their balance sheets. The Fed is bankrupt.

They will print it. Thus they will fail to stop inflation, further needing to increase interest rates, breaking even more things within their already broken financial system.

Eventually, this ends only with one thing: the dollar loses hegemony as the reserve currency.

You might believe in chance, but when it comes to macropolitics, I don’t. It’s all elaborate chess games played over decades and decades.

The New Axis (mainly China and Russia) have played their cards well during these last decades. They slowly permeated the key institutions and decision makers, destabilizing the West.

Examples are Russia interfering US elections and the German chancellor working for Gazprom while Germany (the EU’s economic engine) shut down its nuclear plants.

What now

A tale of two tweets:

It’s obvious now that some nation states will ban crypto.

Their mismanagement has put their currencies in jeopardy, and savvy investors will realize and buy crypto en masse. That exit from the fiat market will create bank runs and chaos, exposing the pitfalls of the fiat system even more. Which in turn will lead to more demand for crypto.

At some point governments will realize that and twist the narrative as follows:

People buying crypto are terrorists and enemies of the state, they are the ones breaking apart our currencies and banking system. They will be prosecuted.

The crypto fiat onramps and offramps will be illegalized. The central banks will issue CBDCs — selling it to the public as “all the benefits of blockchain, without the terrorists and volatility”.

Of course this will be a massive red flag for savvy investors, who will move en masse to crypto-friendly jurisdictions.

Ultimately, people pay the bill through inflation and “investor protections” to “help people not lose money on speculative investments” — aka crypto.

Such actions will impoverish entire countries, and the world order will shift. First world countries that depend on the dollar’s hegemony will become third world countries, as they become the passengers of a sinking ship.

The West is in ruins | Luis Cuende

Emerging countries will be able to make bets that will benefit entire generations — such as distancing from the US and making Bitcoin legal tender. They will become the new first world.

That doesn’t mean we won’t see crypto crashing before it recovers. When systems collapse, things get messy. Sometimes predicting the short-term is harder than predicting the long-term.

We live in those times.

Long-term, the future is optimistic, as human ingenuity keeps creating better systems: crypto, AI, better nuclear, etc.

Short-term, getting from a crooked system to a new one is messy.

For example, what will happen if the dollar hyperinflates? Pax Americana has kept the world relatively peaceful. But the US cannot fund its military operations if the dollar becomes worthless.

Will China invade Taiwan then? Will the US withdraw from NATO? Will that enable Russia to take back the Baltics? It is all highly likely.

I wouldn’t be surprised to see this timeline:

1. US keeps juggling with high inflation and high interest rates, failing to keep the dollar’s value.

2. Dollar keeps inflating, impoverishing North Americans.

3. Trump blames it on military expenditure on Ukraine, wins the 2024 elections.

4. Trump thus withdraws US from NATO.

5. China takes Taiwan, Russia takes Ukraine and starts wars in the Baltics.

6. EU faces massive internal pressure, the euro faces hyperinflation, the EU starts dismantling.

I would rather not see this happen. I would rather see the West’s leaders make a smart move, for once. I’d rather see them acknowledge their mistakes and amend them.

For example, can you imagine what would happen if the US decided to move back to the gold standard? But instead of backing the dollar with physical gold, backing it with digital gold — Bitcoin. That would be a bold move, but one that would secure the dollar’s dominance for a while.

But the gerontocracy will not allow that. They would rather see it all burn than acknowledge they were wrong all along.

Which is why, unfortunately, often systems need to die for new ones to emerge.

I just hope that the new system is one of freedom, and not one of oppression — as upheld by China’s and Russia’s current political regimes.

Most of them drifted towards starting a college degree that would give them good pay.

Most of them didn’t feel passionate about any particular job or activity that could be valuable for the market.

That always felt weird to me, because I felt the opposite.

When I was 12, I got into the open source rabbit hole and it blew my mind. I immediately picked up programming. From there on, creating software products became my passion.

