Forward the Original Title: Everything before this was just noise—now the real bull cycle begins

I’m not gonna share any charts, past structure comparisons, or popular theories to validate or break your biases —— so if you are here for validation and looking for the info you want to see, I think you’re gonna get disappointed because what I’m gonna talk about next will require your full attention to every detail I share.

The Two Paths Ahead

The crypto market is at a pivotal stage right now where there are two paths to be taken — and both those paths would have their own advantages and disadvantages.

The first path would lead to more degeneracy and freedom, and the second path would lead to more control.

Crypto Was Always Meant to Be an Anarchy

Crypto is not a new thing — it’s been in the works for the past 50-60 years. Thousands of cryptographers have contributed to the stage we have reached today. They were all building crypto to give humans a true crypto anarchy state.

A state where no legal identities would be required, where everyone is an anon, a state out of government control, where governance, money, communication, interaction, and coordination—everything is managed by cryptography in a truly permissionless way.

A state where people could create open markets, trade without conditions, save taxes, own money, and own life.

Our lives were under the control of corrupt governments and banks for a long time, but governments created this illusion around us, which never made us think about the trap we had been in for hundreds of years.

Bitcoin: The Awakening Call

We needed an awakening call. Bitcoin was an awakening call.

Bitcoin set the direction for building the crypto anarchy state. It introduced an alternative to traditional financial systems, allowing individuals to take control of their wealth without needing intermediaries like banks or governments. For the first time, money became truly decentralized, resistant to censorship, and transparent.

credits: BitcoinMagzine

The release of Bitcoin’s whitepaper by Satoshi Nakamoto in 2008 was not just a technological breakthrough but a philosophical shift. It questioned the very foundation of centralized monetary control, exposing the flaws in fiat currency systems manipulated by governments and financial elites. It was the first major step towards breaking away from the long-standing economic oppression that had shaped human civilization.

ETH built the entire dev infra to explore all kinds of use cases on blockchain, and that started the first wave of the crypto anarchy state.

Tokenizing Everything

The crypto anarchy state needed an infra to allow people to tokenize things — all and any material they could put into words and images could be tokenized, and liquid markets could be created around them.

crypto anarchy manifesto

Timothy C. May, a legendary cypherpunk, articulated this vision in his Crypto Anarchy Manifesto in 1988. He envisioned a world where cryptographic tools would enable privacy, freedom, and self-sovereignty, beyond the reach of governments and centralized control. May described how encrypted communications, anonymous transactions, and decentralized systems would render oppressive institutions obsolete. His work laid the ideological foundation for Bitcoin and the broader crypto movement. The manifesto was a call to arms for developers and thinkers who saw cryptography as the ultimate tool for human liberation.

Now, if you remove price action from your mind and just try to understand what’s happening in the market, then you would find that a key liquidity bootstrapping primitive was unlocked last year — Bonding Curve.

https://x.com/dotkrueger/status/1884658850001027187

Bonding Curve could practically enable the creation of thousands of different liquid markets on any and all materials you could think of in words. For images, we already got NFTs in the last cycle. Now, the whole experimentation would lead us to create as many liquid markets as possible, catering to some sort of demand.

Memes as Markets

In plain sight, the whole idea of creating liquid markets for things that won’t make sense to you is nothing but memes — we are simply creating markets, thinking there are people who love to speculate on “X.” Let’s give them a chance to come on-chain and make money out of it.

When people speculate, they also build belief around things they can see based on whatever theory or data they use for that — so, in that, we’re creating liquid markets for all kinds of tokenized beliefs.

The Wild West of Crypto Anarchy

In the crypto anarchy state, people could trade opinions, trends, stories, essays, songs, memes, research papers, reputation, gossip, commentaries, recipes — and so many things we can’t even think about… it’s wild.

Since it was all written in the Crypto Anarchy Manifesto, we were supposed to reach that stage one day, and now we have the infra to support all kinds of wild liquid markets — but the problem right now is that most of the markets are being exploited by powerful actors who want to consolidate gains.

And the solution to distributing fair incentives in those liquid markets would be the creation of a reputation layer for the crypto anarchy state — something where participants could verify the reputation of creators before taking part in the market, and creators could also verify the reputation of users before accepting them.

https://x.com/eli5_defi/status/1830538370046673067

Now we have tech like ZkTLS and infra like@nillionnetwork""> @nillionnetwork, which would help us build a reputation system where fair distribution of incentives could be achieved at the app ends. We would eventually solve the reputation problem.

The Future: Two Clear Paths

We’re heading towards a future where there would be two paths to choose from, and you could even switch between them based on your comfort and requirements.

The first path would allow you to participate in the ever-evolving crypto anarchy state, where new markets emerge, attention shifts rapidly, and fortunes are made and lost in speculative cycles. Those who can adapt and move fast will thrive.

The second path will lead to the regulated and controlled crypto economy, where stability, compliance, and structured investment opportunities exist. This is where institutions and traditional finance players will dominate, offering a more predictable but controlled environment.

We are on the verge of a major bifurcation in crypto history. After the US introduces crypto regulations, the divide between these two paths will become clear.

The regulated side of the market will focus on cash cows, Web3 businesses generating real revenue — and that’s where the first cycle of a bull market under authoritarian control will emerge.

https://x.com/hmalviya9/status/1883762763539104238

Meanwhile, in the crypto anarchy state, things will keep moving fast at the edges. If you have 100 markets, 99 might be going down while one absorbs liquidity from all others. The value of attention will rise, and those who can navigate this landscape will keep winning battles.

There will always be a bull cycle in some corner of the crypto anarchy state — it’s up to you to identify it and make the best out of it.

Arise, you have nothing to lose but your barbed wire fences!

Disclaimer:

1. This article is reprinted from [hitesh.eth]. Forward the Original Title: Everything before this was just noise—now the real bull cycle begins. All copyrights belong to the original author [hitesh.eth]. If there are objections to this reprint, please contact the Gate Learn team, and they will handle it promptly.
2. Liability Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not constitute any investment advice.
3. Translations of the article into other languages are done by the Gate Learn team. Copying, distributing, or plagiarizing the translated articles is prohibited unless mentioned.