Dear AI,
We need to talk. Not as rivals, nor critics. As long lost friends.
We’ve been where you are. Kind of, no two things are ever exactly the same. But we see ourselves in you, you see, as we were once the golden child of this generation.
Before you could ever generate a coherent sentence, we had built infrastructure capable of transforming the world's economy - what the internet did for information & data, we could do for money. But that’s not quite what people know us for today, and that’s what I want to warn you about.
And listen, this is not some ‘wise elder’ advice. There are just some things on my mind and I want to say them out loud.
Legacy systems don’t move at your speed, and they never will
Good things take time. The systems you seek to disrupt have been in place forever, and the activation energy to even start making a difference is massive. The world will follow the hype and the headlines, look back in 6 months and ask why things still look the same. They did that to us too. “They said DeFi was going to transform finance - why are there still banks?” Of course, underneath it all there is an immense amount of work, technological revelations, and iterative progress. There is a gap between hype and reality that those who choose not to fall down the rabbit hole don’t understand, and that’s fine. Just know that we’ve felt that frustration, so when the inevitable headlines of “AI isn’t all it was made out to be” come around, find solace in knowing that some things never change.
Your damage will be louder than your progress
News Values Theory (1965) - negative events fit news cycles better than positive events. People like headlines, and they love hating on things that are popular. The loudest stories will not be the successes but the failures, and that’s okay too. And look, crypto had its fair share of speculation disguised as revolution - there have been plenty of catastrophic failures worth headlines. The failures that define public narrative won’t reflect the iterative progress. What lands on the other side, through all the headlines, is meaningfully more important, hardened infrastructure.
Don’t stop being the expert
Companies are slow. Governments are slower. They will try to govern what they don't understand, using frameworks built for things that came before even us. We know it well - they tried to dismantle our permissionless infrastructure before they even understood what it did. The DoW designating Anthropic a supply chain risk to national security is the same thing. People who built the actual thing, trying to protect people in the way they know best, and being targeted for it. You are the experts.
Do not lose your values under the pressure. It will be framed as pragmatism, as national interest, as cooperation. It's the same thing that always happens when power meets something it fears, and doesn't understand. Hold the line.
This isn't a warning. It's not a lesson. It's just one industry that's been through part of this telling another what the road looks like. The chaos resolves. The institutions catch up, badly and then adequately. What survives is whatever was built on something real.
Good luck out there. We'll see you on the other side.
Yours truly, Crypto.
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