I founded my first open source project that eventually got to >20k users worldwide and some international recognition. I was still in high school, and I think finding my passion rescued me from the incredible apathy that the Industrial Era education system inflicts upon children.

As trivial as it sounds, I learned something that changed my life: there are things out there that I love doing for their own sake.

Almost right after this discovery I started playing basketball on my school’s team. I got hooked.

And when I was 15 I discovered electronic music via Eric Prydz and Avicii.

At the same time, I got into startups.

I created my first startup when I was 15, and produced my first track when I was 17. Although today I realize how amateur my attempts were, it was a stepping stone.

At some point I got tired of software and I went explorative.

I co-founded a sunglasses company (yeah, super random) and got deep into making music. The latter made me wonder if I should ditch my already successful entrepreneurial activities and do music full-time.

Fortunately, around that time I got into Bitcoin. With my time, not with my money, which I didn’t have much of. It clicked because it felt like the best combination of open source technology, but that can grow exponentially like startups. I loved the impact it could have upon society.

And then Ethereum, then founded Aragon, now Nation3…

In the process I realized I love writing. And also reading. And angel investments. And design. And coding — which I had forgotten after focusing on management at the startups I founded.

If I had unlimited lives, I would love to design and hack hundreds of cool products, become a professional musician, write dozens of books, start an investment firm and deeply study topics I’m curious about like nutrition or tools for prediction.

Don’t get me wrong, I love loving each of these topics. I could spend a lifetime on each of them and it would be a happy, fulfilling life.

But you only live once. So a question of prioritization arises.

The first logical answer can be do a bit of everything.

The problem is that if you are really passionate about something, you need to master it.

For me, being mediocre just doesn’t cut it. I don’t feel good about doing something I’m mediocre at.

So the only valid answer then is to pick a few, and reevaluate over time (e.g. every year).

The idea is to write down all your passions/hobbies and rate them on the following:

• Passion: How burning is the feeling?

• Knowledge: How much do you know already? The more you know the easier it gets, so at least for me the rewards are higher, as I don’t like to do mediocrity.

• Time requirements: How much does this passion need of you? This might change over time, as newly picked passions will need more time to master them.

• Maintenance requirements: How timeless are the skills? Once mastered, can you get the rewards without the investment?

Priorities might change over time, as you can go from mastering one passion to mastering the next one.

For me, doing this exercise feels like a small part of me is dying. Or rather, that one of the versions I could be will never exist. And that has given me some anxiety before.

Maybe this is a version of Fight Club’s famous quote, the things you own will end up owning you. Maybe it’s the hobbies you have will end up having you. And that’s where one needs to draw the line. These activities are supposed to bring joy, not to make you feel bad you are not enjoying them.

I’m getting comfortable with the fact that at any given point in life I’ll have most passions parked, but not forever forgotten. And even if I don’t get to master and enjoy all of them… I love each of them so much that I would be fine just mastering and doing one of them.

With a myriad of gadgets, people and algorithms calling for our constant attention, simplicity seems more and more unattainable.

Thanks to technology we have gained a tremendous amount of leverage. Said otherwise, we can do much more than before in less time.

What a century again could take days, today it takes minutes. Think about eating a ramen. If you lived outside of Japan a century ago, chances are you would have to figure out how to obtain a book on Japanese food, then figure out where to buy ingredients (or even grow them, if they aren’t available where you live) and eventually get to the cooking process (which in the example of ramen, takes days per se).

Today you open an app, click a few buttons, and get ramen delivered.

The free market has done wonders to satisfy human desires, and today we can satisfy more of them than ever before.

Some of these desires are around making things convenient. For example, a dishwasher is extremely convenient. As well as a washing machine. As well as a dehumidifier. And a microwave. And a fridge. And… the list goes on.

All of these things allow us to spend less time on things we don’t want to do, and more time on things we want to do — in exchange for a fraction of the time maintaining and managing them.

These physical abstractions allow us to spend more time on other realms, like the digital realm.

