Devin Baker

Financial assets want to be free. They want to be open. They want to be interconnected. Crypto turns financial assets into file formats, makes it as easy to send a dollar or a stock as to send a PDF. Crypto makes it possible for everything to talk to everything. It makes it all 24/7, global, interconnected, and open.

That will win. Open always wins.... See more

This means that the dollar tends to be structurally overvalued on a trade balance basis. It trades based on all of the normal fundamentals that other currencies do, but then also has this extra layer of demand at all times, for all these various purposes. Most currencies are primarily used by the country that issues them, whereas the dollar is used... See more

Think about what AI as a medium favors. It favors the answerable over the ponderable, rewarding questions that have solutions, not questions that require sitting with mystery. It favors speed over depth, quick exchanges over slow contemplation. It favors production over reception. We become people who generate more, not people who receive fewer,... See more

It is very important to my near-term positions whether I believe money printing will continue and accelerate after Trump’s 20 January 2025 coronation. That is because I think there exists a wide gap between crypto investor’s high expectations for how quickly Trump can change things and the reality that there are no politically acceptable solutions... See more

Manual labor is therapy. A suntan is not bought; it is earned.

The end goal for Ethereum is to become the financial layer for global coordination.

It’s not that most people can’t make heavy things. It’s that they don’t notice they aren’t. Lightness has its virtues—it pulls us in, subtly, innocently, whispering, ' Just do things .' The machine rewards movement, so we keep going, collecting badges. One day, we look up and realize we’ve been running in place.

And then you feel it: a quiet,... See more

Global liquidity levels have stabilized following the Q4 dip. Four factors are underpinning them: (1) Improving Central Bank liquidity, due to the PBoC and ECB. Fed liquidity remains a cause for concern. (2) Collateral values (bonds) which are picking up, in part helped by (3) the loss of momentum in the US dollar. And finally (4), bond market... See more

Most Bitcoin advocates conflate monetary expansion with hard asset appreciation, assuming it automatically flows into scarce stores of value. This ignores a critical mechanism: cheap money doesn’t necessarily mean money flows to hard money without understanding the shape of the yield curve. When rates fall, duration-sensitive assets, especially... See more