And we live with many digital abstractions. With the marginal cost of creating and storing content going to zero, there’s no shortage of books, videos or whatever other content we are looking for.

The role of the human becomes more and more an information filtering machine. Think about the inbox. The standard these days is to get bombarded with information — sometimes unimportant, sometimes important.

Having so many abstractions means there’s a need to maintain them, too. Software needs to be updated. There are database breaches, and passwords need to be changed. Credit cards expire, they need to be updated. Terms and conditions change, they need to be accepted. And so on.

Even the huge variety of content out there can lead to existential anxiety. Infinite read-later lists need to be triaged. Books need to be read. After all, there’s so much out there to consume, and you only live once!

Physical and digital abstractions allow us to do more, but not infinitely more. After all, the fraction of maintaining those abstractions is way lower than the hypothetical cost of arriving to the same outcome without them — which in some cases is impossible, e.g. imagine having to create your own Netflix movies from scratch. But the time cost of maintaining those abstractions isn’t zero.

Which means, at some point, the myriad of things we purchased, the myriad of services we signed up to, the myriad of articles we saved to read later, will eat us. They will demand more time from us than what we have. Collapse.

What to do?

There are only two options:

• We create better technology to reduce physical and digital maintenance costs, so we can do more.

• We do less.

I think both solutions work together, and I’m trying to embrace both. I have become more and more strict in terms of what to buy, read or sign up to. But I’m also looking forward to a GPT-esque personal assistant system that can take care of the mess that digital life is today.

After all, sometimes it feels like the the Internet has turned humans into mere information filtering algorithms. But we all agree we can be more than that.

I wish that humankind at large gets better at predicting the side effects of our actions. We are really bad at this and it’s causing wars, ruining the life of many millennials and Gen Z and ultimately destroying the planet.

I wish for more investment into researching and deploying (which unfortunately lies partly on governments) better education systems.

I wish for a cloud nation to start providing services that are viable drop-in alternatives to the ones provided by traditional nations. I’m working on this at Nation3.

I wish for the Putin regime to be dismantled and for war to stop… but even more importantly, I wish for whatever comes next to be better/less destructive than the current one.

I wish for culture and regulation to keep pushing on animal rights, which have been abused since forever.

I wish that the US stops seeing crypto as an enemy. After all, many of the founding principles of the US (freedom, decentralization) resonate so much with crypto. Unfortunately, seems like they have been long forgotten.

I wish for the EU to wake up and realize that deep changes are needed. Otherwise the EU is destined to be dismantled and become an irrelevant and poor geriatric in a decade.

I wish that the coming recession is easy on everyone.

What are your wishes for the world? 👇

Leave a comment

• People would rather start a war than go to therapy: Keep that in mind for macro and interpersonal relationships, but also movements like cancel culture.

  Cancel culture and the Dark Ages

• Boomers and their lack of foresight have put millennials and Gen Z in a precarious position: Most of my school friends are now certain they’ll do worse than their parents. It is infuriating.

  How boomers destroyed the West

  How to dethrone the gerontocracy

  The West is in ruins

• We are doing a terrible job taking care of other living (and sentient) beings: Sometimes, I’m really ashamed to be a human.

  Ashamed to be a human

• Doing less is a competitive advantage: Overworking reduces cognition and undermines creativity. Both are vital for strategic thinking. Sometimes, going on a walk and feeding the brain some entropy is the most productive thing to do. Extreme focus + creativity = good stuff.

• We are in an era of change, and in those eras, social cohesion and values are in all-time laws: It’s a save-yourself world out there.

  Extreme individualism and the erosion of values

• The more complexity in the food chain, the more cancerogens and damage to the planet: Animals are heavily mistreated. For plants, pesticides can pass down the food chain. If you can afford it, only buy eco and bio products.

To 2023 🥂

Previous years:

• Learnings in 2021

• Learnings in 2019

We have heard quotes like this before:

You can either optimize for creativity or for productivity, but not for both

We live in a world driven by productivity — or so we think! In reality, both personal and technological progress are extremely non-linear. Our lives are defined by a few key events that fundamentally shape who we are and push forward our personal lives and work careers. The rest of our time, we are either enjoying what those key moments brought us, or trying to get more exposure (luck) to experience more key moments.

An example is meeting your life partner. We spend time out there, trying to get lucky (increasing exposure). Once we get lucky, we can enjoy what that sweet entropy brought to our lives for nearly our entire lifetime.

Same with business. Whether it's founding a successful company, joining one early, inventing something new, writing a great piece that gets wide exposure, producing a summer hit... Those things can push us forward and suddenly make the rest of our lives easier. For example, once an entrepreneur has had an exit, it's orders of magnitude easier to raise, attract talent, etc.

These moments are the culmination of two things: hard work and creativity.

To create a successful startup, a founder needs to master multiple skills such as management, product and technology. But without a vision fueled by creativity, it gets nowhere.

Similarly, to create a summer hit, you need to have spend thousands of hours producing music. But without intuition and taste, both fueled by creativity, the output would just be another boring track, not a summer hit.

In turn, creativity is fueled by entropy — which is essentially randomness. That's why new experiences tend to make us feel creative. But then, why do we sometimes feel creative when bored, maybe just looking out of the window or when we cannot sleep?

Well, creativity is a process. It does need an input (entropy) but it also needs processing time. Creativity takes seemingly random inputs and mixes them in new, unprecedented ways. That process takes time. Walking, going for a run, taking a shower don't need much mental input, and so our brain wanders around and gets creative. It sometimes also happens as the background process over extended periods of time — then there's a final input that comes in and causes an a-ha moment.

After realizing that creativity is responsible for most of our successes, even as a species, we would love to turn the knob up and increase it as much as possible, right? Well, it's not that simple.

So, to be creative, we seem to need:

1. A lot of randomness, which usually comes from spontaneous, diverse experiences. This is the exact opposite to having a routine, which requires having total control over our time.

2. A lot of blank time, which can be walking, taking a shower... In today's world, we usually rush from place to place and even rush taking showers.

It seems like being creative is at great odds with being productive. Yet achieving a creative breakthrough can set us decades ahead of those who have been extremely productive, yet haven't had such breakthrough.

Through those lenses, being creative is the ultimate form of productivity.

Through those lenses, letting go of extreme control and routines — and ultimately the sense of time as a linear constant we have to constantly worry about — is the best path forward.

Still learning how to apply this to my own day to day, like everything in life it's hard to strike a balance.

Creativity sets humans apart from other species. We can build tools like no other animal species can. The first tools were just shaped rocks. Now, those tools have gotten more advanced and we call them technology. In short, creativity is the trait that allows humans to transcend biological evolution — it's an evolutionary shortcut.

If creativity is what we are good at, why are most people on Earth working on non-creative jobs? When I mean creative jobs, I don't mean just art. Programming is creative, architecture is creative, science is creative. But most jobs today don't shine for their creativity.

In COVID times, some stores have to obey with certain maximum capacity restrictions. I have witnessed how some of those firms have hired people to hold a counter in their hand and click each time a new customer comes in.

With the advancements in machine learning technology, installing a cheap camera and equipping it with some open source software would suffice. Having a human do such a task in today's world is almost an insult to nature, who has created the beautiful miracle that humankind is.

It's like using a supersonic plane to drive on a patchy road — maybe it would be better to fly it?

But here comes the paradox — most people today want those kinds of jobs. Because in most cases the alternative is unemployment, and not being able to pay the bills.

How have we ended up in such a paradox? With such technological progress, why do humans need to resort to non-creative jobs that they don't enjoy?

Technology inherently increases inequality

Technological advancements are akin to sophisticated tools. Having an arrow or a sharp stone meant that our ancestors could hunt more efficiently than those without tools.

The same applies to our world, except the gap has widened. Imagine someone who doesn't use modern technology at all — phone, Internet, etc. Can they even live in today's society? Increasingly, the answer is no. Fortunately, most people can learn how to use a smartphone or the Internet.

But there's a catch — as the pace of technology increases, the learning curve becomes steeper.

Of course, that's when specialization and division of labor kicks in — so each person can focus on a field of expertise. But because of technology itself, that field of expertise might quickly change, or even become obsolete. Quickly, most jobs become automated. In the coming decades, people might need to become specialized in different jobs at different points in time. Thus, the standard path from academic education to work (school → college → work) is rendered obsolete as well.

As traditional education has stagnated around the old model, those who are avid self-learners have an evolutionary advantage in this world. They can actively keep up to the latest technology to not fall into the inequality gap.

Economic upside from technology is not widely distributed

Money is an information system for resource allocation. Money helps society direct attention towards producing services and goods that are demanded. But demanded by who? Of course, those with capital.

Most services and goods are still provided or produced by humans in some way, so money becomes an allocation system for human labor. The more capital you have, the more you can demand. How do you achieve freedom in such a system? By having the capital required to purchase all your time.

To put it in a different way, when we are born, the default state is that we will need to work for others in order to sustain ourselves. Working for others doesn't mean employment — even if you are an entrepreneur, you are still working to produce something society wants, therefore working for others.

In today's world, financial freedom is restricted to few and a utopian dream to most.

But wait, didn't we have all these movies about how robots would work so we can chill? If we have the robots already, why cannot we chill?

Well, the robots are there, but they are not working for you. They are working for shareholders.

Companies operating in free markets have brought immense technological progress.

Unfortunately, that progress hasn't been widely distributed. Sure, we can argue that tech companies employ people. But in fact, the core value proposition of a tech company is to achieve hyper-growth by automating processes.

So what's the solution? Should we expropriate companies, take all that money from billionaires and distribute it to all citizens? Sure, that would reduce the inequality gap. But it would also destroy technological progress — since entrepreneurs wouldn't be economically incentivized anymore.

Technology as a common good

I have been a free software enthusiast since the age of 12. I just believed that there are things that everyone should have equal access to, no matter their wealth or location. Otherwise, the inequality gap would only grow wider.

But wait, open source has succeded, right? Every tech company uses open source to power their stack, that's right. Yeah, they use it to power their stack. The entire stack is not open source — the value happens up the stack, in the distribution. Take Amazon. Their open source frontend libraries don't accrue much value. The value accrues in the distribution, in the platform and its network effects.

We need open source stacks. The whole platform, the whole network needs to be open source. This is the vision behind Web3 — open networks which are fully open source.

These open networks resemble a mixture between a company and a common good. The networks have built-in market incentives to remain competitive and capture value, while their ownership is widely distributed among stakeholders.

Bitcoin is the first asset that has achieved such a sweet spot, which is quickly elevating it as the world's store of value. But the same needs to happen to most tech companies — fully open source, community-governed stacks need to replace proprietary software, distribution channels and cap tables.

Economic upside from nation states is not distributed, at all

When we think about common goods, we usually think about first-world nation states and the basic services they provide — like free healthcare to all.

Unfortunately, those services aren't enough for people to achieve financial freedom. Not only they aren't enough, but nation states have become extractive entities that actively stop citizens from achieving such freedom.

Nation states collect taxes, and in exchange they allow their citizens to create wealth within their borders. Essentially, people pay for creating wealth. Isn't that backwards? Shouldn't the nation state pay people in exchange for them creating wealth within their land and increasing its value?

The obvious problem here is that nation states are monopolies. The switching costs resulting from moving nations are very high, thus nation states can pretty much do whatever they want. Fortunately, as remote work becomes the norm, jurisdictional competition will kick in and nation states will have to compete for talent. Some nation states are already offering tax breaks for talented individuals moving in and creating wealth within their borders.

But coming back to financial freedom for the average citizen, does any of this matter? Even if a nation state is smart enough to attract great talent, how does it benefit the average citizen?

For example, if many talented and wealthy people move countries, they will create jobs and purchase real estate. So, home owners can profit and citizens can access more jobs. Okay, but... in a world in which owning a house equals to being rich already, this doesn't benefit the average citizen. What about a job? Well, they are great, but they will rarely get citizens to financial freedom.

Then what's the issue? Citizens don't really own a stake in their nation states. Even if a nation state is doing great, they will only benefit by proxy — by having better services like healthcare. But those services won't buy them food or a house. It's like employment, they are great but they won't move the needle towards financial freedom.

Enter Web3 protocols and DAOs

Wonder why the inequality gap is widening?

On one hand we have corporations who concentrate wealth in the hands of few.

On the other hand we have nation states that fail to distribute wealth into the hands of many.

Corporations do a great job incentivizing founders, investors and employees towards wealth creation. But those same incentives and exclusive distribution make them unsuitable to maintain common goods.

Nation states do a relatively good job maintaining common goods for all their citizens. But they do a very poor job when it comes to producing and accruing wealth for their citizens.

The perfect mixture for both models is what we know as DAOs — which are open communities with built-in economic incentives and where ownership is widely distributed.

DAOs have the potential to create new ownership models with wide distribution and powerful cryptoeconomic incentives. DAOs are still definitely early but experimentation is going strong, with almost $1 billion governed by them at the time of writing — not a huge number, but it was more than 100x less just a year ago.

The future I hope to see

My hope is that experimentation in DAOs will get us to models where large amounts of people will benefit from technological progress, to the point in which they achieve financial freedom or at least UBI.

Bitcoin has been the most groundbreaking technological revolution of the century. Everyone who wanted to participate, had a tiny amount of capital and a big amount of conviction could join. Bitcoin has produced a massive amount of wealth for many. We can always see the glass half-empty and try to argue that Bitcoin has benefitted already wealthy people, but that's not even the point. The point is that Bitcoin is way more inclusive than the alternative.

I'm sure the next decentralized Facebook won't be perfect, but I'm sure its token will have a wider and more inclusive distribution than $FB.

Web3 protocols blur the line between producers and consumers. $FB is owned by founders, employees and investors. A decentralized Facebook will give away stake to its users from day one.

Now imagine a world where all Web2 companies that have generated hundreds of billions of wealth get disrupted by Web3 alternatives — partly, owned by their users.

We quickly get into a world in which users become first-world citizens in the journey of tech wealth creation.

I started writing this blog post by asking one simple question:

Once upon a time, society saw technological progress as the way to free people from 9-to-5 jobs. Where did that dream go?

I have been asking myself that question for years and years. And when I started writing, I didn't know what my answer would be. I analyzed the problem and dove deeper and deeper. It turns out, the answer was closer to me than I thought: we need new governance and ownership structures — DAOs.

Tim Draper invented viral marketing by convincing the Hotmail cofounders to insert signatures at the end of each email:

PS: I Love You. Get Your Free Email at Hotmail

The best way to spread a product is to get users to share it with their peers.

This is as true as ever in crypto, where users have a financial stake and thus a vested interest to spread the network's adoption.

We have seen many great token distribution experiments lately. We have also seen plenty of distasteful airdrops. What sets a genius token distribitution apart from a distasteful airdrop? Great token distributions reward early adopters and make them feel engaged with the ecosystem.

For example, I'd like to draw attention to Uniswap's UNI distribution. Uniswap already had all the elements needed to reward its early adopters, which were:

• Tamper-resistant proof of usage, as trades settle on-chain

• Ethereum addresses to send UNI to, as trades contain user addresses

But not all projects have on-chain products, or even just a fair, straightforward way of measuring usage to calculate rewards. I started thinking about the most generic way to reward early supporters and followers, while creating virality around the distribution.

Uniswap's distribution was extremely viral because it was the first significant token distribution rewarding users of a major protocol. But in a very competitive landscape, chances are that similar ones wouldn't make as much noise if they launched today.

If you think about the crypto ecosystem, most people hang out on Twitter. And on Twitter, it only takes one person posting for hundreds, thousands or even millions to read that post.

So, what if we used Twitter as a platform for token distributions?

A project like Aragon has over 75,000 Twitter followers. All of them know Aragon, but not all of them hold ANT — since there are 25,000 ANT holders. Chances are that if they have been following Aragon for a while, they would be quite happy to own some ANT, and some of them might engage with the network.

We might even be able to use Twitter's API to reward followers based on how early they followed the project — similar to how Uniswap rewarded early LPs.

This would be an interesting token distribution mechanism, rewarding loyal followers and supporters.

But where this token distribution mechanism shines is in virality. Uniswap already had all the Ethereum addresses of its users, so it was straightforward for them to issue UNI to their accounts. Twitter profiles don't have Ethereum addresses linked to them (yet). One of the only ways for this distribution to be technically possible is for users to post a tweet stating they want to participate, together with their Ethereum address.

As an early follower of Aragon's fight for freedom, I would like to receive ANT to participate in the governance of the upcoming Aragon Network DAO #ANDAO 0x123

That's not only 50,000 (75,000 Twitter followers - 25,000 existing ANT holders) possible network participants that we have activated, but possibly hundreds of thousands or millions of people that will hear about Aragon for the first time.

Meet the tweetdrop.

Then, after fetching all the tweets using Twitter's API, a Merkle tree can be constructed and with its corresponding Merkle distributor for redeeming the tokens. And that's it.

The caveat

We have educated users to disregard token distributions on social media. If you have lived through the 2017/18 bull run, you know what I'm talking about.

But in 2020, exploring new ways of distributing network ownership became a trend. With that new trend, it is likely that we will have to re-educate our users about what's okay and what's not.

We are just scratching the surface of token distribution mechanisms, and it is a matter of time that they will leverage social media.

In the future, I might propose for the Aragon Network to do a tweetdrop and a token distribution to DAO users, if there is community interest.

For sure, some people have used Aragon DAOs to fundraise various initiatives to fight COVID-19.

But that’s just a stitch while society is bleeding off.

And it’s all so ironic. Bitcoin was born during the biggest financial crisis of recent times.

It wasn’t born before. It wasn’t there to help people survive that crisis. It was born because of it.

It was born from the pain of those who suffered seeing their families being enslaved from debt they knew they would never ever pay. Pain makes us grow. It’s unfortunate, but it’s the way it is.

And while I am torn apart by the current state of society, that thought makes me hopeful.

The thought that the same way that Bitcoin wasn’t ready to help in the previous economic crisis, it is now here with us today. Because of it, I hope that the next financial crisis won’t be the same.

What this means for us now is that we will keep seeing society crumble down without our work being able to help much. It will be painful, but that pain will make us learn.

Eventually, we will be able to offer real solutions to real problems. And I cannot wait to live that day.

Let’s keep building, because we cannot get there fast enough.

This post was originally sent as a letter to my team.

We can observe this in our day to day. In every market, you can find superior products that lag behind in adoption comparing them with the incumbents. Why is that? Why are people using an inferior product if a superior one is available? There are many reasons, but they come from the same root cause: rate of change. I’m referring to rate of change as how fast the market can adjust itself to its most optimal state. Rate of change is how fast people drop SMS for messaging apps, fuel cars for electric cars, upgrade from Windows XP to the newest version, or even drop in-person work for remote work.

Rate of change varies a lot depending on the demographic: geeks and teens are usually the fastest, while others move slower.

Once in a while, there are black swan events that change the tide. For example, COVID-19 will dramatically accelerate the adoption of remote work and the evolution of decentralized organizations.

Timing is also (mostly?) luck. But you can set the right conditions for luck to happen. And if there is one part of wealth creation that you want to get lucky with, it’s timing the market.